The Yarn of Old Harbour Town

by William Clark Russell

She looked up at him suddenly with her eyes trembling cunningly again as when she asked the phantom to view her treasure, and with a look impossible to portray but which convinced him that she did not know him, and in a voice that was almost tender with its note of seeking after sympathy and help, she exclaimed: "Are you come here to liberate me, to restore me to my father, who weeps because he thinks I am lost, to rescue me from the wicked arts of a treacherous man—oh, tell me so, tell me so!" she cried, springing to her feet, and extending her arms.

What could the unfortunate, infatuated, handsome rascal say? Her appeal was poignant by virtue of her deep distress, the misery of her condition, the insane disposition of her beautiful face, wild and almost white in its shadowing of hair. What could he say to her? His countenance was filled with the confusion of his mind. His heart beat tumultuously with love that raged with its sense of helplessness. These phrases do not exaggerate a state that nothing but the highest form of genius could delineate in its astounding complexity of adoration, despair, horror at the consequences of his own lightly undertaken act, honour that could be no stranger to a valiant nature, and a resolution to persevere and conquer as a consequence of the character that could lay upon its owner's soul this enormous obligation of the betrayal of the girl he worshipped and the man who had stood his friend when the world was sterile, and he must either flee the country or rot in gaol.

"Madam," he said in a broken voice, "it is plain that I have brought upon me something that I had not foreseen, and if you are the sufferer, I am the loser, and of the two the keener sufferer by my loss. This door, madam, will remain unlocked, and you are at liberty to come and go as you please."

He made her one of those elegant and stately bows which was his greatest charm in the eyes of old Miss Acton, and left the berth, closing the door.

Did he believe her mad, or did he conceive that she was merely feigning a part?

It may be at once said that he had very little doubt that her ruthless abduction based upon the fear that her father had met with a serious injury, coupled with her imprisonment and the terrors excited in her by the knowledge that she was being carried away into a remote part of the world and that she was entirely at the mercy of a man who had proved himself a scoundrel, had disordered her intellect, had played havoc with her nerves and brain, so that though she might recover her reason should she be rescued or returned to her home, she must continue mad whilst in his ship or associated with him.

If he doubted her insanity at all his suspicion had no stiffer ground than the shallow sand on which reposed his hope that she was acting. Throughout this passage he did not think to consider her as the child of a great actress. To him she had always been a gentle, sweet, undemonstrative girl, ingenuous in speech, kind, charitable, beloved by the poor, one whose pursuits were amiable and pure. She was nimble and poetical with her pencil. She sang pretty songs prettily. Her beauty informed with a colour of its own the melodies her fingers evoked from the keys or strings of the instruments she touched. He could not think of her as having the talents of an actress, or even the tastes of one. He had never heard of her taking a part in a performance above a charade. Nothing, therefore, but madness or an extraordinary dramatic genius which it was impossible for him to think of her as possessing, could create those parts which she had enacted before him in a manner so immoderately life-like, so absolutely in unison with what he himself could conceive of the behaviour of madness, that deep in his soul might be found the conviction that she had lost her reason, and that his passionate, unprincipled love was the cause of it.

Shortly before twelve the people of the Minorca beheld on the starboard bow one of those bland and beautiful pictures of the sea which have vanished from the face of the waters to be seen no more. The Lizard was painted in a soft, blue looming mass against the sky, and to the right of it upon the sea-line, there sprang like stars in their rising, the white cloths of ships—a numerous convoy from Torbay; they rose fast with a pleasant breeze on the quarter, and one hundred and sixty sail could have been counted with three line-of-battle ships and some frigates to look after them. They were of all rigs known in those days, from the commanding Indiaman armed like a man-o'-war, hoisting her huge main and fore-yards by jeers, loosing her vast topsails out of the tops, clothed as no ship now goes clothed with sprit-sail and sprit-topsail, water sails and other devices in canvas to catch even the faintest cat's paw that should tarnish the burnished calm, down to the little snow bound to Lisbon; a gallant, an imposing, a splendid sight, when every hull was shaped upon the sea which seemed to be transformed into a mighty plain, brilliant for leagues with the shining white cones of tents.

Mr Lawrence, who was on deck at noon, wisely concluding that the then peculiar rig of the Minorca would challenge the attention and excite the suspicion of one or another of the convoying men-of-war, hoisted British colours, and as no observation of the sun was deemed necessary when there hung plain in sight the famous promontory of the Lizard from which a departure was to be made, he overhung the rail gazing apparently with absorbed interest at the grand spectacle of ships which were making a more southerly course than he. Indeed he was so absorbed either by that "vision splendid" or by thinking of the mad pictures he had witnessed in the little berth from which he had lately emerged, that he failed to notice that some of the hands forward for whom the dinner-hour had arrived and who were hanging about the caboose, were staring at him with a degree of obstinacy which perhaps had he regarded it he would have deemed something more than strange, as they had a fine show to arrest and detain their gaze on the bow. One of the most steadfast of these starers was the man Mr Pledge familiarly styled Old Jim.