Miranda of the Balcony: A Story

by A. E. W. Mason

Warriner disembarked at Plymouth and took train to Dartmouth, where he learned the name of the yacht by merely asking at the hotel. He tried to hire a steam launch, for sooner or later in one of the harbours he would be sure to come up with Wilbraham, if he only kept a sharp eye; but steam launches are difficult to hire at this season of the year, and in the end he had to content himself with chartering a ten-ton cutter. He engaged one hand, by whose testimony the history of Ralph's pursuit came to be known, and sailed out of Dartmouth to the west. He sailed out in the morning, and coming to Salcombe ran over the bar on the tail of the flood, but did not find his quarry there, and so beat out again on the first of the ebb and reached past Bolt Head and Bolt Tail, across Bigbury Bay with its low red rocks, to Plymouth. Wilbraham had anchored in the Cattwater only two days before; the yacht was a yawl, named the Monitor; and was making for the Scillies. Warriner laughed when he picked up word about the destination of the yacht, and thought it would be very appropriate if he could overhaul the Monitor somewhere off Rosevear. As to what course he intended to pursue when he caught Wilbraham, he had no settled plan; but on the other hand he had a new revolver in his berth.

He put out from Plymouth under a light breeze, which failed him altogether when he was abreast of Rame Head. Through the rest of the day he drifted with the tide betwixt Rame Head and Plymouth. The night came upon him jewelled with stars, and a light mist upon the surface of the water; all that night he swung up and down some four miles out to sea within view of Plymouth lights, but towards morning, a fitful wind sprang up, drove the cutter as far as Polperro, and left it becalmed on a sea of glass, in front of the little white village in the wooded cliff-hollow, while the sun rose. Warriner opened the narrow line of blue water which marks the mouth of the Fowey river at eleven o'clock of the morning, and anchored in Fowey harbour about twelve. It was a Sunday, and though the Monitor was not at Fowey, Warriner determined to stay at his anchorage till the morrow.

The Brixham fisherman who served him upon this cruise relates that Warriner displayed no impatience or anxiety at any time. Of the febrile instability which had set his thoughts flying this way and that during the days of his companionship with Charnock, there was no longer any trace in his demeanour. Perhaps it was that he was so certain of attaining his desires; perhaps the long lesson of endurance which he had been painfully taught in Morocco now bore its fruit; perhaps too he had acquired something of the passive fatalism of the Moorish race. During this Sunday afternoon, his last Sunday as it proved, he quietly sculled the dinghy of his cutter, when the tide was low, through the mud flats of the Fowey river to Lostwithiel; and coming down again when the river was full, lay for a long time upon his oars opposite a certain church that lifts above a clump of trees on the river-bank. There he remained listening to the roll of the organ and the sweet voices of the singers as they floated out through the painted windows into the quiet of the summer evening; when the service was over he bent to his sculls again and rowed back between the steep and narrowing coppices, but it was dark before he turned the last shoulder of hill and saw the long lines of riding-lights trembling upon the water.

Warriner raised his anchor early on the Monday morning, and having the wind on his quarter, made Falmouth betimes. At Falmouth he learned that the Monitor had put out past St. Anthony's light only the day before and had sailed westwards to Penzance.

Warriner followed without delay, and when he was just past the Manacle rocks, the wind dropped. With the help of the tide and an occasional flaw of wind, he worked his cutter round the Lizard Point and laid her head for Penzance across the bay; and it was then that the fog took him. It crept out of the sea at about four of the afternoon, a thin grey mist, and it thickened into a dense umber fog.

The fog hung upon the Channel for thirty hours. The cutter swung into the bay with the tide. The Brixham fisherman could hear all along, to his right hand, the muffled roar as the groundswell broke upon the Lizard rocks, and the sucking withdrawal which told that those rocks were very near. The Lizard fog-horn, which sounded a minute ago abreast of them, sounded now quite faintly astern. The boat swung with the tide and would not steer; yet Warriner betrayed no alarm and no impatience at the check. He sat on the deck with a lantern by his side and drew, said the fisherman, a little flute or pipe from his pocket, on which he played tunes that were no tunes, and from which he drew a weird shrill music of an infinite melancholy and of infinite suggestions. Once the Brixham man crouched suddenly by the gunwale and peered intently over the boat's side. At a little distance off, something black loomed through the fog about the height of the mast's yard,--something black which rapidly approached.

"It's not a squall," said Warriner, quietly interrupting his music. "It's a rock. I know this coast well. We had better get the dinghy out and row her head off."

When that was done, he squatted again upon the deck by the side of the lantern, and played shrilly upon his pipe while the light threw a grotesque reflection of his figure upon the fog.

After a while they heard the Lizard-horn abreast of them again.

"The tide has turned," said Warriner, and the Brixham man dived hurriedly into the well for the poor fog-horn which the boat carried. The cutter drifted out stern-foremost past the Lizard rocks, and in a little, from this side and from that, ahead of them, astern, they heard the throb of engines and the hoarse steam-whistles of the Atlantic cargo-boats and liners. They had drifted across the track of the ocean-going steamers. The Brixham man blew upon his horn till his lungs cracked. He relates that nothing happened until three o'clock in the morning, as he knows, since Warriner just at three o'clock took his watch from his pocket and looked at the dial by the lantern-light. He mentions too, as a detail which struck him at the time, that the door of the lantern was open, and so still was the heavy air that the candle burnt steadily as in a room. At three o'clock in the morning he suddenly saw a glimmering flash of white upon the cutter's beam. For a fraction of a second he was dazed. Then he lifted the horn to his mouth, and he was still lifting it--so small an interval was there of time--when a huge sharp wedge cut through the fog and towered above the cutter out of sight. The wedge was the bows of an Atlantic liner. No one on that liner heard the despairing, interrupted moan of the tiny fog-horn beneath the ship's forefoot; no one felt the shock. The Brixham man was hurled clear of the steamer, and after swimming for the best part of an hour was picked up by a smack which he came upon by chance. Warriner's body was washed up three days later upon the Lizard rocks.