LUCY'S MADNESS
The monotonous and commonplace demands of everyday life on board ship
as well as on shore will enter into the most exalted and uncommon forms
of romance at sea. Whether Lucy Acton was mad, or whether she was
merely acting a part, it was as certain she must be fed as though she
was a vulgar, homely, steerage passenger with nothing more poetic and
soul-lifting in her life than the faded portrait of the milkman who
wooed and then jilted her.
The cabin breakfast was served at half-past eight. A tray for Lucy was
placed at the side of Mr Lawrence, who with his own hand furnished it.
He then directed Paul, whilst giving him the key, to leave the door
unlocked on quitting the berth, and, turning in his chair, he watched
the hunchback enter. But the door, as before, was closed by the swing
of the ship, and he caught but a glimpse of the interior, which did
not frame its inmate.
This time Paul was for some minutes in the berth. He came out, leaving
the door unlocked as ordered, though shut, and stood beside Mr Lawrence
to make his report.
"How does the lady seem?" said Mr Lawrence.
"She made me put the tray on the deck, sir," answered Paul, "and I see
her running her eyes over it, and she says, 'Where's the knife, you man
of the forest?' I says, 'I don't know, mum.'"
He paused.
"Nothing but a slice or two of tongue was sent to her," said Mr
Lawrence, "that requires a knife to cut it with. Go on! Tell me what
followed."
"After she told me to put the tray on the deck, and looked at it and
asked about the knife, she stares at me just as I was about to go, and
then, your honour, her face changes as if she'd pulled off a mask. She
smiled with so cunning a look, such a trembling of the eyelids, that
I reckoned she'd got something hidden and was going to stab me with
it, and she lifts her shoulders all the while, a-looking at me with a
cunning smile and trembling eyes, till I supposed she was a-imitating
of my figure; and then she whispers so soft that I could just hear
what she said, whilst she beckons to me, smiling: 'If I show it, swear
you'll keep it a secret.' 'I don't know what you mean, ma'am,' I says.
'Here,' she says, with her cunning smile, and still a-beckoning. 'But
if you don't keep the secret I'll kill you as sartin as that you was
born in a forest.'"
Here again the fellow paused, apparently striving to find words to
produce his picture.
"Go on!" said Mr Lawrence fiercely. "What did she show you?"
Paul started, and answered: "She took me to the locker that's under the
window, and, lifting the lid, pointed down into the inside, and began
to laugh with a strange, crying noise, like a cat quarrelling, and then
says she, 'Do you see it?' There was nothing in the locker, saving
that in one end of it she'd made a sort of bird's nest out of the bed
feathers which I 'adn't swept away, and in it was her rings, a piece
of soap, a salt-cellar which I hadn't missed from the tray, and what I
took for a ball, but which, I allow, was her gloves rolled up tight.
'Do you see it?' she said, looking so cunning and a-whispering so
mysterious, it was more like dreaming than living to see and watch her.
'That's my secret!' and then she slams the lid of the locker to, with
a noise which I thought your honour would believe was a pistol-shot,
and says, frownin' and starin' at me with eyes that seemed to be in a
blaze, 'If you says a word about what you've seen I'll kill you.'"
The fellow ceased. He had told all he had to relate, and he was by no
means such a fool as not to see in his listener's face that he had
related much more than enough. He scratched his thigh as a monkey
would, and fell to waiting upon his master.
When Mr Lawrence had finished breakfast he went on deck consistently
with the innovation he had made in the ship's routine aft to relieve
Mr Eagle, who had come on watch at eight o'clock, and who now with Mr
Pledge went to breakfast in the cabin.
It was a very fine, clear, sparkling May morning far down in the
English Channel, and still the sea stretched desolate to its dim blue
recesses: which, had all been right with Mr Lawrence, would have
pleased him very much indeed, but he had something else to think of.
