CHAPTER XIII. I INTERPRET THE WARNING.

The strong wind blew throughout the day and the yacht made a gallant run, floating buoyant in foam from one blue knoll to another, with nothing living outside our decks saving a grey gull that overhung the seething line torn up by the furrow of our keel. A bright look-out was kept aloft; rarely did I send a glance that way but that I saw one or another of the men whose duty lay in overhanging the topgallant-yard sweeping the windy sallow sky against which the ridged horizon was beating, with Wilfrid’s polished, lance-bright tube.

In the first dog-watch before we sat down to dinner the breeze thinned and the ocean flattened out into a softly-heaving surface flowing in folds of tender blue to the dark orange of the west, where lines of the hectic of the crimsoning orb hung like mouldy stains of blood. All cloths were crowded on our little ship, and when after dinner I came on deck I found her sliding through the evening shadow, large and pale, like a body of moon-tinctured mist that floats off some great mountain-top and sails stately on the indigo-blue air, melting as it goes, as our canvas seemed to dissolve to the deepening of the dusk upon its full bosoms. A sailor was playing a concertina forward, and a man was singing to it. Here and there upon the forecastle was a dim grouping of outlines with a scarlet tipping of the darkness by above half-a-score of well-sucked tobacco pipes, making one think of a constellation of fire-flies or of a cluster of riding lights.

I had asked Miss Jennings to join me on deck, but she declined, on the plea—which two or three sneezes emphasised in the most reassuring way—that she felt chilly and was afraid of catching cold. Wilfrid produced his diary again, if a diary it was, and sat writing. I tried to court him into a walk and a smoke, but he said no; he had a fancy for writing just then; it was a humour whose visits were somewhat rare, and therefore, the mood being on him, he wished to encourage it as he had a very great deal to commit to paper.

‘Well,’ said I, ‘I’ll just go and smoke one cigar, and then, with your permission, Miss Jennings, I’ll endeavour to win a six-pence from you at beggar-my-neighbour again, and you shall tell me my fortune once more.’

I yawned as I stepped on deck. Dull enough work, by George! thought I. Only think of this sort of thing lasting till we get to the Cape, with Wilfrid’s intention that even by that time, if we don’t fall in with the ‘Shark,’ little more than a beginning shall have been made! Let me once see the inside of Table Bay and[117] her ladyship may go hang for any further pursuit that I shall be concerned in. The worst of it was that poor Wilfrid’s troubles, warnings, health and the like, engrossed Miss Jennings. Nearly all our talk was about my cousin. I had hoped that the sunshine of her nature, that was bright in her laugh just as you seemed to see it glowing in her hair, would have somewhat cleared the gloom that Wilfrid cast upon our social atmosphere; but she seemed to lie under a kind of spell; it was keen womanly sympathy, no doubt, beautiful for its sincerity, animated too by an honourable sensitiveness—by the feeling, I mean, that the runaway was her sister, and that she to that degree at least shared in the responsibility of the blow that had been dealt the poor fellow’s fond and generous heart. All this was doubtless as it should be; nevertheless her qualities went to fashion a behaviour I could not greatly relish simply because it came between us. Her thoughts were so much with my cousin and her sister’s wrong-doing, that the side of her I was permitted to approach I found somewhat blind.

