When he returned he held a fiddle and a fiddlestick; but this unusual appeal of the cabin to the forecastle had roused curiosity, and a number of the men followed Jimmy to the quarter-deck. I heard their softened footfalls, and caught a glimpse of their figures as they stood round about the skylight, scarce sensible that they were visible through the black glass. The lady took the fiddle and the bow from the lad, who withdrew. She put the fiddle to her neck, tuned it, and played a short, merry air. I had not known that she played the fiddle. I guessed she had asked for the instrument to twang an accompaniment upon. She played a second sweet and merry air; the melody was full of beauty and humor. Someone overhead tapped the deck in time to it. I took care not to look up, willing that the fellows should listen, though they had no business aft.
“How do you like that?” said the lady in Spanish.
“It is sweet and good. Give me more.”
She put down the bow, and, laying the fiddle across her knees, twanged it. She kept her eyes fastened upon me, and, when she had tweaked the fiddlestrings, she shrugged her shoulders and laughed; then, before the laugh had fairly left her lips, she burst into song, singing with that clear, full-throated richness of voice which poor Greaves had predicted her the possessor of. She filled the cabin with her song. She would have filled the biggest theater in Europe with it. Her voice was thrilling with volume and power, and her eyes were full of a gay triumph as she sang, as though she would say, “This is news to you, my friend.”
I thought her spirit the most remarkable part of the performance. Here was a lady—a young and handsome woman, clearly a person of degree in her own country—amusing a young, rough sailor with her songs, fiddling to him, taking lessons in English from him, watching him with shining eyes, as though her heart was as charged with light as her gaze. Her voice, her face, the aroma of her manner, transformed the plain, grim little cabin of the brig into a brilliant drawing room, full of ladies and gentlemen, sweet with the scent of flowers, gay with the gleam of silk and jewel and epaulet. Who, while she sang, would have supposed that she had been shipwrecked not very long ago, living, with small hopes of deliverance, upon a desert island, in company with a couple of common, low seamen; ignorant whether her mother was alive or dead; still many thousands of miles away from her home—if Madrid was to be her home; with twenty hard fortunes before her, for all she knew?
She sang me three songs, and all hands, as I knew by the shuffling of feet, listened above, some shouldering warily into the companion hatch to hear well. I reckoned she knew she had a bigger audience than I, for once she lifted her eyes in the pause of a song and smiled in a conscious way.
“Now I am tired,” said she in English, and put the fiddle upon the table with capricious quickness of movement. “Good-night, Señor Fielding:” and she gave me a low, but somewhat haughty bow, and went to her cabin, stepping the short length of the deck with the most translatable carriage in life: “I have amused you, I have condescended; but I am always the Señorita Aurora de la Cueva. Vaya!”
CHAPTER XXVI.
A TRAGIC SHIFT OF COURSE.
All went well with us through the month of February and through the early days of March in that year of God, 1815, until it came to pass that we arrived in the latitude 45° south, and in longitude 47° west.
I was very hopeful in this time. The crew had been orderly, civil, and quick; strong, prosperous winds had swept us round the Horn and northward; we were homeward bound; we were putting the unfamiliar stars of the south over our stern; already some were gone, and some wheeled low. I walked the deck with gladness, and knew but two sorrows: that Greaves was not at my side to share in the rich issue of his own discovery and his own expedition, and that my poor, faithful, well-loved Galloon was drowned.