WE SIGHT A SCHOONER-YACHT.
I happened to be alone on deck after dinner, having left Wilfrid at
his diary and Miss Jennings in her cabin, where she had gone to make
ready to join me, as she had said. The wreck had faded out before
sundown, melting upon the flashing purple under the sinking luminary
like the memory of a nightmare off a mind upon which is streaming a
light of cheerfulness. The night was clear but dark, with a pleasant
wind through whose dryness the stars looked down purely. The yacht
was sailing a fair six knots, as I gathered when I stepped from the
companion to the lee-rail and peered over in a wool-gathering way at
the emerald gushings and eddyings of the phosphoric fires which winked
in the cloudy paleness along the bends, and fled into the dimness of
glow-worms to the spectral racing of our wake.
I was worried and oppressed by a sort of heaviness of spirits. I had
acted a cheerful part at dinner, but there was little of my heart in
the tongue I wagged. The recollection of the motionless figure seated
upon the wreck, and darker yet, the memory of that bloated, long-haired
phantom face sliding in the space of a breath across the gape in the
shattered deck, with the sobbing wash of the black water on which it
floated to put a dreadful meaning of its own into the livid, nimble
vision went for something--nay, went for a good deal, no doubt; but
it was the hail that had come from the wreck which mainly occasioned
my perplexity and agitation, and, I may add, my depression. Twice now
had syllables sounding from where there were no lips to pronounce them
reached my ears. Had I alone heard them I should have been alarmed
for my reason, not doubting an hallucination, though never for an
instant believing in the reality of the utterance; but the voices had
been audible to others, they were consequently real, and for that
reason oppressive to reflect upon. The shadow of Wilfrid’s craziness
lay on his ship; the voyage was begun in darkness, and was an aimless
excursion, as I thought, with no more reasonable motive for it than
such as was to be found in the contending passions of a bleeding heart.
Hence it was inevitable that any gloomy incident which occurred during
such an adventure as this should gather in the eye of the imagination
a very much darker tincture than the complexion it would carry under
sunnier and more commonplace conditions of an ocean run.
Whilst I lay over the rail lost in thought, I was accosted by Finn.
‘Beg pardon, Mr. Monson; couldn’t make sure in this here gloom whether
it was you or Sir Wilfrid. May I speak a word with ’ee, sir?’
‘Certainly, Finn.’
‘Well now, sir, if that there old Jacob Crimp ain’t gone and took on
so joyful a frame of mind that I’m a land-crab if his sperrits ain’t
downright alarming in a man whose weins runs lime-juice!’
‘Old Crimp!’ cried I, ‘what’s the matter with him?’
‘Why, he comes up to me and says, “Capt’n,” he says, “there’s Joe
Cutbill, Jemmy Smithers, that funeral chap Muffin, and the t’others who
was in the boat that went to the wreck this afternoon, all a-swearing
that they heard a voice in the air!” and so saying, he bursts out a
laughing like a parrot. “A woice!” says he. “So me and Mr. Monson
aren’t the only ones, d’ye see. Damme,” says he, “if it don’t do my
heart good to think on’t. There’s the whole bloomin’ boiling of us
now,” says he, “to laugh at, capt’n; not Jacob Crimp only,” and here he
bursts into another laugh.’
‘What does the old chap want to convey?’ said I.
‘Why, sir, joyfulness as that he no longer stands alone as having
heard a woice, for though to be sure you was with him that night, and
some sound like to a cuss rose up off yon quarter, he feels like being
alone in the hearing of it, for, ye see, a man in his position can’t
comfortably hitch on to a gent like you, and it was the harder for him,
for that the man at the wheel swore that he never heard the cry.’
‘He is superstitious, like most old lobscousers, no doubt,’ said I.
‘Have the others been talking about this mysterious hail from the
wreck?’
‘Ay, sir; ’tis a pity. It’s raised an uneasiness ’mongst the men.
There’s that Irish fool O’Connor, him that foundered the “Dago,” going
about with his face as long as a wet hammock and swearing that ’taint
lucky.’
‘I don’t know about it’s being unlucky,’ said I, ‘but it certainly is
most confoundedly curious, Captain Finn.’
I saw him peering hard at me in the dusk. ‘But surely your honour’s not
going to tell me there _was_ a woice?’ said he.
‘As we were shoving off,’ said I, ‘We were hailed in God’s name to
return. Every man of us in the boat heard it. There were but two bodies
in the wreck, as stone dead as if they had died before the days of the
flood. What say you to _that_, Captain Finn?’