All was now quiet on deck; the concertina had ceased; the watch below had gone to bed; those who were on duty stowed themselves away in various parts, and sat, mere shapes of shadow, blending with the deep gloom betwixt the bulwarks, nodding but ready to leap to the first call. There were many shooting stars this night; one of them scored the heavens with a bright line that lingered a full ten minutes after the meteor had vanished in a puff of spangles, and it was so glittering as to find a clear reflection in the smooth of the swell where it writhed, broadened and contracted like a dim silver serpent of prodigious length. There was some dew in the air, and the sparkle of it upon the rail and skylight flashed crisply to the stars to the quiet rise and fall of the yacht upon the black invisible heave that yearned the whole length of her, with an occasional purr of froth at the cutwater, and a soft, rippling washing noise dying off astern into the gloom. The phosphorus in the sea was so plentiful that you might have thought yourself inside the tropics. It glared like sheet-lightning under each ebony slope running westwards, and in every small play of froth there was the winking of it like the first scratching of lucifer matches. Under the counter where the wake was the streaming of this light was like a thin sheathing of the water there with gold-beater’s skin, rising and falling, and of a greenish tint, of the light of the moon. The flash of the sea-glow forward when the bow broke the swell would throw out the round of the staysail and jib as though the clear lens of a bull’s-eye lamp had glanced upon the canvas. This greenish, baffling twinkling, this fading and flickering of flames over the side thickened the obscurity to the sight within the rails. Somehow, too, the mystic illumination seemed to deepen the stillness that lay upon the deep, spite of the welter and the breeze that had weight enough to lift a streak of foam here and there. It might be that the sight of those fires made one think of the crackling and noise of flame, so that the very dumbness of the[118] burning lay like a hush upon the darkling surface with nothing aboard us to vex it, for our canvas swelled silent as if carved in mother-of-pearl, and not so much as the chafe of a rope or the stir of a sheave in its block fell from above to trouble the ear.

I spied a figure standing a foot or two before the main rigging, leaning over the side. Not knowing whether Finn or Crimp had the watch, and supposing this man to be one of them, I approached close and peered.

‘Is that you, captain?’ said I, for the shadow of the rigging was upon him to darken him yet.

‘No sir, it’s me, Mr. Monson. Muffin, sir.’

He had no need to mention his name, for his greasy, most remarkable voice, along with its indescribable tone of insincere habitual obsequiousness would have proclaimed him Muffin had he spoken as one of a crowd out of the bottom of a coal mine.

‘Feel sick?’ said I.

‘No, I am obliged to you, sir,’ he answered with a simper in his tone. ‘I am taking the liberty of breathing the hair just a little, sir.’

‘I suppose you’ll not be sorry to get home again, Muffin?’

‘Indeed, sir,’ he exclaimed, ‘I shall be most humbly thankful, I assure you.’

‘You’re an Englishman, aren’t you?’

‘Oh dear yes, quite English, sir. Born at ’ammersmith, sir.’

‘Then you ought to be very fond of the sea.’

‘I should be more partial to it, sir, I believe,’ said he, ‘if it was a river. I have a natural aversion to the hocean, sir. I can swim and I can row. I’ve pulled on the Serpentine, sir, and four years ago I made a voyage to the Continong as far as Cally, and found the water very hentertaining. But there’s so much hocean here, sir, that it’s alarming to think of. On a river, Mr. Monson, sir, one can never seem distant, but here—why, sir, if my mother’s ’ouse was in one of them stars, it couldn’t seem further off, and every day I suppose’ll make the distance greater.’

‘That you must expect,’ said I, turning with a notion of seeking Finn or Crimp.

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he said, ‘but could you tell me what them fires are that’s burning in the water?’

‘Phosphorus,’ said I.

‘Phosphorus?’ he ejaculated as though startled, ‘hoh, indeed sir! And might I wenture to ask why it is that the water don’t put it out?’

‘There are more kinds of fire than one,’ said I, laughing, and not much relishing the prostrative nature of the fellow’s respectfulness I walked aft.

Close to a boat that hung inboards by the davits, only a few strides from where Muffin was standing, I spied another figure standing with his back against the rail. It proved to be Mr. Jacob Crimp.

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‘Plenty of fire in the water to-night,’ said I.

‘Is there?’ he answered, slowly rounding his sturdy little figure to look. ‘I ain’t took notice.’

‘Have you followed the sea many years, Mr. Crimp?’ said I, feeling the need of a chat, and willing moreover to humour the quizzical mood that commonly came to me when I conversed with this sour little chap.

‘Thirty year.’

‘A long spell!’

‘Sight too long.’

‘I suppose you’ll be settling down ashore soon?’

‘Ay, if I ain’t drownded. Then settling ashore with me’ll sinnify a hole in the airth.’

‘Come, come,’ said I, ‘after thirty years of hard labour there’ll be surely dollars enough for a clean shirt and a roof. But you may be married, though?’

