WE SPEAK THE ‘WANDERER.’
On the lee-bow was a dash of orange light, much less like the sails of
a ship than a feather of vapour bronzed by a sunset and vanishing in
the tail of a cloud.
‘How does she head, Finn?’ cried Wilfrid to the skipper, who was
viewing her through a long, heavy, powerful glass of his own.
‘Coming dead on end for us, sir.’
‘What’ll she be, captain?’ said I.
He eyed her a bit, and answered, ‘A square rig, sir; a bit of a barque,
I dare say.’
My cousin suddenly slapped his leg--one of his favourite gestures when
a fit of excitement seized him. ‘Charles,’ he bawled, ‘we’ll speak her.
D’ye hear me, Finn? We’ll speak her, I say!’
‘Ay, ay, sir,’ cried the captain.
‘She may have news for us,’ Wilfrid proceeded; ‘it is about time we
fell in with something that has sighted the “Shark.”’
‘A bit betimes, sir,’ said Finn, touching his cap and approaching to
give me his telescope which I had extended my hand for.
‘Confound it, man!’ cried Wilfrid, in a passion, ‘everything’s always
too soon with you. Suppose by this time to-morrow we should have the
schooner in sight--what then, hey? What would be your arguments? That
she had no business to heave in sight, _yet_?’
Finn made no answer, but pulled his cap off to scratch his head, with
his lips muttering unconsciously to himself to the energy of his secret
thoughts, and his long face, which his mouth seemed to sit exactly in
the middle of, working in every muscle with protest.
The distant vessel was showing in the glass as high as the curve of her
fore-course, with now and again a dim sort of refractive glimmer of wet
black hull rising off a head of sea into an airy, pale length of light
that hung in a low gleam betwixt the junction of sea and sky. The sun
was westering though still high, but his orb was rayless, and the body
of him looked no more than an oozing of shapeless yellow flame into the
odd sky that seemed a misty blue in places, though where it appeared
so you would notice a faint outline of cloud; and as he waned, his
reflection in the wind-wrinkled heave of the long head-swell, seemed as
if each broad soft brow was alive with runnings of flaming oil.
There was to be no more argument about good and bad families. Wilfrid
now could think of nothing but the approaching vessel, and the
child-like qualities which went to the creation of his baffling,
unfixable nature showed in an eager impatience, in which you seemed to
witness as much of boyish desire for something fresh and new to happen
as of anything else. For my part, I detest arguments. They force you
to give reasons and to enter upon definitions. I fancied, however,
I was beginning to detect Miss Laura’s little weakness. There was a
feminine hankering in her after ancient blood, sounding titles, high
and mighty things. As I glanced at her sweet face I felt in the humour
to lecture her. What but this weakness had led to her sister’s undoing?
Wilfrid was a worthy, honest, good-hearted, generous-souled creature,
spite of his being a bit mad: but I could not imagine he was a man to
fall in love with; and in this queer chase we had entered upon there
was justification enough of that notion. His wife had married him, I
suppose, for position, which she had allowed the first good-looking
rogue she met to persuade her was as worthless as dust and ashes unless
a human heart beat inside it. And the scoundrel was right, though he
deserved the halter for his practical illustration of his meaning. I
met Miss Jennings’ eye and she smiled. She called softly to me:
‘You are puzzling over the difference between a good and an old family!’
‘I wish my countenance were less ingenuous,’ said I.
‘Hadn’t you better run up some signal,’ exclaimed Wilfrid, turning upon
Finn, ‘to make yonder craft know that we want her to stop?’
‘Lay aft here a couple of hands,’ shouted Finn in a sulky note.
Two seamen instantly came along. The flag-locker was dragged from its
cleats or chocks under the small, milk-white grating abaft the wheel;
Finn, with a square, carrot-coloured thumb ploughed into the book of
directions; then, after a little, a string of butterfly bunting soared
gracefully to the topmost head, where the flags were to be best seen,
a long pennant topping the gay colours like a tongue of flame against
the rusty yellow of the atmosphere; the dip of the yacht to the swell
became a holiday curtsey, and you thought of her as putting on a simper
like some pretty country wench newly pranked out by her sweetheart with
a knot of ribbons.
