MY SHIPMATE LOUISE

VOL. I.

NEW NOVELS AT ALL LIBRARIES.

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London: CHATTO & WINDUS, Piccadilly, W.

MY SHIPMATE LOUISE

The Romance of a Wreck

BY
W. CLARK RUSSELL

IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. I.

London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1890

PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON

TO
LEOPOLD HUDSON, ESQ.
Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England
Warden of Middlesex Hospital College
IN GRATITUDE

CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME

MY SHIPMATE LOUISE

CHAPTER I
DOWN CHANNEL

We had left Gravesend at four o’clock in the morning, and now, at half-past eight o’clock in the evening, we were off the South Foreland, the ship on a taut bowline heading on a due down Channel course.

It was a September night, with an edge of winter in the gusts and blasts which swept squall-like into the airy darkling hollows of the canvas. There was a full moon, small as a silver cannon-ball, with a tropical greenish tinge in its icy sparkling, and the scud came sweeping up over it in shreds and curls and feathers of vapour, sailing up dark from where the land of France was, and whitening out into a gossamer delicacy of tint as it soared into and fled through the central silver splendour. The weight of the whole range of Channel was in the run of the surge that flashed into masses of white water from the ponderous bow of the Indiaman as she stormed and crushed her way along, the tacks of her courses groaning to every windward roll, as though the clew of each sail were the hand of a giant seeking to uproot the massive iron bolt that confined the corner of the groaning cloths to the deck.

The towering foreland showed in a pale and windy heap on the starboard quarter. The land ran in a sort of elusive faintness along our beam, with the Dover lights hanging in the pallid shadow like a galaxy of fireflies: beyond them a sort of trembling nebulous sheen, marking Folkestone; and on high in the clear dusk over the quarter you saw the Foreland light like some wild and yellow star staring down upon the sea clear of the flight of the wing-like scud.

The ship was the Countess Ida, a well-known Indiaman of her day—now so long ago that it makes me feel as though I were two centuries old to be able to relate that I was a hearty young fellow in those times. She was bound to Bombay. Most of the passengers had come aboard at Gravesend, I amongst them; and here we were now thrashing our way into the widening waters of the Channel, mighty thankful—those of us who were not sea-sick, I mean—that there had come a shift of wind when the southern limb of the Goodwin Sands was still abreast, to enable us to keep our anchors at the cathead and save us a heart-wearying spell of detention in the Downs.

The vessel looked noble by moonlight; she was showing a maintopgallant sail to the freshening wind, and the canvas soared to high aloft in shadowy spaces, which came and went in a kind of winking as the luminary leapt from the edge of the hurrying clouds into some little lagoon of soft indigo, flashing down a very rain of silver fires, till the long sparkling beam travelling over the foaming heads of the seas, like a spoke of a revolving wheel, was extinguished in a breath by the sweep of a body of vapour over the lovely planet. I stood at the rail that ran athwart the break of the poop, surveying this grand night-picture of the outward-bound Indiaman. From time to time there would be a roaring of water off her weather-bow, that glanced in the moonshine in a huge fountain of prismatic crystals. The figures of a couple of seamen keeping a look-out trudged the weather-side of the forecastle, their shadows at their feet starting out upon the white plank to some quick and brilliant hurl of moonlight, clear as a sketch in ink, upon white paper. Amidships, forward, loomed up the big galley, with a huge long-boat stowed before it roofed with spare booms; on either hand rose the high bulwarks with three carronades of a side stealing out of the dusk between the tall defences of the ship like the shapes of beasts crouching to obtain a view of the sea through the port-holes. A red ray of light came aslant from the galley and touched with its rusty radiance a few links of the huge chain cable that was ranged along the decks, a coil of rope hanging upon a belaying pin, and a fragment of bulwarks stanchion. Now and again a seaman would pass through this light, the figure of him coming out red against the greenish silver in the atmosphere. A knot of passengers hung together close under the weather poop ladder, with a broad white space of the quarter-deck sloping from their feet to the lee waterways, whence at intervals there would come a sound of choking and gasping as the heave of the ship brought the dark Channel surge brimming to the scupper holes. The growling hum of the voices of the men blended in a strange effect upon the ear with the shrill singing of the wind in the rigging and the ceaseless washing noises over the side and the long-drawn creaking sounds which arise from all parts of a ship struggling against a head sea under a press of canvas.

Aft on the poop where I was standing the vessel had something of a deserted look. The pilot had been dropped off Deal; the officer of the watch (the chief mate) was stumping the weather-side of the deck from the ladder to abreast of the foremost skylight; the dark figure of the captain swung in a sort of pendulum-tramping from the mizzen rigging to the grating abaft the wheel. Dim as a distant firebrand over the port quarter, windily flickering upon the stretch of throbbing waters, shone the lantern of the lightship off the South Sand Head; and it was odd to mark how it rose and fell upon the speeding night sky to the swift yet stately pitching of our ship, with the figure of the man at the helm somehow showing the vaguer for it, spite of the shining of the binnacle lamp flinging a little golden haze round about the compass stand, abaft which the shape of the fellow showed vague as the outline of a ghost.

Ha! thought I, this is being at sea now indeed! Why, though we were in narrow waters yet, there was such a note of ocean yearning in the thunderous wash of the weather billows sweeping along the bends that, but for the pale glimmer of the line of land trending away to starboard, I might easily have imagined the whole waters of the great Atlantic to be under our bow.

It was a bit chilly, and I caught myself hugging my peacoat to me with a half-formed resolution to make for my cabin, where there were yet some traps of mine remaining to be stowed away. But I lingered—lover of all sea-effects, as I then was and still am—to watch a fine brig blowing past us along to the Downs, the strong wind gushing fair over her quarter, and her canvas rising in marble-like curves to the tiny royals; every cloth glancing in pearl to the dance of the moon amongst the clouds, every rope upon her glistening out into silver wire, with the foam, white as sifted snow, lifting to her hawse-pipes to the clipper shearing of her keen stem, and not a light aboard of her but what was kindled by the luminary in the glass and brass about her decks as she went rolling past us delicate as a vision, pale as steam, yet of an exquisite grace as determinable as a piece of painting on ivory.

I walked aft to the companion hatch and entered the cuddy, or, as it is now called, the saloon. The apartment was the width of the ship, and was indeed a very splendid and spacious state-cabin, with a bulkhead at the extremity under the wheel, where the captain’s bedroom was, and a berth alongside of it, where the skipper worked out his navigation along with the officers, and where the midshipmen went to school. There were also two berths right forward close against the entrance to the cuddy by way of the quarter-deck, occupied by the first and second mates; otherwise, the interior was as clear as a ballroom, and it was like entering a brilliantly illuminated pavilion ashore, to pass out of the windy dusk of the night and the flying moonshine of it into the soft brightness of oil-flames burning in handsome lamps of white and gleaming metal, duplicated by mirrors, with hand-paintings between and polished panels in which the radiance cloudily rippled. A long table went down the centre of this cuddy, and over it were the domes of the skylights, in which were many plants and flowers of beauty swinging in pots, and globes of fish and silver swinging trays. Right through the heart of the interior came the shaft of the mizzen mast, rich with chiselled configurations, and of a delicate hue; a handsome piano stood lashed to the deck abaft the trunk of giant spar. The planks were finely carpeted, and sofas and arm-chairs ran the length of this glittering saloon on either side of it.

There were a few people assembled at the fore-end of the table as I made my way to the hatch whose wide steps led to the sleeping berths below. It was not hard to perceive that one of them was an East Indian military gentleman whose liver was on fire through years of curry. His white whiskers of the wire-like inflexibility of a cat’s, stood out on either side his lemon-coloured cheeks; his little blood-shot eyes of indigo sparkled under overhanging brows where the hair lay thick like rolls of cotton-wool. This gentleman I knew to be Colonel Bannister, and as I cautiously made my way along—for the movements of the decks were staggering enough to oblige me to tread warily—I gathered that he was ridiculing the medical profession to Dr. Hemmeridge, the ship’s surgeon, for its inability to prescribe for sea-sickness.

‘It iss der nerves,’ I heard a fat Dutch gentleman say—afterwards known to me as Peter Hemskirk, manager of a firm in Bombay.

‘Nerves!’ sneered the colonel, with a glance at the Dutchman’s waistcoat. ‘Don’t you know the difference between the nerves and the stomach, sir?’

‘Same thing,’ exclaimed Dr. Hemmeridge soothingly; ‘sea-sickness means the head, any way; and pray, colonel, what are the brains but’——

‘Ha! ha!’ roared the colonel, interrupting him; ‘there I have you. If it be the brains only which are affected, why, then, ha! ha! no wonder Mynheer here doesn’t suffer, though it’s his first voyage, he says.’

But my descent of the steps carried me out of earshot of this interesting talk. My cabin was well aft. There was a fairly wide corridor, and the berths were ranged on either hand of it. From some of them, as I made my way along, came in muffled sounds various notes of lamentation and suffering. A black woman, with a ring through her nose and her head draped in white, sat on the deck in front of the closed door of a berth, moaning in a sea-sick way over a baby that she rocked in her arms, and that was crying at the top of its pipes. The door of a cabin immediately opposite opened, and a young fellow with a ghastly face putting his head out exclaimed in accents strongly suggestive of nausea: ‘I thay, confound it! thtop that noithe, will you? The rolling ith bad enough without that thindy. Thteward!’ The ship gave a lurch, and he swung out, but instantly darted back again, being indeed but half clothed: ‘I thay, are you the thteward?’

‘No,’ said I. ‘Keep on singing out. Somebody’ll come to you.’

‘Won’t they thmother that woman?’ he shouted, and he would have said more, but a sudden kickup of the ship slammed his cabin door for him, and the next moment my ear caught a sound that indicated too surely his rashness in leaving his bunk.

I entered my berth, and found the lamp alight in it, and the young gentleman who was to share the cabin with me sitting in his bedstead, that was above mine, dangling his legs over the edge of it, and gazing with a disordered countenance upon the deck. I had chatted with him during the afternoon and had learnt who he was. Indeed, his name was in big letters upon his portmanteau—‘The Hon. Stephen Colledge;’ and incidentally he had told me that he was a son of Lord Sandown, and that he was bound to India on a shooting tour. He was a good-looking young man, with fair whiskers, white teeth, a genial smile, yet with something of affectation in his way of speaking.

‘It’s doocid rough, isn’t it, Mr. Dugdale?’ said he; ‘and isn’t it raining?’

‘No,’ said I.

‘Oh, but look at the glass here,’ he exclaimed, indicating the scuttle or porthole, the thick glass of which showed gleaming, but black as coal against the night outside.

‘Why,’ said I, ‘the wet there is the sea; it is spray; nothing but spray.’

‘Hang all waves!’ he said in a low voice. ‘Why the dickens can’t the ocean always be calm? If I’d have known that this ship pitched so, I’d have waited for a steadier vessel. Will you do me the kindness to lift the lid of that portmanteau? You’ll find a flask of brandy in it. Hang me if I like to move. Sorry now I didn’t bring a cot, though they’re doocid awkward things to get in and out of.’

