CHAPTER X. THE CAPTAIN AND THE GIRL
It was six o'clock on the same day in which Julia Armstrong had been delivered from that horrible sea tragedy, the open boat, by the miraculous apparition of the York, of all the ships which the horizons of the deep were then girdling! The chief mate knocked upon the door of his cabin where the girl lay, and believing he heard her say "Come in," entered, and found her asleep.
The reddening sunshine was away to starboard, but the heavens southeast were glowing, and the girl slept, visible to the eye as the circle of blue port-hole up which and down which you saw the clear-cut line of the horizon sliding like a piece of clockwork. He stood looking at her, for there was love for this girl in the man's heart, and this encounter was so wonderful that he witnessed the hand of God in it, and a sentiment of religion sanctified his emotion; otherwise, with the sailor's respect for the repose of those who sleep—for the seamen's best blessing upon you is, Lord grant you a good night's rest, sir!—he would have softly stepped out and left her.
And this he would have soon done, but as he looked she all at once opened her gray eyes full upon him, stared a few moments till intelligence came to her, then started, smiled, and sat up in the bunk.
"I've awaked you, I'm afraid," said Hardy.
"I'm glad you have. I have slept sweetly and I feel well," she answered. "Strange that I have not dreamt at all, for I have passed through a nightmare since the burning of the ship. How marvellous to see you standing there!"
"Could you eat a piece of cold fowl and drink some wine?"
"Yes."
"You shall sup here, for I want to hear your story. If you are in the cabin, and the captain comes—"
He put his head out of the door and hailed the cabin servant, who was polishing glasses in the pantry. He told him what to get and bring, and he then caused the girl to get out of her bunk, and cushioned his sea-chest with his bunk pillow as a seat for her. He smiled as he saw her fall into the incomparable posture (as he thought it): the head a little on one side, the hands on the hips, the feet crossed, the whole figure beautiful now that her jacket was removed, though her dark blue blouse imperfectly suggested the faultless grace of her breast. Sleep had faintly tinged her cheek whereon the shadow of suffering had lain; her eyes had brightened, her lips had reddened, and all the romance of her face, which was not beautiful nor even pretty, but alluring, nevertheless, was expressed once more in the flattering evening light, which suffused with a liquid softness the atmosphere of that little cabin.
Until the man knocked at the door with the tray of food and wine, they talked chiefly of home, of the dry ditch and Bax's farm, of the East India Dock road and of Captain Smedley, whose escape and probable safety the girl had mentioned early in this talk. And then whilst she supped—an early supper, but on the ocean it is the last meal—she told him the story of a memorable fire at sea.
There had been many such fires, and they nearly all read like one. It begins by some rascally sailor broaching a rum cask; or it is a naked candle in the hand of a fool looking for a brand in the lazarette; or it is a pipeful of glowing tobacco amongst wool; the capsizal of a lamp; or it is caused by something which the ocean sucks down to her ooze and buries there, one secret more. But however it be, the end is nearly always the same. It was so in this case; the fire took such a hold there was no dealing with it; a score may have perished. The girl saw the bowsprit and jib-booms black with figures of men who had been cut off by the amidship furnace. Numbers—for she was a full ship with many children, and besides passengers she was carrying hard upon a hundred soldiers in her 'tween-decks—numbers, I say, got away in the boats, and amongst them, the last to leave, was the captain; she did not doubt that. She fell overboard in her terror, and in her recoil right aft from the smoke and its burning stars, and afterwards found herself in a boat in the company of five men, one of whom, groaning heavily with internal injury, died in the night and was dropped over the boat's side.
She had more to tell him about this shipwreck, but that fire concerns my story only in so far as it brings this girl again on to the stage by one of those dramatic and startling methods adopted by the ocean, whose moods are many.
"If your captain is a madman," she said, "what is to happen to this ship?"
He put his finger to his lips in a gesture of caution and reticence.
"We may whisper it to each other," said he, in a low voice, "but the crew have no knowledge of it, or they may attribute any strangeness in his manner to the loss of his child, and think it passing. They all loved the poor little fellow, and so did I."
And he told her how the boy used to beat his drum in accompaniment to the sailor's whistle, and related the story of his falling overboard and the efforts to save him, and the captain's frantic dumb-show and sudden exhibition of insanity, so that he believed his child was merely missing, and that something would happen to tell him where he might be found.
