‘What are you thinking of?’ she asked: ‘you are plunged in thought. I hope you are struggling to do justice to my perception of the truth.’
I started, and then laughed out. ‘I will not tell you what I was thinking of,’ said I; ‘but I will express what was in my mind whilst you were speaking just now. You dwell with horror upon the captain’s account of his crew. Well, I heartily wish for both our sakes that they were an honest straight-headed body of men. But then every ship’s forecastle is a menagerie. There is ruffianism, and there is respectability. Quite likely that the carpenter Lush may have killed a man; but one must hear the story before deciding to call him a murderer. So of the convicts; so of the mutineers. In many ships at sea there is unspeakable provocation, and crimes are committed of which the blood rests upon the head of anyone sooner than those who are held guilty and punished by the law. I am not to be greatly frightened by Captain Braine’s talk of his crew, particularly since in a few days we may either be on board the Indiaman or homeward-bound in another ship. Let us now go on deck. I wish to take a view of the sailors, and see what sort of a craft this is, for as yet I have seen but little of her.’
I could not help remarking that she kept very close to me as we made our way out of the cuddy, and that the glances she directed forwards where some seamen were at work were full of apprehension. The short poop of the Lady Blanche was gained by a central ladder falling fair in the face of the little doorway of the cuddy front with its two small windows and row of buckets. A low, handsomely carved wooden rail was fixed athwart the break of this raised deck, and I stood with Miss Temple at a point of it that provided me with a clear view fore and aft. The captain sat on a grating abaft the wheel reading. Mr. Lush was near the mizzen rigging, gazing seawards with a stubborn wooden expression of face. After the spacious decks and wide topgallant-forecastle of the Indiaman, this little Lady Blanche looked a mere toy. But though a ship shows least admirably from her own deck, I found a deal to please and even delight me in the first comprehensive look I threw around. She was as clean as a yacht; the insides of her bulwarks were painted a delicate green, and they were as spotless as though the brush were just off them; on either side were two little brass guns, mounted on carriages, and they shone as freshly as though the sunlight were upon them; the running gear was everywhere neatly coiled away. The small caboose, with its smoking chimney, abaft the foremast; the length of windlass close in under the overlap of the short space of forecastle; the white longboat; the white scuttle-butt abreast of it; the little winch abaft the mainmast; the brass-lined circle of the wheel in the grasp of the sober, good-tempered-looking old fellow who had made one of the boat’s crew; the two shapely clinker-built quarter-boats hanging at the davits abreast of the mizzen mast—these and much more seemed details of a miniature delicacy and finish, that entered with surprising effect into the fabric’s general character of toy-like grace and elegance. On high, the white canvas soared in symmetrical spaces; but after the towering spires of the Indiaman, the main-yard of this little barque seemed within reach of the hand, and the tiny skysail that crowned the summit of the airy, snow-white, faintly-swelling cloths, no bigger than a lady’s pocket-handkerchief.
‘This is really a beautiful little ship, Miss Temple,’ said I.
‘I might be able to admire her from the deck of the Countess Ida,’ she answered; ‘but there must be happiness to enable me to find beauty, and I am not happy here.’
I searched the sea-line, but it was as bare and flawless as the rim of a brand-new guinea. The dull shadow of the morning still overspread the heavens; it was the same leaden sky, with here and there a little break of faintness, revealing some edge of apparently motionless cloud, and the ocean lay sallow beneath it, darker than it was for the pencilling of the ripples which wrinkled the wide expanse as they rode the long, light heave of the swell. There were some sailors at work in the waist on jobs, of which I forget the nature; I examined them attentively—they were within easy eyeshot; but though there was no lack of prejudice in my observation, I protest I could find nothing rascally in their appearance. They were all of them of the then familiar type of merchant seaman, as like to members of the crew of the Indiaman as one pea is to another; faces burnt by the sun and decorated with the usual assemblage of warts and moles, all of them of an unmistakably English cut—I am speaking of the five of them then visible—dressed in the rough apparel of the ocean, rude shirts revealing the bare hairy breast, duck breeches with stains of oil and tar in them which there was no virtue in the scrubbing-brush and the lee-scuppers to remedy. Miss Temple, standing at my side, gazed at them.
‘They have quite the look of cut-throats, I think,’ said she.
‘Well, now, to my fancy,’ said I, ‘they seem as honest a set of lively hearties as one could wish to sail with.’
‘You merely say that to encourage me,’ she exclaimed with a pout of vexation. ‘Observe that man with the black beard—the one that is nearest to us. Could you figure a completer likeness of a pirate? I do not like his way of glancing at us out of the corner of his eyes. An honest sailor would stare boldly.’
I laughed, and then put on a face of apology.