The waters frolicked in little sliding runs; it was a chasing dance
of waters with the billows pointing their white satin shoes under
their brilliant skirts of liquid blue. Mr Lawrence walked the deck,
and seemed to be keeping a bright look-out as he swept the horizon
with the glass he had brought with him, and often his stern, haughty,
and handsome face was directed towards the men, who seemed to know
that a vigilant eye had hove into view through the companion, and they
clapped a fresh colour of activity into those motions of limbs which
accompanied their labours.
But in truth Mr Lawrence was all the while thinking of what he had
heard from Paul, and every time he took a turn his gaze went to the
companion hatch, whence, now that her cabin door was unlocked, he
expected at any moment to see the figure of Lucy Acton emerge.
What would she do if she came on deck? And what was he to do if
his treatment of her had driven her mad? It seemed like all the
world to a very little, for here was this one man in conflict with
really stupendous circumstances brought about by himself. Upon his
hands was the girl of his heart, the most adorable of women in his
opinion, as mad--if he was to trust the evidence of his own senses
and the report of his steward--as any howling, grimacing, jibbering
inmate of a lunatic asylum. Upon his hands, too, was the ship with
a crowd of sailors, the ship to be feloniously sold, the sailors to
be fraudulently got rid of: and much must depend upon the reception
accorded him and his friend Dick, if it ever should come to the
_Minorca's_ safe arrival at Rio de Janeiro, by the intelligent
scoundrel whom he had named in his letter as Don José Zamovano y Villa.
Mr Eagle did not keep him long waiting, and when that surly, awkward
seaman arrived Mr Lawrence went below and found Mr Thomas Pledge in the
act of leaving the table and the cabin, with his jaw still working in
mastication. It was clear that Mr Pledge had no intention of keeping
his seat, even though he had not entirely swallowed his last mouthful,
when Mr Lawrence hove in sight.
As the second mate climbed the companion steps Mr Lawrence stood
with his hand upon the table and his eyes fastened upon Lucy's door,
thinking. It was clear he was hanging in the wind, as sailors say. He
could head a boarding party, he could look a loaded cannon full in the
muzzle, he could risk seizing the side-rope which was connected with a
fuse for exploding the powder-room of a pirate that was to be boarded
and taken; but he seemed to lack heart for such an enterprise as his
opening of that door, and his entrance into that berth signified.
He formed his resolution, and stepping to the door, knocked. He
received no answer, whereupon he entered.
He started as though he was confronted by something totally different
from the lady he expected to see. In truth Mr Lawrence had never seen
Lucy Acton with her hair down. Always when they met her hair had been
dressed in the prevailing mode, with a little fringing or shadowing
of wisps on her fair brow and curls on the beautiful outlines of her
shoulders. Whether her hair had become disengaged from its fastenings
in the night, or whether the deck mattress had done half and she with
her fingers had let fall the rest, matters not; she was before him,
clothed all about her back and breast with her abundance of soft dark
hair.
She was kneeling or crouching at the breakfast tray which was upon
the deck, and when Mr Lawrence entered, she held in one hand a piece
of cold tongue, a bite or two out of which she was eating, and in the
other hand a white biscuit. The cup was half-full of tea. She did
not lift her eyes when he entered, nor seem to be aware that another
occupied the cabin besides herself. She looked at the piece of tongue
with a smile which was a miracle of idiotism in its perfect conveyance
of no meaning, then bit what was in her mouth, then smiled again; and
again as suddenly frowned with a marvellous swiftness of transformation
of facial expression. So that whilst she looked, she appeared idiotic
in one instant, in the next she wore a strange and alarming look of
angry madness, dreadful to witness, working in her lineaments so
sweetly feminine, so purely gentle.
Her natural colour had not wholly faded from her cheek, but the bloom
was very faint indeed, once removed only perhaps from pallor, so that
her eyes, which in the full glow of her beauty were as a sorceress's
for liquid softness and the lambent lights of passions and emotions,
making one think of a dark midnight sea illuminated by the moon,
gathered a keenness of outline, a vitality of colour and play which of
themselves would have suffered her to pass as the mad girl she was or
figured to be.
