CHAPTER VII. SAIL HO!

A characteristic of Wilfrid’s mental feebleness was his inability to keep his attention long fixed. This symptom would be more or less acute according to the hold his trouble had of him. He arrived at the luncheon table to the second summons, and I was really startled, after conversing with him a little, to gather from what he said that the whole incident of the testing of the men’s eyesight had gone sheer out of his memory. This being so, no purpose could have been served by recurring to it, though, had he mentioned the subject, I had made up my mind to use it as a text that I had might exhort him not to meddle with his crew, nor in any way step between Captain Finn and the navigation of the ‘Bride.’

However I found something to raise a hope in me too, in his odd, variable, imperfect intellect; namely, that he might come presently to but dimly comprehend the purport of this voyage, and then I did not doubt of being able to influence him and carry him back home, in short; for the wild uncertainty of the adventure was made to my mind more extravagant still by the inspiration of it being due to my poor cousin’s weak brains; in fact, not to mince my meaning, it would have been a mad undertaking in the sanest man’s hands; to my fancy, then, it became the completest expression of madness possible, when I thought of a madman as conceiving and governing it.

Finn, as I afterwards learnt, sent the other watch aloft whilst we were at lunch, and there they hung, staring away for an hour; when, just as the captain was about to sing out to them to come down, a fellow on the foreyard (the lowest of the three yards) signalled a sail, and then all hands saw it together! so, to arrest any further grumbling, Finn gave five shillings to the foreyard man and made the watch draw lots for the other two five-shilling prizes. This arrangement satisfied them, and it seemed to soothe the fellows in the other watch as well, who perhaps now perceived that[59] there was little but inanity in the test, and that the only sensible way to treat the whole affair was to look upon it as a joke.

This I learnt afterwards from Finn, who did not show himself much surprised to hear that Sir Wilfrid had apparently forgotten the incident of the morning.

‘You’ll forgive me saying of it, Mr. Monson,’ he exclaimed, ‘seeing it is your own cousin I’m speaking about, sir; but I’ve been master of his yacht now since he bought her for her ladyship, and I know this much of Sir Wilfrid, that his mind ain’t as if it were half the time with the orders he gives. He’ll say a thing without the eyes of his intellects being upon it. The result is that soon after the words is off his lips the sentiment of ’em is gone from his recollection. It is like breathing on a looking-glass; there’s the mark, but it don’t last long.’

It came on a bit thick that afternoon, with now and again a haze of rain in the gust of a squall, sweeping like the explosion of a gun into the straining canvas out of the heart of the hard but steady breeze, and this weather, together with some strange edge of cold that had entered it since luncheon time, kept us below, though I was on deck for a little while when I had that chat with the skipper which I have just repeated. Wilfrid lighted his big pipe in the cabin, telling Miss Laura that she had given us leave to smoke there on the preceding night, an odd proof of his power to remember little things. The interior was a bit gloomy with the ashen atmosphere of the grey day sifting through the skylight and down the companion hatch, and with a green dimness coming yet into it from time to time to the burying of the glass of the ports in the pale emerald of the clear brine under the froth that was roaring away past on the surface. But there was nothing much to incommode one in the movements of the vessel; wind and sea, as I have said, were on the quarter, and the lift of the tall Channel surge came soft as its own melting head to the weather counter, running the shapely fabric into a long arrowy floating launch ahead, with a lean down that was wrought by rhythmic action into a mere bit of cradle-play.