I found the flask, and gave it to him, and he took a pull at it. I declined his offer of a dram, and went to work to stow away some odds and ends which were in my trunk.

‘Don’t you feel ill?’ said he.

‘No,’ said I.

‘Oh, ah, I remember now!’ he exclaimed; ‘you were a sailor once, weren’t you?’

‘Yes; I had a couple of years of it.’

‘Wish I’d been a sailor, I know,’ said he. ‘I mean, after I’d given it up. As to being a sailor—merciful goodness! think of four, perhaps five months of this.’

‘Oh, you’ll be as good a sailor as ever a seaman amongst us in a day or two,’ said I encouragingly.

‘Don’t feel like it now, though,’ he exclaimed. ‘Let’s see: I think you said you were going out to do some painting?—Oh no! I beg pardon: it was a chap named Emmett who told me that. You—you——’ He looked at me with a slightly inebriated cock of the head, from which I might infer that the ‘pull’ he had taken at his flask was by no means his first ‘drain’ within the hour.

‘No,’ said I, with a laugh; ‘I am going out to see an old relative up country. And not more for that than for the fun of a voyage.’

‘The fun of the voyage!’ he echoed with a stupid face; then with a sudden brightening up of his manner, though his gloomy countenance quickly returned to him, he exclaimed, ‘I say, Dugdale—beg pardon, you know; no good in mistering a chap that you’re going to sleep with for four or five months—call me Colledge, old fellow—but I say, though, seen anything more of that ripping girl since dinner? By George! what eyes, eh?’

He drew his legs up, and with a slight groan composed himself in a posture for sleep, manifestly heedless of any answer I might make to his question.

I lingered awhile in the berth, and then, filling a pipe, mounted to the saloon, and made my way to the quarter-deck to smoke in the shelter of the recess in the cuddy front. Colonel Bannister lay sprawling upon a sofa, holding a tumbler of brandy grog. There were other passengers in the cuddy, scattered, and all of them grimly silent, staring hard at the lamps, yet with something of vacancy in their regard, as though their thoughts were elsewhere. As I stepped on to the quarter-deck, the cries and chorusing of men aloft, came sounding through the strong and hissing pouring of the wind between the masts and through the harsh seething of the seas, which the bows of the ship were smiting into snowstorms as she went sullenly ploughing through the water with the weather-leech of the maintopgallant-sail trembling in the green glancings of the moonlight like the fly of a flag in a breeze of wind. They were taking a reef in the fore and mizzen topsails. The chief mate, Mr. Prance, from time to time, would sing out an order over my head that was answered by a hoarse ‘Ay, ay, sir,’ echoing out of the gloom in which the fore-part of the ship was plunged. I lighted my pipe and sat myself down on the coamings of the booby hatch to enjoy a smoke. I was alone, and this moon-touched flying Channel night-scene carried my memory back to the times when I was a sailor, when I had paced the deck of such another vessel as this, as a midshipman of her. It seemed a long time ago, yet it was no more than six years either. The old professional instinct was quickened in me by the voices of the fellows aloft, till I felt as though it were my watch on deck, that I was skulking under the break of the poop here, and that I ought to be aloft jockeying a lee yard-arm or dangling to windward on the flemish horse.

Presently all was quiet on high, and by the windy sheen in the atmosphere, caused by the commingling of white waters and the frequent glance of the moon through some rent in the ragged scud, I could make out the figures of the fellows on the fore descending the shrouds. A little while afterwards a deep sea voice broke out into a strange wild song, that was caught up and re-echoed in a hurricane chorus by the tail of men hauling upon the halliards to masthead the yard. It was a proper sort of note to fit such a night as that. A minute after, a chorus of a like gruffness but of a different melody resounded on the poop, where they were mastheading the topsail yard after reefing it. The combined notes flung a true oceanic character into the picture of the darkling Indiaman swelling and rolling and pitching in floating launches through it, with her wide pinions rising in spaces of faintness to the scud, and the black lines of her royal yards sheering to and fro against the moon that, when she showed, seemed to reel amidst the rushing wings of vapour to the wild dance of our mastheads. The songs of the sailors, the clear shrill whistling of a boatswain’s mate forward, the orders uttered quickly by the chief officer, the washing noises of the creaming surges, the sullen shouting of the wind in the rigging resembling the sulky breaker-like roar of a wood of tall trees swept by a gale—all this made one feel that one was at sea in earnest.

I knocked the ashes out of my pipe and went on to the poop. The land still showed very dimly to starboard, with here and there little oozings of dim radiance that might mark a village or a town. You could see to the horizon, where the water showed in a sort of greenish blackness with some speck of flame of a French lighthouse over the port quarter, and the September clouds soaring up off the edge of the sea like puffs and coils of smoke from a thousand factory chimneys down there, and now and again a bright star glancing out from amongst them as they came swiftly floating up to the moon, turning of a silvery white as they neared the glorious planet.

There were windows in the cuddy front, and as I glanced through one of them I saw the captain come down the companion steps into the brightly lighted saloon and seat himself at the table, where in a moment he was joined by the fiery-eyed little colonel. Decanters and glasses were placed by one of the stewards on a swing-tray, and the scene then had something of a homely look spite of the cuddy’s aspect of comparative desertion. Captain Keeling, I think, was about the most sailorly-looking man I ever remember meeting. I had heard of him ashore, and learnt that he had used the sea for upwards of forty-five years. He had served in every kind of craft, and had obtained great reputation amongst owners and underwriters for his defence and preservation of an Indiaman he was in command of that was attacked in the Bay of Bengal by a heavily armed French picaroon full of men. Cups and swords and services of plate and purses of money were heaped upon him for his conduct in that affair; and indeed in his way he was a sort of small Commodore Dance.

I looked at him with some interest as he sat beside the colonel with the full light of the lamp over against him shining upon his face and figure. There had been little enough to see of him during the day, and it was not until we dropped the pilot that he showed himself. His countenance was crimsoned with long spells of tropic weather, and hardened into ruggedness like the face of a rock by the years of gales he had gone through. He was about sixty years of age; and his short-cropped hair was as white as silver, with a thin line of whisker of a like fleecy sort slanting from his ear to the middle of his cheek. His nose was shaped like the bowl of a clay-pipe, and was of a darker red than the rest of his face. His small sea-blue eyes were sunk deep, as though from the effect of long staring to windward; and almost hidden as they were by the heavy ridge of silver eyebrow, they seemed to be no more than gimlet holes in his head for the admission of light. He had thrown open his peacoat, and discovered a sort of uniform under it: a buff-coloured waistcoat with gilt buttons, an open frock-coat of blue cloth with velvet lapels. Around his neck was a satin stock, in which were three pins, connected by small chains. His shirt collar was divided behind, and rose in two sharp points under his chin, which obliged him to keep his head erect in a quite military posture. Such was Captain Keeling, commander of the famous old Indiaman Countess Ida.

I guessed he would not remain long below, otherwise I should have been tempted to join him in a glass of grog, spite of the company of Colonel Bannister, who was hardly the sort of man to make one feel happy on such an occasion as the first night out at sea with memory bitterly recent of leave-taking, of kisses, of the hand-shakes of folks one might never see again.

CHAPTER II
THE FRENCH LUGGER

My pipe was out; the quarter-deck bulwarks hid the sea, and so I mounted the poop ladder to take a look round before turning in. Away to port, or larboard, as we then called it, was a full-rigged ship rolling up Channel under all plain sail, with such a smother of white yeast clouding her bows, and racing aft into the long line of her wake, which went glaring over the dark throbbing waters, that it made one think of the base of a waterspout writhing upwards to meet the descending tube of vapour. She was the first object that took my eye, and I hurriedly crossed the deck to view her. Mr. Prance, the chief mate, stood at the rail watching her.

‘A noble sight!’ said I.

‘Yes, sir, an English frigate. A fifty-one gun vessel, apparently. Upon my word, nothing statelier ever swam, or ever again will swim, than ships of that kind. Look at the line of her batteries—black and white like the keys of a pianoforte! What squareness of yard, sir! Her main-royal should be as big as our topgallant-sail.’

He sent a look aloft at the reeling, fabric over our heads, with a thoughtful drag, at a short growth of beard that curled upwards from his chin like the fore-thatch of a sou’-wester. The noble ship went floating out into the darkness astern, and her pale heights died upon the gloom like a burst of steam dissolving in the wind.

‘What is that out yonder upon the starboard bow there, Mr. Prance?’ said I.

He peered awhile, and said: ‘Some craft reaching like ourselves—standing as we head—a lumpish thing, anyhow. What a blot she makes, seeing that she has no height of spar!’

‘We are overhauling her,’ said I.

‘Ay,’ he answered, keeping his eyes fixed upon her. ‘Doesn’t she seem a bit uncertain, though?’ he muttered, as if thinking aloud.

I had wonderfully good sight in those days, and after straining my eyes awhile against the heap of scarce determinable shadow which the craft made, I exclaimed: ‘She’ll be a French lugger, or I’m greatly mistaken.’

‘I believe you are right, sir,’ answered the mate.

He drew a little away from me, as a hint, perhaps, that he desired to address his attention to the vessel on the bow, and suddenly putting his hand to his mouth, he hailed the forecastle in a sharp clear note. An answer was returned swift as the tone of a bell to the blow of its tongue.

‘Show a light forward! Smartly now! That chap ahead seems asleep.’

There were no side-lights in those days. Some long years were to elapse before the Shipping Act enforced the use of a night signal more to the point than a short flourish of the binnacle lamp over the side. In a few moments a large globular lantern in the grip of a seaman, whose figure showed like a sketch in phosphorus to the illumination of the flame, was rested upon the forecastle rail, with the night beyond him looking the blacker for the rising and falling point of fire. The hint seemed to be taken by the fellow ahead, and the mate walked aft to the binnacle, into which he stood looking, afterwards going to the rail, at which he lingered, staring forwards.

I crossed over to leeward to watch the milk-like race of waters along the side. The foam made a sort of twilight of its own in the air. Under the foot of the mainsail that was arched transversely across the deck, the wind stormed with a note of hurricane out of the huge concavity of the cloths, and made the rushing snow giddy with the whipping of it, till the eye reeled again to the sight of the yeasty boiling. Never did any ship raise such a smother about her as the Countess Ida. Our speed was scarce a full five miles, and yet, looking over to leeward, when the huge fabric came heeling down to her channels to the scud of a sea and to the weight of the wind in her canvas, you would have supposed her thundering through it a whole ten knots at least.

On a sudden there was a loud and fearful cry forward. ‘Port your hellum! port your hellum!’ I could hear a voice roaring out with a meaning as of life or death in the startling vehemence of the utterance.

‘Starboard! starboard!’ shouted Mr. Prance, who was still standing aft: ‘over with it, men, for God’s sake, before we’re into her!’

