CHAPTER IX. A SQUALL.

Although Finn’s calculations showed very well upon the chart, it will not be supposed I could find anything in them upon which to ground that hope of falling in with the ‘Shark’ which had become a conviction with Wilfrid. The look-out man at our masthead might perhaps, on a clear day, compass a range of some twenty miles, even thirty if it came to a gleam of lofty canvas hovering over a hull a league or two past the slope of waters; but what was a view of this kind to signify in so vast an ocean as we had entered? As I have elsewhere said, the difference of a quarter of a point would in a few hours, supposing a good breeze of wind to be blowing, carry the ‘Bride’ wide of the wake of the ‘Shark,’ and put the two yachts out of sight fair abreast of one another.

Finn understood this as well as I; but when I fell into a talk with him on the subject that evening—I mean the evening of the day on which we had spoken the ‘Wanderer’—he told me very honestly that the odds indeed were heavy against our heaving the[77] ‘Shark’ into view, though he was quite sure of outsailing her if the course was to extend to the Cape of Good Hope; but that as there was a chance of our picking her up, whether by luck, if I chose to think it so, or by his hitting with accuracy upon the line of direction that Fidler would take, he had made up his mind to regard the thing as going to happen, for his own ease of mind as well as to keep my cousin’s expectations lively and trusting.

‘A man can but do his best, sir,’ he said to me. ‘Sir Wilfrid needs a deal of humouring; you can see that, sir. I knew all along, when he first came and told me what had happened and gave me my orders, that the job of keeping him pacified would have to go hand in hand with the business of sailing the “Bride” and lighting upon the “Shark,” if so be she’s discoverable. My notion is that if you’re called upon so to act as to fit an employer’s taste and keep his views and wishes gratified, though by no more than maintaining expectation in him, the best thing is to tarn to and try to think as fur as you can the same way as he do. I don’t mind saying, Mr. Monson, that I allow the whole of this here voyage to be as wague as wagueness can well be; therefore why worrit over parts of it? Suppose we overhaul the “Shark”—then it’ll be all right; suppose we don’t—then it won’t be for the want of trying.’

This was the substance of Finn’s opinion as he imparted it to me that night. His sincerity touched me; besides, I saw worry enough in the poor fellow to make me sorry for him. Indeed, I resolved from that hour to back him up, heartily agreeing with him that the adventure was quite too vague to justify anxiety in respect of any one detail of the programme.

The weather was quiet when I went to bed that night. I came below from my long yarn with Finn, leaving a windy smear of moon over our mastheads and a dark sky going down from it to the obscured sea-line, with here and there a pale and vapoury point of star hovering sparely over a wing of cloud that lay still in the dusk, as though what wind there was blew low upon the waters. The wide sea came to the yacht in a dusky throbbing, like folds of gloom rolling with a sort of palpitation in them to the eye; the foam glanced in places, but there was little weight in the wind, and the pallid spires of the yacht’s canvas floated nearly upright through the dark atmosphere, with a sound of the sob of water coming off her weather bow and the dead plash of the hidden billow falling without life from her quarter, in a way that made one think there were fellows emptying buckets over the side abreast of the wheel.

Wilfrid had been moody and reserved throughout the dinner, and retired early to bed. I sat an hour with Miss Laura, with the mild diversion of a draught-board between us; but we soon forgot to play in talking. We had been but a few days together, yet I had already made the discovery that I wonderfully enjoyed her company, and that I immensely relished a quality of arch na?veté[78] in her conversation, which owed something of its effect to the contrast between a sort of coquettish sagacity in many things she said and the nun-like artlessness and virginal sweetness I seemed to find in the gentle girlish regard of her charming eyes. I also observed in myself that the more I saw of her the more her beauty gained upon me. I never remember meeting a woman’s face that I would sooner have taken as a frank expression of mind; there was a softness and delicacy of feature that one instinctively accepted as an illustration of habitual refinement and purity of thought. Her manner, save when aroused, was of engaging gentleness and tenderness, and her smile the most amiable of any I remember. Her position was of great delicacy, and could not have failed to painfully distress one of your self-conscious women. Our adventure, every reference to it, every mention of the ‘Shark,’ every expression in Wilfrid of grief, shame, temper, was as it were a rude withdrawal of the veil from before her sister’s frailty. There was no other lady on board to help her to bear, so to speak, the burthen of the inevitable topic, and yet she never made it appear as though there was pain and shame to her in the subject, outside her grief for Wilfrid, her eagerness that her sister should be recovered, her resentment against the man who had betrayed and dishonoured his friend.