Snugged in the cushions of a most luxurious arm-chair, with the consoling scent of a fine cigar under my nose and a noble claret within arm’s reach chilled to the temperature of snow by the richly-chased silver jug which contained it, I felt that there must be greater hardships in life than yachting, even when the sailing cruise came to a hunt for a runaway wife. Miss Jennings sat near me, with a novel in her lap, on whose open page her violet eyes would sometimes rest when the conversation languished. There was a mirror in the bulkhead just behind me and her hair shone in it as though a sunbeam rested on her tresses. Wilfrid lay at full length upon a couch, blowing clouds from his pipe with his large strange weak eyes fixed upon the upper deck. He talked a good deal of his travels, always rationally, and often with evidences of a shrewd perception; but again and again he would withdraw his[60] pipe from his mouth and seem to forget that he held it, sigh deeply, a long tremulous inspiration that was full of the tears of a heart which sobbed continuously, then start on a sudden, sit upright and send a crazy wandering look at the porthole near him; after which he would stretch his form again and resume his pipe and fall to talking afresh, but never picking up the thread he had let drop, or speaking with the least reference to the anecdote, experience, incident, or what not, from whose relation he had just before broken.

Once he jumped up, after lying silent for five or ten minutes, during which Miss Jennings seemed to read; whilst I, thinking of nothing in particular, lazily watched the rings of cigar smoke I expelled float to the wreathing of flowers and foliage painted with delightful taste upon the cabin ceiling. His movement was extraordinarily abrupt; he put his pipe down and stalked to his cabin—stalk is the one word that expresses my cousin’s peculiar walk when any dark or strange mood was upon him—and I presumed that he had gone into hiding for a while; but he quickly reappeared. There was a light in his eye and a spot of red on each high cheekbone as he put a case in my hand, saying, ‘Will these do, d’ye think, Charles?’

It contained a handsome pair of duelling pistols.

‘Upon my word, Wilfrid,’ said I, in an offhand way whilst I toyed with one of the weapons as if admiring it, ‘our little ship is not without teeth, eh? What with your gun forward and the small arms near my cabin, and now these—you’ll be having a powder magazine on board, I suppose?’

‘There’ll be as much powder as we need, I dare say. What think you of those weapons?’

‘They are quite killing. For what purpose are pills like these gilded so sumptuously? Is all this garnishing supposed to make death more palatable?’

Miss Laura extended her hand, and I gave her the weapon I was examining. A look came into her face that made me feel glad I wasn’t Colonel Hope-Kennedy just then. She flushed to some thought with a sudden sweep of her gaze to the porthole, then looked again at the pistol while she bit her lip. I found something fascinating in this brief passage of spirit in her. Wilfrid, holding the other pistol, drew himself erect before a length of looking-glass against the starboard bulkhead, and levelled the weapon at his own reflection. He stood motionless, save for the swaying of his figure upon the rolling deck, his head thrown back, his nostrils large, his countenance a sallow white; it was absolutely as though he believed in the reality of his own impersonation, and waited for the signal to fire.

‘Bless me, Wilfrid!’ cried I, ‘I hope these affairs of yours aren’t loaded! Hair triggers, by Jingo! Mind—if they are—you’ll destroy that fine piece of plate glass.’

Of course I knew better; but his rapt posture was a little[61] alarming, and I said the first thing that came into my head to break the spell. His arm sank to his side, and he turned to me with a grin that was bewildering with its confliction emotions of anger, misery, and triumph.

‘Let that man give me a chance!’ said he, in a low but deep voice.

‘Ay, but my dear boy,’ said I, relieved by his slowly returning the pistols to the case, ‘figure the boot on the other leg;—supposing he kills you?’

‘Good God!’ cried he, ‘d’ye think that consideration would hinder me from attempting the life of the ruffian who has brought shame and dishonour upon me and my child?’

‘No,’ said I, with a glance at Miss Laura, whom I found eyeing me with a look of surprise that sparkled with something more than a hint of temper; ‘but if we should meet this fellow on the open sea, and you challenge him, and he should kill you, what will you have done for yourself? Suffered him to put you quietly out of the road and achieve the double triumph of first taking your wife from you and then making a widow of her!—which, of course, would answer his purpose very well, whether he designed matrimony or not, seeing that there could not be much peace of mind for him with the knowledge either that you were on his track, or waiting with spider-like patience in England for his return.’