Next instant there was a dull shock throughout the ship; a thrill that ran through her planks into the very soles of one’s feet, while there arose shrieks and shouts as from three-score throats under the bows, and a most lamentable and terrifying noise of wood-splintering, of canvas tearing, of liberated sails flogging the wind. I bounded to the weather-rail, and saw a large hull of some eighty tons wholly dismasted—a wild scene of wreck and ruin to the flash of the moon at that moment shining down out of a clear space of sky—gliding past into our wake. The dark object seemed filled with men, and the yells left me in no doubt that she was a Frenchman—a large three-masted lugger, as I had supposed her.

In an instant our ship was in an uproar. There is nothing in language to express the noise and excitement. To begin with, our helm having been put down, we had come round into the wind, and lay pitching heavily with sails slatting and thundering, yards creaking, rigging straining. The sailors rushed to and fro. All discipline for the moment seemed to have gone overboard. The captain had come tumbling up on deck, and was calling orders to the mate, who re-echoed them in loud bawlings to the quarter-deck and forecastle. Lanterns were got up and shown over the rail, and by the light of them you saw the figures of the seamen speeding from rope to rope and hauling upon the gear, their gruff, harsh chorusings rising high above the terrified chatter of the passengers—many of whom had rushed up on deck barely clothed—high also above the storming and shrilling of the wind, the deep notes of angry waters warring at our bows, and the distracting shaking and beating of the sails.

But a few orders delivered by Mr. Prance, whose tongue was as a trumpet in a moment like this, acted upon the ship as the sympathetic hand of a horseman upon a restive terrified thoroughbred.

‘Haul up the mainsail—fore clew garnets—back maintopsail yard—tail on to the weather-braces and round in handsomely. Mr. Cocker (this was addressed to the second-mate, who had tumbled up with the rest of the watch below on feeling the thump the Countess Ida had given herself, and on hearing the uproar that followed)—burn a flare—smartly, if you please! Also get blue lights and rockets up.’

I ran aft to see if the vessel that we had wrecked was anywhere about. The moon was shining brilliantly down upon the sea at that time, and the swollen Channel waters were lifting their black heights into creaming peaks in an atmosphere of delicate silver haze, that yet suffered the eye to penetrate to the dark confines of the horizon. The wake of the planet was a long throbbing line of angry broken splendour in the south; but the tail of it seemed to stream fair to the point of sea into which the lugger had veered, and I was confident that if she were afloat I should see her.

‘Who is that to leeward there?’ called the captain from the other side of the wheel in a tone of worry and irritation.

‘Mr. Dugdale,’ I replied.

‘Oh, beg pardon, I’m sure,’ he exclaimed; ‘do you see anything of the vessel that we’ve run down?’

‘Nothing,’ I responded.

‘She must have foundered,’ said he; ‘yet though I listened, I heard no cries after the wreck had once fairly settled away from us.’

Here the mate came aft hastily, and with a touch of his cap, reported that the well had been sounded, and that all was right with the ship.

‘Very well, sir,’ said the captain. ‘I shall keep all fast with my boats. The calamity can’t be helped. I’m not going to increase it by sacrificing my men’s lives. The poor devils will have had a boat of their own, I suppose. Show blue lights, will ye, Mr. Prance, and send a rocket up from time to time.’

They were burning a flare over the quarter-deck rail at that moment—some turpentine arrangement, that threw out a long flickering flame and a great coil of smoke from the yawning mouth of the tin funnel that contained the mixture. It was like watching the ship by sheet-lightning to see a large part of her amidships and her mainmast and the pale lights of the mainsail hanging from the yard in the grip of the gear—to see all this come and go as the flame leapt and faded. There was a crowd of terrified passengers on the poop, some of them ladies, hugging themselves in dressing-gowns and shawls; and out of the heart of the little mob rose the saw-like notes of Colonel Bannister.

‘These collisions,’ I heard him cry, ‘never can take place if a proper look-out be kept. It is preposterous to argue. I’d compel the oldest seaman who contradicted me to eat his words. Why, have I been making the voyage to India four times——’ But the rest of his observations were drowned in cries of astonishment and alarm from the ladies as a rocket, discharged close to them, went hissing and shearing up athwart the howling wind in a stream of fire, breaking on high into a blood-red ball, that floated swiftly landwards, like an electric meteor, ghastly against the moonshine, with a wide crimson atmosphere about it that tinctured the very scud. A moment after a blue light was burnt over the side from the head of the poop ladder, whereat there was a general recoil and more shrill exclamations from the ladies. In fact, these wild mystical lights as it were coming on top of the fancy of men drowning astern, and colouring the ship with unearthly glares, and flinging a wonderful complexion of horror upon the night for a wide space round about the pitching and groaning Indiaman, put such an element of mystery and fear into the scene that though I was by no means a new hand at such sea-shows, I will own to shuddering again and yet again as I overhung the side of the poop, striving to discern any object that might resemble a boat in the foam-whitened gloom into which the lugger had slided.

‘What has happened? Everybody is so excited that one can’t get at the real story.’

I turned quickly, and saw the tall figure of a lady at my side. She was habited in a cloak, the hood of which was over her head, and darkened her face almost to the concealment of it, saving her eyes, which shone large, liquid, with a clear red spot in the depths, from the reflection of the flare at the quarter-deck bulwark.

I briefly explained, lifting my cap as I gave her her name—Miss Temple—for I had particularly remarked her as she came aboard at Gravesend, and asked who she was, though I had seen nothing more of her down to that moment. I ended my account pointing to the quarter of the sea where the lugger had disappeared.

‘Thanks for the story,’ she exclaimed, with a sudden note of haughtiness in her voice, while she kept her eyes, of the rich blackness of the tropic night-sky, fixed firm and gleaming upon me, as though she had addressed me in error, and wanted to make sure of me. She moved as though she would walk off, paused, and said: ‘Poor creatures! I hope they will be saved. Is our ship injured, do you know?’

‘I believe not,’ said I a little coldly. ‘There may be a rope or two broken forward perhaps, but there is nothing but the French lugger to be sorry for.’

‘My aunt, Mrs. Radcliffe,’ said she, ‘has been rendered somewhat hysterical by the commotion on deck. She is too ill to leave her bed. I think I may reassure her?’

‘Oh yes,’ I exclaimed. ‘But yonder, abreast of the wheel there, is the captain to confirm my words.’

She gave me a bow, or rather a curtsey of those days, and walked aft to address the captain, as I supposed. Instead, she descended the companion hatch, and I lost sight of her.

A disdainful lady, thought I, but a rare beauty too!—marvellous eyes, anyhow, to behold by such an illumination as this of rockets and blue lights, and flying moonshine, and the yellow glimmer of flare-tins.

All this while the ship lay hove-to, her maintopsail to the mast, the folds of her hanging mainsail sending a low thunder into the wind as it shook its cloths, the seas breaking in stormy noises from her bow; but now there fell a dead silence upon the people along her decks: nothing broke this hush upon the life of the vessel, save the occasional harsh hissing rush of a rocket piercing the restless noises of the sea and the whistling of the wind in the rigging. The bulwark rail was lined with sailors, eagerly looking towards the tail of the misty wake of the moon, into which the black surges went shouldering and changing into troubled hills of dull silver. The captain and two of the mates stood aft, intently watching the water, often putting themselves into strained hearkening postures, their hands to their ears. Most of the lady passengers went below, but not to bed, for you could catch a sight of them through the skylight seated at the table talking swiftly, often directing anxious glances at the window-glass through which you could see them. There was one majestic old lady amongst them with grey hair that looked to be powdered, a hawk’s-bill nose, an immense bosom, that started immediately from under her chin. The lamplight flashed in diamonds in her ears, and in rubies and in stones of value and beauty upon her fingers. She was Colonel Bannister’s wife, and was apparently not wanting in her husband’s fiery energy and capacity of taking peppery views of things, if I might judge by her vehement nods, and the glances she shot around her from her grey eyes. It was a cabin picture I caught but a glimpse of as I crossed the deck to take a look to leeward, but one, somehow, that sunk into my memory, maybe because of the magic-lantern-like look of the interior, with its brilliant lamps and many-coloured attire of the ladies in their shawls, dressing-gowns, and what not—standing out upon the eye amidst the wild dark frame of the seething clamorous night.

All at once there was a loud cry. I rushed back to the weather rail.

‘There’s a boat heading for us, sir—see her, sir? Away yonder, this side o’ the tumble of the moon’s reflection!’

‘Ay, there she is! It’ll be the lugger’s boat. God, how she dives!’

Twenty shadowy arms pointed in the direction which had been indicated by the gruff grumbling cries of the sailors. The second mate, Mr. Cocker, came hastily forward to the break of the poop.

‘Stand by, some of you,’ he shouted, ‘to heave them the end of a line. Make ready with bowlines to help them over the side.’

I could see the boat clearly now as she rose to the height of a sea, her black wet side sparkling out an instant to the moonlight ere she sank out of sight past the ivory white head of the surge sweeping under her. She seemed to be deep with men; but I could count only two oars. She was rushed down upon us by the impulse of the sea and wind, and I felt my heart stand still as she drove bow on into us, whirling round alongside in a manner to make you look for the wreck of her in staves washing away under our counter. She was full of people, with women amongst them—poor creatures, in great white caps and long golden earrings, the men for the most part in huge fishermen’s boots, and tasselled caps and jerseys that might have been of any colour in that light. One could just make these features out, but no more, for the contents of the boat as it rose soaring and falling alongside were but a dark huddle of human shapes, writhing and twisting like a mass of worms in a pot, vociferating to us in the scarce intelligible patois of Gravelines or Calais or Boulogne.

There was no magic in the commands even of British officers to British sailors to put the least element of calm into the business. It was not only that at one moment the boat alongside seemed to be hove up to the Indiaman’s covering-board and that at the next she was rushing down into a chasm that laid bare many feet of the big ship’s yellow sheathing: there was the dreadful expectation of the whole of the human freight being overset and drowning alongside in a breath; there were the heart-rending shouts of the distracted people; there was the total inability of captain and mates to make themselves understood. How it was managed I will not pretend to explain. By some means the boat was dragged to the gangway, grinding and thumping herself horribly against the Indiaman’s rolling, stooping, massive side; then bowlines and ropes in plenty were dangled over or flung into her; and through the unshipped gangway, illuminated by half-a-dozen lanterns, and crowded by a hustling mob of sailors and passengers, one after another, the women and the men—most of the men coming first!—were dragged inboards, some of them falling flat upon the deck, some dropping on their knees and crossing themselves; a few of the women weeping passionately, one of them sobbing in dreadful paroxysms, the others mute as statues, as though terror and the presence of death had frozen the lifeblood in them and arrested the very beating of their hearts. Two of them fell into the sea; but they had lines about them and were dragged up half dead. They were all of them dripping wet, the men’s sea-boots full of water; whilst the soaked gowns of the women flooded the deck on which they stood, as though several buckets of brine had been capsized there.

Old Keeling’s pity for them would not go to the length of introducing the wretched creatures into the cuddy, to spoil the ship’s fine carpets and stain and ruin the coverings of the couches. They were accordingly brought together in the recess under the break of the poop, where at all events they were sheltered. Hot spirits and water were given to them along with bread and meat, and this supper the unhappy creatures ate by the light of the dimly burning lanterns held by the sailors.