"I wish, madam," he said, "I could see you seated more comfortably. But
I wish more that you could see into my heart, what I feel there, and
how my pain is infinitely keener than yours, because my love for you,
my inexorable passion for you, my determination to win you and make
you my own for life, paralysing the efforts of those who would keep us
asunder, make the very soul within me shrink to behold you so uneasy,
so unhappy, so reluctant to cast upon me one look--even one look--to
persuade me that my stratagem was based upon my conviction that I am
not indifferent to you, nay, that deep in your spirit your love for
me dwells as a jewel in a casket that yourself dare not open, though
willing that I should."
She continued at one moment smiling her idiot smile, at another
moment frowning her madwoman's frown, whilst he spoke. Then looking
up she seemed to perceive him for the first time, sprang erect with a
wonderful convulsion of terror in her whole form, and a sharp, short,
piercing shriek of distress.
"Who are you, sir?" she cried, brushing her hair by a fling of both
hands from her brow and cheeks. "How durst you intrude upon me? Do you
know I am a woman--a lady--a lady--a princess--the Princess Tatters,
sir, the daughter of a great and powerful lord who would condemn you to
be hanged if he caught you here!"
It was sure that neither the spirit nor the inspiration of the genius
of the famous Kitty O'Hara was far distant from her child when this
sweet and astonishing young creature executed the above feat of
dramatic gymnastics and delivered the words just recorded.
The bewildered man stared at her as though he was himself bereft of
reason. Amazement, confusion, love, pity, horror, doubt were amongst
the expressions which ran through his countenance like shadow chasing
shadow.
"My dearest madam!" he cried. "My sweetest Lucy!" and here he clasped
his hands and swayed with passion in his posture of piteous and painful
appeal, which rendered him as a figure a really noble piece of flesh
and blood, exalted as it was by its peculiar manly beauty of face. "Is
it possible that you do not know me? How can I act to undo the dreadful
distress my love has brought upon you? Oh, thou fair and everlasting
darling of my heart, have those secret sweet feelings with which you
regard me no power to influence your moods, to control these strange
manifestations, to----"
He drew his breath in a gasp and stopped, arrested by her suddenly
turning her back upon him and bowing with the exquisite grace of the
finished curtsy of those days to what Mr Lawrence guessed was an
apparition.
"It is good of your Royal Highness," she exclaimed in softly modulated,
respectful tones, uttered in a measure that gave them a courtier-like
dignity, "to visit me in my loneliness and distress. The great Duke of
Clarence, sir"--again she curtsied--"will ever be remembered with love
and pride by a kingdom whose glory lies in the deeds of her sailors,
for his devotion to the sea, to those who sail it, and who bleed for
their country upon it."
She seemed to listen in a profoundly respectful attitude to the reply
of the vision, and then said as though in answer to it: "Your Royal
Highness, I am imprisoned in this ship by a man who is the son of a
sailor and was himself a sailor until he was expelled from the Service
of which your Royal Highness is one of the most brilliant lights, by a
shameful and a barbarous act unworthy of an officer and a gentleman.
He hopes to marry me, sir, by stealing me from my father, who was a
captain in the Royal Navy, and who trusted him. I entreat your Royal
Highness's influence to procure my immediate liberation from this
wicked man that I may return to my father who will be breaking his
heart over my disappearance and loss."
She pronounced the words "who will be breaking his heart" in a
plaintive Irish accent. But it did not occur to the listener that
the apparition she apostrophised was not H.R.H. the Duke of Clarence
but Mrs Kitty O'Hara, her mother, who was as famous in her day as
Peg Woffington and equal to Mrs Jordan in some scenes of romping and
roguishness.