‘By Heaven, Charles!’ he roared out, ‘no man but you would dare talk to me like this——’

I raised my hand. ‘Wilfrid, nothing that you can say, no temper that you can exhibit, no menaces that you may utter, will prevent me from remembering that I am here at your earnest request as the one male friend you wished at your side in such a time, and from speaking to you as freely as I should think within myself. This, to be sure, is ridiculously premature. We have yet to fall in with the “Shark.” Supposing that happens, and that Colonel Hope-Kennedy consents to fight you, and you insist, then it will not be for me to say you nay. But, believe me, nothing shall intimidate me from trying to make you understand that, honour or no honour, to give that rascal an opportunity of assassinating you would be the very maddest act your most righteous wrath could hurry you into.’

He looked at me a little while in silence, was about to speak, checked himself, or maybe it was his voice that failed him; a dampness came into his eyes; he compressed his lips till they were bloodless in the effort to suppress his tears; then, flourishing his arm with a gesture grievously expressive of the anguish he was feeling at that moment, he went to his cabin, and we saw no more of him till dinner-time.

I thought Miss Jennings would rebuke me for what I had said, and I gathered myself together, in an intellectual sense, for a little gentle fencing with her for a bit; for, let her hate the Colonel as[62] she might, and let her be as eager as she would that her sister should be speedily rescued from the villain she had sacrificed her honour for, I had made up my mind not to suffer her to imagine that I regarded a meeting between the two men as a necessary effect of the Colonel’s action; but that, on the contrary, I should consider it my duty to vehemently discountenance a duel, until I found that there was nothing in argument to dissuade my cousin; when of course I would render him such services as he might expect from me.

In short, as you will see, I took a cold-blooded view of the whole business. The prosaic arbitrament of the law! that was my notion! The shears of a dispassionate judge: no pistols and coffee for two, thank’ee! Methinks when it comes to one’s wife preferring Jones or Tomkins to one’s own lovely self, her new emotions should be helped, not by giving the latest darling of her heart the chance to kill one, but by starting one’s attorney to play upon the blissful couple with the cold black venom of his ink-horn!

Miss Jennings, however, made no reference to my speech, nor to the manner of Wilfrid’s going. She remained quiet, and showed herself subdued and grieved for some time, and then we talked about the testing of the men’s sight, and I repeated what Captain Finn had said to me on that subject. On a sudden she exclaimed:

‘You told me, Mr. Monson, that you have never seen my sister?’

‘No, only heard of her, and then quite indirectly.’

She went to her cabin, moving in a very inimitable, floating, graceful, yielding way to the heave of the deck, never offering to grasp anything for support, though the lee-lurches were at times somewhat staggering, and I thought I never saw a more perfect little figure as she withdrew, her hair glowing when her form was already vague as she flitted into the shadow astern of the companion steps towards the dark corridor or passage which conducted to her cabin. She returned after a short absence with a miniature painting set in a very handsome case, on which was my cousin’s crest with initials beneath, signifying that it was a gift from him to Laura Jennings. I carried it under the skylight to see it clearly.

‘When was this done?’ I asked.

‘About a year ago,’ she answered. ‘Wilfrid sent it to Melbourne as a gift to me.’

Now it might be that I was then—taste, of course, changes—no very passionate admirer of dark women; brunettes, I mean, of a South European sort, which the face in the miniature was after the pattern of; and that is why, no doubt, the expectation in me of the ripe and tropic graces I was to behold was not a little disappointed. Anyone could see by the likeness that Lady Monson was a fine woman; her hair was raven black, but there was a want of taste in the fashion in which it was dressed; her eyes were bright, imperious, rather too staring, with something of haughty astonishment in their expression; but this might have been the artist’s misinterpretation[63] of their character. She was as like her sister Laura as I was like her. Her mouth was somewhat large, rich, voluptuous; the throat very beautiful, with something about the line or curve of the jaw which would have made you suspect, without knowing the original, that the character of this part of the face was exquisitely reproduced. It was a heaviness to communicate a slightly masculine air to the whole countenance. I turned to Miss Jennings and found her eyes intent on my face.