There never was an odder wilder sight than the picture the poor half-drowned creatures made. Some of the women scarcely once intermitted their sobs and lamentations, save when they silenced their throats by a mouthful of food or drink. They were very ugly, dark as coffee; and their black wet hair streaming like sea-weed upon their shoulders and brows from under their soaked caps made them look like witches. The men talked hoarsely and eagerly with many passionate gestures, which suggested fierce denunciation. The mate coming down to the booby hatch around which these people were squatting, eating, drinking, moaning, and jabbering without the least regard to the crowd of curious eyes which inspected them from the quarter-deck—the mate, I say, coming down, stood looking a minute at them, and then sent a glance round, and seeing me, asked if I spoke French.

‘Yes,’ said I, ‘but not such French as those people are talking.’

‘We have three passengers,’ said he, ‘who, I am told, are scholars in that language; but the steward informs me they’re too sea-sick to come on deck. Just ask these people in such French as you have, if their captain’s amongst them.’

As he said this, a little old man seated on the hatch-coaming, with a red nightcap on, immense earrings, and a face of leather puckered into a thousand wrinkles like the grin of a monkey, looked up at Mr. Prance, and nodding with frightful energy whilst he struck his bosom with his clenched fist, cried out: ‘Yash, yash, me capitaine.’

‘Ha!’ said the mate, ‘do you speak English, then?’

‘Yash, yash,’ he roared: ‘me speakee Angleesh.’

Happily he knew enough to save me the labour of interpreting; and labour it would have been with a vengeance, since, though it was perfectly certain none amongst them, saving the little monkey-faced man, comprehended a syllable of the mate’s questions, every time the small withered chap answered—which he did with extraordinary convulsions and a vast variety of frantic gesticulations—all the rest of them broke into speech, the women joining in, and there was such a hubbub of tongues that not an inch of idea could I have got out of the distracting row. However, in course of time the leathery manikin who called himself captain made Mr. Prance understand that the lugger belonged to Boulogne; that she had the survivors of another lugger on board, making some thirty-four souls in all, men and women, at the time of the collision, of which seventeen or eighteen were drowned. After he had given Mr. Prance these figures, he turned to the others and said something in a shrill, fierce, rapid voice, whereat the women fell to shrieking and weeping, whilst many of the men tore their hair, some going the length of knocking their heads against the cuddy front. It was a sight to sicken the heart, the more, I think, for the unutterable element of grotesque farce imported into that dismal tragedy by their countenances, postures, and behaviour; and having heard and seen enough, I slipped away on to the poop, with a chill coming into my very soul to the thought of the drowned bodies out yonder when my eye went to the sea weltering black to the troubled line of moonshine, and heaving in ashen luminous billows in that chill path of light.

But long before this, our rockets, blue-lights, and flares had been seen; and a moment or two after I had gained the poop I spied the figure of Captain Keeling with a few male passengers at his side standing at the rail watching a powerful cutter thrashing through it to us close-hauled, with the water boiling to her leaps, and her big mainsail to midway high dark with the saturation of the flying brine. In less than twenty minutes she was rising and falling buoyant as a seabird abreast of us, with a shadowy figure at her lee rail bawling with lungs of brass to know what was wrong.

‘I have run down a French lugger,’ shouted Captain Keeling, ‘and have half her people on board, and must put them ashore at once, for I wish to proceed.’

‘Right y’are,’ came from the cutter; but with a note of irritation and disappointment in the cry, as I could not but fancy.

Then followed some wonderful manœuvring. There was only one way of transshipping the miserable French people, and that was by a yard-arm whip and a big basket. Hands sprang aloft to prepare the necessary tackle; Prance meanwhile, from the head of the poop ladder, thundered the intentions of the Indiaman through a speaking-trumpet to the cutter. I could see old Keeling stamp from time to time with impatience as he broke away from the questions of the passengers, one of whom was Colonel Bannister, into a sharp walk full of grief and irritability. Meanwhile they had shifted their helm aboard the cutter and got way upon the fine little craft. I saw her take the weight of the wind and heel down to the line of her gunwale, then break a dark sea into boiling milk, leaping the liquid acclivity, as a horse takes a tall gate, burying herself nose under with the downwards launching rush, then soaring again to the height of the next billow with full way upon her. She came tearing and hissing through it as though her coppered forefoot were of red-hot metal, and when abreast of our lee quarter, put her helm down, and swept with marvellous grace and precision to alongside of us, clear of our shearing spars, and there she lay.

It was hard upon midnight when the last basket-load had been lowered on to her deck. There was no hitch; all went well; a line attached to the basket enabled the cutter’s people to haul it fair to their decks; but the terror of the unfortunate Frenchmen was painful to see. The women got into the basket bravely; but many of the men blankly refused to enter, and had to be stowed in it by force, our Jacks holding on till the order to ‘sway away’ was given, when up would go poor Crapaud shrieking vengeance upon us all, and calling upon the Virgin and saints for help. In its way it was like a little engagement with an enemy. Some of the Frenchmen drew knives, and had to be knocked down.

Then, when the last of them was swayed over the side and lowered—‘Are you all right?’ shouted Captain Keeling to the cutter.

‘All right,’ responded a deep voice, hoarse with rum and weather. ‘I suppose your owners’ll make the job worth something to us?’

‘Ay, ay,’ answered the captain. ‘Round with your topsail yard, Mr. Prance. Lively now! this business has cost us half a night as it is.’

In a few minutes the great yards on the main were swung slowly to the drag of the braces with loud heave-yeos from the sailors, and the ship, feeling the weight of the wind in the vast dim hollow of the topsail, leaned with a new impulse of life in her frame and drove half an acre of foam ahead of her. We had resumed our voyage; and with a sense of supreme weariness in me following the excitement of the hours, and chilled to the marrow by my long spell on deck and incessant loiterings in the keen night-wind, I entered the saloon, called for a tumbler of grog, and made my way to my berth.

CHAPTER III
MY FELLOW PASSENGERS

It blew a hard breeze of wind that night. Soon after I had left the deck they furled the mainsail and topgallant-sail, reefed the maintopsail, and tied another reef in the mizzen-topsail. In fact, it looked as if we were to have a black gale of wind, dead on end too, with a sure prospect then of bearing up for the Downs afresh. How it may be in these steamboat times, I will not pretend to say; but my experience of the old sailing-ship is that the first night out, let the weather be what it will, is, on the whole, about as wretched a time as a man at any period of his life has to pass through.

Mr. Colledge was sound asleep in his bunk, his brandy flask within convenient reach of his hand. It was certain enough that he had heard nothing of the disturbance on deck. I undressed and rolled into my bed, and there lay wide awake for a long time. The ship creaked like a cradle. The full dismalness of a first night out was upon me, and it was made weightier yet—how much weightier indeed!—by the recollection of the wild and sudden tragedy of the evening. Oh, the insufferable weariness of the noises, the straining of the bulkheads, the yearning roar of the dark surge washing the porthole, with the boiling of it dying out into a dim simmering upon the wind, the instant stagger of the ship to the blow of some heavy sea full on her bow, the sensation of breathless descent as the vessel chopped down with a huge heave to windward into the trough, the pendulum swing of one’s wearing apparel hanging against the bulkhead, the half-stifled exclamations breaking from adjacent cabins, the whole improved into a true oceanic flavour by the occasional hoarse songs of the sailors above, faintly heard, as though you were in a vault, and that strange vibratory humming which the wind makes to one hearkening to it out of the cabin of a ship.

I fell asleep at last, and was awakened at half-past seven by the steward, who wished to know if I wanted hot water to shave with. The moment I had my consciousness, I was sensible that a heavy sea was running.

‘No shaving this morning, thank you,’ said I, ‘unless I have a mind to slice the nose off my face. How’s the weather, steward?’

‘Blowing a buster from the south’ard, sir,’ he answered, talking with his lips at the venetian of the closed door, ‘and the ship going along ’andsomely as a roll of smoke.’

Here somebody called him, and he trotted away.

Mr. Colledge awoke. ‘By George!’ he exclaimed, ‘I’ve had a doocid long sleep.’

‘How d’ye feel?’ said I.

‘In no humour to rise,’ he answered. ‘I suppose I can have what breakfast I’m likely to eat brought to me here?’

‘Bless you, yes,’ I answered.

‘Any news, Mr. Dugdale?’ he asked, his voice beginning to languish as a sensation of nausea grew upon him with the larger awakening of his faculties.

‘We ran down a French lugger last night,’ said I, ‘and drowned a lot of men. That’s all.’

He eyed me dully, thinking perhaps that I was joking, and then said: ‘Well, there it is, you see. Yesterday, you were talking of the fun of a voyage; and the very earliest of the humours is the drowning of a lot of men.’

‘And women,’ said I.

‘Poor devils!’ he exclaimed. ‘Will you hand me a bottle of Hungary water that you’ll find in my portmanteau? Much obliged to you, Dugdale: and will you kindly tell the steward as you pass through the cabin to bring me a cup of tea?’

‘Get up by-and-by, if you feel equal to it,’ said I. ‘Nursing sea-sickness only makes the demon more pitiless. Show yourself on deck, and the wind’ll blow the nausea out of you. And I’ll tell you a better cure than Hungary water or brandy flasks—a cube of salt-horse, Colledge; a hearty lump of marine beef, something to work up the muscles of your jaws, and to sharpen your teeth for you.’

‘Oh gracious, my dear fellow—don’t,’ he exclaimed, turning his face to the wall of the ship; and I heard him exclaim, as though muttering to himself: ‘How the water gurgles about this window, and what a doocid sickly green it is!’

But a very few of us assembled at the breakfast table. Colonel Bannister was there, a very ramrod of a man, with a Bengal-tigerish expression of face as he glared round about him from betwixt his white wire-like whiskers. There were also present Mr. Emmett, an artist, who was making the voyage to the East for the purpose of painting Indian scenery, a man with long hair curling down his back, a ragged beard and moustaches, a velvet coat, and Byronic collars, out of which his long thin neck forked up like the head of a pole through a scarecrow’s suit of clothes; Mr. Peter Hemskirk, who looked uncommonly fat, pale, and unfinished in his attire this morning; two young Civil Service fellows—as we should now call their trade—named Greenhew and Fairthorne; and Mr. Sylvanus Johnson, a journalist, bound to Bombay or Calcutta (I cannot be sure of the city), to edit a newspaper—a bullet-headed man, with a sort of low-comedian face, very blue about the cheeks where he shaved, and small keen restless black eyes, full of intelligence, whose suggestion in that way was not to be impaired or weakened by an expression in repose of singular self-complacency. Captain Keeling, at the head of the table, sat skewered up in his uniform frock-coat in stiff satin stock and collars. Mr. Prance occupied the other end of the table. He, too, was attired in a uniform resembling the dress worn by the skipper. He had a pleasant brown sailorly face, with a floating pose of head upon his shoulders that made one think of a soap-bubble poised on top of a pipe-stem. There were no ladies. Once I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Colonel Bannister’s Roman nose, and grey hair ornamented with a large black lace cap, fitfully hovering for a moment or two in the wide hatch past the chief officer’s chair, down which the steps led that went to the sleeping berths. But the apparition vanished with almost startling suddenness, as though the old lady had fallen or been violently pulled below. When, later on, I inquired after her, I learnt that she had betaken herself again to her bunk.