He pulled off his hat to scratch his head. After a pause he exclaimed
slowly, ‘Well, I’m for leaving alone what isn’t to be understood. There
was ghosts maybe afore I was born, but none since; and the dead h’aint
talked, to my knowledge, since New Testament times. Old Jamaicy rum
isn’t to be had by dropping a bucket over the side, and if a truth lies
too deep to be fished up by creeps, better drop it, says I, and fix the
attention on something else.’
‘You tell me the men are uneasy?’
‘Ay, sir.’
‘Do you mean all hands?’
‘Well, your honour knows what sailors are. When they’re housed together
under one deck they’re like a box of them patent lucifer lights--if one
catches, the whole mass is aflame.’
‘It’s a passing fit of superstition,’ said I. ‘Give it time. Best say
nothing about it to Sir Wilfrid.’
‘Bless us, no, sir. Sorry it’s raised so much satisfaction in that
there old Jacob, though. A laugh in Jacob don’t sound natural. Any sort
o’ joyfulness in such a constitution is agin nature.’
At this point Miss Jennings arrived on deck, and Finn, with a shadowy
fist mowing at his brow, stepped to the opposite rail, where his figure
was easily distinguished by the stars he blotted out.
‘I hope your spirits are better,’ said Miss Laura.
‘I should be glad to turn the silent sailor of that wreck out of my
memory; but my spirits are very well.’
‘Wilfrid noticed your depression at table, but he attributed it
entirely to the dreadful sight you witnessed on the wreck.’ She passed
her hand through my arm with a soft impulse that started me into a
walk, but there was so much real unconsciousness in her way of doing
this--a childlike intimation of her wish to walk without proposing it,
and so breaking the flow of our speech at the moment--that for some
little while I was scarce sensible that I held her arm, and that I was
pacing with her. ‘But I think there is more the matter with you, Mr.
Monson,’ she continued, with her face glimmering like pearl in the
dusk, as she looked up at me, ‘than meets the ear--I will not say the
eye.’
‘The fact is, Miss Jennings,’ said I abruptly, ‘I am bothered.’
‘By what?’
‘Well, what think you of the suspicion which grows in me that this
yacht carries along with her, in the atmosphere that enfolds her, some
sort of Ariel, whose mission it is to bewilder out of its invisibility
the sober senses of men of plain, practical judgment, like your humble
servant?’
‘You want to frighten me by pretending that you are falling a little
crazy.’
‘No!’
‘Or are you creating an excuse to return home.’
‘No again. How can I return home?’
‘Why, by the first convenient ship we happen to sight and speak. Is
this some stratagem to prepare Wilfrid’s mind for your bidding us
farewell when the chance happens?’
She spoke with a subdued note and a tremble of fretfulness in it.
‘Suffer me to justify myself,’ said I, and with that I led her to the
captain, who stood with folded arms leaning against the rail near the
main rigging. ‘Finn!’ He dropped his hands and stood bold upright.
‘Be so good as to tell Miss Jennings what the men are talking about
forward.’
‘You mean the woice, sir?’
‘What the men are talking about,’ said I.
‘Well, miss,’ said Finn, ‘as the boat that Mr. Monson had charge of
this afternoon was a-leaving the wreck, the men heard themselves hailed
by a woice that begged ’em, in God’s name, not to leave the party as
called behind. Mr. Monson, sir, you heard it likewise.’
‘I did,’ I answered.
‘Another mystery,’ exclaimed Miss Laura, ‘quite as dismal and
astonishing as Muffin’s phosphoric warning.’
‘Thanks, Finn; that’s all I wanted to ask you,’ said I, and we left him
to resume our walk.
‘Tell me about this voice,’ said the girl.
I did so, putting plenty of colour into the picture, too, for I wanted
her to sympathise with my superstitious mood, whilst up to now there
was nothing but incredulity and a kind of coquettish pique in her voice
and manner.
‘And you are afraid of this voice, Mr. Monson? I wonder at you!’
‘You should have my full consent to wonder,’ said I, ‘if it were the
first time; but there was the other night, you know, with solid, sour,
uncompromising old Crimp to hear me witness, and now again to-day, with
a boatful of men for evidence.’
‘Really, Mr. Monson, what do you want to make yourself believe?’ she
asked, with a tone like a half-laugh in her speech; ‘the dead cannot
speak.’
‘So ’tis said,’ I grumbled, sucking hard at my cigar to kindle it
afresh.
‘Human syllables cannot be delivered save by human lips. What, then,
could have spoken out of the darkness of the sea the other night?’
‘Does not Milton tell of airy tongues that syllable men’s names?’ said
I gloomily.
‘Mr. Monson, I repeat that I wonder at you. How can you suffer your
imagination to be cheated by some trick of the senses?’ she laughed.