‘She is a handsome lady,’ said I, ‘handsomer, I should think, than she is here represented: quite apart, I mean, from the glow of countenance, the animation of look, and all the rest of the things which go to make up two-thirds at least of human beauty.’

She took the miniature in silence.

‘She is not like you,’ said I.

‘Not in the least,’ she exclaimed. ‘I am little; she is very tall. She has a commanding manner, a rich voice, and indeed,’ she added with a smile, and then looking down, ‘anyone might suppose her of noble blood.’

I should have liked to tell her how very much sweeter and prettier she was than her sister; what a very different sort of heart, as it seemed to me, from her ladyship’s, looked out at you from her violet eyes; how very much more good, pure, gentle, sympathetic, womanly, was the expression of her mouth compared with what I had found in the portrait’s. But our friendship was rather too new just then for such candour as this; yet I would not swear that some faint suspicion did not cross her of what was in my mind, though so subtle are women’s ways, so indeterminable by words the meaning that may be perfectly emphatic to every instinct in one in the turn of the head, a droop of the lid, a sudden soft tincturing of the cheek, that I have no reason to offer for supposing this.

She took the miniature to her cabin, and I waited awhile, thinking she would return. I then lighted a cigar, but as I stepped towards the companion with the design of killing the rest of the afternoon till the dinner-hour on deck, Muffin came down the steps. He looked hideously sallow, and carried a horribly dismal expression of countenance, but he appeared to be no longer in liquor.

‘Well,’ said I shortly, ‘how are you now, Muffin?’

‘Uncommonly queer, I am sorrowful to say, sir,’ he answered, patting his stomach and falling away on his left leg with a humbly respectful downcast look and a writhe of the lips into a smile that would have been expressionless if it was not that it increased his ugliness by the exhibition of a row of fangs of the colour of the keys of an ancient harpsichord. ‘The sea is not a congenial spear, sir.’

‘Sphere, I suppose you mean,’ said I; ‘but give yourself a day or two, man; the sickness will wear off.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’—he paused, still keeping his eyes[64] downward whilst he bowed meekly and respectfully, but with an air of profound dejection.

‘Well?’ I exclaimed, running my gaze over the fellow’s odd figure with a yearning to laugh in me at the sight of the gouty bulgings of his feet over his pumps.

‘May I take it, sir,’ said he, clasping his hands humbly upon his waistcoat, ‘that there is no dispogition on the Bayronet’s part to give up chasing of her ladyship by water?’

‘You may,’ said I, bluntly. ‘Why, confound it, Muffin, we’ve only just entered on the run!’

He turned up his eyes to heaven till nothing showed but the bloodshot whites: ‘Sir, I humbly beg your pardon. It seems an ordacious liberty for the likes of me to be questioning the likes of you; but may I ask, sir—is the voyage likely to carry us fur?’

‘Well, it is about six thousand miles to the Cape, to begin with,’ said I.

‘Good God!’ he cried, startled out of all respectfulness. ‘Why, there’ll be years of sailing in that distance, sir, begging your pardon for the hexclamation my agitation caused me to make, sir.’

‘If you want to return,’ said I, feeling a sort of pity for the poor devil, for the consternation that worked in him lay very strong upon his yellow face, ‘your plan must be to obtain Sir Wilfrid’s permission to tranship yourself into the first vessel we speak that will be willing to receive you and carry you to England. It is the only remedy I can suggest.’

He bowed very meekly and with a manner of respectful gratitude; nevertheless, something in him seemed to tell me that he was not very much obliged by my suggestion, and that if he quitted Wilfrid’s service it would not be in the manner I recommended.