It was a mighty uncomfortable breakfast. The ship was rolling violently and convulsively upon the short snappish Channel seas—the most insufferable of all waters when in commotion, making even the seasoned salt pine for the long regular rhythmic heave of the blue ocean billow. The fiddles hindered the plates from sliding on to our laps; but their contents were not to be so easily coaxed into keeping their place; an unusually heavy lurch shot a large helping of liver and bacon on to Mr. Hemskirk’s knees; and the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Hemmeridge, came perilously near to being badly scalded by Mr. Johnson, the literary man, who, in reaching for a cup of tea tilted the swinging tray. There was not much talk, and what little was said chiefly concerned the incident of the previous evening.

‘Captain,’ cried young Mr. Fairthorne in an effeminate voice—he was the gentleman, it seems, who last night had been calling upon anybody to smother the ayah—‘whath to become of thothe poor Frenchmen?’

‘Sir,’ answered Captain Keeling in a manner as stiff as a marline-spike with his dislike of the subject, ‘I do not know.’

‘Frenchmen,’ cried Colonel Bannister in a loud voice, as though he were directing the manœuvres of a company of Sepoys, ‘are the hereditary enemies of our country, and it never can matter to a Briton what becomes of them.’

‘Boot my tear sir,’ remarked Mr. Hemskirk, ‘you are a Briton, yes—and you are a Christian too, und der Franchman iss your broder.’

‘My what?’ roared the colonel. ‘Tell ye what it is, Mr. Hemskirk: it is a good job that you cannot pronounce our language, otherwise you might happen sometimes, sir, to grow offensive.’

Mynheer, who seemed to have had some previous acquaintance with this little bombshell of a man, dried the grease upon his lips with a napkin, and cast a wink upon Mr. Greenhew, whose face of resentment at this familiarity caused me to break into such an immoderate fit of laughter that there was nothing for it but to bolt from the table.

I found a real Channel picture stretching round me when I gained the deck; a grey sky, lightened in places with a kind of suffusion of radiance that made one think of the rusty bronze lingering in the wake of an expired sunset. Saving these flaws of dull light, there was no break anywhere visible in the wide cold bald stare of heaven over our mastheads. The strong wind was a dry one, yet the horizon was thick with a look of rain all the way round; and out of the smother in the south, the sea was rolling in heights of a dark green, rich with creaming foam, that somehow seemed to satisfy the eye, as though each frothing crest were a streak of sunshine. There was a smack half a mile to windward of us staggering along and sinking and rising under a fragment of red mainsail; but there was nothing else to be seen in that way.

The wind was blowing free for us—almost dead abeam, indeed; and the Countess Ida was swarming through it in a manner to put a quicker beat into the heart at the first sight of the picture she made. The topgallant-sail was set over the single-reefed maintopsail; the whole foresail was on her, and, with the other topsails and a staysail or two, was tearing the great ship through the short savage heapings of water with a power that made one think of steam as trifling by comparison. The forecastle was wet with flying spray. The galley chimney was smoking cheerily, and from all about the long-boat came hearty farmyard sounds of the grunting of pigs and the bleating of sheep and the cackling of hens. There was a gang of seamen at the pumps, and as they plied the brakes with nervous sinewy arms, their song chimed in with the gushing of the water flowing freely to the scuppers, and washing back again to their feet with every roll to windward. Other seamen were at work upon the carronades, or cleaning paint-work with scrubbing-brushes, or coiling gear away upon pins, and so on, and so on. It was after eight, and all hands were on deck, and a fine set of livelies they looked, spite of most of them being snugged up in black or yellow oil-skins. Ships went with full companies in those days, and but for the slenderness of our ordnance, it might have been easy to imagine one’s self on board a man-of-war when one ran one’s eyes over the decks of the Countess Ida and counted the crew, and marked the butcher and butcher’s mates, the cook and his mates, the baker and his mates, the carpenter and his mates, coming and going, and making a very fair of the neighbourhood of the galley.

The second mate warmly clad paced the weather side of the poop, sending many a weatherly glance to seaward, with a frequent lifting of his eyes to the rounded iron-hard canvas; whilst against the brilliant white wake of the ship, roaring and boiling upwards as it seemed, to the stoop of the Indiaman’s huge square counter, the figures of the two sailors at the big wheel stood out clear-cut as cameos, with the broad brass band upon the circle dully reflecting a space of copperish light in the sky over the weather mizzen-topsail yard-arm, and the newly polished hood of the binnacle gleaming as though sun-touched. A couple of midshipmen in pea-coats and brass buttons, curly headed young rogues, with a spirit of mischief bright in every glance they sent, patrolled the lee side of the poop; and up in the mizzen top were two more of them, with yet another long-legged fellow jockeying a spur of the cross-trees, with his loose trousers rattling like a flag; but what job he was upon I could not tell. The planks of this deck were as white as the trunk of a tree newly stripped of its bark. Four handsome quarter-boats swung at the davits. Along the rail on either hand went a row of hencoops, through the bars of which the heads of cocks and hens came and went in a winking sort of way, like a swift showing and withdrawing of red rags. On the rail, for a considerable distance, were stowed bundles of compressed hay, the scent of which was a real puzzle to the nose, coming as it did through the hard sweep of the salt wind. The white skylights glistened through the intricacies of brass wire which shielded them. Abaft the wheel, on either side of it, their tompioned muzzles eyed blindly by the closed ports meant to receive them, were a couple of eighteen pounders; for in those days the Indiamen still went armed; not heavily, indeed, as in the war-times of an earlier period, but with artillery and small-arms enough to enable her to dispute with some promise of success with the picaroon who was still afloat, whose malignant flag the burnished waters of the Antilles yet reflected, and whose amiable company of assassins were as often to be met with under the African and South American heights as in the Channel of the Mozambique, or eastward yet on the broad surface of the Indian Ocean.

I crossed the deck to where Mr. Cocker was stumping, and asked him if he could tell me off what part of the English coast our ship now was.

‘Drawing on to the Wight, sir,’ he answered, with a sort of groping look in the little moist blue eyes he turned over the lee bow into the thickness beyond.

‘Well, we’re blowing through it, anyway,’ said I. ‘I shouldn’t have allowed these heels for any conceivable structure born with such bows as the Countess Ida. What is it?’ I asked with a glance at the broad dazzle of yeast dancing and whipping and slinging off the Indiaman’s tall side against the hurl of the weather surge.

‘It’ll be all eight,’ answered the second officer: ‘it would be ten had she worked herself loose of the grip of the stevedores. She wants the mainsail and foreto’garn’sail. These old buckets are manufactured to creak, and whilst they creak, they hold, it is said.’

His face crumpled up into a grin that made him look twenty years older under the thatch of his sou’-wester curling to his eyebrows, with the broad flaps over his ears like a nightcap for his sea-helmet to sit upon.

‘Pray, Mr. Cocker,’ said I, ‘was any damage done to the ship by the collision last night?’

‘There wasn’t so much as a rope-yarn parted,’ he answered. ‘I looked to see the spritsail yard sprung, for it’ll have been that spar, I reckon, which dragged the lugger’s masts overboard by the shrouds of them. But it’s as sound as anything else aboard the ship.’

He shifted uneasily, as though to make off, and, turning my head, I spied the captain looking into the binnacle. So, having had already enough of the deck, I stepped below for a smoke in the cuddy recess, where I found Mr. Emmett in a long cloak, such as mysterious assassins and renegade noblemen used to wear at the Coburg Theatre, sucking at a large curled meerschaum pipe, and arguing on the subject of longitude with a little man almost a dwarf, an honest and highly intelligent pigmy, with the head of a giant supported on the legs of a boy of six, an amiable earnest little creature, with a trick of looking up wistfully into your face. His name was Richard Saunders: and I afterwards understood that he was proceeding to India on behalf of some Pharmaceutical Society, to collect information on and examples of Hindu and other medicines, drugs, charms, and so forth.

Well, all that day it continued to blow a very strong wind. The ship’s plunging increased as the Channel opened under her bow and admitted something of the weight of the Atlantic in the run of its seas. There was a constant sharp-shooting of spray forward over the forecastle, and the wet came sobbing along; the lee scuppers to where the cuddy front checked it under the poop ladder. Very few of us assembled at lunch or at dinner.

During the progress of this last meal, Colonel Bannister left the table and went below, and after an interval, uprose through the hatch, with his large distinguished-looking wife holding on to him. Mynheer Peter Hemskirk, on seeing her, cried out: ‘Ah, Meestrees Bannister, boot dot iss vot I call plooky!’ and Mr. Johnson came near to breaking his neck whilst starting to his legs to stand as she passed. She took a chair next her husband, and sat grimly staring around her, her lips pale with the compression of them. She shook her head to every suggestion made by the steward, and then, being unable to hold out any longer, seized hold of her little ramrod of a husband and went staggering and rolling below with him. When he returned, he tossed down a glass of wine with an angry gesture and a fierce countenance, and looking at Hemskirk, cried out: ‘I’ve a great respect for my wife, sir, and she’s a fine woman in every sense of the word.’—The Dutchman nodded.—‘But,’ continued the colonel, clenching his fist, ‘if ever I go to sea with a woman again, be she wife, aunt, or grandmother, may I be poisoned for a lunatic, and my remains committed to the deep. This is the fourth time I’ve sworn it—my mind is now resolved!’

Out of all this sort of thing one could get a laugh here and there; but on the whole it was desperately weary work, and continued so till we had blown clear of soundings. Altogether, it was as ugly a down Channel run as any man would pray to be preserved from; the atmosphere grey, the seas a muddy green, the howling blast chill as a November morn, often darkening to a squall, that would sweep between the masts in horizontal lines of rain sparkling like steel, and with spite enough in the lancing of them to compel the strongest to turn his back. Now and again a lady passenger would show in the cuddy; but though there were some twenty-eight of us in all, not reckoning a couple of ayahs, and a Chinaman in the garb of his country, who acted as nurse to one Mrs. Trevor’s baby, never once in those days did above seven of us, barring the skipper and his mates, sit down to a meal.

The thick weather lay heavily upon the captain’s mind, held him in fits of abstraction whilst at table, dismissed him after a brief sitting to the deck, and kept him heedful and taciturn whilst there. He had had one collision, and wanted no more; and you would notice how that tragedy had served him, by observing him when in the cuddy to prick up his ears to the least unusual noise on deck, to glance at the tell-tale compass over his head, as though it were the sun which he had been patiently waiting for a chance to ‘shoot,’ to swallow his food with impatient motions to the steward to bear a hand, and to bolt up the cabin steps without a smile or syllable of apology to us for quitting the table.

