OUTWARD BOUND
On a sudden, much about the hour of noon, there came a lull; the wind
dropped as if by magic, here and there over the wide green surface of
ocean the foam glanced, but in the main the billows ceased to break and
washed along in a troubled but fast moderating swell. A kind of
brightness sat in the east, and the horizon opened to its normal
confines; but it was a desolate sea, nothing in sight save the ship,
though I eagerly and anxiously scanned the whole circle of the waters.
The two vessels had widened their distance, yet the note of the hail,
if dull, was perfectly distinct.
"Yacht ahoy! We're going to send a boat."
I saw a number of figures in motion on the ship's poop. The aftermost
boat was then swung through the davits over the side, four or five men
entered her, and a minute later she sank to the water.
"Here they come, Grace!" cried I. "At last, thank Heaven!"
"Oh, Herbert, I shall never be able to enter her," she exclaimed,
shrinking to my side.
But I knew better, and made answer with a caress only.
The oars rose and fell, the boat showed and vanished, showed and
vanished again as she came buzzing to the yacht, to the impulse of the
powerfully swept blades. Caudel stood by with some coils of line in
his hand; the end was flung, caught, and in a trice the boat was
alongside, and a sun-burnt, reddish-haired man, in a suit of serge, and
a naval peak to his cap, tumbled with the dexterity of a monkey over
the yacht's rail.
He looked round him an instant, and then came straight up to Grace and
me, taking the heaving and slanting deck as easily as though it were
the floor of a ball-room.
"I am the second mate of the _Carthusian_," said he, touching his cap
with an expression of astonishment and admiration in his eyes as he
looked at Grace. "Are all your people ready to leave, sir? Captain
Parsons is anxious that there should be no delay."
"The lady and I are perfectly ready," said I, "but my men have made up
their minds to stick to the yacht with the hope of carrying her home."
He looked round to Caudel who stood near.
"Ay, sir, that's right," exclaimed the worthy fellow, "it's agoing to
be fine weather and the water's to be kept under."
The second mate ran his eye over the yacht with a short-lived look of
puzzlement in his face, then addressed me:
"We had thought your case a hopeless one, sir."
"So it is," I answered.
"Are you wise in your resolution, my man?" he exclaimed, turning to
Caudel again.
"Ay, sir," answered Caudel doggedly, as though anticipating an
argument, "who's agoing to leave such a dandy craft as this to founder
for the want of keeping a pump going for a day or two? There are four
men and a boy all resolved, and we'll _manage_ it," he added
emphatically.
"The yacht is in no fit state for the young lady, anyway," said the
second mate. "Now, sir, and you, madam, if you are ready," and he put
his head over the side to look at his boat.
I helped Grace to stand, and whilst I supported her I extended my hand
to Caudel.
"God bless you and send you safe home!" said I; "your pluck and
determination make me feel but half a man. But my mind is resolved
too. Not for worlds would Miss Bellassys and I pass another hour in
this craft."
He shook me cordially by the hand, and respectfully bade Grace
farewell. The others of my crew approached, leaving one pumping, and
amongst the strong fellows on deck and over the side--sinewy arms to
raise and muscular fists to receive her--Grace, white and shrinking and
exclaiming, was handed dexterously and swiftly down over the side.
Watching my chance, I sprang, and plumped heavily but safely into the
boat. The second mate then followed and we shoved off.
The crew of the yacht raised a cheer and waved their caps to us, and I
felt heartily grieved to leave them. They had behaved well throughout
the wild hours of storm now passed, and it seemed but a poor return, so
to speak, on my part to quit the yacht in this fashion, as if, indeed,
I was abandoning them to their fate, though, of course, they had made
up their minds and knew very well what they were about; so that it was
little more than sensitiveness that made me think of them as I did
whilst I watched them flourishing to me and listened to their cheers.
