CHAPTER X.

THE VISION OF THE SHIP.

Dr. Fabos Proposes to Visit the Azores.

I slept a little about midnight, being convinced that the night had written the last word of its story. The storm had not abated. A wild wind blew tempestuously from the south-east, and drove us before it as a leaf before a winter’s blast. Good ship as my yacht proved to be, she was like many turbined steamers, a wet boat in a gale and no friend to the landsman. We shipped heavy seas persistently, and drove our bull’s nose wildly into mountains of seething foam. Even the hardy crew complained of her; while my poor friend Timothy McShanus implored me, for the love of God, to throw him overboard.

“Was it for this I left the home of me fathers?” he asked me pitifully when I entered the cabin where he lay. “Is this the land of milk and honey to which ye would take me? Stop the ship, I tell ye, and put me ashore. Let me die among the naygroes. Kill me with laudanum. Man, I’ll thank ye to have done it. I’ll call ye the best friend that Timothy McShanus ever had.”

Poor fellow! His groans were in my ears when I fell to sleep. His was the voice which reproached me when I awoke. That would have been about three o’clock of the morning, I suppose. Dawn was breaking furtively in an ink-black sky. The swaying of a lamp in the gimbals, the swish of water against the cabin walls told me that the gale had somewhat abated. I asked McShanus if he had waked me, and he answered that the captain had been down to call me to the deck.

“Put Timothy McShanus ashore and let the naygroes devour him,” he said; and then, almost with tears in his eyes, “Man, the last of me has been given up. I’m no more than a hollow drum for sport to bate upon. Bury me where the shamrock grows. Say ’twas the ups and downs that did for this same McShanus.”

I spoke what cheer I could, and went on deck as the captain had asked me. Abel, the quartermaster, stood at the wheel, and all our officers were with Larry upon the bridge. The sea still ran high, but the wind had moderated. I perceived a sky that was black and thunderous to leeward, but clearing in the sun’s path. There were wonderful lights upon the raging waters—beams of gold and grey and green interweaved and superb in their weirdness. The waves ran high, but with less power in their assault; and though a fine rain was falling, the measure of it became less with every minute that passed. These things I observed almost as I stepped from the companion hatch. But it was not until I stood side by side with Captain Larry upon the bridge that I knew why he had summoned me.

He turned as I mounted the ladder, and helped me up with an icy cold hand. The little group there, I thought, seemed awed and afraid to speak. Larry himself merely pointed with his hand to a sailing ship sagging heavily in the swell, perhaps half a mile from our port quarter. The glass which he put into my hand helped me but little, so dense was the spray upon its lens. I could, at the first glance, make little of the spectacle save that the ship had four masts, was of unusual size, and seemed to be standing well up to the gale, although her masts were bare. For the rest, she might have been any ship you like bound from Europe to “down under,” and thence returning by Cape Horn. I told Larry as much, and then looked at the stranger again. Undoubtedly there was something queer about her. Yet what it was a landsman might well have been unable to say.

“Well, Larry, and what do you make of it now?” I asked the captain presently. Had I not known him too well, his answer would have made me doubt his sanity.

“I think she is the ship you are seeking, sir.”

I took up the glass without a word, and focussed it upon the deck of the sailing ship. Not a living soul could be discerned there. It might have been a derelict buffeted at hazard about the great Atlantic waste. And yet the vessel appeared to hold a steady course. Behind it my quick eye detected a wake of water such as is left by the propeller of a steamer. There were black objects at the bows which, in sober reason, might have been given the shape of machine guns. These things I was almost afraid to admit aloud. The idea that came to me had been purchased at a heavy price. I felt that I could share it with none.

“She is a sailing ship, Larry,” I said, “and yet not a sailing ship.”

“Far from it, sir. Yon’s no sailing ship.”

“You are thinking that she is fitted with auxiliary steam?”

“I am thinking that she has enough arms on board to serve a cruiser of the line. Machine guns fore and aft and big stuff amidships. The masts are all blarney, sir, or I’m a Dutchman. That vessel’s heavily engined, and we may thank God we’re the fastest yacht afloat. If there were less sea running they would have fired at us already.”

“You mean it, Larry?”

“As true as there’s blue sky above, sir, yonder ship will sink us if we stand by. I’m telling you what I see with an old sailor’s eyes. Ten minutes ago, we came on her suddenly out of the mists. She had fifty men on her poop then, and one dead man she put overboard. The sound of a gun they were firing called my attention to her. I saw a group of hands on the quarter-deck, and one shot down in cold blood. They put him overboard and then discovered us. What happens then? The men go out of sight like so many spiders to their webs. The ship is navigated, heaven knows how. She keeps by us, and wants to know our business. I signal to them and no man answers. What shall I make of that, sir?”