CHAPTER IV
LOUISE TEMPLE

But there came a change at last. Ushant was then many long leagues astern, and the night had been dark but quiet, with a long Biscayan swell brimming to our starboard quarter, and a play of sheet-lightning off the lee bow, and wind enough to send the Indiaman through it at some six knots with her royals and cross-jack furled and the weather clew of her mainsail up. This was as the picture showed when I went to bed at five bells—half-past ten—and on opening my eyes next morning I found the berth brilliant with sunshine, bulkhead and ceiling trembling to the glory rippling off the sea through the large round scuttle or porthole, and the action of the ship a stately gliding, with a slow long floating heave that raised no sound whatever of creak or straining, and that, after the long spell of tumblefication, was as grateful to every sense and to all wearied bones as the firm unrocking surface of dry land.

Mr. Colledge was shaving himself. I lay eyeing him for a few minutes, admiring the handsome high-born looks of the youth, and thinking it was a pity that such manly beauty as his should lack the consecrating touch of an intellectual expression to parallel his physical graces. He saw me in the glass in which he was scraping himself.

‘Good-morning, Dugdale. I feel all right again, d’ye know. I am going to eat my breakfast in the cuddy and then go on deck.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ said I, putting my legs over the side of the bunk.

‘I suppose there’ll be some girls about this morning,’ said he. ‘Who the dooce are the passengers, I wonder? Anybody very nice aboard, not counting that ripping young lady with the black eyes?’

‘Nearly everybody’s been as sea-sick as you,’ said I; ‘and the few who have put in an appearance are males—your friend Emmett, the fat Dutchman, and two or three others.’

‘Oh, you mean Mynheer Hemskirk, the corpulent chap, whose voice sounds like that of a man inside a rum puncheon talking through the bunghole.’

I asked him if he could tell me anything about Miss Temple, the black-eyed lady.

‘Some one told me at Gravesend,’ he answered—‘but I don’t know who it was—that she’s a daughter of Sir Conyers Temple. I think I’ve heard my father speak of him as a man he has hunted with. If he’s that Sir Conyers, he broke his neck four years ago in a steeplechase.’

‘Who accompanies the young lady to India, I wonder?’ said I.

‘Her aunt, I believe; but I don’t know her name. But I say, though, what makes you so inquisitive?’

‘Oh, my dear Colledge,’ said I, ‘one is always inquisitive about one’s fellow-passengers on board ship. The girl came up to me on deck the other night when the row of the collision was in full swing. I see her big eyes now—black as ebony, yet luminous too, with the flame of a flare-tin at the side reflected in each magnificent orb in a spot of crimson which made her pale hooded face as mystical as a vision of the night.’

He turned to stare at me, and broke into a laugh. ‘So! you are the poet amongst the passengers, eh? as Emmett’s the painter? What’s to be my walk? Oh, there goes the first breakfast bell! Heaven bless us, what a delightful thing it is not to feel sea-sick!’

We continued to gabble a bit in this fashion; he then left the berth, and a little later I followed him.

The large cuddy wore an aspect it had not before exhibited. The sunshine sparkled upon the skylights, and the interior was full of the blue and silver radiance of the rich and welcome autumn morning outside. The long table was all aglow with the silver and crystal furniture of the white damask, and through the glazed domes in the upper deck you could see the canvas on the mizzen swelling in a milky softness from yard to yard as the sails mounted to the height of the tender little royal.

The passengers came from the deck or up from below one after another; the change in the weather had acted as a charm, and here now was the whole mob of us, one old lady excepted, with a glimpse to be had of the two ayahs sunning themselves on the quarter-deck. The skipper, looking a bit stale, as with too much of all-night work, but smart enough in the gingerbread trickery of his uniform, made a little speech of compliments to the ladies and gentlemen from the head of the table. There was a courtliness about the old fellow that gained not a little in relish from a sort of deep-sea flavour in his manner and varying expressions of face. I liked the quality of the bow with which he accompanied his answer to any lady who addressed him.

I sat at the bottom of the table on the right hand of the chief-officer, and was able to command a pretty good view of the people that I was to be associated with, as I might suppose, for the next three or four, and perhaps five months. There were several girls amongst us—two Miss Joliffes, three Miss Brookes’s, Miss Hudson, and four or five more. Miss Hudson was exceedingly pretty—hair of dark gold, and a skin delicate as a lily, upon which lay a kind of golden tinge—oh, call it not freckles! though I daresay the charming effect was produced by something of that sort. Her eyes were large, moist, violet in hue, with slightly lifted eyebrows, which gave them an arch look. Mr. Sylvanus Johnson, who sat next me, after staring at her a little, muttered in my ear in a dramatic undertone: ‘Perdita has expressed that girl, sir:

Violets dim,

But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes

Or Cytherea’s breath.’

‘If that be her mother next to her,’ said I, ‘fix your attention upon her, Mr. Johnson, and Perdita’s fancy will exhale!’

And indeed Mrs. Hudson was a very extraordinary, and I may say violent contrast to her daughter: a pursy lady of about fifty, with a heavy underlip, puffed-out cheeks of a bluish tint, and a wig, the youthful hue of which defined every trace of age in her countenance, till one thought of her as being some score years older than she really was.

But the interior was wonderfully humanised by these ladies. Their dress, the sparkle of jewels in their ears, on their fingers and throats, here and there a turban seated high on some motherly head—it was the age of turbans and feathers—the soft notes of the girls running an undertone of music through the deeper voices of the matrons and the growling of us males grumbling conversation across and up the table, whipped the fancy ashore, and made one think of drawing-rooms and guitars and Books of Beauty.

There was one lady, however, who held my eye from the start. She was Miss Louise Temple, and I cannot express how deep was the admiration her charms excited in me. I told you that I had caught a glimpse of her at Gravesend; but, down to this moment, I had been unable to obtain a fair view of her. Her hair that, to judge by the coils of it, when let down would have reached to below her knees, was of a wonderful blackness without either gloss or deadness. She wore it in a manner that was perfectly new in those days: in twinings which heaped it up to the aspect of a crown; whilst behind it was brushed up in a way to exhibit the lovely form of the head from the curve of the neck to where the beautiful tresses lay piled. Her face was perfectly colourless, the complexion clear, and the skin exquisitely delicate. Her mouth was small, the upper lip slightly curved, and there was the hint of a pout in the faint, scarce perceptible protrusion of the under lip. Her nose was perfectly straight, like a Greek woman’s; but it had the English indent under the brow, and therefore had the beauty, which to my fancy, no Greek profile ever yet possessed.

But her eyes! How am I to describe them? What impression can I hope to convey by such terms as large, black, soft, and fluid? The lids were delicately veined, the eyelashes long, and between these fringes the eyes shone of a dark liquid loveliness, full of the light, as it seemed to me, of a high intelligence, with spirit and haughtiness in every glance. They were the most dramatic, by which I do not mean theatric, pair of twinklers that ever sparkled star-like under the beauty of a woman’s brow; created, you might have thought, for the interpretation of the Shakespearean imaginations, with all capacity in them of surprise, scorn, resentment, melting tenderness, and of every fine and noble passion. She was attired in a dress of black cloth, simple as a riding habit of to-day, and so fitting her figure as to express without exaggeration every point of grace in the curves and fulness of her tall but still maidenly form.

I caught her glance for a moment: I am sure she remembered me as the passenger she had addressed on the poop; yet there was not the faintest expression of recognition in the full, firm, swift stare she honoured me with. She looked away from me as haughtily as a queen, with flashing inspection of the others of the row of us that confronted her, though it seemed to me that her gaze lingered a little on the Honourable Mr. Colledge, who was seated immediately opposite.

‘I reckon now,’ whispered Mr. Prance, leaning to me in his chair from his athwart-ship post at the foot of the table, ‘that yonder Miss Temple will be about the handsomest woman that was ever afloat.’

‘There have been many thousands of women afloat,’ said I, ‘since Noah got under way with the ladies of his family aboard.’

‘I have been sailing in passenger-ships,’ said he,‘for nineteen years come next month, and have never before seen such a figure-head as Miss Temple’s. What teeth she has! Little teeth, sir, as all women’s should be; and where’s the whiteness that’s to be compared to them?’

‘Who is that homely, pleasant-faced woman sitting by her side?’

‘Her aunt, Mrs. Radcliffe,’ he answered.

‘What errand carries that stately creature to India, do you know, Mr. Prance?’

‘I do not, sir.’

‘Not very likely,’ I continued, ‘that she’s bound out in search of a husband.’

‘No, no,’ he muttered. ‘The like of her have a big enough market at home to command. No need for her to cross the ocean to find a sweetheart. She’s the daughter of a dead baronet, a tenth title, so the captain was saying; and her mother has a large estate to live on. Captain Keeling knows all about them. Her ladyship was seized with paralysis when her husband was brought home with his neck broken, and has been a sheer hulk ever since, I believe, poor thing. We brought Mrs. Radcliffe to England last voyage. Her husband’s a big planter up country, and worth a lac or two. I expect Miss Temple is going out on a visit—nothing more. Her health may need a voyage. Those choice bits of mechanism often go wrong in their works. She wants a stroke of colour in her cheeks. ’Tis the scent of the milkmaid that she lacks, sir.’

He gave a pleasant nod, quietly rose, and went on deck by way of the cuddy front, to relieve the second officer, who was watching the ship for him whilst he breakfasted.

At such a first meal as this, so to speak, when, barring one, we had all come together for the first time, there was no want of British reserve and shyness. We chiefly contented ourselves with staring. Colonel Bannister alone talked freely; he was loud on the subject of army grievances, and was rendered indeed, intolerably fluent and noisy by the respectful attention he received from a gentleman who sat over against him, one Mr. Hodder, a tall, thin, nervous, yellow-faced man, with a paralytic catching up of his breath in his speech, who was going to India to fill some post of responsibility in a college. Mrs. Bannister with her hawks-bill nose, grey hair, and full figure, sat bolt upright, eating with avidity, and sweeping the faces round about her with a small severe eye.

I watched little Mrs. Radcliffe with attention. It was not hard to guess that she was an amiable, fidgety, anxious body, of elastic properties of mind, easily, but only temporarily, to be repressed. She talked in a quick way to her niece, darting what she had to say into the girl’s ear, with an abrupt withdrawal of her head, and an earnest look at Miss Temple’s face. The other would sometimes faintly smile, but for the most part her air was one of haughty abstraction. Indeed, it was easy to see that, so far as her opinion of her fellow-passengers went, it was not quite flattering to the bulk of us.

It was a noble morning, indeed, on deck. There was a long blue heave of swell from the northward, quiet as the rise and fall of a sleeper’s breast, and the white buttons of the ship’s trucks, glancing like silver against the moist blue of the sky, swung so slowly and tenderly to and fro that one could almost watch them without perception of any movement. The ocean was of a deep sea blue, all to eastward flashing under the sun, and the small waves chased us with a voice of summer in the caressing seething of the snow of their heads against the sides of the Indiaman. The ship had studdingsails set, and under these far overhanging wings the water trembled back the radiance that fell from the swelling cloths, as though there were a floating thinness of quicksilver there prismatic as a soap-bubble.