‘Pray, be careful. You may influence me. Then what a morbid company
shall we make? I am sure you would like me to believe in this
mysterious voice of yours. But, happily, we Colonials are too young, as
a people, to be superstitious. We must wait for our ruined castles, and
our moated granges, and our long, echoing, tapestry-lined corridors.
Then, like you English, we may tremble when we hear a mysterious voice.’
She started violently as she said this, giving my arm so smart a pull
that it instantly brought me to a halt, whilst in a voice of genuine
alarm she exclaimed, ‘Good gracious! what is that?’
Her face was turned up towards the weather yardarm of the
square topsail, where, apparently floating a little above the
studdingsail-boom iron, like to a flame in the act of running down
the smoke of an extinguished candle ere firing the wick, shone a
pendulous bubble of greenish fire, but of a luminosity sufficiently
powerful to distinctly reveal the extremity of the black spar pointing
finger-like into the darkness ahead, whilst a large space of the curve
of the topgallant-sail above showed in the lustre with something of
the glassy, delicate greenness you observe in a midsummer leaf in
moonshine. The darkness, with its burden of stars, seemed to press to
the yacht the deeper for that mystic light, and much that had been
distinguishable outlines before melted out upon the sight.
‘What is it?’ exclaimed Miss Jennings in a voice of consternation, and
I felt her hand tighten upon my arm with her fears thrilling through
the involuntary pressure.
‘Figure an echoing corridor hung with aged tapestry stirring to cold
draughts which seem to come like blasts from a graveyard, a noise as
of the distant clanking of chains, and then the apparition of a man in
armour, holding up such a lantern as that yonder, approaching you who
are spell-bound and cannot move for horror.’ I burst out laughing.
‘What is that light, Mr. Monson?’ she cried petulantly.
‘Why, Miss Jennings,’ I answered, ‘’tis a saint, not a light; a
reverend old chap called St. Elmo who transforms himself at pleasure
into a species of snapdragon for the encouragement of poor Jack.’
‘See that corposant, sir?’ rumbled Finn out of the darkness.
‘Very well, indeed,’ I answered. ‘Finn has explained,’ I continued;
‘that light is what sailors call a corpusant--sometimes compr_ee_sant.
If we were Catholics of the Columbian period we should tumble down
upon our knees and favour it with a litany or oblige it with a hymn;
but being bleak-minded Protestants all that we can do is to wonder
how the deuce it happens to be burning on such a night as this, for I
have seen scores of these corposants in my time, but always either
in dead calms or in gales of wind. But there it is, Miss Jennings, an
atmospheric exhalation as commonplace as lightning, harmless as the
glow-worm, though in its way one of the most poetic of old ocean’s
hundred suggestions; for how easy to imagine some giant figure holding
that mystic lamp, whose irradiation blends the vast spirit shape with
the gloom and blinds the sight to it, though by watching with a little
loving coaxing of fancy one should be able after a bit to catch a
glimpse of a pair of large sorrowful eyes or the outline of some wan
giant face.’
‘It is gone,’ she exclaimed with a shudder.
‘Hush!’ I exclaimed, ‘we may hear the rustling of pinions by listening.’
‘Mr. Monson, you are ungenerous,’ she cried with an hysterical laugh.
Suddenly the light glanced and then flamed at the foretopmast head,
where it threw out, though very palely, the form of the lookout man on
the topgallantyard, whose posture showed him to be crouching with his
arm over his eyes.
‘I dare say that poor devil up there,’ I exclaimed, ‘fully believes the
fire-bubble to be a man’s ghost.’
‘It is a startling thing to see,’ exclaimed Miss Jennings.
‘But Colonials are too young as a people to be superstitious,’ said
I. ‘It is only we of the old country, you know, with our moated
granges----’
‘What is the hour, Mr. Monson?’
‘I say, Charles, are you on deck?’ shouted Wilfrid from the companion
hatch.
‘Ay; here I am with Miss Jennings. What’s the time, Wilfrid, d’ye know?’
As I spoke two silver chimes, and then a third, came floating and
ringing from the forecastle--three bells, half-past nine.
‘See that corposant?’ bawled Wilfrid. And he came groping up to us. ‘An
omen, by George!’ he cried with an odd hilarious note in his voice.
‘Laura, mark me, that flame isn’t shining for nothing. ’Tis a signal
light fired by fortune to advise us of some great event at hand.’
‘Quarterdeck there!’ came down the voice of the lookout man, falling
from sail to sail, as it seemed, in an echo that made the mysterious
flame a wild thing to the imagination for a moment by its coming direct
from it.
‘Hallo?’ roared Finn.