By this time, the light that I had taken notice of in the east had
brightened; there were breaks in it, with here and there a dim view of
blue sky, and the waters beneath had a gleam of steel as they rolled
frothless and swollen. In fact, it was easy to see that fine weather
was at hand, and this assurance it was that reconciled me as nothing
else could to the fancy of Caudel and my little crew carrying the
leaking, crippled yacht home.
The men in the boat pulled sturdily, eyeing Grace and me out of the
corner of their eyes, and gnawing upon the hunks of tobacco in their
cheeks, as though in the most literal manner they were chewing the cud
of the thoughts put into them by this encounter. The second mate
uttered a remark or two about the weather, but the business of the
tiller held him too busy to talk. There was the heavy swell to watch,
and the tall, slowly-rolling metal fabric ahead of us to sheer
alongside of. For my part, I could not see how Grace was to get
aboard, and, observing no ladder over the side as we rounded under the
vessel's stern, I asked the second mate how we were to manage it.
"Oh," said he, "we shall send you both up in a chair with a whip.
There's the block," he added, pointing to the yard-arm, "and the line's
already rove, you'll observe."
There were some seventy or eighty people watching us as we drew
alongside, all staring over the rail and from the forecastle and from
the poop, as one man. I remarked a few bonnets and shawled heads
forward, and two or three well-dressed women aft, otherwise the crowd
of heads belonged to men-emigrants--shabby and grimy; most of them
looking seasick, I thought, as they overhung the side.
A line was thrown from the ship, and the boat was hauled under the
yard-arm whip, where she lay rising and falling, carefully fended off
from the vessel's iron side by a couple of the men in her.
"Now, then, bear a hand!" shouted a voice from the poop; "get your
gangway unshipped, and stand by to hoist away handsomely."
A minute later a large chair with arms dangled over our heads, and was
caught by the fellows in the boat. A more uncomfortable,
nerve-capsizing performance I never took a part in. The water washed
with a thunderous sobbing sound along the metal bends of the ship,
that, as she stooped her side into the brine, flashed up the swell in
froth, hurling towards us also a recoiling billow, which made the dance
of the boat horribly bewildering and nauseating. One moment we were
floated, as it seemed to my eye, to the level of the bulwarks of the
stooping ship; the next we were in a valley, with the great bare hull
leaning away from us--an immense wet surface of red and black and
chequered band, her shrouds vanishing in a slope, and her yard-arms
forking up sky high.
"Now, madam," said the second mate, "will you please seat yourself in
that chair?"
Grace was very white, but she saw that it must be done, and with set
lips and in silence, was helped by the sailors to seat herself. I
adored her then for her spirit, for I confess that I had dreaded she
would hang back, shriek out, cling to me, and complicate and delay the
miserable business by her terrors. She was securely fastened into the
chair, and the second mate paused for the chance.
"Hoist away!" he yelled, and up went my darling, uttering one little
scream only as she soared.
"Lower away!" and by the line that was attached to the chair, she was
dragged through the gangway where I lost sight of her.
It was now my turn. The chair descended, and I sat upon it, not
without several yearning glances at the sloping side of the ship,
which, however, only satisfied me that there was no other method by
which I might enter the vessel than the chair, active as I was.
"Hoist away!" was shouted, and up I went, and I shall not readily
forget the sensation. My brains seemed to sink into my boots as I
mounted. I was hoisted needlessly high, almost to the yard-arm itself,
I fancy, through some blunder on the part of the men who manned the
"whip." For some breathless moments I dangled between heaven and
ocean, seeing nothing but grey sky and heaving waters. But the torture
was brief. I felt the chair sinking, saw the open gangway sweep past
me, and presently I was out of the chair at Grace's side, stared at by
some eighty or a hundred emigrants, all 'tweendecks passengers, who had
left the bulwarks to congregate on the main deck.
"Well, thank Heaven, here we are, anyway!" was my first exclamation to
Grace.
"It was a thousand times worse than the _Spitfire_ whilst it lasted,"
she answered.
"You behaved magnificently," said I.