I answered him without a moment’s hesitation.

“You will make full speed ahead, Larry—now, this instant, let the yacht do what she can.”

He rang the order down to the engineers, and White Wings began to race as a human thing over the great seas which swept upward toward the equator. The words were not spoken a moment too soon. Even as the bells rang out, a shell came hurtling after us from the great gun Larry’s clever eyes had discerned upon the deck of the unknown vessel. It fell far ahead of us—a reckless, unmeaning threat, and yet one which Fate ironically might have turned to our destruction. A second and a third followed it. We stood as though spell-bound, the spindrift half blinding us, the monster seas surging upon our decks in cataracts of clear water. Would they hit us, or should we be lost in the curtain of the storm? I claim no better courage in that moment of the ordeal than the good fellows who closed about me were so ready to display. We raced from death together, and numbered the minutes which stood between us and our salvation. No thought or deed of our own could help us. The good yacht alone would answer for our lives.

Now, this strange pursuit lasted, I suppose, a full ten minutes. That it came to a premature end must be set down to the immense speed of which the White Wings was capable, and the force of the gale which still raged about us. We had, indeed, now caught the tail end of the hurricane, the outer edge of the storm cycle; and immediately it enveloped us, a darkness as of intensest night came down upon the waters. Turbulent waves, foaming and angry at their crests, deeply hollowed and black below, rolled northward in monster seas of towering grandeur, each threatening us with the menace of disaster, but passing impotently as we rose at its approach and were hurled onward to the depths. The sound of the rushing wind became terrible to hear. Unseen armies of the ether clashed and thundered above our heads. The rain of the spindrift cut our faces as with a whip. We held a course with difficulty, and must instantly have been lost to the view of those upon the pursuing ship.

A full hour elapsed, I suppose, before the storm spent itself. Swiftly as it had come upon us, so swiftly it passed, leaving an aftermath of glorious sunshine and sweet, clear air, and a sea deliciously green and fresh. Not a trace of any other ship could we now espy upon the horizon. We steamed the hither ocean alone, and the memory of the night was as that of a vision moribund, of sights and sounds of sleep to be mocked and forgotten at the dawn. So reason would have had it, but reason is rarely a sailor’s friend. If my men had made nothing of the unknown ships, of the shell they had fired, and the deeper mysteries they spoke of, none the less I knew that the fo’castle would resound presently with the talk of it, and that even my officers would recount that strange experience by many a fireside yet unbuilt. For myself, my duty had become plain to me. Until I had set foot upon the deck of the Diamond Ship (for this I called her henceforth) I had no place ashore, nor must think of my leisure at all. A man apart, I did not shrink from that lonely vigil. The mystery of it beckoned me, the excitement challenged my intellect to such a combat as the mind must love. I would go on to the end, and no man should turn me from my purpose.

Now, our course had been Northward during these exciting hours; but as the day wore on, we set it full N.N.W. Captain Larry alone upon the ship knew my determination to sail from the African coast to Santa Maria in the Azores. I gave him no reason, nor did he ask one. He understood that my purpose was worthy of him and the yacht, and obeyed me unquestioningly. As for the men, they had been engaged for a service which they knew to have some measure of risk in it. A scale of pay beyond anything expected from the master of a yacht tempered their criticism and rewarded their fidelity. This I will say for them, that they were seamen, brave beyond the common, from the burly boatswain Balaam to the beef-faced cabin boy we had christened Nimbles. If they called my ship “a police boat,” I did not resent the term. I think that they had come to have some affection and respect for me; and I would have wagered my fortune upon their loyalty. To such men it mattered little whether our head lay to the North or to the South. The mystery held their interest; they admitted that they had never known brighter days at sea.

There remained my poor Timothy McShanus. Good soul, how his heart warmed to the sunshine! And who would have hailed the Timothy of storm and of tempest when upon the second night of our Northward voyage he dressed himself to dine with me in the exquisite little saloon my builders had designed for the White Wings? The sea had ebbed down by this time to the stillness of a great inland lake. The moonbeams upon the sleeping water shone with an ethereal radiance of light filtered as it were in a mesh of mirrors. Scarce a breath of wind stirred the awnings of the deck or was caught by the gaping cowls. The yacht moved with that odd gliding motion a turbine engine ensures. We appeared to be running over the unctuous swell as a car upon well-laid rails. The sounds of the night were of steam hissing and valves at a suction and shafts swiftly revolving. The decks trembled at the voice of speed; the movement of the vessel was that of a living, breathing entity, pitted against the majesty of spaces and conquering them.