Nothing worth noting happened till next day. It was in the afternoon. The Scillies were astern and the broad Atlantic was now stretching fair under our bows. A strong fine wind had bowled us steadily down Channel, and the utmost had been made of it by Captain Finn, who, despite his talk of studdingsails and stowed anchors, had sent his booms aloft ere we had brought Prawle Point abeam and the ‘Bride’ had swept along before the strong wind that would come in slaps at times with almost the spite of a bit of a hurricane in them, under a foretopmast studdingsail; whence you will gather that the yacht was prodigiously crowded; but then Finn was always under the influence of the fear of Wilfrid’s head in the companion hatch; for I learnt that several times in the night my cousin unexpectedly made his appearance on deck, and his hot incessant command to both Finn and old Jacob Crimp, according as he found one or the other in charge, was that they were to sail the yacht at all hazards short of springing her lower masts, for in the matter of spare booms and suits of canvas she could not have been more liberally equipped had her errand signified a three years’ fighting voyage.

Well, as I have said, it was the afternoon of the third day of[65] our leaving Southampton. The breeze had slackened much about the time that Finn stood ogling the sun through his sextant, and then it veered in a small puff and came on to blow a gentle, steady wind from south-south-east, which tautened our sheets for us and brought the square yards fore and aft. There was a long broad-browed swell from the southward that flashed under the hazy sunlight like splintered glass with the wrinkling of it, over which the yacht went rolling and bowing in a rhythm as stately and regular as the swing of a thousand-ton Indiaman, with a sulky lift of foam to her cutwater at every plunge and a yeasty seething spreading on either quarter, the recoiling wash of it from the counter as snappish as surf. Suddenly from high above, cleaving the vaporous yellow of the atmosphere in a dead sort of way, came a cry from the look-out man on the topgallant yard, ‘Sail ho!’ and the sparkle of the telescope in his hands as he levelled the glittering tube at the sea, over the starboard bow, rendered the customary echo of ‘Where away?’ unnecessary.

There was nothing however to take notice of in this; the cry of ‘Sail ho!’ had been sounding pretty regularly on and off since the look-out aloft had been established, as you will suppose when you think of the crowded waters we were then navigating; though everything thus signalled so far had hove into view broad on either bow or on either beam. We were all on deck; that is to say, Miss Jennings, snug in a fur cloak,—for the shift of wind had not softened the temperature of the atmosphere,—in a chair near the skylight; Wilfrid near her, lying upon the ivory-white plank smoking a cigar, with his head supported on his elbow, and I stumping the deck close to them, with Finn abreast of the wheel to windward. We were in the midst of some commonplace chatter when that voice from aloft smote our ears, and when we saw the direction in which the fellow was holding his glass levelled we all looked that way, scarce thinking for the moment that if the stranger were heading for us she would not be in sight from the deck for a spell yet, and as long again if she were travelling our course.

Miss Jennings resumed her seat; Wilfrid stretched his length along the deck as before; and I went on pacing to and fro close beside them.

‘It will be a Monday on which we sight the “Shark,”’ said Wilfrid.

‘How do you know?’ said I.

‘I dreamt it,’ he answered.

Miss Jennings looked at him wistfully as if she believed in dreams.

‘It was an odd vision,’ he continued, with a soft far-away expression in his eyes, very unlike the usual trouble in them. ‘I dreamt that on hearing of the—of the——’ he pushed his hair from his forehead and spoke with his hand to his brow—‘I say that I dreamt I flung myself on horseback—it was a favourite mare—Lady[66] Henrietta, Laura’—she bowed her head—‘and gave chase. I did not know which way to go, so I let fall the reins on the animal’s neck and left the scent to the detection of her instincts. She carried me to the sea-coast, a desolate bit of a bay, I remember, with the air full of the moaning of vexed waters and a melancholy crying of wind in the crevices and chasms of the cliff, and the whole scene made gaunter than it needed to have been, as I fancied, by a skeleton that was one moment that of a big fish and the next of a man, fluctuating upon the sight like an image seen three fathoms deep floating in such glass-clear water as you get in the West Indian latitudes.’ He paused. ‘Where was I?’ he inquired, with an air of bewilderment.