"Will you step this way?" exclaimed a voice overhead.
On looking up I found that we were addressed by a short, somewhat
thick-set man, who stood at the rail that protected the forward
extremity of the poop deck. This was the person who had talked to us
through the speaking-trumpet, and I at once guessed him to be the
captain. There were about a dozen first-class passengers gazing at us
from either side of him, two or three of whom were ladies. I took
Grace by the hand, and conducted her up a short flight of steps, and
approached the captain, raising my hat as I did so, and receiving from
him a sea-flourish of the tall hat he wore. He was buttoned up in a
cloth coat, and his cheeks rested in a pair of high, sharp-pointed
collars, starched to an iron hardness, so that his body and head moved
as one piece. His short legs arched outwards, and his feet were
encased in long boots, the toes of which were of the shape of a shovel.
He wore the familiar tall hat of the streets; it looked to be brushed
the wrong way, was bronze at the rims, and on the whole showed as a hat
that had made several voyages. Yet, if there was but little of the
sailor in his costume, his face suggested itself to me as a very good
example of the nautical life. His nose was scarcely more than a pimple
of a reddish tincture, and his small, moist, grey eyes lying deep in
their sockets seemed, as they gazed at you, to be boring their way
through the apertures which Nature had provided for the admission of
light. A short piece of white whisker decorated either cheek, and his
hair that was cropped close as a soldier's was also white.
"Is that your yacht, young gentleman?" said he, bringing his eyes from
Grace to me, at whom he had to stare up as at his masthead, so
considerably did I tower over the little man.
"Yes," said I, "she is the _Spitfire_--belongs to Southampton. I am
very much obliged to you for receiving this lady and me."
"Not at all," said he, looking hard at Grace; "your wife, sir?"
"No," said I, greatly embarrassed by the question, and by the gaze of
the ten or dozen passengers who hung near, eyeing us intently and
whispering, yet, for the most part, with no lack of sympathy and good
nature in their countenances. I saw Grace quickly bite upon her
under-lip, but without colouring or any other sign of confusion than a
slight turn of her head as though she viewed the yacht.
"But what have you done with the rest of your people, young gentleman?"
inquired the captain.
"My name is Barclay--Mr. Herbert Barclay: the name of the young lady to
whom I am engaged to be married," said I, significantly sending a look
along the faces of the listeners, "is Miss Grace Bellassys, whose aunt,
Lady Amelia Roscoe, you may probably have heard of."
This, I thought, was introduction enough. My business was to assert
our dignity first of all, and then as I was addressing a number of
persons who were either English or Colonial, or both, the pronunciation
of her ladyship's name was, I considered, a very early and essential
duty.
"With regard to my crew--" I continued, and I told the captain they had
made up their minds to carry the vessel home.
"Miss Bellassys looks very tired," exclaimed a middle-aged lady with
grey hair, speaking with a gentle, concerned smile, engaging with its
air of sympathetic apology, "if she will allow me to conduct her to my
cabin--"
"By all means, Mrs. Barstow," cried the captain. "If she has been
knocking about in that bit of a craft there through the gale that's
been blowing, all I can say, ladies and gentlemen, she'll have seen
more tumbling and weather in forty-eight hours than you'll have any
idea of though I was to keep you at sea for ten years in this ship."
Mrs. Barstow, with a motherly manner, approached Grace, who bowed and
thanked her, and together they walked to the companion hatch and
disappeared.
By this time the boat had been hoisted, and the ship was full of the
animation and business of her sailors piling canvas upon her. The
sudden stagnation that had fallen was now threaded by a weak draught of
air out of the east where the brightness of the new weather had first
shown. The compacted pall of cloud was fast breaking up, settling into
large bodies of vapour, with spaces of dim blue sky between and in the
south there stood a shaft of golden sunshine that flashed up a space of
water at its base in splendour, though past it the sulky heaps of cloud
loomed the darker for that magical and beautiful lance of radiance.
