“Dark night,” the Captain continued, after a short silence, “and a heavy sea, about mid-channel off Dieppe. We sighted a French fishing-boat yawing about abandoned. Something queer about her, the skipper thought. Those were queer times in France. We hailed her, and getting no answer put out a boat and boarded her. There was nobody on board but a woman and a child. Woman was half mad with fear. I have seen many afraid, but never one like that. I was only a boy myself, but I remember thinking it wasn’t the sea and drowning she was afraid of. We couldn’t find out the smack’s name. It had been painted out with a tar-brush, and she was half full of water. The skipper took the woman and child off, and left the fishing-smack as we found her yawing about—all sail set. They reckoned she would founder in a few minutes. But there was one old man on board, the boatswain, who had seen many years at sea, who said that she wasn’t making any water at all, because he had been told to look for the leak and couldn’t find it. He said that the water had been pumped into her so as to waterlog her; and it was his belief that she had not been abandoned many minutes, that the crew were hanging about somewhere near in a boat waiting to see if we sighted her and put men on board.”
Mr. Dormer Colville was attending to the claret, and pressed Captain Clubbe by a gesture of the hand to empty his glass.
“Something wrong somewhere?” he suggested, in a conversational way.
“By daylight we were ramping up channel with three French men-of-war after us,” was Captain Clubbe’s comprehensive reply. “As chance had it, the channel squadron hove in sight round the Foreland, and the Frenchmen turned and left us.”
Clubbe marked a pause in his narrative by a glass of claret, taken at one draught like beer.
“Skipper was a Farlingford man, name of Doy,” he continued. “Long as he lived he was pestered by inquiries from the French government respecting a Dieppe fishing-smack supposed to have been picked up abandoned at sea. He had picked up no fishing-smack, and he answered no letters about it. He was an old man when it happened, and he died at sea soon after my indentures expired. The woman and child were brought here, where nobody could speak French, and, of course, neither of them could speak any English. The boy was white-faced and frightened at first, but he soon picked up spirit. They were taken in and cared for by one and another—any who could afford it. For Farlingford has always bred seafaring men ready to give and take.”
“So we were told yesterday by the rector. We had a long talk with him in the morning. A clever man, if—”
Dormer Colville did not complete the remark, but broke off with a sigh. He had no doubt seen trouble himself. For it is not always the ragged and unkempt who have been sore buffeted by the world, but also such as have a clean-washed look almost touching sleekness.
“Yes,” said Clubbe, slowly and conclusively. “So you have seen the parson.”
“Of course,” Colville remarked, cheerfully, after a pause; for we cannot always be commiserating the unfortunate. “Of course, all this happened before his time, and Monsieur de Gemosac does not want to learn from hearsay, you understand, but at first hand. I fancy he would, for instance, like to know when the woman, the—mother died.”