Cerise: A Tale of the Last Century

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

CHAPTER XXVII
‘THE BASHFUL MAID’

If Captain George kept a log, as is probable, or Eugène Beaudésir a diary, as is possible, I have no intention of copying it. In the history of individuals, as of nations, the exception is Stir, the rule Stagnation. There are long links in the Silver Cord, smooth, polished, uniform, one exactly like the other, ere its sameness is varied by the carving of a boss or the flash of a gem. It is only here and there that life-like figures and spirit-stirring scenes start from the dead surface of the Golden Bowl. Perhaps, when both are broken, neither brilliancy nor workmanship, but sterling worth of metal, shall constitute the true value of each.

‘The Bashful Maid’ found her share of favouring winds and baffling breezes; trim and weatherly, she made the best of them all. Her crew, as they gained confidence in their skipper and became well acquainted amongst themselves, worked her to perfection. In squally weather, she had the great advantage of being over-manned, and could therefore carry the broadest surface of canvas it was possible to show. After a few stormy nights all shook into their places, and every man found himself told off to the duty he was best able to perform. The late Captain of Musketeers had the knack of selecting men, and of making them obey him. His last-joined hands were perhaps the best of his whole ship’s company. Bottle-Jack became boatswain’s mate, Smoke-Jack gunner, and Slap-jack captain of the foretop. These three were still fast friends and sworn adherents of Beaudésir. The latter, though he had no ostensible rank or office, seemed, next to the skipper himself, the most influential and the most useful person on board. He soon picked up enough knowledge of navigation to bring his mathematical acquirements into play. He kept the accounts of stores and cargo. He possessed a slight knowledge of medicine and surgery. He played the violin with a taste and feeling that enchanted the Spaniard, his only rival in this accomplishment, and caused many a stout heart to thrill with unaccustomed thoughts of green nooks and leafy copses, of laughing children and cottage-gardens, and summer evenings at home; lastly, the three Jacks, his fast friends, found him an apt pupil in lessons relating to sheets and tacks, blocks and braces, yards and spars, in fine, all the practical mysteries of seamanship.

During stirring times, such as the first half of the eighteenth century, a brigantine like ‘The Bashful Maid,’ well-armed, well-manned, commanded by a young adventurous captain having letters of marque in his cabin, and no certain knowledge that peace had yet been proclaimed with Spain, was not likely long to preserve her sails unbleached by use nor the paint and varnish undimmed on her hull. Not many months elapsed ere she was very different in appearance from the yacht-like craft that ran past the Needles, carrying Eugène Beaudésir prone and helpless as a log in her after-cabin. He could scarcely believe himself the same man when, bronzed, robust, and vigorous, feeling every inch a sailor, he paced her deck under the glowing stars and the mellow moonlight of the tropics. Gales had been weathered since then, shots fired, prizes taken, and that career of adventure embarked on which possesses so strange a fascination for the majority of mankind, partly, I think, from its permanent uncertainty, partly from its pandering to their self-esteem. A few more swoops, another prize or two taken, pillaged, but suffered to proceed if not worth towing into port, and the cruise would have been so successful, that already the men were calculating their share of profit and talking as if their eventual return to Britain was no longer a wild impossibility. Everything, too, had as yet been done according to fair usage of war. No piracy, no cruelty, nothing that could justify a British three-decker in capturing the brigantine, to impress her crew and hang her captain at his own yard-arm. Eugène’s counsels had so far prevailed with George that he had resolved on confining himself to the legitimate profits of a privateer, and not overstepping the narrow line of demarcation that distinguished him from a pirate.

While, however, some of her crew had been killed and some wounded, ‘The Bashful Maid’ herself had by no means emerged scatheless from her encounters. Eugène was foolish enough to experience a thrill of pride while he marked the grim holes, planked and caulked, in her sides; the workmanlike splicing of such yards and spars as had not suffered too severely for repair, and the carefully-mended foresail, now white and weather-bleached, save where the breadths of darker, newer canvas betrayed it had been riddled by round-shot.

But soon his impressionable temperament, catching the influence of the hour, threw off its warlike thoughts and abandoned itself to those gentler associations that could hardly fail to be in the ascendant.

The night was such as is only to be seen in the tropics. Above, like golden lamps, the stars were flaming rather than twinkling in the sky; while low down on the horizon a broad moon, rising from the sea, spread a lustrous path along the gently-heaving waves to the very ship’s side; a path on which myriads of glittering fairies seem to dance and revel, and disappear in changing sparkles of light.

Through all this blaze of beauty, the brigantine glided smoothly and steadily on her course. For several days and nights not a sail had been altered, not a rope shifted, before that soft and balmy breeze. The men had nothing to do but tell each other interminable yarns and smoke. It was the fair side of the medal, the bloom on the fruit, the smooth of the profession, this enchanted voyage over an enchanted sea.

Eugène revelled in its charm, but with his enjoyment was mingled that quiet melancholy so intimately associated with all beauty in those hearts (and how many of them are there!) which treasure up an impossible longing, a dream that can never come to pass. It is a morbid sentiment, no doubt, which can thus extract from the loveliest scenes of nature, and even from the brightest triumphs of art, a strange wild ecstasy of pain, possessing a fascination of its own; but it is a sentiment to which the most generous and the most noble minds are peculiarly susceptible; a sentiment that in itself denotes excessive capability, for the happiness denied or withheld. Were it better for them to be of duller spirit and coarser fibre, callous to the spur, unequal to the effort? Who knows? I think Beaudésir would not willingly have parted with the sensibility from which he experienced so much pain, from the memories on which, at moments like these, under a moonlit sky, he brooded and dwelt so fondly, yet so despondently, to have obtained in exchange the inexhaustible good-humour of Slap-Jack or the imperturbable self-command of Captain George.