Well, next day, I promise you, this incident of the bird gave us plenty to talk about. In fact it even swamped the memory of the dance and the supper, and again and again you would see one or another of the ladies sending a wistful glance round the sea-line, in search of the dismasted brig—as often looking astern as ahead, whilst one or two of the young fellows amongst us crept very gingerly aloft, holding on as they went as though they would squeeze all the tar out of the shrouds, just to make sure that there was nothing in sight. However, there was a professional look-out kept forward. I heard the captain give directions to the officer of the watch to send a man on to the fore-royal yard from time to time to report if there was anything in view; but as to altering his course with the chance of picking up the Frenchman, that was not to be expected in old Bow, whose business was to get to Bombay as fast as the wind would blow him along; and indeed, seeing that the Ruby had already been hard upon four months from the river Thames, you will suppose that, concerned as we might all feel about the fate of La Mulette, the softest-hearted amongst us would have been loth to lose even a day in a search that was tolerably certain to prove fruitless—as the mate proved to a group of us whilst he stood pointing out our situation and the supposed position of the brig upon a chart of the Indian Ocean lying open upon the skylight.
We got no wind till daybreak of the morning following the dance, and then a pleasant air came along out of south-south-east, which enabled the Ruby to expand her stunsails and she went floating over the long sapphire swells of the fervid ocean under an overhanging cloud of cloths which whitened the water to starboard of her, till it looked like a sheet of quicksilver draining there. This breeze held and shoved the ponderous bows of the Indiaman through it at the rate of some four or five miles in the hour. So we jogged along, till it came to the fourth day from the date of my adventure in the maintop. The fiery breeze had by this time crept round to off the starboard bow, and the ship was sailing along with her yards as fore and aft as they would lie. It was a little before the hour of noon. The captain and mates were ogling the sun through their sextants on either hand the poop, for the luminary hung pretty nearly over the royal truck with a wake of flaming gold under him broadening to our cutwater, so that the Ruby looked to be stemming some burning river of glory flowing through a strange province of dark blue land.
Suddenly high aloft from off the maintop-gallant-yard—whose arm was jockeyed by the figure of a sailor doing something with the clew of the royal—came a clear, distant cry of “Sail ho!” and I saw the man levelling his marline-spike at an object visible to him a little to the right of the flying-jibboom end.
“Aloft there!” bawled the mate, putting his hand to the side of his mouth, “how does she show, my lad?”
“’Tis something black, sir,” cried the man, making a binocular glass of his fists. “’Tis well to the starboard of the dazzle upon the water. It is too blinding that way to make sure.”
“Something black!” shouted the little colonel, whose Christian name was Desmond, “La Mulette, Captain Bow, without doubt. Anybody feel inclined to bet?”
Some wagering followed, whilst I stepped below for a telescope of my own, and then went forward and got into the fore-rigging, with the glass slung over my shoulders. There was no need to ascend above the top. I levelled the telescope when I gained that platform, and instantly saw the object with a handbreadth of the gleam of the blue sea past her, showing that she was well this side of the horizon from the elevation of the foremast, and that she would be visible from the poop in a little while. There was but a very light swell on; the spires of the Ruby floated steadily through the blue atmosphere. I had no difficulty in commanding the object therefore, and the powerful lenses of my telescope brought her close. It was a wreck, a sheer hulk indeed, and without a shadow of a doubt La Mulette. Her masts were gone, though a fragment of bowsprit remained. Whole lengths of her bulwark were apparently crushed flat to the covering-board; nevertheless, the hulk preserved a sort of rakish aspect, a piratical sheer of long, low side. “Let her prove what she will,” thought I, “I am a Dutchman if yonder craft hasn’t carried a bitter and poisonous sting in her head and tail in her time.”
They had “made” eight bells on the poop, and the mellow chimes were sounding upon the quarter-deck, and echoing in the silent squares of canvas, as I descended the rigging and made my way aft. I told Captain Bow that the craft ahead was a hulk, and without doubt La Mulette; on hearing which the passengers went in a rush to the side and stood staring as though the object was close aboard, some of them pointing and swearing they could see her, though at the rate at which we were shoving through it she was a fair hour and a half yet behind the horizon from the altitude of the poop.
However, when I came up from tiffin some little while before two o’clock, the hulk lay bare upon the sea over the starboard cat-head, with a light like the flash of a gun breaking from her wet black side to the languid roll of her sunwards, and a crowd of steerage-passengers and sailors forward staring at her. At any time a wreck at sea, washing about in the heart of some great ocean solitude, will appeal with solemn significance to the eye of one sailing past it. What dreadful tragedy has she been the little theatre of? you wonder. You speculate upon the human anguish she memorializes, upon the dark and scaring horrors her shape may entomb. But it is a sight to appeal with added force to people who have been at sea for many long weeks, without so much as the glimpse of a sail for days at a time to break the enormous monotony of the ocean, or to furnish a fugitive human interest to the ever-receding sea-line—that most mocking of all earthly limitations.
“Anybody see any signs of life aboard of her?” asked Captain Bow. “My sight is not what it was.”