‘No I ain’t,’ he answered with a snap like cocking a gun.

‘Well, a sailor is a fool to get married,’ said I. ‘Why should a man burthen himself with a wife whose society he cannot enjoy, with whom he accepts all the obligations of a home without the privilege of occupying it, save for a few weeks at a time?’

‘Well, I ain’t married, so I don’t care. It’s nothen to me what other men do. Talk o’ settling! If you come to my berth I’ll show you the fruits of thirty year of sea sarvice; an old chest, a soot or two of clothes, and ’bout as much ready cash as ’ud purchase a dose of ratsbane.’ Here emotion choked him and he remained silent.

At this moment a low, mocking, most extraordinary laugh came out of the blackness upon the sea in the direction I happened to be gazing in. The sound was a distinct ha! ha! ha! and before the derisive, hollow, mirthless note had fairly died off the ear, a brisk angry voice within apparently a pistol-shot of us exclaimed, ‘That yacht is cursed!’ A laugh like the first followed and then all was still.

Crimp started, and I was grateful to heaven he did so, since it was an assurance the noise had been no imagination of my own. I will not deny that I felt exceedingly frightened. My legs trembled like an up-and-down lead line in a strong tideway. It was not only the suddenness, the unexpectedness of such a thing; it was the combination of deep gloom upon the waters, the play of the phosphoric fires there, the oppressive mystery of the sombre vastness stretching from over our rail as it seemed to the immeasurably remote dim lights of heaven lying low upon the edge of the ocean, and languishing in the darkness there.

‘Did you hear it?’ I cried in a subdued voice to Crimp.

‘Ay,’ responded the man in a startled voice. ‘I don’t see anything. Do you?’

I peered my hardest. ‘Nothing,’ I exclaimed. ‘Hush, the cry may be repeated.’

[120]

We strained our eyes and ears too, but all was silent; nor was there any livelier sparkle in the liquid dusk to indicate the dip of an oar or the stirring of the fiery water by a boat’s stem.

‘Did the fellow at the wheel hear it, think you?’ said I.

We both stepped aft, the mate looking to right and left, and even up at the stars overhead as though he feared something would tumble down upon us out of the dark air. He approached the man who was at the helm and said, ‘Thomas, did you hear anybody a-laughing like just now out on the quarter there?’

‘No,’ answered the man.

‘Are ye a bit deaf?’

‘Ne’er a bit.’

‘And you mean to say you heard nothen?’

‘Nothen.’

Grumbling with astonishment and perplexity, Crimp turned to me. ‘If it wur fancy,’ he muttered, ‘call me a dawg’s flea.’

I believe I could see Muffin’s figure still leaning over the rail. Had he heard the voice? As I passed the skylight I looked down and perceived him standing with drooped head and folded arms before Wilfrid in the cabin. My cousin appeared to be giving him some instructions. Advancing yet a little I discovered that what I had taken to be the valet’s figure was merely a coil of rope on a pin, the outline of which was blackened up and enlarged to the proportions and even the posture of a human shape by the illusive character of the obscurity made by the shrouds just there. I threw my half-finished cigar overboard.

‘Enough to make a man feel as if he’d like to be turned in,’ said Crimp. ‘It’s gone blooming cold, han’t it?’

‘It’s the most puzzling thing that ever happened to me,’ said I; ‘but of course if we were in the secret we should find nothing wonderful in it. In the West Indian waters, you know, there is a fish to be caught that talks well enough to put a ship about. Who’s to tell in a midnight blackness of this sort what amazing marine thing may not rise to the surface and utter sounds which an alarmed ear would easily interpret into something confoundedly unpleasant?’

‘What did it say?’ inquired Crimp.

‘Why, after the laugh, “that yacht’s cursed,” then another laugh. So it seemed to me,’ said I, with my eyes going blind against the blackness whence the noise had proceeded.

‘That’s just what I heard,’ said Crimp gruffly, ‘exactly them words. Two ears ain’t a going to get the same meaning out of what’s got no sense in it to start with.’