"How sad!" said the girl. "It would have broken my heart to see it. And does he still think that he will find his little boy?"
"I'm afraid it's his conviction, the subtle delusion of the diseased brain," Hardy answered; "but in other matters with him it's like writing on sand; next tide all's gone. Do not tell him you were a stewardess. Converse with him as though he were perfectly sane. He is a gentleman and an educated man. Humour his sorrowful fancy, for it can hurt no one, and it keeps the poor fellow's heart up."
"I suppose you are really in charge of the ship?" she said.
"I am watching her navigation," he answered, "but I tell you I am at a dead loss because he is the supreme law-giver of the vessel, and what he orders must be done or it is mutiny. His orders may be dangerous to my judgment, but not to the men's, who take the course as it's given; and I dare not go amongst them and speak the truth. He might get better and hear of it, and it would be in his power to ruin me."
She sank her head thoughtfully, understanding him. The door was rapped.
"Hullo," cried Hardy.
It was the cabin servant who had come to tell Hardy that the captain wished to see the lady.
"Where is he?" inquired the mate.
"On deck, sir. He'll come below when I report her ready to receive him."
"Report her ready," said Hardy, and he and the girl went into the cabin.
She seated herself on a cushioned locker, and he stood beside her.
"That's your berth," said he, pointing to a door.
Gratitude and love were in the smile she gave him. The red western blaze was on the skylight, and reposed on her hair like gold-dust. It was Hardy's watch below—he was therefore at liberty to be in the cabin. He caught sight of Candy staring through the skylight, but the pale-eyed man walked off in a minute, and then the captain came down.
He bowed with the courtesy of breeding to the girl. Tradition has scored so heavily against the merchant shipmaster by virtue of romantic invention, which largely consists of lies, that I dare say it is impossible for a landsman to believe that the commander of a merchant-ship could be anything but a rough, grog-seamed, hoarse-voiced salt, without grammar for his log-book. The lie stands as everlasting as the pyramids, and for my part it may go on standing, but it is a lie all the same, and it is my pleasure to paint the truth.
As the girl returned the bow she saw the great Newfoundland in the captain's wake, and cried out with a sudden passion of admiration, "Oh, what a magnificent creature!" The dog made friends with her in an instant, and by twenty canine tokens expressed delight in the caress of her hand. No doubt the beautiful and faithful creature appreciated the sweetening and civilising influence of the lady in that cabin.
The captain began by putting several sane questions, and she remembered that she was not to tell him that she had shipped as an under-stewardess in the Glamis Castle. He knew the vessel, and listened with a degree of attention, that excited Hardy's surprise, to her narrative of the fire. He seemed to take a fancy to her, to be pleased by her presence, and said he hoped she would be comfortable on board his ship. In the midst of his rational talk he slapped his forehead and kept his hand pressed to it, and his face changed; a look of grief that made him almost haggard was visible when he dropped his hand and gazed at the girl.
"I miss my son—my little son," he exclaimed, "and I am waiting for something"—he added, in a broken voice—"to tell me where I can find him. His drum is by his bed—come and look at it."
Awed by the sudden confrontment of hopeless human grief, the girl rose and followed him, with a glance at Hardy as for courage. The heave of the deck was gentle; she was stronger, and stepped without difficulty. The captain entered his cabin and closed the door upon them both, which frightened her, for she easily now saw how it was with his poor brain, and no one in the company of a madman can ever dare swear that in the next minute he will continue harmless.
"That is his drum," said the captain. "That is the little bed he slept in."
Hardy outside stood close at the door, listening and prepared.
"He is my only child," continued the captain, compelling by his own gaze the girl's attention to a little coat and a little cap, and other garments of the boy which were hanging upon the bulkhead. "His mother is dead, and she was my first and my only love. I miss him of a night, and want him. He has been my constant companion in several voyages, and the life of the captain of a ship at sea is lonely, and I miss him. It was my delight to dress him and to listen to his talk. Oh, he is a clever boy! He can ask questions which the greatest mind could not answer."
He sat down on a chair by the table on which were instruments of navigation, a few books, pen and ink, and the like, and folding his arms and bowing his head he sobbed dryly without concealment of features, and the piteous face, bearded, the half-closed eyes, the long hair under the cap which he had not removed, made the girl feel sick and faint, as though to some oppressive stroke of personal grief.