Like most sailors of his time Mr Lawrence possessed the instinct of
superstition, a quality or element which has contributed the most
brilliant of the rays to the glory of the romance of the sea. He
was sensible of an emotion of awe as he watched Lucy bowing to and
addressing a royal apparition so well known to him as the Sailor Prince
whose viewless eye might be upon him, whose invisible ear might be
taking in his story whilst the wild-haired girl bowed apparently to the
bulkhead or addressed the thin air.
She appeared to be listening: then with a profound curtsy, said: "I
thank your Royal Highness for your gracious condescension. It is not
my wish that this unhappy man should be severely punished. If, sir, it
should be your pleasure to order him to be executed, I would travel
twenty miles upon my knees to beg him off. I am reduced to this one
gown, and am now the Princess Tatters. My cruel gaoler will not suffer
me to use a knife to cut the food he sends me. Look at that tray, sir!
I feed upon the floor because I have been made a beggar of, and as
though I were a savage, I am obliged to use my fingers to eat with."
Here she paused and looked round at the tray as though she would have
Mr Lawrence catch a sight of her face, whose composite expression of
indignation, distress, and eager yearning for help and sympathy was
heightened and scored by the mad look her eyes wore, and the unmeaning
smile which deformed her mouth. She again addressed the apparition.
"Can I trust your Royal Highness with a secret?... How good you are,
sir! Your Royal Highness shall see my treasure, but you are too great
as a Prince, and too virtuous as a man, to betray me."
With that, and looking round about her with insane cunning glittering
in her eyes as diamonds tremble in the dancer's ear, as though she
feared she might be watched by another in that berth, albeit her manner
persuaded Mr Lawrence that she did not know he was looking on, she went
to the locker, lifted the lid and disclosed her treasure-hidings of
rings, soap, and the rest of it, looking up meanwhile as though into
the face of a person who was bending a little to catch a sight of that
nest of feathers, but looking up with such marvellous vitality in the
composition of her lineaments, and in the penetrating glare of those
eyes of hers which in hours of repose and content seemed to brood upon
what they viewed, that Mr Lawrence could almost swear that he beheld
the spectral shadow of the Royal apparition into whose face she gazed,
stooping and peering into the nest at the end of the locker.
She spoke again to the phantom, but this time in such a mere muttering
of words that the listener caught nothing of her meaning, and then sank
her figure in a profoundly respectful curtsy whilst she seemed to kiss
a hand extended to her.
She stood a few moments with her hands clasped before her at arm's
length, and her head bowed as though deep in thought, then went to
the tray again, knelt beside it and continued her meal, taking the
biscuit and the tongue in her hands without seeming to be in the least
conscious of the presence of Mr Lawrence.
"Madam," said he softly, "after so lively a conversation with your
Royal but unrevealed visitor, have you no word for me--no look----"
"I have no piano in this cabin, sir," she answered, without raising her
eyes. "And I have no heart to sing without music."
"I do not ask you to sing," he said. "Give me but a word, give me but a
look. You tear my heart by this behaviour."
She looked up at him suddenly with her eyes trembling cunningly again
as when she asked the phantom to view her treasure, and with a look
impossible to portray but which convinced him that she did not know
him, and in a voice that was almost tender with its note of seeking
after sympathy and help, she exclaimed: "Are you come here to liberate
me, to restore me to my father, who weeps because he thinks I am lost,
to rescue me from the wicked arts of a treacherous man--oh, tell me so,
tell me so!" she cried, springing to her feet, and extending her arms.
What could the unfortunate, infatuated, handsome rascal say? Her
appeal was poignant by virtue of her deep distress, the misery of her
condition, the insane disposition of her beautiful face, wild and
almost white in its shadowing of hair. What could he say to her? His
countenance was filled with the confusion of his mind. His heart beat
tumultuously with love that raged with its sense of helplessness. These
phrases do not exaggerate a state that nothing but the highest form
of genius could delineate in its astounding complexity of adoration,
despair, horror at the consequences of his own lightly undertaken act,
honour that could be no stranger to a valiant nature, and a resolution
to persevere and conquer as a consequence of the character that could
lay upon its owner's soul this enormous obligation of the betrayal of
the girl he worshipped and the man who had stood his friend when the
world was sterile, and he must either flee the country or rot in gaol.