‘Aft and haul up the main-tack; round in on the weather fore braces
and lay the topsail to the mast; down hellum! so--leave her at that!’
and the ‘Bride,’ with the wide ocean heave lifting to the bow, came to
a stand, her way arrested, the wind combing her fore and aft canvas
like the countless invisible fingers of giant spirits, and a dull
plash and sulky wash of water alongside, and a frequent sharp clatter
of wheel chains to the jar of the churning rudder. There was the true
spirit of the deep in this picture then, for the seamen had dropped the
various jobs they were upon, and stood awaiting orders about the decks,
every man’s shadow swaying upon the salt sparkling of the spotless
planks, and all eyes directed at the approaching craft that had now
risen to her wash streak and was coming along in a slow stately roll
with her canvas yearning from flying jib to fore royal, every cloth
yellow as satin, and flashes of light like the explosion of ordnance
breaking in soft sulphur-coloured flames from her wet side as she
lifted it sunwards from the pale blue brine that melted yeastily from
her metalled forefoot into two salival lines, which united abaft and
went astern in a wake that looked as if she were towing some half mile
length of amber-tinctured satin. Yet there was no beauty in her as in
us; it was the sweetness and grace of airy distance working in her and
the mild and misty gushing of the afternoon radiance, and the wild
enfolding arms of the horizon sweeping as it were the very soul of the
mighty ocean loneliness into her solitary shape and into her bland and
starlike canvas, until you found her veritably spiritualised out of her
commonplace meaning into a mere fairy fancy, some toy-like imagination
of the deep; but she hardened rapidly into the familiar prosaics of
timber, sailcloth and tackling, as she came floating down upon us,
sinking to her narrow white band, then poised till a broad width of her
green sheathing was exposed, with a figure in a tall chimney-pot hat
standing on the rail holding on by a backstay.
She was a slow old waggon, and one saw the reason of it as she came
sliding along, rolling like an anchored galliot in a sea-way, in her
bows as round as an apple and her kettle-bottom run; and Wilfrid’s
impatience grew into torture to us to see almost as much as to him
to feel as he’d pace the deck for a minute or two tumultuously, then
fling against the rail with a wild stare at the approaching craft as if
indeed he was cocksure she was full of news for him, though for my part
it seemed mere trifling with the yacht’s routine to back her yard that
we might ask questions at that early time of day. She steered so as to
come within easy hail and then boom-ending her foretopmast studdingsail
she backed her main topsail and floated the full length of her out
abreast of us within pistol shot, pitching clumsily and bringing her
bows out of it with the white brine frothing like lacework all about
her there, her line of bulwarks dotted with heads watching us, the
sounds of the creaking of her aloft very clear along with a farmyard
noise of several cocks crowing one after the other lustily, and the
lowing of bulls or cows.
‘Barque ahoy?’ sung out Captain Finn, funnelling his hands as a vehicle
for his voice.
‘Halloa?’ cried the figure that stood upon the rail in the most cheery,
laughing voice that can be conceived.
‘What ship is that?’
‘The “Wanderer.”’
‘Where are you from? and where are you bound to?’
‘From Valparaiso to Sunderland,’ answered the other, in a way that made
one think he spoke with difficulty through suppressed mirth.
‘Will you tell us,’ bawled Finn, ‘if you’ve sighted an outward bound
fore and aft schooner-yacht within the past week?’
‘Sighted a fore and aft schooner-yacht? ay, that I have, master, fine a
vessel as yourn pretty nigh,’ shouted the other as though he must burst
in a moment into a roar of laughter.
‘Ask him aboard! ask him aboard!’ cried Wilfrid wild with excitement,
slapping his knee till it was like a discharge of pistols. ‘Beg him
to do me the favour of drinking a bottle of champagne with me; ask
him--ask him--but first ascertain if he has made an entry of the
meeting in his log-book.’
