The deck-house door was open. The light of the lantern streamed freely into the air, and illuminated a considerable area of plank, in the midst of which a fight was apparently going on, for it was thence the uproar proceeded. Mr. Vanderholt ran forward, and saw the girl tearing with outstretched claws at one of the men as though she would rend him in pieces. His trouble was to get away. He butted and dodged behind his elbow, shouting: 'S'elp me Bob, Polly, it worn't no fault o' mine'! And then she would shriek out: 'Yer drove me to it! It was along o' you, and not Bill, you sink——' And here she would nearly tear his ear off; and then she got at his hair, whilst the man, never offering to hit her, danced in the light, shouting with pain, and swearing that he had had nothing to do with it.
'Stop it!' roared Captain Glew. 'Is a gentleman's yacht to be disgraced by a stowaway spitfire? Help her into the boat, Mr. Officers;' and plunging, they bore the girl out of her entangled embrace of Maul, and in a few minutes they were over the side, and gone.
The crew followed Maul into the deck-house, and a grunt of laughter went along with them.
'What have you been a-doing to her?' says one.
'Where's my 'at?' said Maul.
'What do it feel like, Frederick?' sung out a sailor named Legg. 'As if you was married?'
'Never mind her. I'm a-thinking of what I've left behind me, my joys,' exclaimed a seaman.
'I'm durned mighty glad I sold off all my furniture,' said the deep-throated Jack who had on an early occasion made a statement on this subject.
Father and daughter sat in the cabin till half-past ten. Miss Violet was then sleepy, and went to bed. When she left her berth in the morning the schooner was under weigh, storming through Sea Reach, with half a gale of wind astern of her, and a thunderstorm of hell's own hue lancing the land beyond Canvey Island with lightning that fell in showers of fiery bayonets. It was a majestic, sublime, terrible storm. The girl, standing in the companion-way, was fascinated. The sun peeped at a corner of this purple-black bank of vapour, off which rags of tempest, gilded by his radiance, were blowing sheer across the wind, whilst for miles the edge of the electric mass was a line of glorious light. It was as though a bed of fire lay on top, with the molten stuff darting in flames through the swollen belly; and the thunder roared in rattling broadsides.
The noble, dangerous scene of sky, however, was soon far astern; and the schooner sped on, carving out a grass-green comber with her chisel-like stem, and leaving the tail of a comet blowing in froth behind her. And now did nothing noticeable happen for some days. They met with heavy weather in the Channel. The wind darkened with snow, and the Mowbray, under small canvas, ratched, panting over the crazy, choppy sea behind the Goodwins for a board that should open her a free run down the English coast. Miss Violet was rather sea-sick. Strange to say, her father was rather sea-sick, too.