"Madam," he said in a broken voice, "it is plain that I have brought
upon me something that I had not foreseen, and if you are the sufferer,
I am the loser, and of the two the keener sufferer by my loss. This
door, madam, will remain unlocked, and you are at liberty to come and
go as you please."
He made her one of those elegant and stately bows which was his
greatest charm in the eyes of old Miss Acton, and left the berth,
closing the door.
Did he believe her mad, or did he conceive that she was merely feigning
a part?
It may be at once said that he had very little doubt that her ruthless
abduction based upon the fear that her father had met with a serious
injury, coupled with her imprisonment and the terrors excited in her by
the knowledge that she was being carried away into a remote part of the
world and that she was entirely at the mercy of a man who had proved
himself a scoundrel, had disordered her intellect, had played havoc
with her nerves and brain, so that though she might recover her reason
should she be rescued or returned to her home, she must continue mad
whilst in his ship or associated with him.
If he doubted her insanity at all his suspicion had no stiffer ground
than the shallow sand on which reposed his hope that she was acting.
Throughout this passage he did not think to consider her as the child
of a great actress. To him she had always been a gentle, sweet,
undemonstrative girl, ingenuous in speech, kind, charitable, beloved by
the poor, one whose pursuits were amiable and pure. She was nimble and
poetical with her pencil. She sang pretty songs prettily. Her beauty
informed with a colour of its own the melodies her fingers evoked from
the keys or strings of the instruments she touched. He could not think
of her as having the talents of an actress, or even the tastes of
one. He had never heard of her taking a part in a performance above a
charade. Nothing, therefore, but madness or an extraordinary dramatic
genius which it was impossible for him to think of her as possessing,
could create those parts which she had enacted before him in a manner
so immoderately life-like, so absolutely in unison with what he himself
could conceive of the behaviour of madness, that deep in his soul might
be found the conviction that she had lost her reason, and that his
passionate, unprincipled love was the cause of it.
Shortly before twelve the people of the _Minorca_ beheld on the
starboard bow one of those bland and beautiful pictures of the sea
which have vanished from the face of the waters to be seen no more.
The Lizard was painted in a soft, blue looming mass against the sky,
and to the right of it upon the sea-line, there sprang like stars in
their rising, the white cloths of ships--a numerous convoy from Torbay;
they rose fast with a pleasant breeze on the quarter, and one hundred
and sixty sail could have been counted with three line-of-battle ships
and some frigates to look after them. They were of all rigs known in
those days, from the commanding Indiaman armed like a man-o'-war,
hoisting her huge main and fore-yards by jeers, loosing her vast
topsails out of the tops, clothed as no ship now goes clothed with
sprit-sail and sprit-topsail, water sails and other devices in canvas
to catch even the faintest cat's paw that should tarnish the burnished
calm, down to the little snow bound to Lisbon; a gallant, an imposing,
a splendid sight, when every hull was shaped upon the sea which seemed
to be transformed into a mighty plain, brilliant for leagues with the
shining white cones of tents.
Mr Lawrence, who was on deck at noon, wisely concluding that the then
peculiar rig of the _Minorca_ would challenge the attention and excite
the suspicion of one or another of the convoying men-of-war, hoisted
British colours, and as no observation of the sun was deemed necessary
when there hung plain in sight the famous promontory of the Lizard
from which a departure was to be made, he overhung the rail gazing
apparently with absorbed interest at the grand spectacle of ships which
were making a more southerly course than he. Indeed he was so absorbed
either by that "vision splendid" or by thinking of the mad pictures he
had witnessed in the little berth from which he had lately emerged,
that he failed to notice that some of the hands forward for whom the
dinner-hour had arrived and who were hanging about the caboose, were
staring at him with a degree of obstinacy which perhaps had he regarded
it he would have deemed something more than strange, as they had a
fine show to arrest and detain their gaze on the bow. One of the most
steadfast of these starers was the man Mr Pledge familiarly styled Old
Jim.