‘Pooh!’ I exclaimed, mentally protesting against an argument that was much too forcible to be soothing, ‘what could it have been, man, if it were not, say, some great bird, mayhap, flapping past us unseen, and uttering notes which, since they sounded the same to you and me, would have sounded the same to the whole ship’s company had they been on deck listening?’

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‘Beats all my going a-fishing anyhow,’ growled Crimp, going to the rail and looking over.

‘Well, take my advice and don’t speak of it,’ said I; ‘you’ll only get laughed at, especially as the fellow at the wheel heard nothing.’

‘His starboard ear’s caulked; he’s hard o’ hearing,’ rumbled Crimp.

I walked to the taffrail and looked astern. There was nothing to be seen but faint phantasmal sheets of phosphoric light softly undulating, with the brighter glow of our wake. I was really more agitated than I should have liked to own, and I must have stood for nearly a quarter of an hour speculating upon the incident and striving to reassure myself. One thought led to another and presently I found myself starting to a sudden odd suspicion that came into my head with the vivid gleam of a broad space of the sea-glow that flashed out bright as though it reflected a lantern hung over the side from the run of the yacht where the bends hollowed in from the sternpost. It was a suspicion that had no reference whatever to the voice that Crimp and I had heard, yet it did me good by drawing my mind away from that bit of preternaturalism, and a few minutes later I found myself below alongside of Miss Jennings.

‘The cigar you lighted to-night must have been an unusually big one,’ said she with a light glance, in which, however, it was easy to see that she noted my expression was something different from what was usual in me.

I smiled, and measuring on my finger, told her that I had smoked but that much of the cigar and thrown the rest of it overboard. Wilfrid sat at the table with a tumbler of seltzer and brandy before him, and he was filling his large meerschaum pipe as I arrived.

‘Help yourself, Charles,’ said he, pointing to the swing tray that was full of decanters. ‘I was about to join you on deck. How goes the night?’

‘Dark, but fine; the wind just a small pleasant air. I am tired, or I should accompany you.’

‘We are sailing though, I hope,’ said he.

‘Ay, some four knots or thereabouts, and heading our course. We have no right to grumble. It has blown a fine gale all day, and from the hour of our start down to the present moment I think we have had fairer weather and brisker breezes than we had a right to hope for.’

He emptied his tumbler, lighted his pipe, and said that he would go and take a turn or two. ‘If I should loiter,’ he added, ‘don’t sit up. If I am not to sleep when I turn in, the night will be all too long for me were I to go to bed at four o’clock in the morning.’

As he mounted the cabin steps I rose to mix a glass of seltzer and brandy, and when I returned to my seat near Miss Jennings,[122] she at once said, ‘I hope nothing has happened to worry you, Mr. Monson?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘You had a slightly troubled look when you came into the cabin just now.’

‘What will you think,’ said I, ‘if I tell you that I have had a warning?’

Her eyes glittered to the rounding of the brows, and her lips parted as though with a sigh of surprise. I shook my head, looking with a smile at her. ‘I see how it is. If I am candid, you will think there are two instead of one!’

‘No, no,’ she cried.

I was in the midst of telling her about the voice Crimp and I had heard when Muffin passed through the cabin, seemingly from his own berth on his way to his master’s. He held a little parcel of some kind. On arriving at the opening of the short alley or corridor that divided the after berths, he stopped, looked round, and said in his humblest manner, ‘I beg your pardon, sir, but is the bayronet in his cabin, d’ye know, sir?’

‘He’s on deck,’ I answered.

‘Thank you, sir,’ he exclaimed, and vanished.

I proceeded with my story and finished it.

‘It must have been some trick of the hearing, Mr. Monson,’ exclaimed the girl; ‘some sea-fowl winging slowly past, as you suggest, or—it is impossible to say. I can speak from experience. Often I have been alone and have heard my name called so distinctly that I have started and looked round, though there might have been nobody within a mile of me. The senses are conjurors; they are perpetually playing one tricks, and, which is very mortifying, with the simplest appliances.’