Miles away in the south-west a white sail hovered, but nothing else
broke the sea-line.
I took all this in at a glance: also the figure of my poor, mutilated
yacht heaving forlorn and naked upon the swell that still rolled
heavily, as though after the savage vexing of its heart during the past
hours, old ocean could not quickly draw its breath placidly. The
little vessel looked but a toy from the height of the poop of the iron
ship. As I surveyed her, I marvelled to think that she had
successfully encountered the weather of the past two days and nights.
I could see one of the men--Dick Files--steadily labouring at the pump
whilst the others were busy with the tackle and gear that supported the
mast. But even as I watched, the _Carthusian_ had got way upon her,
and was dwarfing yet the poor brave little _Spitfire_ as she slided
round to the government of her helm, her yards squaring, her canvas
spreading, and her crew chorussing all about her decks as she went.
The captain asked me many questions, most of which I answered
mechanically, for my thoughts were fixed upon the little yacht, and my
heart was with the poor fellows who had resolved to carry her home--but
with _them_ only! not with _her_. No! as I watched her rolling, and
the fellow pumping, not for worlds would I have gone aboard of her
again with Grace, though Caudel should have yelled out that the leak
was stopped, and though a fair, bright breezy day, with promise of its
quiet lasting for a week, should have opened round about us.
The captain wanted to know when I had sailed, from what port I had
started, where I was bound to, and the like. I kept my face with
difficulty when I gave him my attention at last. It was not only his
own mirth-provoking, nautical countenance; the saloon passengers could
not take their eyes off me, and they bobbed and leaned forward in an
eager, hearkening way to catch every syllable of my replies. Nor was
this all, for below on the quarter-deck and along the waist stood the
scores of steerage passengers, all straining their eyes at me. The
curiosity and excitement were ridiculous. But fame is a thing very
cheaply earned in these days.
The captain inquired a little too curiously sometimes. So Miss
Bellassys was engaged to to be married to me, hey? Was she alone with
me? No relative, no maid, nobody of her own sex in attendance? To
these questions the ladies listened with an odd expression on their
faces. I particularly noticed one of them: she had sausage-shaped
curls, lips so thin that when they were closed they formed a fine line
as though produced by a single sweep of a camel's hair-brush under her
nose; the pupil of one eye was considerably larger than that of the
other, which gave her a very staring, knowing look on one side of her
face; but there was nothing in my responses to appease hers, or the
captain's, or the others' thirst for information. In fact, ever since
I had resolved to quit the _Spitfire_ for the _Carthusian_, I had made
up my mind to keep secret the business that had brought Grace and me
into this plight. The captain and the rest of them might think as they
chose; Grace was not to be much hurt by their conjectures or opinions;
there could be nothing to wholly occupy our thoughts whilst aboard the
_Carthusian_, but the obligation of leaving her as speedily as might
be, of reaching Penzance, and then getting married.
"There can be no doubt, I hope, Captain Parsons," said I, for the
second mate had given me the skipper's name, "of our promptly falling
in with something homeward bound that will land Miss Bellassys and me?
What the craft may prove can signify nothing--a smack would serve our
purpose."
"I'll signal when I have a chance," he answered, looking round the sea
and then up aloft, "but it's astonishing, ladies and gentlemen," he
continued, addressing the passengers, "how lonesome the ocean is, even
where you look for plenty of shipping."
"Not in this age of steam, I think," observed a tall, thin man mildly.
"In this age of steam, sir," responded the captain. "You may not
credit it, but on three occasions I have measured the two Atlantics
from abreast of Ushant to abreast of the Cape of Good Hope without
sighting a single ship, steam or sail."
"You amaze me," said the mild, thin man.
"How far are we from Penzance, captain?" I inquired.
"Why," he answered, "all a hundred and fifty miles."
"If that be so then," I cried, "our drift must have been that of a
balloon."
"Will those poor creatures ever be able to reach the English coast in
that broken boat?" exclaimed one of the ladies, indicating the
_Spitfire_ that now lay dwarfed right over the stern of the ship.