Be sure that Timothy McShanus came in to dinner on such a night as this. He had found his sea-legs and his appetite, and soup, fish, and bird disappeared like one o’clock. To watch him drink ’89 Bollinger from a Venetian tumbler might have inspired even the gods to thirst. Groomed to the last hair upon a time-worn scalp, Timothy would have served well for the model of an Englishman of the ’sixties as Paris used to see him.

“By the holy soul of Christopher Columbus, ’tis a rare seaman I am,” he said, as we went up above to take our coffee and cigars under the shelter of the awning. “Ask me to point out the terrestrial paradise, and the yacht White Wings will I name to ye. Ah, don’t talk to me of yesterday. ’Twas a bit of the touch of neuralgia I had, and keeping to me bed for security.”

“You wanted them to throw you overboard, Timothy.”

“The divil I did—and phwat for, if not to lighten the ship in the storm? ’Tis a Jonah I would be, and three days in the belly of the whale. Man, ’twould make a taytotaler of Bacchus himself.”

He lighted a cigar of prodigious length, and fell for a while to practical observations upon the sea and sky and the ship which were of interest to none but himself. By-and-bye they would appear in the columns of the Daily Shuffler. I begged of him to be less Dantesque and more practical, and presently, becoming quite serious, he spoke of the Diamond Ship.

“Phwat the blazes does it all mean, Ean me bhoy? A ship in such a hurry that she fires a shot at ye for looking at her. Larry has told me the story, and, by me sowl, ’tis astonishing. When I return to London next month?——”

“You are contemplating a return then, Timothy?”

“Faith, would ye have so much ganius buried in the Doldrums?”

“We shall have to pick up a liner and put you aboard,” said I.

He set his cup down with a bang and looked at me as though I had done him an injury.

“’Tis to the British Isles ye are bound. Would ye deny it?”

“I do deny it, Timothy. We are bound to the Island of Santa Maria in the Azores.”

“For phwat the divil——”

But this masterly sentence he never finished. I could see that he was thinking deeply. Presently he settled himself in his chair and began to talk almost as one communing with himself.

“He takes me from London, me that is an orphan and has buried three wives. He puts me on the sea and shows me a wild man’s country. Ach, ’tis a wonderful man, me friend Fabos, and none like unto him. As a lamb to the shearing do I thread in his footsteps.”

“Rather an old sheep, Timothy, is it not?”

He brushed the objection aside, and apostrophising the stars in that grandiose style he had learned from ancient melodrama, he exclaimed:

“Woman eternal, the crimes that are committed in your name.”

“Do you mean to say——”

“I mean to say that ye are going to the Azores to see her.”

“Joan Fordibras?”

“No other. Joan Fordibras. The little divil of a shepherdess in the red dress. Ye are going to see her. Deny it not. Ye are risking much to see her—your duty which bought ye this ship, the knowledge ye have learned out of Africa, the story ye would tell to the British Government. Ye are losing these because of the shepherdess. I’ll deny it, Ean Fabos, when ye tell me it is not true.”

“Then deny it now, Timothy. I am going to the Azores because I believe that a house there can finish the story which the sea has begun. That is the whole truth of it. There are men afloat in a ship, Timothy, who hide some of the world’s greatest criminals and their plunder from the police of all cities. That is what I had supposed, and this voyage has gratified my supposition. I am going to the Azores to meet some of these men face to face?——”

“And Joan Fordibras?”

“I hope from my heart that I shall never see her again.”

“Ye hope nothing of the kind, man. ’Tis lurking in yer heart the thought that ye will see and save her. I honour ye for it. I would not turn ye from your purpose for a fortune upon the table, poor divil of a man that I am. Go where ye will, Ean Fabos, there’s one that will go with ye to the world’s end and back again and say that friendship sent him.”

“Then I am not to put you on a liner, Timothy?”

“May that same ship rot on verdurous reefs.”

“But you are risking your life, man.”

He stood up and flicked the ash of his cigar into the sea.

“Yon is life,” he said, “a little red light in the houses of our pleasure, and then the ashes on the waters. Ean, me bhoy, I go with you to Santa Maria——”

We smoked awhile in silence. Presently he asked me how I came to think of the Azores at all, and why I expected to find Joan Fordibras upon the island of Santa Maria.

“Did she speak of it at Dieppe, by any chance?” he asked me.

“Not a word,” said I.

“General Fordibras would have let it slip?”

“Nothing of the kind.”

“Then, how the blazes——?”

“Timothy,” I said, “when we dined with Joan Fordibras at Dieppe, her chaperone, the elderly but engaging Miss Aston, carried a letter in her hand.”

“Indade, and she did.”

“I saw the stamp upon it, Timothy.”

He raised his eyes to heaven.

“God save all wicked men from Ean Fabos,” he exclaimed.

But I had only told him the truth, and but for that letter the lady carried, the high seas might yet embosom the secret of the Diamond Ship.