At noon Mr Eagle, who had been in charge of the watch since eight
o'clock, was relieved by Mr Pledge, and went below. On entering the
cabin on his way to his berth, he started and stopped dead on beholding
Miss Lucy Acton standing at the table and looking up through the
skylight. She had gathered up her hair, but in such wise that had it
not been for the jockey-shaped hat which she had resumed she would
have looked as wild as though her tresses hung about her shoulders and
down her back as in her berth.
If she was sensible of the entrance of Mr Eagle she did not for
some moments running into a minute or two appear to notice him, but
continued to gaze fixedly through the skylight as though she beheld
something that riveted her vision through the open glazed cover.
Mr Eagle did not speak. Indeed, having started, he came to a stand and
scarcely moved, staring. Of course he knew that the young lady was on
board, but realisation had not been completed in his narrow, shallow
understanding, because down to this moment he had not been able to use
his eyes to see her. But now she stood before him, Miss Lucy Acton
indeed, but Lord defend him! how changed! "Why," he reflected with
the velocity of thought, "it was only a few days ago, in a manner of
speaking, that she comes aboard this vessel when we was lying at the
wharf and asks after my rheumatism, and says she'd like to make a
voyage to the West Indies if the weather could be kept fine and the
sea smooth. And I couldn't help thinking to myself that I never could
imagine a smarter and a more modish young party than she looked, whilst
now--well, if this rooning away to sea with a man is to be called love,
bust me if it ain't only another name for madness. For what young lady
in such sarcumstances as that there with a beautiful 'ome, carriages,
sarvants to wait upon her, and a loving father to give her everything
that she wants, and more than she wants, would dream of rooning away to
sea with a man with no other clothes than those on her back, onless she
was as mad as that there Miss Lucy Acton looks."
She turned her eyes upon him when the surly shell-back had come to this
part of his thoughts, and frowned without recognition in her face as
he read it. She stared at him, not with the heavy-lidded, beautiful
eyes of Lucy Acton, but with orbs of sight whose glances seemed keen
as rays of light as they shot from under her knitted brows. Though her
fair forehead was deformed by a scowl, her lips were curved into a
meaningless smile--the very expression of the idiot's highest facial
effort, and all meaning or no meaning that was in her countenance was
accentuated by the unusual, uncommon, very faint tinge which had taken
the place of the habitual bloom of her cheeks and paled her into an
aspect of distraction, wildness, and insanity.
"Do you belong to this ship?" she asked.
"Of course I do, ma'am," answered Mr Eagle, with profound astonishment
moving in his face as though it were some vitalising subcutaneous
influence that stirred in one part of his visage at a time. "Don't you
recollect me, ma'am?"
"Who is in command of this ship?" she enquired in a low, harsh voice,
almost a whisper. "Whoever he is," she rattled on, "I am his prisoner.
I am being carried away into captivity, I who am a princess, though
soon to be clothed in tatters. If you are a man with a heart have mercy
upon me, and turn this ship and steer me home!"
Eagle stood dumbfounded. He was prepared to hear her represent her
state in such fiction as had been preconcerted between her and Mr
Lawrence. But he never could have supposed that simulation of madness
was the posture of mind she had pre-arranged to feign, and she looked
so mad and spoke so madly that it was impossible for such a stubborn,
sour old fool to see the truth or know what she meant.