I may fail to convey what I thought of her maidenly acceptance of her share in this strange adventure, but I am certain that nobody but a person of exquisite instincts could have acted, as she did, the delicate and exacting part allotted her by my cousin.

The weather was still very quiet when I bade her good-night. I went to my cabin, and do not suppose I was ten minutes in my bed before I fell asleep. I awoke to a sound of a great roaring all about, accompanied by the cries of men on deck, the sharp flinging down of coils of rope and the thunder of shaking canvas trembling in every fibre of the hull. My bunk was an athwart-ship one, and I had turned-in, to employ the proper sea parlance, with my head to windward; but now the yacht was lying over on t’other side, and I awoke to find my heels in the air and the weight of my body upon my neck; but the angle of the craft was so sharp that it was not without a prodigious amount of heaving and floundering I managed to get my legs over and to sit upright.

A squall! thought I, feeling for my pillow, which I placed in the port end of my bedstead and once again lay down. A flash of sun-bright lightning glanced through the port-hole as though a gun had been fired into my cabin, and the interior glanced out into a noon-tide effulgence for one breathless instant, in which, however, I managed to catch sight of the angle formed by a coat with a stanchion, upon which it hung by a peg. Upon my word, it was as though the yacht was upon her beam ends—such a heel as was not to be realised by one lying in a bunk or even sitting upright in it: then came the darkness like a sea of ink,[79] rolling to the sight in which the reflection of the flash still writhed, followed by a mighty shock of thunder that died away in a hundred rattling peals, as though ’twas high mountainous land all around the horizon, honeycombed with caverns and every peak as resonant as a hollow dome.

A sharp squall! thought I, but there was too much noise for sleep. It was all hands on deck I was pretty sure by the numerous scampering over my head; the harsh voices of the sailors bawling at the ropes would be swept into faint cries by the rush of the wind, and now and again a heavy lumpish sound that put a quiver into every plank, followed by a snarling noise like the hissing of half a dozen locomotives blowing off steam, was warrant enough to ears not unused to such sounds that the ‘Bride’ was taking large doses of water in pretty freely over her rail.

I lay quiet, and was presently sensible that the yacht was off the wind; the righting of her was no small comfort; she was manifestly going through it like a comet; the sea was now well aft, and the suggestion of swiftness I found in the mere feel of the hull, somehow or other, black as my cabin was and the blacker as it remained for the flash of lightning, was accentuated by the thunderous rush of each surge outstripping us in the race and hurling its black length along the vessel’s side, and the fierce spitting and crackling of the smother of spume that was raised by the vessel’s headlong flight, and that went raging and racing astern on top of the swelling ebony fold that swept forwards from the opposite direction.