‘True enough that, Miss Jennings. The creak of a door will be a murdered man’s groan sometimes. I remember once being at a country house and holding a pistol in my hand ready to cover the figure of a man that was watching the old-fashioned building with burglarious intentness; which same man, after I had stood staring at him her a long twenty minutes, was resolved by the crawl of the moonshine into the original fabric and proportions of a neatly-clipped bush. No; I shall not suffer that mysterious voice to sink very deep. It was passing strange and that’s all. I hope sour old Crimp has some sense of the ridiculous and will keep his mouth shut. Heaven deliver us if he should take it upon himself to tell Wilfrid a mysterious sea-voice sung out just now that this yacht was cursed!’

I rose with a glance at the skylight. ‘Excuse me for a few minutes. I am going to Wilfrid’s cabin to confirm a suspicion that has entered my head. Should my cousin arrive whilst I am absent, endeavour to detain him here until I return. I shall know how to excuse myself for entering his bed-room.’

She looked at me wonderingly, but asked no questions. I[123] walked swiftly but softly to the corridor aft. Wilfrid’s cabin was on the port side. It was the aftermost berth, two cabins there having been knocked into one. I turned the handle of the door and entered. The flame of a silver-bright bracket lamp filled the place with light. It was a very handsome sea apartment, with no lack of mirrors, hangings, small costly furniture, all designed for the comfort and happiness of her ladyship. I nimbly closed the door behind me and stood for an instant beholding the precise spectacle I had entered fully expecting to witness. It was Muffin, who stood close against the bulkhead at the foot of the bunk my cousin occupied, grasping in his left hand a small white jar such as might be used for jam, whilst in the other hand he flourished a brush, with which he was apparently painting or scoring marks upon the bulkhead as I entered. The occasional kick of the rudder, with frequent creaking, straining noises arising from the movement of the yacht, hindered him from hearing me turn the handle of the door and from being conscious of my presence, whilst I stood looking on. He had made some progress with his mysterious lettering; for, having dipped the brush into the jar, he fell to writing a big B after several preliminary flourishes of his arm as though he had a mind to give an artistic curve to the letter; he was then beginning to paint a small A, though the brush left no mark, when I exclaimed, ‘How many b’s are there in baby?’

He looked round slowly, keeping his right hand nevertheless lifted, and preserving his posture in all save the turn of his head as though he had been blasted into motionlessness by a flash of lightning. I walked up to him:

‘So,’ said I, ‘you are the warning, eh? You are the mysterious fiery message which has distracted my cousin for the last two days and nights, and which, if continued, must end in driving him mad? You scoundrel!’

He faced round, his right hand slowly sinking to his side like a pump-handle gradually settling. For a moment there was a look of malevolent defiance in his face, but it yielded to one of consternation, terror, eager entreaty.

‘Mr. Monson, sir,’ he exclaimed in a voice that was the very double-distilled extract of oily accent, ‘I am discovered, sir. I meant the honourable bayronet no ’arm. My ’umble wish is to get ’ome.’

‘What is that stuff you have there?’

‘A remedy for wermin, sir, which they told me was numerous on board ship.’

‘Open that porthole!’

He did so after giving me a look as if he suspected I meant to squeeze him overboard through the aperture.

‘Out now with that pot and brush.’

He tossed them into the sea. I turned down the lamp till only the feeblest glimmer of flame remained, and then sure enough[124] there stole out upon the bulkhead in a feeble, green, glittering scrawl that seemed to wink upon the sight with its coming and going the words ‘Return to Ba—.’

‘Rub that off at once,’ said I, ‘and be quick about it too. If Sir Wilfrid arrives I shall have to explain; and he’s a man to shoot you for such an act as this.’

He pulled a pocket handkerchief out of his coat-tail and fell to rubbing the bulkhead with a terrified hand, backing to see if the letters were gone, then applying himself afresh, breathing hard meanwhile and manifesting much fear, for no doubt he believed that my hint that Wilfrid would shoot him was very well founded, seeing that he had a half-crazy man to deal with in his master. He rubbed till nothing was left of the letters. I turned up the lamp and ordered him out of the cabin. He was about to address me.

