The Castaways

by Harry Collingwood

As I told her of the fate that had been planned for us, I saw her blanch to the lips, and her eyes grow wide and glassy with horror; but presently her colour returned and her mouth set in firm, resolute lines; and when at length I ceased to speak, she said:

“My poor Charlie, no wonder that you look worn and worried! But take courage, dear; I cannot believe that God will permit those wretches to murder us in cold blood. He will surely inspire you with an idea that will enable you to defeat and prevent an act of such atrocious wickedness; and I have a sure conviction that in His own good time we shall be accorded a happy deliverance out of all our troubles, and that you will by and by enjoy the satisfaction of happily reuniting me to my dear father—and receiving the usual reward accorded to the all-conquering prince in the fairy tale.”

“God grant it, my dearest!” I exclaimed fervently, as I kissed her. “And now,” said I, “I must go on deck, I suppose, and endeavour to appear as though I had not a care in the world; for if those fellows notice that I am looking gloomy and preoccupied, they will at once guess that I suspect something, and may in that case so precipitate their plans as to render our case more desperate than ever.”

“We will go together,” said the brave girl, “and you shall have an example of the deep duplicity of which I am capable. I will defy any one of them to detect the faintest shadow of care on my brow!”

And therewith she retired to her cabin, and presently emerged again, attired for the deck.

It was a glorious morning of true Pacific weather, with the wind blowing a merry breeze from about west-north-west; the sky, an exquisitely pure and delicate turquoise blue, flecked with patches of fleecy, prismatic-tinted cloud that here and there darkened the sapphire of the sparkling, foam-flecked ocean with broad spaces of deep, rich, violet shadow. As for the brig, she was swarming along at a nine-knot pace under all plain sail supplemented by her starboard studding-sail, with her mast-heads sweeping in wide arcs athwart the blue as she swayed and rose and sank in long, floating rushes over the rugged ridges of the pursuing swell, while dazzling sunshine and purple shadow chased each other in and out of the hollows of her canvas and athwart her grimy decks. There was a thin, eddying coil of bluish smoke hurrying from the galley chimney under the high-arching foot of the fore-course and out over the port cat-head; and the watch, having no sail-trimming to attend to, were squatted upon their hams on the fore deck, playing cards. The hooker needed no looking after in such weather as this, and the only individual, beside ourselves, abaft the mainmast was the helmsman.

Miss Onslow’s appearance on deck never failed to attract the notice of the men, although she had made a point of being up and down every day, and all day long, and I soon discovered that we were the objects of the stealthy regard not only of the group on the forecastle but also of the man at the wheel. But no child could have appeared more completely free from care than she was; she chatted with me about Calcutta, and Simla, described the characteristics of the several castes and classes of natives, illustrating her description with amusing anecdotes that even coaxed a smile upon the sullen, wooden visage of the fellow at the wheel, and spoke of being reunited to her father with an absolute confidence that left no room for even a shadow of suspicion that she entertained the slightest doubt upon that subject.

A considerable period now elapsed without the occurrence of any incident worthy of mention, except that I observed in the men a quite extraordinary devotion to card-playing; they did no work of any kind whatsoever beyond such necessary duties as making, shortening, or trimming sale, as occasion demanded; and when they were not doing this they were playing cards. I was at first somewhat puzzled to account for the feverish and unflagging zeal with which this particular form of amusement was pursued by all hands; for although sailors are fond of an occasional quiet game of cards, they are, as a rule, by no means devotees of the pasteboards. But at length I obtained enlightenment from the man Harry: they were gambling with the gems for stakes! This intelligence disquieted me greatly, for I foresaw possibilities of trouble in it; and by and by it came. Meanwhile, however, I neglected no opportunity to seek intelligence as to any change in the views of these men with regard to the ultimate disposal of myself and Miss Onslow, and learned from time to time—my informant, of course, being Harry—that, so far, nothing had transpired justifying the suspicion that any departure from the original plan was contemplated. This was, in a measure, gratifying, in so far at least as that it still left me a fair amount of time to evolve some satisfactory scheme for our salvation—a task in which I had not yet succeeded, although I had considered I might almost say hundreds of ideas, only to discard them as either impracticable or unreliable.

At the moment of which I am now about to speak—we were drawing close on toward the meridian of the Horn, but well to the south of it; and the weather was what sailors call “dirty”—a dark, scowling sky overhead, charged with sleet and rain squalls that, when we ran into them, lashed us and stung the skin like whips; the atmosphere was nippingly raw, and thick enough to veil and blot out everything at a distance of more than four miles; and the wind was blowing so fresh from the southward that the men had at length been compelled to unwillingly turn out and snug the brig down to double-reefed topsails, with the mainsail stowed. There was a very steep and ugly beam sea running, and the brig was rolling to it as though bent on rolling the masts out of her; while the decks were mid-leg deep with the water that she dished in over the rail at every roll with a regularity that I was very far from appreciating. Worst of all, there was no pretence whatever on the part of the men to watch the ship or keep a lookout—the scoundrels were well aware that I might be depended on for that; the only man on deck was the helmsman; and from the condition of those who came staggering aft from time to time at the stroke of the bell to relieve the wheel, I more than suspected that a drinking bout was under way in the forecastle. Such a condition of affairs was amply sufficient at any time to create within me a sense of profound uneasiness, much more so at that especial time; for we were then in a part of the ocean notorious for sudden, savage gales, thick weather, and floating ice as deadly as any reef that ever trapped a ship; and the safety of the brig, and of all hands, might at any moment be fatally imperilled by the slightest lack of alertness, or the briefest powerlessness on the part of the crew. It was this conviction alone that restrained me from an immediate endeavour to recapture the brig; the conditions were propitious, for as I have said all hands were below with the exception of the helmsman. The cook, it is true, was in his galley; but if I chose to arm myself with the pistols that had been presented to me by the Frenchman aboard the Marie Renaud, it would be no such desperate matter to slip for’ard and clap the hatch over the fore-scuttle, secure the cook in his galley, and then compel the half-drunken helmsman to surrender. But to resort to such measures as those where we then were would have been sheer madness; and the idea no sooner occurred to me than it was dismissed as impracticable. But although impracticable just then, it might not be so later on, when we should have arrived in less perilous latitudes; and I there and then resolved to do everything that in me lay to facilitate such a coup on the first suitable occasion.

Meanwhile, it was little short of madness for the men to drink to excess under the then prevailing conditions of weather and situation; and I determined to remonstrate with O’Gorman for permitting such perilous indulgence. So I went aft and took the wheel, directing the man whom I relieved to ask O’Gorman to come aft, as I wished to speak to him.