She rallied, for she was a young woman of great spirit, as I have a right to hold, and remembering what Hardy had said, she exclaimed, softly:
"You will find him, Captain Layard."
At this he looked up at her, started to his feet, and his face was eager and impassioned with emotion not communicable, for who can expound the workings of the diseased mind?
"Tell me," he cried, and she saw what Hardy had also seen—the baleful sparkle of mania in his eyes, "you're fresh from the sea, and God may have sent you to me. Tell me!"
She could not speak. Her consolatory phrase had exhausted imagination, and her heart refused its sanction to the mate's humane idea, that it was good to keep up the poor fellow's spirits.
"Tell me!" he repeated, and he advanced a step and his eyes devoured her face.
"God will comfort you and help you," she replied, not knowing what to say.
He sighed, and turning his head fastened his eyes upon the little bed, then looked at her again, this time with his painful expression of superiority, the air of a man whose soul is exalted by contemplation of something of heavenly importance divulged to him and to him only, and wearing this face, he opened the door and she passed out, which was lucky for Hardy, because had the captain gone first he would have found the mate standing close and listening.
The captain remained in his cabin. The others stood by the table, and the western light, rich and red as a deep-bosomed rose, flowed down upon them through the open skylight.
"Poor man! Poor man!" the girl exclaimed. "I fear that what I've said will create a delusion; he will think I know where his child is."
"His moods are like the dog-vane," said Hardy. "I could not hear what passed."
She told him. He frowned with the puzzle of his mind.
"You can judge now for yourself," said he. "Is it right that a man like this should command a ship whose safety became doubly precious to me this morning?"
She smiled gently, but gravity quickly returned; she could not but reflect his face of worry and uncertainty. The great dog was lying at his master's door, and all was silent in the captain's cabin. This, in the pause, made her say:
"He may commit suicide."
"Not whilst he believes his son is alive and to be found," answered Hardy.
He walked to the door of her berth, opened it, and she saw that it was as comfortably equipped as the ship would allow.
"You shall have a hair-brush and whatever else I possess to give you," said he. "But how about clothes? I can't dress you."
"I am saved," she answered, "and that is enough to think of at present."
This was a spirited answer for a girl who was talking to the man she loved, for would not any girl, addressing the man of her heart, grow pensive to the thought that she had but one gown to wear in the whole world?
He felt a certain sense of independency owing to the captain's state, and considered that he was entitled to act beyond his rights as a mate. By which I mean that it could not much concern him if the captain came out and found him talking to the girl, and generally acting as though he were a passenger instead of an officer of the ship.
"Come on deck," said he, "the air will refresh you."
And they went up the companion-steps, whilst the Newfoundland continued to sentinel the captain's door.
A glorious evening sky, in the west like a city on fire, clouds with brows glowing into scarlet as they sailed into the splendour abeam, the ship leaning with the breeze, and the white spume twinkling on the eastern blue in a trembling heaven-full of the lights of foam. Two sail were in sight, fairy gleams upon the lens-like edge on the port bow.
"Oh," cried the girl, with a swift look along the deck, "after an open boat! and one man groaning and then lying dead in her!"
They walked slowly to and fro to leeward, leaving Mr. Candy, who ogled them betwixt his white eyelashes, to pace the weather quarter-deck in the loneliness of command. The sailors had immediately seen how things stood. Nothing that happens at sea astonishes a sailor, unless it is the expected, which is often a real surprise, so full of disappointments, of leeway, head winds, misreckoning is the life. Here was the chief mate who had fallen in with a girl whom he knew.
"They might have kept company ashore," says Bill to Jim. "She was bound one way and he another. Ain't that sailor fashion?"
"Ain't she got a figure?" says Jim to Bill. "Wouldn't I like to put my arm round her waist if Dick and the little 'un was playing. It's damned hard on us sailor men that no female society's allowed aboard a ship."
"There's the figurehead if it's female," says Bill. "I've known a man so 'ard up that of a dog-watch, when there was plenty o' light, he'd slide down the dolphin-striker just to talk to the woman on the stem-head. He'd say it was the next best thing."
