But it was a sadly worn, and strained, and shattered craft that lay upon the fast subsiding water, some six hours after the squall, under the glowing sun of a morning in the tropics; a sun that glinted on the sea till its heaving surface looked all one sheet of burnished gold; a sun that was truly comforting to the drenched and wearied crew, although its glare exposed pitilessly the whole amount of damage the brigantine had sustained. That poor ‘Bashful Maid’ was as different now from the trim yacht-like craft that sailed past the Needles, gaudy with paint and gleaming with varnish, as is the dead seabird, lying helpless and draggled on the wave, from the same creature soaring white and beautiful, in all its pride of power and plumage, against the summer sky.
There was but one opinion, however, amongst the crew as to the merits of the craft, and the way she had been handled. Not one of them, and it was a great acknowledgment for sailors to make, who never think their present berth the best—not one of them had ever before sailed in any description of vessel which answered her helm so readily or could lay her head so near the wind’s eye—not one of them had ever seen a furious tropical squall weathered so scientifically and so successfully, nor could call to mind a captain who seemed so completely master of his trade. The three Jacks compared notes on the subject before turning in about sunrise, when the worst was indeed over, but the situation, to a landsman at least, would have yet appeared sufficiently precarious: The brigantine was still driving before a heavy sea, showing just so much canvas as should save her from being becalmed in its trough, overtaken and buried under the pursuing enemy. The gale was still blowing with a fury that offered the best chance of its force soon becoming exhausted, and two men were at the helm under the immediate supervision of the skipper himself.
Nevertheless, the three stout tars betook themselves to their berth without the slightest anxiety, well aware that each would be sleeping like a child almost before he could clamber into his hammock.
But while he took off and wrung his dripping sea-coat, Bottle-Jack observed sententiously to his mates—
“Captain Kidd could fight a ship, my sons, and Captain Kidd could sail a ship. Now if you asks my opinion, it’s this here—In such a squall as we’ve a-weathered, or pretty nigh a-weathered, Captain Kidd, he’d a-run afore it at once, an’ he’d a bin in it now. This here young skipper, he laid to, so long as she could lay to, an’ he never run till he couldn’t fight no more. That’s why he’ll be out on it afore the middle watch. Belay now, I’m a-goin’ to caulk it for a spell.”
Neither Smoke-Jack nor Slap-Jack were in a humour for discussion, and each cheerfully conceded the Captain’s judicious seamanship. The former expressing his opinion that nothing in the King’s navy could touch the brigantine, and the latter, recurring to his previous experience, rejoicing that he no longer sailed under the gallant but unseamanlike Captain Delaval.
The honest fellows, thoroughly wearied, were soon in the land of dreams. Haunted no more by visions of dancing spars, wet slippery ropes, yards dripping in the waves, and flapping sails struggling wildly for the freedom that must be their own destruction, and the whole ship’s company’s doom. No, their thoughts were of warm sanded parlours, cheerful coal-fires, endless pipes of tobacco, messmates singing, women dancing, the unrestrained festivities and flowing ale-jugs of the Fox and Fiddle. Perhaps, to the imagination of the youngest, a fair pale face, loving and tearful, stood out from all these jovial surroundings, and Slap-Jack felt a purer and a better man while, though but in imagination, he clasped his true and tender Alice to his heart once more.
CHAPTER XXIX
PORT WELCOME
It was a refreshing sight to behold Slap-Jack, “rigged,” as he was pleased to term it, “to the nines,” in the extreme of sea-dandyism, enacting the favourite part of a “liberty-man” ashore.