Humph! thought I, if this is a case of ‘up keeleg’ with friend Finn he’ll have to enter into something shrewder and surer than dead reckoning to find his way back again into the ‘Shark’s’ wake. I had a mind to see what was happening, and after a spell of troublesome groping and clawing, during which I had like to have broke my nose by striking it against the edge of a chest of drawers built into a corner, I succeeded in lighting my lamp, and was presently snug in a pea coat and a sou’-wester which I had been wise enough to include in the slender sea outfit I had purchased for this voyage. The cabin light was always kept burning throughout the night, dimmed by one of the stewards, after we had retired to our berths, but with plenty of flame left to see by, and on emerging the first object I caught sight of was the figure of a man on his knees on the cabin floor in a posture of prayer and apparently in an agony of fright. Nothing was to be heard of him until I had approached close, for the roaring of the wind and the washing and foaming of seas drowned all other noises; but on stooping to make sure of the fellow, whose hands were clasped over his eyes whilst he held his face upturned as he swayed upon his knees, I could hear him praying with all his might, with an energy indeed that might of itself have accounted for the drops of perspiration that glistened upon his brow, if it wasn’t that his attitude of terror explained the secret of that[80] moisture. It was Muffin. There was something so shameful in the fellow’s cowardice that all in an instant I lost my temper and gave him a kick which flung him at his length, face down, upon the deck. He set up a horrible howl.

‘Oh Lord! oh mercy! we’re gone! we’re gone! Oh, if I was only on dry ground——’

Here I seized him by the collar. ‘Get up, you fool,’ I cried. ‘Do you know where you are, you idiot? Cease! If you alarm Miss Jennings——’ and I hauled him on to his legs, shaking him heartily as I did so.

‘Oh, Mr. Monson,’ he whined, ‘is it you, sir? Tell me we ain’t all dead and gone, sir! Oh, this is ’orrible, though! ’orrible! Never no more; never no more for me!’

‘Be off to your berth at once,’ cried I angrily, though my temper died out of me at the absurd sight of his yellow, working, terrified face, rendered ugly enough to challenge the skill of a Cruikshank by the manner in which, during his devotions, he had streaked his forehead and nose and his cheeks past his eyes with his plaister-like lengths of coal-black hair. He was for speaking, but I grasped him by the shoulder and ran him towards his berth that lay some little distance forward of mine on the starboard side, and when he had shut himself in I made my way on deck, with a peep aft, as I went up the steps, where all seemed quiet.

The night was still very dark, but of a clearer dusk. The moon made a red streak low in the west amongst some ragged clouds that seemed to fall like a short flight of steps, every one edged with blood, to the sea-line, where the muddy crimson drained out, just showing the lurid staining of it now and again when some surge beneath reared an unbroken head to the lustre. The night was made to look amazingly wilder than it was in reality by that western setting jumble of ugly lustre and torn vapour, like a flock of giant bats heading from the moon for ocean solitude of deeper blackness. To windward there was a great lake of indigo-blue in the sky, in which a number of trembling stars were floating and vast white puffs of cloud crossing it with the swiftness of scud in the gale; but to leeward it was just a mass of heaped-up gloom, one dye of dusk on top of another in blocks of blackness such as a poet might dream of in picturing the hellish walls and battlements of a beleaguered city of demons; and upon this mass of darkness that looked as substantial as stone to the eye there was a plentiful play and crackle of violet lightning; but no thunder, at least none that I could hear. It was blowing fresh, but the wind had taken off considerably within the last ten minutes; the ‘Bride’ was close hauled; there was a strong sea on the bow and she was plunging; smartly, with at frequent intervals a brisk squall of spray over her head that rattled upon the deck like a fall of hail in a thunderstorm; a dark gleam would break first here and then there from her deck to her rolling, but the water was draining off fast, flashing in a loud hissing through the scupper holes at every lee send,[81] but with weight enough yet remaining in each rush of it to enable me to gather that it must have been pretty nearly waist-high between the bulwarks with the first shipping of the seas and the first downrush of the fierce squall.

They had snugged the ‘Bride’ to very small canvas; the play of the white waters round her threw out her shape clear as black paint on canvas; at moments she dived till you would think the tall black coil arching at her past the creaming glare crushed out of the sea by the smiting of her forefoot must leap right aboard her; but her staunch and buoyant bow, the truest piece of ocean moulding I ever saw in a ship, would regularly swing with a leap to the peak of the billow, shattering it with a saucy disdain that seemed to be followed by an echo of derisive laughter in the yelling ring of the wind splitting upon the rigging or sweeping into the iron hard cavities of the diminished spaces of wan and spectral canvas.