‘Ay, ay, sir. Ho the barque ahoy!’
‘Halloa?’
‘Can you tell us when and whereabouts ye fell in with that there
schooner?’
‘Tell ye! to be sure I can; got it in black and white, master. Ha!
ha! ha!’ and here the old figure in the tall hat clapped his hand to
his side and laughed outright, toppling and reeling about on the rail
in such a manner that I took it for granted he was drunk and expected
every moment to see him plunge overboard.
‘Ask him aboard! ask him aboard!’ shrieked Wilfrid. ‘Request him to
bring his log-book with him. We will send a boat.’
Finn hailed the barque again. ‘Sir Wilfrid Monson’s compliments to
you, sir, and will be pleased to see you aboard to drink a bottle of
champagne with him. Will you kindly bring your log-book with you? We
will send a boat.’
‘Right y’are,’ shouted the old chap with a humorous flourish of his
hand, and so speaking he sprang inboard, laughing heartily, and
disappeared down his little companion hatch.
A boat was lowered with four men in charge of surly old Crimp. My
cousin’s excitement was a real torment to witness. He smote his hands
violently together whilst he urged the men at the top of his voice to
bear a hand and be off or the barque would be swinging her topsail and
sailing away from us. He twitched from head to foot as though he must
fall into convulsions; he bawled to the sailors not to wait to cast
anything adrift but to put their knives through it as though somebody
were drowning astern and the delay of a single moment might make all
the difference between life or death. ‘By heaven!’ he cried, halting
in front of me and Miss Jennings with a fierceness of manner that was
rendered almost delirious by the quality of savage exultation in it,
‘I _knew_ it would fall out thus! They cannot escape me. Of course it
is the “Shark” that that fellow has sighted.’ He broke from us and ran
to the rail and overhung it, gnawing his nails whilst he watched the
receding boat with his eyelids quivering and his face working like that
of a man in acute pain.
‘I fear,’ said I, in a low voice, to Miss Jennings, ‘that it would not
require more than two or three incidents of this sort to utterly dement
him. His resolution is strong enough. Why in the name of pity will not
he secure his mind to it? It’s bound to go adrift else, I fear.’
‘But realise what he has suffered, Mr. Monson,’ she answered gently,
‘such a blow might unseat a stronger reason than his. I cannot wonder
at his excitement. Look how I am trembling!’ She lifted her little
hand, which shook as though she had been seized with a chill, but there
was tremor enough in her voice to indicate her agitation. ‘The mere
idea that the “Shark” may be much nearer to us than we imagine--that
this chase may very shortly bring her within sight of us----’ a strong
shiver ran through her. ‘Do you believe it is the “Shark” that that old
man saw?’
‘I shall be better able to judge when he comes aboard,’ said I. ‘See,
our boat is alongside. They must fend her off handsomely, by George, if
she is not to be swamped. Heavens! how that old cask wallows!’
In a few moments the little old man in the tall hat came to the gangway
and looked over; there was apparently some discussion; I imagined the
elderly humourist was going to funk it, for I fancied I saw him wag
his head; but on a sudden, all very nimbly, he dropped into the wide
main chains, whence, watching his opportunity, he toppled into the
boat, which immediately shoved off. Wilfrid went to the gangway to
receive him. I was a little apprehensive of the effect of my cousin’s
behaviour--which had something of the contortions and motions of a
galvanised body--upon the old sea-dog that was coming, and I say I
rather hoped that this captain might be a bit too tipsy to prove a nice
observer. I took a view of him as he sat in the stern sheets, the boat
sinking and rising from peak to hollow as she burst through the water
to the gilded, sparkling sweep of the admirably handled oars, and could
have laughed out of mere sympathy with the broad grin that lay upon his
jolly, mottled countenance. His face was as round as the full moon, and
of the appearance of brawn; his nose was a little fiery pimple; small
white whiskers went in a slant in the direction of his nostrils, coming
to an end under either eye. His hat was too big for him, and pressed
down the top of his ears into the likeness of overhanging flaps under
the Quaker-like breadth of brim; his mouth was stretched in a smile all
the time he was approaching the yacht, and he burst into a loud laugh
as he grasped the man-ropes and bundled agilely up the side of the
‘Bride.’