‘Can I lay down till this here blasted light’s burnt out? ’Tain’t right
to be all alone with it up here.’
‘It _is_ burnt out,’ cried Finn, in a way which showed he sympathised
with the fellow. In fact, as the sailor called, the light vanished,
and, though we stood looking awhile waiting for its reappearance, we
saw no more of it.
That ocean corpse candle had shone at the right moment. Likely enough
I should have made myself a bit merry over my tender and beautiful
companion’s fears in revenge for her pouting, pettish wonderment at
the uneasiness which the mysterious voices had raised in me. But
Wilfrid remained with us for the rest of the evening, and, as I was
anxious that he should know nothing about the strange sound, I forbore
all raillery. It was midnight when we went to bed. Our talk had been
very sober, indeed somewhat philosophical in its way, with references
to electrical phenomena. Wilfrid chatted with excitement, which he
increased by two or three fuming glasses of seltzer and spirits. He
told us a wild story of a ship that he was on board of somewhere down
off the New Zealand coast, ploughing through an ocean of fire on a
pitch-black night with a gale of wind blowing and a school of whales
keeping pace with the rushing fabric, spouting vast feather-like
fountains of burning water as they stormed through it. He talked like
a man reciting a dream or delivering an imagination, and there was a
passion in his speech due to excitement and old Cognac, along with a
glow in his large peering eyes and a play of flushed features that
persuaded me of a very defined mood of craziness passing over his mind.
His fancy seemed to riot in the roaring, fiery scene he figured; the
ship, plunging into hollows, which flashed about her bows like volcanic
vomitings of flame, the heavens above black as soot, the ocean waving
like sheet lightning to its confines, and the huge body of the whales
crushing the towering surges as they rolled headlong through them into
a moonlike brilliance, flinging on high their delicate emerald-green
sparkling spouts of water, which floated comet-like over them against
the midnight of the heavens.
On eight-bells striking we went to bed. All was quiet on deck; a
pleasant breeze blowing under the hovering prisms and crystals of the
firmament, the yacht leaning over in a pale shadow in the dusk and
seething pleasantly along with a noise rising up from round about her
like the rippling of a flag in a summer breeze. I fell asleep and slept
soundly, and when I awoke it was to the beating of somebody’s knuckles
upon my cabin-door. The day had broken, and my first glance going to
the scuttle, I spied through the thick glass of it a windy sunrise with
smoky crimson flakes and a tint of tarnished pink upon the atmosphere.
‘Hallo! Hallo there! Who’s that knocking?’
‘’Tis me, sir, Capt’n Finn. Can I have a word with your honour?’
exclaimed the skipper, who had subdued his voice to a note that was
alarming with its suggestion of physical effort.
‘Come in, Finn. What is it now?’
The handle was turned, and the captain entered cap in hand. He closed
the door carefully, and instantly said, ‘Sorry to disturb you, sir,
but baste me for an old duckling, Mr. Monson, if I don’t believe the
“Shark” to be in sight.’
‘_What?_’ I shouted, sitting bolt upright and flinging my legs over the
edge of the bunk.
He glanced at the door, looking an intimation to me to make no noise.
‘I thought I’d consult with ’ee first, sir, before reporting to Sir
Wilfrid.’
‘Is she in sight from the deck?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Have you seen her?’
‘Ay, Mr. Monson, I’m just off the t’gallant-yard, where I’ve been
inspecting her ever since she was first reported, and that’ll be
drawing on for five and twenty minutes.’
‘But she is hull down?’
‘Yes, sir, and still a schooner-yacht at that,’ said he emphatically.
‘Mind, I don’t say she _is_ the “Shark.” All I want to report is a
schooner with a yacht’s canvas--not American cotton. No, sir, canvas
like ourn, nothen square forrards, and sailing well she looks.’
‘How heading?’
‘Why to the south’ard and west’ard as we are. I’m in your hands, sir.
It’ll be a fearful excitement for Sir Wilfrid and a terrible blow if
it’s another vessel.’
‘Oh, but you have to give him the news, happen what will! Wait,
however, till I have had a look, will you? I shall be with you in a
minute or two.’