I took all this in as I stood a minute in the companion hatch; then perceiving the figure of a man to windward almost abreast of me, I crossed to him. It was Finn.

‘Very ugly squall that, Mr. Monson,’ said he after peering at me to make sure of my identity; ‘it found us with tops’l and t’gallants’l set and took us slap aback. It was the most onexpected thing that ever happened to me; as onnatural as that there moon. Talk of keeping a look-out! I was staring hard that way with the wind a pleasant air blowing off t’other side and saw nothing and heard nothing until I felt it.’

‘You had to run?’

‘Ay, but not for long, sir.’

‘How’s her head now, Captain Finn?’

‘Her proper course, Mr. Monson.’

‘Well, the weather is brightening. You’ll be making sail again on your ship, I suppose, presently?’

‘Ay, but let that muck blow away first,’ he answered, pointing with a shadowy arm into the mass of obscurity where the lightning still winked fitfully. ‘After such a blow-me-aback job as this I ain’t going to trust the weather till I can see more of it.’

I lingered a little, watching the slow opening of the sky to windward, and the gradual unfolding of the stars down the velvet declivity, that looked as though purified by the cleansing of the black wet squall, and then bidding good-night to Finn, who seemed a bit subdued by the wildly disconcerting attack of the weather, that to a sober, vigilant seaman was about as uncomfortable a snub in its way as could be administered, I went below, intending to walk straight to my berth and go to bed again. On entering the cabin, however, I found the lamp turned up, and Wilfrid pacing the carpet with long strides and with an agitation of manner that was grotesquely deepened by the occasional stagger of his gait by the plunging of the yacht and the hurried lift of his arm to clutch the nearest thing at hand for support. I concluded that he had been aroused by the commotion of the squall, but thought it[82] strange he had not stepped on deck to see how things were. On seeing me he put his hand on the back of a fixed revolving chair, and swung, or rather reeled, himself into it, then leaned his cheek upon his hand in a posture of extreme moodiness, whilst he kept his eyes bent downwards.

I took a seat opposite him, after a glance round in search of Miss Jennings, who, I thought, might also be up.

‘The noise above disturbed you, I suppose, Wilfrid?’ said I.

‘I have not slept,’ he answered.

‘Not since half-past nine! You went to bed then, you know, and it’s now two o’clock,’ I exclaimed, looking at the dial under the skylight.

‘I have not slept,’ he repeated.

‘I wonder that the squall did not bring you on deck.’

‘For what purpose?’ he exclaimed gloomily. ‘I could hear Finn’s voice; I could follow what the men were doing. If every squall we are likely to meet is to bring me from my bed, I may as well order a hammock to be slung for me on deck.’

‘What is the matter, Wilfrid?’ said I, earnestly and soothingly. ‘Something, I fear, has happened to vex and bother you.’

He passed his hand over his eyes, and looking down said, ‘I have had a warning.’

‘A what?’ I exclaimed.

‘A warning,’ he answered, fetching a deep sigh and making as if to rise, retaining, however, his posture of profound melancholy, whilst he sent a slow, wandering look around, finally fastening his eyes upon me.

‘From whom came this warning, Wilfrid?’ said I cheerfully. ‘Muffin? Egad, you’ll be getting a warning from him soon, I reckon. I found the chap on his knees just now, sweating with fear and praying like clockwork. I gave him a kick, and I wonder the howl that he raised did not bring you running out of your cabin.’ I jabbered this off in a reckless, laughing way, though I watched him narrowly, too, all the time I was speaking.