‘You are very good to come on board, sir,’ cried Wilfrid, bowing with
agitation, and speaking as though suffering from a swollen throat, with
the hurry, anxiety, impatience, which mastered him. ‘I thank you for
this visit. I see you have your log-book with you. Let me inquire your
name?’
‘Puncheon, sir. Ha! ha! ha! Toby Puncheon, sir; a rascally queer name,
ho! ho! And your honour’s a lord, ain’t ye? I didn’t quite catch the
words. He! he! he!’ rattled out the old fellow, laughing after almost
every other word, and staring at us one after another as he spoke
without the least diminution of his prodigious grin.
‘No, no; not a lord,’ exclaimed Wilfrid; ‘but pray step this way,
Captain Puncheon. Charles, please accompany us. Captain Finn, I shall
want you below.’
He led the road to the companion, calling to the steward, whilst he was
yet midway down the steps, to put champagne and glasses upon the table.
Captain Puncheon’s grin grew alarmingly wide as he surveyed the
glittering cabin. ‘My eye!’ he cried, after a rumbling laugh full
of astonishment, ‘them’s looking-glasses and no mistake! and pickle
me blue if ever I see the likes of such lamps afore on board ship!’
growing grave an instant to utter a low whistle. ‘Why, it’s finer than
a theaytre, ain’t it?’ he exclaimed, turning to me, once more grinning
from ear to ear, and addressing me as if I was his mate that had come
off with him. His glass was filled; he drank to us, and pulled his
log-book out of the piece of newspaper in which he had brought it
wrapped up.
‘Will you kindly give us,’ said Wilfrid, ‘the date on which you passed
the schooner-yacht?’
‘Aye, that I will,’ cried Puncheon, turning back the pages of his log,
and then pouncing upon an entry with a forefinger curled by rheumatism
into the aspect of a fish-hook as though the piece of writing would run
away if he did not keep it squeezed down upon the page. He felt about
his coat with his other hand, and then bursting into a laugh exclaimed:
‘Gents, you must read for yourselves. Blow’d if I ain’t gone and forgot
my glasses.’
The entry was perfectly ship-shape, and written in a round, somewhat
trembling old hand. There were the usual records of weather, courses
steered, and the like, and under the heading of observations was:
‘Passed large schooner-yacht steering west-south-west. Hoisted our
ensign, but she showed no colours.’ The log gave the latitude and
longitude of this encounter as 16° West longitude, 41° 30′ North
latitude.
I hurriedly made certain calculations after reading aloud this entry,
and addressing Finn said, ‘If that vessel be the “Shark” she has
managed to hold her own so far.’
‘Ay, sir,’ answered Finn, peering at my figures, ‘but what’s been her
weather?’
‘Are you chasing of her, gents?’ whipped out Puncheon, smiling as
though he only waited for us to answer to break into a roar of laughter.
‘Yes,’ cried Wilfrid fiercely, ‘and we mean to catch her;’ then,
controlling himself, ‘Captain, will you be so good as to describe the
vessel you met?’
‘Describe her? ’Course I will,’ answered the old chap, and forthwith
he gave us a sailorly picture of a yacht apparently of the burthen
of the ‘Shark’: a fore and aft schooner, a long, low, black, handsome
vessel, loftily rigged even for a craft of her kind. She passed within
a mile and a half of the ‘Wanderer’; it was about eight o’clock in the
morning, the sunshine bright, the wind north-east, a pleasant air. I
asked Puncheon if he examined her with his glass? ‘Examine her through
my glass? Ay, that I did,’ he answered in his hilarious way. ‘I see
some figures aboard aft. No lady. No, ne’er a hint of a female garment.