‘Not a word,’ I cried, subduing my voice, for though my temper was such that I could scarce keep my hands off him, yet I was exceedingly anxious too that Wilfrid should not overhear me nor come to his berth and find me in it with his valet. ‘Get away forward now to your own cabin.’

‘For God’s sake, Mr. Monson, don’t tell Sir Wilfrid, sir,’ he exclaimed, in a hoarse, broken tone.

‘Away with you! I promise nothing. This is a matter to think over. I shall require to talk with you in the morning.’

I held open the cabin door and he passed out in a sideways fashion as if he feared I should hit him, and then travelled swiftly forwards with such a twinkling of the white socks bulging over his pumps as made me believe he ran. My cousin was still on deck. Miss Jennings gazed at me earnestly; I looked to see if the coast was clear, and exclaimed: ‘It proved as I had supposed. I have interpreted the warning Wilfrid has received.’

She gazed at me in silence.

‘The mysterious handwriting is Muffin’s,’ I continued. ‘The flaming admonition is wrought by a brush dipped in a phosphoric composition for—for—beetles!’

‘You mean to say, Mr. Monson——’ She paused to take a long breath whilst her eyes shone with astonishment.

‘The long and short of it is, Miss Jennings,’ said I, ‘that our friend Muffin hates the sea; he has been cursing the voyage from the bottom of his soul pretty nearly ever since we started, and has hit upon this device to appeal to Wilfrid’s instincts as a father and to his poor, weak, credulous nerves as—as—well as a man not wholly sound, in the hope, not ill-founded, that provided the warning be repeated often enough, my cousin would return to baby.’

‘The horrid wretch! You actually found him——?’

‘Yes, he had got as far as Return to Ba—.’

‘Shall you tell Wilfrid?’

‘No,’ I answered; ‘not a word must be said to him on the[125] subject. I told Muffin—and I believe in my own notion too—that if my cousin were to hear that the sufferings occasioned him by the mysterious writing on his cabin wall were due to a trick of his valet, he would pistol the scoundrel. No, we must keep our counsel. I shall confer with Finn in the morning and contrive that our melancholy humourist be wholly and effectually sundered henceforth from all intercourse with this end of the yacht.’

Well, she was thunderstruck, and could hardly be brought to credit that a servant should play his master so cruel a trick. I told her that in my opinion Muffin would do well as keeper of a private lunatic asylum, since so artful a wretch might be warranted to drive anyone whose nerves were not ‘laid up’ with galvanised iron strands into a condition of sullen imbecility or clamorous lunacy within any time specified by the friends and relatives of the sufferer. When, however, the pretty creature’s surprise had somewhat abated, she expressed herself as wonderfully grateful that the discovery had been so early made. ‘Had the writing been continued,’ she said, ‘I am sure it would have ended in completely crazing poor Wilfrid. And I am glad too for another reason, Mr. Monson—it proves at all events that there was nothing insane in your cousin’s fancy of a warning. After all, the healthiest-minded person would be startled and dismayed, and afterwards, perhaps, dangerously affected, by finding a reference to his baby shining out upon him in the dark, night after night.’

‘I believe I should have got up and rubbed the reference out,’ said I, ‘had it glimmered upon me.’

‘But you are not Wilfrid. What made you suspect Muffin?’

‘I suspected not Muffin, but a trick, and then that Muffin must be the man. It came to me with the sight of a bright sheet of phosphoric fire flaming off the yacht’s quarter as I overhung the rail, staring into the gloom and puzzling over the cry Crimp and I had heard. One can’t give a reason for the visitations of fancy. Instinct I take to be the soul’s forefinger with which it points out things to the reason.’

‘I hope it will point to the true cause of the mysterious voice you heard,’ she exclaimed, smiling, but with something of uneasiness in her face nevertheless.

We continued chatting a little; she then went to her cabin. Soon after she had withdrawn, Wilfrid arrived. He yawned, and without seating himself spoke of the weather, the yacht’s progress, and other commonplace matters. For my part I had too much on my mind just then to feel in the humour to detain him, so after a few sentences as carelessly spoken as I could manage, I advised him after his sleepless nights to try once more for a spell of rest, and so saying went away to my own berth.