Very soon after breakfast the poop was filled, and I marked the Jacks forward staring aft at the sight of us all. It was not hot enough for an awning, and there was still too much edge in the breeze, warmly as the sun looked down, to suffer the ladies to sit for any length of time. The picture was a cheerful one, full of movement and life and colour. The white-headed skipper, skewered up in his bebuttoned and belaced frock-coat, patrolled the weather side of the deck with Mrs. Radcliffe on his arm. Mr. Emmett paced the planks with Mrs. Joliffe and her daughters, and I could hear him bidding them admire the contrast between the violet shadowing in the hollows of the sails and the delicate sheen of the edges against the blue, as though at those extremities they dissolved into pure lustre. Little Mr. Saunders trotted alongside the orbicular form of Mynheer Hemskirk, who showed as a giant as he looked down into the earnest upstaring face of the big-headed little chap. Three Civil Service youths lounged upon a hencoop, looking askant at the young ladies, and laughing under their breaths at what one or another of them said. Near the foremost skylight stood Mr. Johnson and Colonel Bannister. One did not need to listen attentively to understand that the colonel was falling foul of the calling of journalism, and that Mr. Johnson was endeavouring to defend it by repeating over and over again: ‘Granted—I admit it—I’m not going to say no; but give me leave to ask, where on earth would your profession be, sir, if its actions were not chronicled?’ These remarks he continued to reiterate till the colonel was in a white heat, and I had to walk away to conceal my laughter.

As I passed the companion hatchway, which you will please to understand is the hooded entrance to the cuddy by way of the poop, Miss Temple came up out of it, closely followed by Mr. Colledge. There was something like a smile on her pale face, and he was talking with animation. She wore a black hat, wide at the brim, with a large black feather encircling it, and a sort of jacket with some rich trimming of dark fur upon it. I was close enough to overhear them as they emerged.

‘I quite remember my dear father speaking of Lord Sandown,’ she said, coming to a stand at the head of the companion steps, and sending a sparkling sweeping look along the decks. ‘Is not Lady Isabella FitzJames an aunt of yours, Mr. Colledge?’

‘Oh yes. I hope you don’t know her,’ he answered. ‘She writes books, you know, and fancies herself a wit; and her conversation is as parching as the seedcake she used to give me when I was a boy.’

‘I have met her,’ said Miss Temple. ‘I rather liked her. Perhaps she neglects to be clever in the company of her own sex.’

‘Ever been to India before?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she answered in a voice whose note of affability somehow by no means softened her haughty regard of the passengers as they walked past. ‘I am entirely obliging my aunt by undertaking the trip. My uncle is very old, and too infirm to make the passage to England, and he was extremely anxious for my mother and me to spend some months with him. Of course it was a ridiculous invitation as far as poor mamma is concerned. You know she is a helpless cripple, Mr. Colledge.’

‘Oh, indeed. I didn’t know. I am very sorry, I’m sure,’ said he.

‘I shall not remain long,’ she continued; ‘most probably I shall return in this ship.’

‘By George, though, I hope you will!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m booked to come home in her too. There’ll be more shooting in three months than I shall want, you know. I mean to pot a few tigers, and try my hand on a wild elephant or two. By Jove, Miss Temple, if you’ll allow me, you shall have the skin of the first tiger I shoot!’

‘Oh, you are too good, Mr. Colledge,’ said she, with a smile trembling on her parted lips, lifting her hand as she spoke to smooth a streak of hair off her forehead with fingers that sparkled with rings; but her eyes were brighter than any of her gems; they turned at that instant full upon me as I stood looking at her a little way past the mizzen-mast, and there seemed something of positive insolence in the brief stare she fixed upon me; the faint smile vanished to the curl of her upper lip as she turned her head.

That, my fine madam, thought I, may be your manner of regarding everything which is not to be found in the Peerage.

Colledge, who had followed her glance, saw me.

‘Oh, Dugdale,’ he cried, ‘can you tell me anything about tigers’ skins—how long it takes to doctor them into rugs and all that sort of thing, don’t you know?’

‘I can tell you nothing about tigers’ skins,’ said I curtly. ‘I have never seen a tiger.’

‘Know anything about lions’ skins, then?’ he sung out with a half-smile, meant, as my temper fancied, for Miss Temple.

‘The ass in the fable clothed himself in one, I believe,’ said I, ‘but his roar betrayed him.’

‘Now I come to think of it,’ said he, ‘I believe there are no lions in India;’ and he looked from me to the girl with a face of interrogation so full of good temper as to satisfy me that at heart he was a kindly-natured young fellow.

‘I think I shall walk, Mr. Colledge,’ said Miss Temple.

They joined the folks promenading the weather-deck, and I went to the recess under the poop to smoke a pipe.

I leaned in a sulky mood against the bulkhead. There was a sense upon me as of having been snubbed. I was a young man in those days, of an uncomfortably sensitive disposition. Yet there should have been virtue enough in that glorious morning to soothe in one’s soul a keener sting than was to be inflicted by a handsome woman’s scornful glance. The slight leaning away of the ship from the soft breeze showed a space over the bulwark rails of the sparkling azure under the sun steeping to the delicate silver blue of the sky, with a small star-like point of white in the far-off airy dazzle, marking the topmost cloths of a ship out there. The white planks under my feet had the glistening look of sand, now that the decks had been washed down, and had dried out into a frosting of themselves, as it were, with tiny crystals of brine. The shadows of the rigging in ink-black lines swung sleepily to the motion of the fabric. The Chinaman nurse, in a gown of blue, and wide blue trousers, and primrose-coloured face, and a gleaming tail like a dead black serpent lying down his back, leaned against a carronade, tossing the little baby he had charge of till the plump little sweet crowed again with delight. On the warm tarpaulin over the main-hatch sat the two ayahs, crooning over the infants they held, often lifting their eyes, like beads of unpolished indigo stuck into slips of mottled soap, to the poop, where the mothers of their youngsters were. There was a taste as of a hubble-bubble in the air, with the faint relish of bamboo chafing-gear and cocoa-nut ropes. The hubble-bubble, I daresay, was a fancy wrought by the spectacle of those black faces, and helped by a noise of parrots somewhere aft.

A length of sail was stretched along the waist, and upon it were seated several sailors, flourishing palms and needles as they stitched. They talked together in a low voice that the mate of the watch should not hear them. At one of the fellows who sat with his face towards me, I found myself looking as at a curiosity that slowly compels the attention, spite of any heedless mood you may be in. Many ugly mariners had I met in my time, but never the like of that man. His right eye had a lamentable cast; his back was so round that I imagined he had a hunch. He had enormously long strong arms, with immense fists at the ends of them, and the sleeves of his shirt being rolled to above his elbow exposed a score of extraordinary devices in Indian ink writhing amongst the hair that lay in places like fur upon the flesh. The bridge of his nose had been crushed to his face, and a mere knob with two holes in it stood out about an inch above his hare-lip. Though manifestly an old sailor, salted down for ship’s use by years of seafaring, his complexion was dingy and dough-like as the skin of a London baker, with nothing distinctive upon it saving a number of warts, and a huge mole over a ridge of scarlet eyebrow dashed with a few grey hairs. His hair, that was of coarse brick-red, hung down upon his back, as though, forsooth, the ship’s cook had made a wig for him out of the parings of carrots. Indeed, he was as much a monster as anything that was ever shut up in a cage and carried about as a show.

I was watching him with growing interest, wondering to myself what sort of a life such a creature as that had led, what kind of ships he had sailed in chiefly, and how so grotesque an object had been suffered to ‘sign on’ for an Indiaman, in which one might expect to find something of a man-of-war uniformity and smartness of crew, when Mr. Sylvanus Johnson came out from the cuddy, rolling an unlighted cheroot betwixt his lips.

‘See that chap sitting upon the sail yonder?’ said I—‘a good subject for a leading article, Mr. Johnson.’

‘Oh confound it, Mr. Dugdale; no sneers, if you please. Let me light this cigar at your pipe. That fellow is in Emmett’s way, not mine. Quite a triumph of hideousness, I protest. But what’s the matter with you, this lovely morning? You look a bit down in the mouth, Mr. Dugdale. Not going to be sea-sick, I hope, now that all the rest of us have recovered?’

‘Down in the mouth? Not I. But I’ll tell you what, Mr. Johnson—when you take charge of your newspaper, will you be so good as to inform the world that there is nothing under the broad sky more consumedly insipid than the chattering of a young man and a young woman when they first meet.’

‘Why, how now?’ said he.

‘Oh, my dear sir,’ cried I, ‘hear them. The unspeakable drivel of it—the “reallys” and “oh dears” and “yes quites”’—

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Johnson looking at the ash of his cigar after every puff; ‘I think I know what you mean. But it is the effect of politeness, I believe. A young gentleman and a young lady who desire to please will begin very low with each other, lest they should prove disconcerting. But what d’ye say’—he lowered his voice—‘to the drivel, as you call it, of a man of advanced years?’—here he looked into the cuddy, then took a step forward to peer up at the poop—‘of a person who has seen the world—of a colonel, in short? I wish to be on good terms with my fellow-passengers; but if that man Bannister goes on as he has begun, I’m afraid—I’m afraid it will end in my having to pull his nose.’

He sent another nervous look into the cuddy and frowned upon his cigar end.

‘Has he been offensive?’ said I.

‘Well, judge,’ he exclaimed, ‘when I tell you that he said there wasn’t a respectable man connected with journalism; that the calling was distinctly a tipsy one; that his idea of a journalist was that of a man lying in bed till his only shirt came from the wash, and inventing lies to publish to the world when the washerwoman enabled him to clothe himself.—“And pray, sir,” said I, sneering at him, “what would the country know of your military achievements if it were not for the journalist? You army gentlemen profess to despise him; but you will get up very early to buy his paper if you have a notion that there will be any mention of your doings in it.”—That was pretty warm, I think?’

‘Rather,’ said I; ‘and what did he say?’

‘He answered that if any other man but myself had said as much, he would have told him to go and be damned.’

‘Well,’ said I, ‘I hope the passengers may prove a companionable body, I am sure. For my part, it is more likely than not that my place of abode whilst the weather permits will be the foretop. Anything to escape overhearing the insipidity of a chat between a young man and a young woman when they first meet.’

‘I see,’ said he, ‘that your friend Colledge has hooked himself on to Miss Temple. I should say he needs to be the son of a nobleman to make headway with such a Cleopatra as her ladyship. Fine eyes, perhaps; but a little pale, eh? Give me Miss Hudson. I don’t admire the sneering part of the sex.’

‘Nor I,’ said I.

‘But every woman,’ said he, ‘has a way of her own of making love. Some simper themselves into a man’s affection, and some triumph by scorn and contempt. Do you remember how the Duchess of Cleveland made love to Wycherley? She put her head out of the coach window and cried out to him: “Sir, you’re a rascal, you’re a villain!” and Pope tells us that Wycherley from that moment entertained hopes.’