Happen if there was women they was still abed, seeing how young the
morn was for females as goes to sea for pleasure. I took notice of a
tall gent in a white cap with a naval peak and a white jacket.’ That
was about as much as he could tell us, and so saying he regaled himself
with a hearty laugh. Finn questioned him as one sailor would another on
points of the yacht’s furniture aloft, but the old fellow could only
speak generally of the impression left upon him. Wilfrid’s face was
flushed with excitement.
‘Finn,’ he exclaimed, ‘what do you think?’
‘Why, your honour,’ said the man deliberately, ‘putting two and two
together, and totalling up all sarcumstances of rig, haspect, time and
place, I don’t doubt that the schooner-yacht Captain Puncheon here fell
in with was the “Shark.”’
Puncheon rose.
‘Empty this bottle,’ cried Wilfrid to him. ‘By heaven, man, the news
you give me does me good, though!’
The old chap filled up, grinning merrily.
‘Gents,’ he cried, holding the foaming glass aloft and looking at it
with one eye closed, ‘your errand’s an honest one, I’m sure, and so
here’s success to it. The craft I fell in with has got legs, mind ye.
Yes, by thunder, ha! ha! ha! she’s got legs, gents, and’ll require all
the catching I expects your honours have stomachs for. ’Tain’t to be
done in the inside of a month, he! he! he! and so I tells ye. See her
slipping through it under her square sail! God bless my body and soul,
’twas like the shadow of a cloud running ower the waters. But give
yourselves a long course, gents all, and you’ve got a beauty here as
must lay her aboard--in time, ha! ha! ha! Your honours, my respects to
you.’
Down went the wine and up he got, pulling his hat to his ears and
stepping with a deep sea roll up the companion ladder. We followed him
to the gangway.
‘Is there nothing more to ask, Charles?’ cried Wilfrid.
But Puncheon had given us all he had to tell, and though I could have
wished him to hint at something distinctive in the vessel’s hull, such
as her figure-head or any other point of the like kind in which the
‘Shark’ might differ from vessels of her build and appearance, yet
there was the strongest possible reason to suppose that the craft he
reported was Lord Winterton’s schooner, with Lady Monson and Colonel
Hope-Kennedy on board.
Whilst Captain Puncheon waited for the yacht’s boat to haul alongside
Sir Wilfrid sent for a box of cigars which he presented to the old
chap. The gift produced such a grin that I saw some of the hands
forward turn their backs upon us to conceal their mirth.
‘Do you think, captain,’ exclaimed Wilfrid, once more rendered almost
alarmingly convulsive in his movements by the excitement that filled
him, ‘that there are men aboard your vessel who took note of more than
you did in the yacht’s appearance? If so----’
But Puncheon interrupted him by saying that he was the only man who
examined the schooner through a glass, and therefore neither his mate
nor any of the seamen who were on deck at the time could possibly have
observed her so fully as he.
‘Make haste and return,’ bawled my cousin to the fellows in the boat
as they shoved off with the grinning old skipper in the stern sheets.
‘Every moment is precious,’ he muttered, walking briskly in short turns
opposite Miss Jennings and me. ‘To think of them sneaking along like
the shadow of a cloud, hey!’ he sent a wildly impatient look aloft and
brought his foot with a heavy stamp to the deck.
‘It is the “Shark” then?’ whispered Miss Jennings.
‘No doubt of it,’ I answered.
She glanced at me as if she had been wounded and her lips turned pale.