‘Your horse had carried you to the sea-shore,’ said Miss Laura, with her face full of credulity. I love a superstitious girl, and who is the woman that does not believe in dreams?

‘Ha!’ he cried, after a brief effort of memory; ‘yes, the mare came to a stand on the margin of the beach, and heaven knows whence the apparition rose: but there was an empty boat tossing before me, with a sort of sign-post erected in her, a pole with a black board upon it on which was written, in letters that glowed as though wrought by a brush dipped in a sunbeam, the single word Monday!’

‘Pooh!’ said I, scornfully, and fancying at the moment that something stirred in the companion-way, I moved a step or two in that direction and saw Muffin with his head a trifle above the level of the top step apparently taking the air, though no doubt he was diverting himself too, by listening to our talk. On seeing me he descended, stepping backwards with a sickly respectful smile of apology.

‘Why do you say pooh, Mr. Monson?’ asked Miss Jennings. ‘Wise people never ridicule dreams until they have been disproved.’

I admired her arch air that floated like a veil of gauze over her sympathy with Wilfrid.

‘I don’t want to believe in dreams,’ said I, ‘my own dreams are much too uncomfortable to make me desire faith in that direction.’

I glanced at Wilfrid; his eyes were staring right up at the vane at the maintopmast-head, and it was easily seen that he was no longer thinking of what we had been talking about. Miss Jennings opened the novel that lay in her lap and seemed to read; there was a store of this sort of literature in the yacht, laid in, I dare say, by Sir Wilfrid for Lady Monson, who, I don’t doubt, was a great devourer of novels; the trash in one, two, and three volumes of an age of trashy fiction, of a romantic literature of gorgeous waistcoats, nankeen breeches, and Pelham cravats. I don’t think Miss Jennings had read much of the book she held. It was called ‘The Peeress,’ and I believe it had taken her two days to arrive at the end of the first chapter. But then, who can read at sea? For my part I can never fix my attention. In a dead calm I am prone to snooze; in a brisk breeze, every sweep of surge, every leap of froth[67]ing head, every glance of sunshine, every solemn soaring of white cloud up the slope of the liquid girdle is an irresistible appeal to me to quit my author for teachers full of hints worth remembering; and then, indeed, I yield myself to that luxury of passivity Wordsworth rhymes about—that disposition to keep quiet until I am visited with impulses—the happiest apology ever attempted by a home-keeping poet for an unwillingness to be at the trouble to seek beyond his hillside for ideas.

‘Here is a flowery fancy!’ exclaimed Miss Jennings, and she began to read. It was something—I forget what—in the primitive Bulwerian vein; plenty of capitals, I dare say, and without much sense that I could make out to linger upon the ear; but one sentence I remember: ‘He had that inexpressible air of distinction which comes as a royal gift from heaven to members of old families and only to them.’

‘Stupid ass!’ exclaimed Wilfrid, whom I had imagined to be wool-gathering.

‘But there is truth in it, though,’ said Miss Jennings.

‘What is an old family?’ I exclaimed.

‘Why a good family, surely, Mr. Monson,’ she answered.

‘No, no, Laura,’ grumbled Wilfrid. ‘I could introduce you to a longshore sailor who can’t sign his name, and whose sole theory of principle lies in successfully hoodwinking the revenue people, who will tell you that his forefathers have been boatmen and smugglers for over three hundred years, and who could feel his way back along a chain of Jims, Dicks, and Joes without a link missing, down, maybe, to a time when the progenitors of scores of our Dukes, Earls, and the rest of them were—tush! That boatman belongs to an old family.’

‘Then, pray, what is a good family?’ inquired Miss Jennings.

‘Yonder’s the sail that was sighted awhile gone, Sir Wilfrid,’ sung out Captain Finn in his leather-lunged voice.

My cousin sprang to his feet, and the three of us went to the rail to look.