But by this time my pipe was smoked out; and catching sight of Mynheer Hemskirk and a passenger named Adams, a lawyer, coming down the ladder with the notion as I might guess of joining us in the recess that was the one smoking-room of the ship, I bolted forwards, got upon the forecastle, and overhung the rail, where I lay for a long half-hour lazily enjoying the sight of the massive cutwater of the Indiaman rending the brilliant blue surface, with a clear lift of azure water either hand of her, that broke into a little running stream of foam abreast of the cat-heads, and swarmed quietly aft in foam-bells and winking bubbles, that made one think of the froth at the foot of a cascade gliding along the crystal-clear breast of a stream to the murmur of summer leaves and the horn-like hum of insects.

CHAPTER V
A MYSTERIOUS VOICE

Well, all that day the weather held fine and clear; indeed, we might have been on the Madeira parallels; and I said to Mr. Prance that it was enough to make one keep a bright look-out for the flying fish. The sky was of a wonderful softness of blue, piebald in the main, with small snow-like puffs of cloud flying low, as though they were a fog that had broken up. A large black ship passed us in the afternoon. She was close hauled, and, being to leeward, showed to perfection when she came abreast. Her sails seemed to be formed of cotton cloth, and mounted in three spires to little skysails, with a crowd of fleecy jibs curving at the bowsprit and jib-booms, and many stay-sails between the masts softly shadowed like a drawing in pencil. The lustre lifting off the sea was reverberated in a row of scuttles, and the flash of the glass was so like the yellow blaze of a gun that you started to the sight, and strained your ear an instant for the report.

She was too far off to hail. The captain, standing in the midst of a crowd of ladies, said that she was an American, and told the second officer, who had the watch, to make the Countess Ida’s number.

‘Oh, what a lovely string of flags!’ exclaimed Miss Hudson, who stood near me, following with her languishing violet eyes the soaring of the mani-coloured bunting as it rose to the block of the peak signal halliards like the tail of a kite. ‘Is there anybody very important in that ship that we are honouring him with that pretty display?’

‘No,’ said I, laughing, as I let my gaze sink fair into the sweet depths of her wonderful peepers. ‘By means of those flags the Countess Ida is telling yonder craft who she is, so that when she arrives home she may report us.’

‘Oh, how heavenly! Only think of a ship being made to tell her name! Oh mamma,’ she cried, making a step to catch hold of her mother’s gown, and to give it a tweak, as the old lady stood at the rail gazing at the American vessel from the ambush of a large bonnet, shaped like a coal-scuttle; ‘imagine, dear: Mr. Dugdale says that the Countess Ida is telling that ship who she is. How clever men are—particularly sailors. I love sailors.’

Her melting eyes sought the deck, and the long lashes drooped in a tender shadow of beauty upon the faint golden tinge of her cheeks.

‘La, now, to think of it!’ cried Mrs. Hudson. ‘Well, those who go down into the sea, as the saying is, do certainly see some wonderful things.’

Here Mr. Colledge, who did not know, I suppose, that I was conversing with these ladies, came up to me and said: ‘By the way, Dugdale, what was that joke of yours about the lion’s skin this morning? Miss Temple says it was meant for a joke; but hang me if I can see any point in it.’

‘What did I say?’ I asked.

He repeated the remark.

‘Oh, yes; the young lady is right,’ said I, sending a look at her as she stood near the wheel by her aunt’s side—the pair of them well away from the rest of us—gazing through a pair of delicate little opera glasses at the Yankee; ‘it was a joke. What a capital memory you have. But as to point, it had none, and the joke, my dear fellow, lies in that.’

‘Well,’ said he, ‘it makes a man feel like an ass to miss a good thing when a lady is standing by who can see it clearly enough to laugh at it afterwards.’

‘Yes,’ I exclaimed; ‘very true indeed. What a fine picture that ship makes, eh? There goes her answering pennant! Let them say what they will of Jonathan, he has a trick high above the art of John Bull in shipbuilding.’

I watched his handsome face as he peered at her. He turned to me and said: ‘D’ye know, there’s a doocid lot of humour in the idea of the point of a joke lying in its having no point;’ and with that he went over to Miss Temple, whose haughty face softened into a smile to his approach; and there for some time the three of them stood, he ogling the American (that was slowly slipping into toy-like dimensions upon our quarter) through the girl’s binocular; whilst she talked with him, as I could tell by the movement of her lips, Mrs. Radcliffe meanwhile looking on with fidgety motions of her head, and frequent glances at her niece, the nervous interrogative slightly troubled character of which was as suggestive to me as to how it stood between them, as if she had come to my side and whipped out that she was really afraid that Louise’s character would make the charge of her a worry and a perplexity.

There was a noble sunset that evening, in the west lay stretched a delicate curtain of cloud linked in shapes of shell, with dashes here and there as of mare’s tails; whilst near the sea-line the vapour was more compacted, still linked, but with a closer inwreathing, as like to chain armour as anything I can compare it to. When the sun sank into this exquisite lace of vapour, it lighted up a hundred colours all over it, which transformed the whole of the western heavens into a most gorgeous and dazzling tapestry. Never saw I before the like of such a sunset. But for the visible circle of the glowing mass of the orb, you would have thought those glorious shooting hues, those astonishing and sumptuous emissions of green and gold and purple, of rose and brilliant yellow and shining blue fainting into an unimaginably delicate texture of green, some phenomenal exhibition of electric splendour. The sea glowed under this vast display of western magnificence in fifty superb hues. We all stood looking, whilst the wondrous pageant slowly faded, the ship meanwhile reflecting the splendour in her sails till they showed like yellow satin against the soft evening blue gathering over the mastheads, as she pushed softly through the water, the oil-smooth surface of her wake lined with the spume broken out by the passage of her bows lifting tenderly on the swell that was flowing in long lines to the ship from out of the north-west.

The moon rose late, but it was a fine clear starlit dusk when eight bells of the second dog-watch floated along the decks and echoed quietly down out of the wind-hushed spaces of the canvas. The sea swept black to its confines where the low wheeling stars were hovering like ships’ lights in the immeasurable distance. The radiance of the cuddy lamps flung a sheen upon the quarter-deck atmosphere; but away forward from abreast of the mainmast the ship lay black in the shadow of her own canvas, with a view of a few dark blotches of the forms of men moving about the forecastle, their figures showing out against the brilliant dust in the sky under the wide yawn of the fore-course.

Old Keeling was pacing the deck with studdingsails out on both sides, as Jack says, that is to say, with a lady on either arm. Other figures moved here and there; and Mr. Cocker, who had charge of the deck, walked to and fro from rail to rail with the young fourth officer by his side, regularly pausing, ere swinging round for the stump back, to take a peep under the foot of the mainsail or to send a long look into the weather horizon. Little Mr. Saunders came up to me, spoke of the beauty of the evening, and asked me to walk. He was a very intelligent little chap, and had written several works on the superstitions of various peoples in relation to their treatment of diseases. He was wonderfully in earnest in all he said, and would again and again in his enthusiasm come to a stand, raise his arm to catch hold of a button of my coat, as if to detain me, meanwhile standing on the tips of his toes and peering up into my face. On the other side of the deck walked my friend Colledge between Miss Temple and her aunt. Three of the Civil Service gentlemen were in tow of Mrs. Brookes and her daughters; and right aft, leaning in picturesque attitude against one of the guns, was Mr. Sylvanus Johnson airily and in a gallant tone of voice explaining to Mrs. and Miss Hudson how it was that the sun and moon were sometimes to be seen shining together. Down in the cuddy, directly under the after-skylight, sat Colonel Bannister playing whist with his wife, Mr. Hodder, and Mr. Adams; and almost every time I passed I could hear the military man’s voice remonstrating with one or the other of them for having played such or such a card: ‘You should have led the knave, sir. What on earth, my dear, made you trump spades? No, no; I was right! I believe I am not to be taught whist at my time of life, sir;’ and so on, and so on.

By-and-by a bell rang to summon the passengers below to such refreshments of wine and biscuits and strong waters as they chose to partake of. The promenaders in shadowy forms melted down the companion hatchway, and two or three of us only remained on deck. Mr. Colledge was one of them. He came over to me, staring in my face, to make sure of me, and exclaimed: ‘I wish they would allow a man to smoke up here. What is the evil in a pipe of tobacco or a cheroot, that you must go and sneak into a dark corner to light it?’

‘How is it that you are not below with Miss Temple?’ said I.

‘Oh,’ said he, laughing, ‘I want to make her last me out the voyage, and that won’t be done, you know, if we see too much of each other.’

‘You are to be congratulated,’ said I, ‘on the compliment she pays you:

Favours to none, to none she smiles extends;

Oft she rejects, and oftener still offends.

That’s not exactly how the poet puts it, but it is apter than the original.’

‘Oh well, you know, Dugdale, she has met some of my people. I don’t dislike her for holding off. It shows that her blood and instincts are English; though, faith, when I first saw her I took her to be a Spaniard. Between you and me, though, the golden headed girl’s the belle of the ship. What’s her name?—Ah! Miss Hudson. Look at her as she sits in the light down there! Why, now, if I had your poetical turn, how would I spout whole yards about her fingers like snowflakes, and her lips like—— But see here! there’s nothing new in the shape of imagery to apply to a pretty woman. Oh yes! Miss Hudson’s the ship’s beauty. But Miss Temple is ripping company, and, my stars! what eyes!’

‘Take care,’ said I, laughing, ‘that you don’t do what the man who marries the deceased wife’s sister always does—wed the wrong one. Choose correctly at the start.’

He burst into a laugh.

‘I am already engaged to be married,’ said he. ‘What single man of judgment would dare adventure a voyage to Bombay without securing himself in that fashion against all risks?’

I stared into his grinning face, as we stood at the skylight, to discover if he was in earnest.

‘Keep your secret, Colledge,’ said I; ‘I’ll not peach.’

Here the second-mate interrupted us by singing out an order to the watch to haul down the fore and main topgallant studdingsails. Then he took in his lower and main topmast studdingsails. The men’s noisy bawling made talking difficult, and Colledge went below for a glass of brandy-and-water. Presently old Keeling came on deck, and after a look around, and a pretty long stare over the weather bow, where there was a very faint show of lightning, he said something to the second mate and returned to the cuddy.

‘In foretopmast studdingsail!’ bawled Mr. Cocker; ‘clew up the mizzen-royal and furl it.’

A little group of midshipmen hovering in the dusk in the lee of the break of the poop, where the shadow of the great mainsail lay like the darkness of a thunderstorm upon the air, rushed to the mizzen rigging, and in a few moments the gossamer-like cloud floating under the mizzen-royal truck was melting out like a streak of vapour against the stars, with a couple of the young lads making the shrouds dance as they clawed their way up the ratlines.

‘What’s wrong with the weather, Mr. Cocker,’ said I, ‘that you are denuding the ship in this fashion?’

‘Oh,’ said he with a short laugh, ‘Captain Keeling is a very cautious commander, sir. He’ll never show a stun’sail to the night outside the tropics; and it is a regular business with us to furl the fore and mizzen royal in the second dog-watch, though it is so fine to-night, he has let them fly longer than usual.’