Well, thought I, anticipation, to be sure, is often the worst part of
an affair of this sort, but if the mere hearing of the ‘Shark’ affects
this little sweetheart so violently, how will the sighting of the craft
serve her, and the boarding of her, if ever it comes to it? In a few
minutes the yacht’s boat was returning, whilst you saw the figure of
old Puncheon clambering out of his main chains over the bulwarks of
the ‘Wanderer.’ A little later and there were hands tailing on to the
falls, the boat rising dripping to the davits, and the foretopsail
yard slowly pointing its arm to the wind; then, to the full weight of
the breeze sweeping red with the sunset into her hollowed canvas, the
‘Bride’ leaned down, sullenly shouldering the swell into foam with the
first stubborn push of her bows, till gathering way she was once more
swinging into the west and south with the gloom of the evening growing
into a windy vagueness on her lee-beam, whilst on the weather quarter,
black as indigo against the dull western redness, was the figure of the
barque rolling with filled maintopsail over the long Atlantic heavings,
and rapidly diminishing into the fragile beauty of some exquisitely
carved toy of ebony wood on the skirts of the rising and falling
fan-shaped stretch of seething paleness that marked the limits of the
‘Bride’s’ wake.
Wilfrid, who had been standing at the compass staring with a frown at
the card, with his arms folded, whilst the men trimmed sail and started
the yacht afresh, marched up to me when that business was over and
exclaimed, ‘What did you make the average of the “Shark’s” daily runs
according to Puncheon’s reckonings of the place of his meeting her?’
‘About a hundred and eighty miles a day,’ I answered.
‘_We_ haven’t been doing that though!’
‘No: but wait a little,’ said I; ‘let your “Bride” feel the trade wind
humming aloft.’
‘Finn,’ he bawled. The captain came running to us. ‘Fetch the track
chart, Finn. There’s light enough yet to see by.’
The man disappeared and very quickly returned, with a handy chart of
the world which he unrolled and laid on the top of the skylight. We
all overhung it, Miss Jennings amongst us. The men forward watched
us curiously. Something in the manner of them suggested to the swift
glance I sent their way that the perception our voyage was more
serious, with a wilder, sterner purpose in it than they had imagined,
was beginning to dawn upon them since Puncheon’s visit.
‘Mark the spot, Finn,’ exclaimed Wilfrid in the dogged voice of a man
sullenly and obstinately struggling to master a feeling of exhaustion,
‘the exact spot where the barque fell in with the “Shark.”’
Finn produced a parallel ruler, a pair of compasses, a pencil and the
like, calculated and indicated the spot by a little cross.
‘How short the distance she has sailed seems!’ exclaimed Miss Jennings.
‘Fifteen degrees of latitude, though,’ said I; ‘these charts are mighty
deceptive. A very small pencil mark will cover a tremendously long
course.’
Wilfrid stood motionless with his eyes fixed upon the mark Finn had
made. He talked a little to himself, but voicelessly. The captain
watched him nervously. My cousin came to himself with a start. ‘What
will have been the “Shark’s” course by magnetic compass, Finn, say from
the latitude of the Scillies to the spot where the “Wanderer” met her?’
The captain put his parallel rules on the chart and named the course;
what it was I forget,--south-west by south, I believe, or something
near it.
‘Supposing the wind not to head her, Finn,’ continued my cousin, ‘would
she steer the same course down to the time when the “Wanderer” met her?’
‘No, your honour. There’s no call for Fidler any more than there is for
me to go to the westwards of Madeira.’
‘Now, Finn, show me on this chart where, steering the course you are
now heading, you will have arrived when you have run nine hundred
miles?’
‘How’s her head?’ sung out Finn to the fellow at the wheel. The man
answered. ‘You hear it, Sir Wilfrid?’ said Finn. My cousin nodded. The
captain put his rules on the chart, adjusting them to the course the
‘Bride’ was then sailing, and the measure of nine hundred miles brought
the mark he made to touch the cross that represented the ‘Shark’s’
place. ‘That’s right, I think, Mr. Monson,’ said he, turning a sober
face of triumph on me.
‘Quite right,’ I answered, and I spoke no more than the truth, for the
poor fellow had made his calculations with laborious anxiety.
Wilfrid clapped his hands together with a shout of laughter that
carried his voice to a shriek almost, and without speaking a word he
strode to the hatch and went below.