He left the berth, and in red-hot haste with a heart beating with
excitement I plunged into my clothes and ran on deck, passing softly,
however, through the cabin; for, though I know not why it should be,
yet I have observed that at sea there is something almost electrical
in a time full of startling significance like this, an influence that,
act as softly and be as hushed as you may, will yet arouse sleeping
people and bring them about you in a dreaming way, wondering what
on earth has happened. Pale and windy as the sunrise was, there was
dazzle enough in the soaring luminary to stagger my sight on my first
emergence. I stepped clear of the companion and stood whilst I fetched
a few breaths gazing round me. The sea was a dull, freckled blue with
a struggling swell underrunning it athwart the course of the wind as
though the coming breeze was to be sought northwards. The horizon
astern was gloomy and vague in the shadow of a long bank of clouds,
a heap of sullen terraces of vapour rising from flint to saffron and
then to a faint wet rose where the ragged sky-line of the compacted
body caught the eastern colour. All was clear water, turn where the
gaze would. On the topgallant-yard the fellow on the look-out lay
over the spar with a telescope at his eye; his figure, as it swung
through the misty radiance against the pale blue of the morning sky
that south-east looked to be kindling into whiteness, was motionless
with the intentness of his stare. If what the tubes were revealing to
him was the ‘Shark,’ then, as he had been the first to sight her, that
glittering heavy five-guinea piece nailed to the mainmast was his. It
was as much the thought of this reward going from them as curiosity
that had sent the watch on deck aloft too to have a look. The last of
them was coming down hand over hand as I went forward. Discipline was
forgotten in the excitement of such a moment as this, and swabs and
squiligees had been flung down without a word of rebuke from Cutbill,
whose business it was to superintend the washing of the decks.
I sprang into the foreshrouds, and was presently alongside the lookout
fellow. ‘Give me hold of that glass,’ said I. To the naked eye up here
the sail hung transparently visible upon the edge of the sea, a point
of lustrous white like the head of a marble obelisk lustrous with the
silver of sunrise. But the telescope made a deal more of that dash
of light than this. I threw a leg over the yard, steadied the glass
against the mast, and instantly witnessed the white canvas of what
seemed unquestionably a large schooner-yacht risen to her rail upon the
horizon where the thin black length of her swam like an eel with the
fluctuations of the refractive atmosphere; but all above was the steady
brilliant whiteness of the cloths of the pleasure ship mounting from
boom to gaff; a wide and handsome spread with a flight of triangular
canvas hovering between jibboom and topmast, as though a flock of
seafowl were winging past just there.
‘Do you know the “Shark”?’ said I to the man.
‘I’ve seen her once or twice at Southampton, sir.’
‘Is that she, think you?’
‘Ay, sartin as that there water’s salt.’
‘Well, there’ll be good pickings for you on the mainmast,’ said I,
handing him back the glass.
His face seemed to wither up between his whiskers to the incredible
wrinkles of the smile which shrunk it to the aspect of an old dried
apple. I got into the rigging and descended to the deck. The sailors
stared hard at me as I went out. I suppose they imagined that I was
well acquainted with the ‘Shark,’ and they eyed my countenance with a
solicitude that was almost humorous. Finn stood near the main rigging
perspiring with impatience and anxiety, fanning his long face with his
cap and sending glances in the direction of the sea, where presently
those two alabaster-like spires now hidden would be visible.
‘Is it the “Shark,” think ’ee, sir?’ he cried in a breathless way.
‘My good Finn, how the dickens should I know? I know no more of the
“Shark” than of Noah’s Ark. But, seeing that the vessel we want is a
schooner of some two hundred tons, of a fore and aft rig, bound our
way, and a yacht to boot, then, if yonder little ship be not the chap
we are in search of, this meeting with her will be an atrociously
strange coincidence.’
‘Just what I think, sir,’ he cried, still breathless.
‘Do you mean to shift your helm for her?’
‘She was abeam when first sighted, sir. I have brought her on the bow
since then, as ye can see. But I’ll head straight if ye should think
proper,’ he exclaimed with a look aloft and around.
‘Oh, by all means go slap for her, captain!’ said I. ‘That you know
will be my cousin’s first order.’
‘Trim sail, the watch!’ he bawled out.
The helm was put over and the yacht’s head fell off till you saw by the
line of the flashing glass through which the fellow aloft continued
to peer that the hidden sail had been brought about two points on the
lee bow. All was now bustle on deck with trimming canvas, setting
studdingsails, and the like. The dawn had found us close hauled with
the topgallantsail lifting and every sheet flat aft, and now we were
carrying the wind abaft the beam with a subdued stormy heave of the
yacht over the sulky swell. Indeed, Finn should have made sail to the
first shift of helm; but the poor fellow seemed to have lost his head
till he had talked with me, scarce knowing how to settle his mind as to
the right course to be instantly adopted in the face of that unexpected
apparition which was showing like a snow-flake from aloft. For my part,
I thought, I could not better employ the leisure that yet remained than
by preparing for what was to come by a cold brine bath. So down I went,
telling Finn that I would rout out Sir Wilfrid as I passed through the
cabin and give him the news.