We were ourselves sailing fast, and the two ships were coming along faster perhaps by two or three miles in the hour than we were going; in a magically short time they were two defined shapes upon the bow about a quarter of a mile apart, black spots under brilliant clouds showing like shapes of white flame through the windy blue dazzle trembling into the atmosphere they were coming through. The sailors dropped their several tasks to look; the surly mate stared with a fixed devouring leer; all hands I guessed understood what they were to see; the cook stepped from the galley to the rail. In less than half an hour from the moment of our sighting them they were abreast, and when they were right abeam this one hid the other, so completely were they neck and neck.
By this time our own ship's number was flying at our peak, and now as they came abreast, each having told us by a thin tongue of flag that our colours had been spelt out, they hoisted their own names.
'An Aberdeen clipper and a Blackwall liner,' said Captain Burke, reading out of a signal book. 'Both from an Australian port. A very pretty race indeed. But it's the spirit of Souchong that puts life into that sort of thing.'
Yet spite of that I thought the show as gallant as anything old ocean ever submitted, if it were not a scene of old line-of-battle ships in a gale of wind. They opened into six spires of delicate shadow and snowlike whiteness; they leaned their full and starlike breasts to us, the lustrous canvas tapering to an apex of cloth that was a very puff of sail, wan as some web of cloud near the afternoon moon. Every stitch that would draw was heaped upon them; they had the wind right abeam; to windward they were clothed with studding-sails; betwixt the masts some becalmed wing of fore and aft canvas would swing in and out idly like the pinion of a wounded bird. The sight was a marvellous hurry of shadows, and flashing lights, and steady shining of rounded canvas; and under the bows of each a glass-clear sea arching, flashed into a very snow-storm, and broke aft as far as the gangway.
They passed like clouds, silent and stately, and I continued to watch them till they were glowing astern, dwindling and dimming, but, as Captain Burke declared, neck and neck yet even when they had sunk their courses, and nothing above the clews of their topsails were 'dipping' upon the horizon.
It was not many days after this that we crossed the equator. A pleasant sailing wind blew us over the line and failed us not till we had reached almost within the Polar verge of the south-east trade wind, into which Captain Burke and the mate sneaked the ship by careful and unwearied attention to every faintest breathing that tarnished the surface of the long, blue equatorial heave. Then one morning, coming on deck, I found a strong wind humming like a concert of organs off the port bow, and the vessel with her yards fore and aft, breaking through a quick spitting sea, and clouds passing like dust over our mast-heads. This was the first of the south-east trade wind.
'It's all right with us now, Miss Otway,' said Captain Burke as he shook me by the hand. 'We're making a straight course for the Horn, and we shall be putting her nose off for the great South Sea presently.'
But even though he spoke lightly, and seemed very well satisfied to have taken the trade gale in its strength so young, there was the same suggestion of spiritlessness in his manner that had been more or less visible in him now ever since the sailor had told him he had seen his apparition. Though the ghost had not again appeared; though Mr. Owen, with the hope, no doubt, of settling the captain's spirits, had got the seaman to admit that he might have been mistaken, that he was leaning against the forecastle rail in a sort of doze perhaps when he started and saw the thing, which, he avowed, might very well have been an illusion of shadow and moonlight upon his sleepy vision—it was all one; a weight of dejection had come upon the captain's mind, and ever since the night of superstition he had ceased to be that merry, arch, humorous Irishman who had called upon my father, and made us laugh almost in the very anguish of my leave-taking. This was so noticeable in him whilst he talked to me about the south-east trade wind, and going for Cape Horn in a bee-line, and our first sunny port—full of quaint costumes and pleasant fruit and queer merry-makings—just round the corner, that on returning to the cabin sometime afterwards and finding Mrs. Burke there sewing, I sat down beside her and talked about him.