'There is a young naval officer lying in the poop cabin, and he is slightly wounded. His name is--is----'
'What?' roared Pooley, astonished at the mate's hesitation.
'It is marked on the rim of his cap--inside. It is--I--I am afraid it is Miss Waldron's fiancé. The--the--name is Bampfyld.'
CHAPTER IX
[ Come over, come home
Through the salt sea foam.]
Never, perhaps, on all that old highway of the waters, that silent road along which so many had steered their course to fabled Ormuz and to Ind, nor amidst fierce sea-fights 'twixt Arab and Persian, or Arab and European in later centuries, nor in the howl of storm when the waters closed around the shipwrecked and doomed, had there arisen a more piercing shriek than that which now issued from Bella Waldron's blanched lips.
'My God!' she screamed, repeating the second mate's words. '"The name is Bampfyld!" Oh, it's Gilbert--Gilbert! There is no other in the Navy List. Let me go to him, uncle!'
'No, no,' the master said, while good Mrs. Pooley put her arms round the girl as she stood there by the poop-rails and endeavoured to calm and soothe her. 'No, no, Bella; they will bring him on board directly, then,'--and in his desire to ease the girl's heart he raised the ghost of a smile to his lips--'then you shall nurse him till he is well. Yet,' he muttered to Charke, as he walked over to where the first mate stood, 'yet, how on earth does he find himself in that infernal dhow!'
'Heaven knows,' the other answered. 'But, perhaps, 'tis not so strange, after all. There may have been a fight between his ship and the slaver--though there's not much fight in them when they get a sight of the British Flag!--or he may have been sent to board her and got cut down, or half-a-hundred things. All of which,' he added, with his now usual cynicism, 'are equally likely or unlikely. Anyhow, he is here--or will be in a few moments--and we shall have him for a passenger to Bombay. Your niece is in luck, sir,' and he turned on his heel and went down the ladder to the deck to see to the raising of the boat, which was now making its way back to the ship.
To Stephen Charke, still loving the girl as madly as he did, still raging inwardly at the knowledge that every knot which the ship made was bringing her nearer to the man who, as he considered, had torn her from him, this incident seemed the last and most crushing blow of all. God knows what hopes the mate had cherished in his bosom since first he had learnt that Bella was to be a passenger in her uncle's ship for about four months; what ideas might have been revolving in his mind as to whether, in those four months, something extraordinary, something almost unheard of--not to be dreamt of nor foreseen--might happen to give him one more chance of winning her. He was a romantically-minded man, a man with so rich an imagination that, to him, there sometimes came ideas that few are ever burdened with. And, in that full and teeming imagination, there had been pictured to him visions of the Emperor of the Moon being wrecked and Bella and he alone spared--he, of course, saving her at the peril of his own life and winning her away from her more aristocratic lover by so doing. Or, he dreamt of that lover being himself wrecked and lost, or pierced by an Arab spear in some affray, or shot in a hand-to-hand fight with a particularly bold slaver (since he knew well enough that the ships of the Bombay station were often enough down here) or--or--or he cherished any mad vision that first rose to his brain.