Perhaps it was, for some figureheads in those days were a little gorgeous. I have seen ladies under the bowsprit with long black hair and swelling bosoms, bright with golden stars. Their blush was deep, their lips scarlet, their smile alluring, they were always curtseying, and the sea in its loving humours flung snow-white nosegays at them.
But the shadow of the boy's death was still upon the ship, and so far the captain had treated his men as men, and they were sorry for him. You may take it that a man is no sailor who ill-treats a sailor, and despite tradition and the presence of the sea-lawyer, your ship's company, if they are British, will serve you honestly if their food is fit even for sailors, and if they are numerous enough to do the work of one man and half a man added per head, as against the one-man work which the shore exacts without expecting more.
As Hardy and the girl walked the deck, whilst the ship sailed along stately in the beautiful light of that evening, they talked again of home and then of the country to which they were voyaging. The sail upon the port bow leaned like tiny jets of red flame, and no star of heaven could have filled the liquid distance with more grace.
"It was certainly your destiny to make for Australia," said Hardy, "and I now say what I thought from the beginning, that your chances lie there. But we had to find you a berth."
"Captain Smedley was very kind to me," she answered. "He would sometimes invite me into his cabin and talk to me as pleasantly as though he had known me all his life. He gave me an introduction to the Bishop of Calcutta, and begged him to do everything that could be done for a girl placed as I am. I believe he talked to the passengers about me, for some were extremely good-natured and sympathetic, and would apologise for troubling me if I waited upon them."
"Any griffs aboard?" asked Hardy.
"Some young officers," she answered, with a half smile upon her lips, and looking down upon the deck, "but I kept as much to myself as I could."
"You'll find plenty of opportunities in Australia," said Hardy. "There are rich squatters in that country, and you can be driving about Melbourne and entertaining and doing what you pleased whilst he was a thousand miles off counting his sheep."
"Suppose all the rich squatters kept themselves a thousand miles distant whilst I was in Melbourne, could I return in this ship?"
She asked this question placidly, but her expression showed that she did not appreciate this reference to the squatters.
"You want position and you'll get it."
"Could I return in this ship?"
"We'll see," he answered, smiling at her. "A dinner and champagne to the head of the firm of agents might help us, and nature did not intend that you should ever plead in vain."
As he said this the captain came on deck, followed by Sailor. The Newfoundland, with the critical eye of an old salt, took a view of the horizon, and in a minute rushed forward on to the forecastle and reported two ships in sight on the port bow by a number of barks, which made the men, who were lounging about the knight-heads, laugh heartily. On seeing the captain, the mate touched his cap and walked right aft on the lee-side, where with folded arms he seemed to watch the sea, though he kept the captain and Julia in the corner of his eye.
The poor man approached the girl, who received him with a smile.
"Has Mr. Hardy looked after you?" he said, kindly and gently.
"Oh, yes, Captain Layard, I am very happy and comfortable, and thank you over and over again for your goodness. I believe I should have died by this time in that open boat, and I owe my life to you and this noble ship."
"I am very dull and lonely," he said in a musing way, clearly inattentive to her words. "Those ships yonder break the continuity of this everlasting circle, but they'll vanish shortly, and the full desolation of the night will encompass us. It is the night that I fear—it is the night that I fear!" he continued, almost whispering, and gazing at her as a man looks at another whose pity and help his heart is yearning for. "I miss him! If I dream of him I shall go mad to find it a dream. But you know where he is."
She hoped to divert his thoughts, and said: "I do not find the sea desolate, Captain Layard. On fine nights I could stand for hours looking at the stars; and is desolation on the sea when the sun is shining? If I were a man I would be a sailor, for, although it has nearly destroyed me, I have learnt to love the ocean."
She looked toward Hardy. The dog, having barked his report of two sail in sight, came trotting aft, and stood beside his master. The captain looked at him a little while in silence, his brow contracted in meditation.
"Which is real?" he asked, placing his foot upon the dog's shadow, "this or this?" and he put his hand upon the dog.
Julia, who found a necessity to humour him, answered:
"Some great thinker has written, 'Shadows we are, and shadows we pursue.'"
"How long grows one's shadow in the dying sun!" said Captain Layard, turning his face—filled with the yearning of grief and charged with that subtle expression of madness for which no words are to be found—toward the burning sky; "and soon we are nothing but shadows. Do you believe in God?" He looked at her suddenly with an extraordinary gaze of passionate anxiety.
