Chapter Eleven.
A Ghastly Waif of the Sea.
Our voyage had, thus far, proved to be an unusually eventful one; yet it was to be made the more notable ere its close by the addition of still one more incident, and that, too, of a sufficiently ghastly character, to the catalogue of those already recorded. It occurred on the tenth day after our brush with the Malays in the Straits of Sunda, and when we were about midway across the China Sea.
Since that wild night on which we had so nearly laid the bones of the Esmeralda—and possibly our own as well—to rest on the shores of Sumatra, we had met with uninterrupted bright sunshine and light, favourable breezes. The day on which the incident occurred was no exception to the rule. The weather was gloriously fine, with a rich, softly mottled sky of blue and white overhead, out of the midst of which the afternoon sun blazed fiercely down upon a smooth, sparkling sea, gently ruffling under the faint, warm breeze to a surface of pale, glowing sapphire, along which the barque, wooing the soft zephyr with studding-sails spread on both sides, from the royals down, swam with a sleepy, rhythmical swaying of her taunt spars, at a speed of some five knots in the hour.
It was close upon eight bells of the afternoon watch, and the saloon party were all on deck, grouped under the shadow of the awning; the elders lounging in easy, unconventional attitudes in capacious basket-chairs, the women, attired in snowy white, beguiling the time by making a pretence at working at some embroidery, or fancy sewing of some kind, as they fitfully conversed upon such topics as occurred to them; while Sir Edgar, clothed in flannels, with a Panama hat tilted well forward over his eyes, smoked and read with an air of placid enjoyment; the youngsters, apparently less affected than the rest of us by the languorous heat of the weather, meanwhile indulging in a game at hide-and-seek about the decks with the ship’s cat.
Of the hands forward, some of the watch were aloft, working at odd jobs about the rigging, while the drowsy clinking of a spunyarn winch somewhere on the forecastle, in the shadow of the head sails, accounted for the remainder. Most of the watch below were invisible; but two or three industrious ones had grouped themselves on the foredeck, in situations which secured at once a sufficiency of shadow and a maximum of breeze, and were smoking and chatting as they washed or repaired their clothing.
As for me, I was indulging in a brief spell of perfect bodily idleness, and had established myself in my own particular wicker chair, near the break of the poop, and, with hands crossed behind my head and cigar in mouth, was lazily watching a man on the main-royal yard who was reeving a new set of signal halliards, while my mind was busy upon the apparently insoluble problem of finding the key to the cipher relating to Richard Saint Leger’s buried treasure.
The signal halliards had just been successfully rove when eight bells were struck, and the man who had been reeving them—now off duty—was preparing leisurely to descend to the deck, when, as nine out of every ten sailors will, he paused to take a last, long, comprehensive look round the horizon. There was not a sail of any sort in sight from the deck, not even so much as the glancing of a bird’s wing against the warm, tender, grey tones of the horizon to arrest one’s wandering glances; but this was apparently not the case from the superior altitude of the main-royal yard, for presently I observed a change in the attitude of the man up there from that of listless indifference to awakened curiosity and interest. His gaze grew earnest and attentive; then he shaded his eyes with his hand, and his body assumed an attitude and expression of alertness. Long and steadily he maintained his gaze in one fixed direction; then he glanced down on deck, and, catching sight of me with my face upturned toward him, he hailed—