"If they are longshoremen--and yet I don't know," exclaimed the captain
with a short laugh, "a boatman will easily handle a craft of that sort
when a blue-water sailor would be all abroad." He put his hand into
the skylight and lifted a telescope off its brackets, and applied it to
his eye. "Still pumping," said he, talking whilst he gazed through the
glass, "and they're stretching a sail along--bending it no doubt.
There's plenty of mast there for cloths enough to blow them home. The
pump keeps the water under--that's certain. To my mind she looks more
buoyant than she was. Ladies and gentlemen, she'll do--she'll do. If
I thought not--" he viewed her for a little while in silence. "Oh,
yes, ladies and gentlemen, she'll do," he repeated, and then replacing
the glass, exclaimed to me, "Have you lunched, Mr. Barclay?"
"No, captain, I have not, neither can I say I have breakfasted."
"Oh, confound it, man, you should have said so before. Step this way,
sir, step this way," and he led me to the companion hatch that
conducted to the saloon, pausing on the road, however, to beckon with a
square forefinger to a sober, Scotch-faced personage in a monkey jacket
and loose pilot trousers--the chief mate as I afterwards learnt--to
whom in a wheezy undertone he addressed some instructions, which, as I
gathered from one or two syllables I overheard, referred to the
speaking of inward-bound ships, and to our trans-shipment.
The saloon was a fine, long, handsome interior, but I preserve no more
of it than a general impression of mirrors, rich panels, a short row of
lamps formed of some lustrous metal, an elaborate stove aft, a piano
secured to the richly-decorated shaft of the mizzenmast; a long table
with fixed revolving chairs on either hand, flanked to port and
starboard by a row of cabins or berths. After our experience aboard
the _Spitfire_, I was scarcely sensible of the motions of the deck of
this big ship, albeit she was rolling and curtseying as she floated,
clothed to her royal yards, over the sulky undulations of the water.
But I was able to gather from certain sounds which penetrated through
the closed doors of the berths that some of the passengers were not yet
quite well. There was nobody in the saloon save one little man with a
quantity of hair down his back after the manner of poets and
professors. He was seated near the main-deck entrance with a
countenance of a ghastly hue. His eyes were riveted to the deck, and
when the captain cheerily called to him to know how he did, he answered
without moving his figure or shifting his gaze, "Ach! Gott! don't
shpeak to me."
At this moment a door close beside which I was standing opened and
Grace came out, followed by the kind lady, Mrs. Barstow. She had
removed her hat and jacket, and was sweet and fresh with the
application of such toilet conveniences as her sympathetic acquaintance
could provide her with. Captain Parsons stared at her and then whipped
off his tall hat.
"This is better than the _Spitfire_, Grace," said I.
"Oh, yes, Herbert," she answered, sending a glance of her fine dark
eyes over the saloon; "but Mrs. Barstow tells me that the ship is going
to New Zealand."
"So she is, so she is," cried Captain Parsons, bursting into a laugh,
"and if you like, Mr. Barclay and you shall accompany us."
She looked at him with a frightened girlish air.
"Oh, no, Miss Bellassys," said Mrs. Barstow. "Captain Parsons is a
great humorist. I have made two voyages with him, and he keeps me
laughing from port to port. He will see that you get safely home, and
I wish that we could count upon arriving at Otaga as speedily as you
will reach England."
Just then a man in a camlet jacket entered the saloon--cuddy, I
believe, is the proper word for it. He was the head steward, and
Captain Parsons immediately called to him.
"Jenkins, here. This lady and gentleman have not breakfasted; they
have been shipwrecked, and wish to lunch. You understand? And draw
the cork of a quart bottle of champagne. There is no better
sea-physic, Miss Bellassys. I've known what it is to be five days in
an open boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and I believe if even
Mrs. Barstow had been my wife, I should not have scrupled to make away
with her for a quart bottle of champagne."