George at once went below, and found Walford sitting up in the berth, muttering to himself disconnectedly and occasionally addressing with great earnestness the watchful Tom, whose horror-stricken face plainly revealed that his patient’s random observations had been of a somewhat startling character. On entering the state-room, Leicester at once addressed Walford, asking him whether he felt better; and the unfortunate man glanced for a moment in George’s face with an air of semi-recognition; but this immediately passed away, and the incoherent mutterings went on again as before.
“That’s just how he’ve been goin’ on for the last half-’our,” explained Tom; “talkin’ about ‘murder’ and ‘hangin’,’ and being left to burn in the ship; it’s enough to give one the ’orrors to listen to him.”
George sat down by the side of the cot and listened patiently for nearly an hour to Walford’s rambling talk; and, although he was unable to make out from it a clearly-connected story, he heard enough to give him a shrewd idea of the truth, and to convince him that a terrible tragedy of some kind had occurred on board the ill-fated Princess Royal. The patient at length grew calm once more, and, lying back upon his pillow, seemed inclined to sleep, upon which George quietly rose and went on deck again to see how matters were proceeding there.
As he meditatively made his way up the companion-ladder, he could not help thinking of the singularity of this last meeting between him and his rival, and comparing it with the one which had occurred on that lovely June evening, on the road to Stoke. As the two men stood there on the white dusty road, with the rays of the declining sun darting down upon them through the foliage of the overhanging trees, and as Walford told the story of his just concluded engagement to Lucy, how little, thought George, could either of them suspect that, when they next came into such close contact, it would be literally on the bosom of the broad Atlantic, up-borne by nothing save its restless waters. Poor Leicester was greatly disturbed by this singular and unconscious claim upon his hospitality which had so recently arisen. He was as generous-hearted a man as the sun ever shone upon, ever ready to give liberally and ungrudgingly to any one who seemed to be in need; but somehow he wished that in the present instance it had fallen to the lot of some one else than himself to play the part of rescuer and benefactor, or that the rescued individual had been any one rather than Walford. The fact was that he wanted to forget, if possible, the keen and bitter pain of his disappointment: and now the presence of his unhappy guest had brought it all back to him and would keep it in poignant remembrance as long as they two should remain together. Then, he bethought himself how selfish a feeling he had been allowing himself to indulge; how utterly he had forgotten that the matter was one with which Lucy’s happiness must be inseparably connected; and that fate—or Providence, rather, as he reverently corrected himself—had in a very great measure confided that happiness to his keeping, by delivering into his care the man upon whom she had bestowed the priceless treasure of her heart’s best love. And as he thought this, he solemnly vowed that he would honestly strive to prove worthy of the trust; that he would be to Lucy’s lover a brother—ay, more than a brother; that he would nurse and tend him, restore to him his reason if God willed it, and, in any case, watch over and protect him—at the cost of his own life even, if need were—until he could restore him to the arms of the woman who was impatiently awaiting at home his safe return.
“His well-being has been confided to me as a sacred trust,” he murmured in conclusion, “and, please God, I will prove myself worthy of it.”
With this resolution he dismissed the subject temporarily from his thoughts, and turned his attention once more to the affairs of the ship.
Glancing aloft, and then all round the horizon, he observed that it had fallen a flat calm, and that moreover there was no immediate prospect of a breeze. The sky was a clear deep blue in the zenith, merging by imperceptible gradations into a delicate warm grey at the horizon. The water was absolutely without a ripple, there was not so much as the faintest suggestion of a “cat’s-paw” on all its glassy surface; and save for the long sluggish sweep and heave of the swell which, as it undulated past the ship, caught and reflected the varying tints of the sky, it would have been difficult to detect the presence of water at all at a distance of more than a few yards from the ship. The Aurora was still rolling sluggishly on the sleepy swell; her dazzling white canvas flapping and the slings and trusses of the yards creaking with the roll; the men, rendered languid by the heat, were making such show as they were able of being busy on various odd jobs about the decks or aloft; and the man at the wheel had lashed it and was leaning upon it more than half-asleep. Ritson, apparently for want of something better to do, was seated on the main-topmast cross-trees, with the ship’s telescope in his hand, scrutinising the motions of the distant schooner, whose tiny “royal” was now visible from the deck, gleaming white as snow on the extreme verge of the horizon.
Noting all these things at a glance, George turned to saunter aft, thinking that on such a perfectly calm day, and with such still water, he might, by leaning well out over the taffrail, get a glimpse of the ship’s bottom and see whether it had fouled at all, or whether the copper showed any signs of wrinkling. Arrived at the taffrail, he leaned well out over it, and peered down into the water. The first thing which attracted his notice was the deep, pure, beautiful ultramarine tint of the water, as he gazed far down into its unfathomable depths; the next was, the presence of a long greyish-brown object under the ship’s counter, which had escaped his notice at first in consequence of its being in the deepest shadow of the hull. A moment sufficed to satisfy him that it was a huge shark; and as the creature caught sight of him, and with a barely perceptible movement of its fins, backed out a foot or two from under the ship, as if in preparation to make a dart at him in case he should fall into the water, George shuddered at the thought of what might have been his or Walford’s fate, had the monster been in the neighbourhood of the ship a few hours earlier.
Sliding his body gently inboard again, Leicester turned to the dozing helmsman, and exclaimed—
“Here, you Ned; rouse up, man. There’s a big shark under the counter, so get out the shark-hook, ask the cook for a piece of good fat pork, and muster the watch aft in readiness to haul him inboard, in case we can coax him into swallowing the bait.”