"Oh, yes, Captain Layard," replied the girl. "I believe in him now if ever I did, and I have thanked him."
His face put on its triumphant look, but he was interrupted in the irrelevant sentiments he was about to deliver by the approach of the boatswain.
Julia crossed the deck to Hardy, glad to escape the pain of such talk.
"What is it?" said the captain.
"The men we picked up," answered the boatswain, "have asked me to come aft to say they're willing to serve as seamen aboard this ship."
"You are a full company," replied the captain, quickly. "I can't afford to pay and keep more sailors."
"They're likely men, sir," said the boatswain, speaking in a softened note of respectful compassion.
"They'll expect their wages."
The boatswain answered he thought that was likely.
"No," said the captain, "we'll transship them, and send them home."
He rounded on his heel, and sat upon the skylight, and gazed at the dying lights in the west. What could be more sane than this man's answers to the boatswain? Hardy had overheard them, and perplexity was deepened in him. Who was going to convince the sailors that their captain was mad unless he talked to them as he did to him and Julia? And the captain sat looking at the dimming glory, and did not seem to remember that he had been conversing with the girl, or to know that she had left him.
It was fine weather throughout that night, and the moon shone, and the heaven of stars swarmed in sparkling hosts toward the grave of the sun until the pallor of the dawn, like the face of the risen Christ, put out those fires of the dark; the ship, bathed in the ice-white radiance, stole phantom-like over the boundless cemetery of the drowned, the perished sailors whose tombstones were in every breaking surge. All had been quiet aboard that stealing ship, clad to her trucks in the raiment of her day. The captain would pass a long time in his cabin, then appear on deck, and walk it for a little space self-engrossed; and it seemed to Hardy when his watch came round, and when the captain showed himself, that the man's isolation and silence expressed, perhaps, a still dim but growing perception of the fate of his little boy, in which case the delusion would leave him, and his mind recover at least the strength it possessed when they made sail in the English Channel.
When the sun rose the ocean rolled in mackerel-tinted mounds, and the ship swayed as she floated onwards at about five knots. Stu'nsails had been set by order of the captain when he came on deck at dawn, and, whitening the air on high, the swelling cloths carried the sight to the heavens, which arched in a miracle of motionless feathers of cloud, a glorious canopy of delicate plumes, in sweet keeping with the airy graces of the queenly fabric which proudly bowed upon its mighty throne.
A sail was in sight on the starboard bow, and in two hours she would be abreast. The Newfoundland, coming on deck with the captain when the light broke, instantly barked its report of her, and now, a little after eight, Hardy was viewing her through the ship's telescope; for the sane instructions which had reached him were, that the four men were to be transferred to the first ship which would receive them.
The four men were on the forecastle watching the coming vessel; they were good specimens of the English seaman of those days, sturdy and whiskered, bronzed in face and bowed in back, with that steady air which made you know that, like most British sailors, they were to be trusted beyond all breeds of foreign mariners in the hour of sea peril, when the ship was grinding out her heart upon the rocks, when the belching hatches were blackening the air into a storm cloud, when the blow of the stranger's bows had riven the side into a gulf, when the yawn of the started butt was burdening the hold with tons of ship-drowning brine.
When the ships were abreast, the stranger proved American, bound for the River Thames. The beautiful flag of her great country shook its barred folds at the peak, and you thought of Bishop's Berkeley's prophetic line, "Westward the course of empire takes its way." Her yellow sheathing flashed in artillery spoutings as she rolled from the sun, her canvas with cotton was as white as milk, she was a wonder of sea architecture, the creation of a people whose sires had launched that exquisite structure, the Baltimore clipper.
Captain Layard was now on deck, and Hardy must discover that in matters of routine he was not going to work with the diseased half of his head. He hailed the American captain, and they exchanged the information they asked.
"What ship is that? Where are you from, and where are you bound to?"
And the American wanted to know the Greenwich time by the chronometers in Captain Layard's cabin.
Then was shouted across in words as sane as ever sounded from a quarter-deck the news of the recovery of four men from an open boat, and would the American captain carry them home? Of course he would, and within half an hour from the beginning of this rencounter the two ships had started on their separate courses with colours dipping in cordial good-byes—the seaman's hand-shake. And these were cousins.