‘Nothing shall hinder me, Charles,’ he exclaimed, closing his right fist and letting it lie in a menacing way upon the table. ‘I have made up my mind to tear the creature who still remains my wife from the side of the man she has left me for; and before God’—he rolled his eyes up and raised his clenched hand—‘my vow is this: that I will hunt them from port to port, through ocean after ocean, until I meet with them! When that shall be I know not; but this I do know—that my time will come and I can wait. But I must be on the move. Nothing could render life tolerable to me now but the sense of action, the animation and hope of pursuit.’

‘But the warning——?’ said I.

‘Oh, to be vexed by ghostly exhortations—it is enough to craze one!’ he exclaimed. ‘Heaven knows, resolution grows weak enough in me as it is to any thought of my little one that visits me. Oh no,’ he cried, with a sarcastic shake of the head and a[83] singular smile, ‘do not believe that thoughts of my baby girl would cause me to falter even for one breathless instant on this course that I have made up my mind to pursue. But to think of the helpless lamb as alone——’

‘My dear fellow,’ I interrupted, ‘the child could not possibly be in tenderer hands.’

‘I know, I know,’ he cried, with a sob in his voice, ‘but she is motherless, Charles; and then how precarious is life at that age! I may never see her again!’

He broke down at this and hid his face.

‘Come, come,’ said I, ‘your nerves have been strained by the incident of this afternoon, or, I should say of yesterday afternoon—unduly, though intelligibly, excited by Puncheon’s report of having passed the “Shark.” Endeavour to get some rest, old fellow. These warnings, these visions, mysterious voices sounding out of heaven knows where, midnight shapes as thin as moonshine—Wilfrid, depend upon it, they all emanate from a disordered condition of that part of the body which the Chinese have most wisely selected as the true seat of the soul; I mean here,’ said I, patting my waistcoat.

He regarded me somewhat vacantly and sat awhile in silence, sighed tremulously, and stepped to the foot of the companion ladder, where he stood staring up into the arch of black night that filled the companion entrance. Presently Finn rumbled out an order on deck. There was the flash of bright stars upon the gleaming ebony of the cabin windows with every heave of the yacht; the sea was moderating, and the loud humming of the wind aloft gradually fining into a dull complaining noise. Ropes were thrown down overhead; voices began to sing out. I uttered a loud yawn. Wilfrid turned and exclaimed, ‘Don’t let me keep you up, Charles.’

‘It’s all right,’ said I, ‘but why not go to bed, too? Or first describe this warning that you have had; express the nature of it. Perhaps, like the proverbial onlooker who sees most of the game, I might be able to help you with some reassuring suggestion.’

But he merely shook his head; and now, feeling quite intolerably sleepy, and in no mood, therefore, as you will suppose, to reason with a mind so oppressed as his with superstitious melancholy, I called a cheery good-night to him, went to my cabin, and was soon fast asleep.

I was awakened by the brilliant daylight that filled my berth, and at once rose and sung out to the steward to prepare me a bath. All the time I bathed and dressed I was thinking of Wilfrid and of what he called his ‘warning.’ I supposed it was some voice that he had heard, and he had made it plain that it had referred, amongst other things maybe, to his little infant. Now, though of course I had known for years that he was ‘touched,’ as the expression goes, I had never understood that his craziness had risen to the height of hearing voices and beholding visions in his waking[84] hours; and I was, therefore, forced to believe that his mind was far more unhinged at present than his manners and speech, peculiar as they unquestionably were at times, had indicated. Well, thought I, assuredly if he gets worse, if the symptoms should grow more defined, this chase will have to come to an end. I, for one, should most certainly call a halt. Why, what could be fuller of madness than his vow last night before me—to go on sailing from port to port, and traversing ocean after ocean, until he has captured her ladyship; as if a pursuit on such lines as these were going to end in anything better than driving all hands daft and converting the ‘Bride’ into a floating lunatic asylum? So far, it is true, I have found method enough to keep my mind tolerably easy; but if poor Wilfrid is going to become very much worse, hang me, thought I, plying a pair of hair-brushes with very agitated hands, if Captain Finn don’t haul his wind for the handiest port and set me ashore for one.