He gazed at her with the vacancy of a confounded mind, perplexed
not infinitely, for few understandings were more limited, and then
said: "I've got no power here, ma'am. It isn't for me to steer the
ship, if you was to condescend to go on your bended knees, which the
Lord forbid. Indeed, ma'am, I don't know what to say, and only know
what I've been told, and can but judge by what I see. It's not for
me as mate of this vessel to mess about with something that may be
all right or all wrong. There's one in this ship as could break me
and would break me if so be I gave him the chance, and a chance he'd
find"--here he lowered his voice and looked up at the skylight--"though
no other captain would think of taking advantage of it. If you've been
wronged, I'm 'eartily sorry for it. And if it's all right, why then,
ma'am, I wish you joy, though it's a very bold henterprise--a very
bold henterprise," he added, and he gloomily shook his head and sourly
viewed her.
Whilst this singular conversation was being conducted in the cabin, a
scene in the tragicomedy of which this book is the relation was being
prepared on deck. The convoy on the starboard bow had considerably
risen and was scattering, and flags from the armed fabrics which
watched the vessels streamed at gaff end and mizzen royal mast-head
in signal to the slow sailers and to other ships whose blockheads of
masters, indifferent to the safety of the bottoms they commanded, acted
without reference to the possibility of the enemy heaving into view,
and some of them with the contemptible determination to prove their
independence by giving the commodore and the naval officers in the
other ships as much trouble and annoyance as skilless seamanship could
provide.
Mr Lawrence kept the _Minorca_ away a point or two that he might hold
the convoy in view and hang upon their quarter without drawing close as
though he was one of the convoyed ships, for it must be intelligible
even to the most inexperienced in sea-going affairs that Mr Lawrence
had no wish to invite the attention of one of those British men-o'-war.
He leaned over the rail, and then walked the deck, whilst Mr Pledge
paced to leeward. On a sudden Mr Lawrence became aware that the whole
ship's company were on deck forward in the neighbourhood of the
caboose, and that a few talked together with frequent glances aft,
whilst others stared in the direction in which he moved, deliberately
and obstinately.
He stood a moment before he made a turn for another quarterdeck
excursion and viewed them, and then walked right aft with his back
turned to the bows of the ship, and in such an attitude that should the
man at the wheel look over his shoulder he would not be able to see
what he was doing. What he did was to pull from the pocket of his coat
a pistol whose priming he quickly examined; he replaced the weapon,
which was of a lighter pattern than the cumbrous engine which in those
days men stuffed into their belts, and none by observation of his coat
would conceive that he went about armed with a loaded pistol. This
done he wheeled round and walked the usual distance forward.
As he advanced, one of the sailors came away from a little crowd of men
manifestly with the object of addressing him. This man was Pledge's
friend "Old Jim." He was about forty-five, with a neck as long as
a piece of broken pillar, and lantern jaws deformed by a growth of
mustard-coloured hair sprouting in single fibres. He had but three or
four teeth in his gums, two of which shot outwards and lifted his upper
lip. He was generally reckoned the ugliest man in Old Harbour Town, and
esteemed by his brethren of the jacket as one of the best sailors that
ever stepped a ship's deck.
"May I have a word with you, sir?" he exclaimed in a coarse, hoarse,
broken voice.
"What do you want?" said Mr Lawrence, halting and viewing the fellow
with a frowning face and lips which grew tight-set the instant he
closed them.
"I beg your pardon, sir----" began the man.
"To the point! Out with it and bear a hand!" exclaimed Mr Lawrence with
a stern, contemptuous glance at the huddle of faces forward, and then
slightly turning his head to see in the tail of his eye what Mr Pledge
was doing.
"Well, sir, it's like this," said the man, pronouncing his words
forcibly in his determination to show a bold front. "Us sailors who
agreed to sail this 'ere ship to Kingston in Jamaica have got to hear
that we are bound to another port, though where it is ain't know'd."
"What's this matter got to do with you?" said Mr Lawrence fiercely.
"It's got to do with us all, sir, not alone with me," was the answer.
"If it's the owner's wish that this vessel shall be carried to another
port, there she shall go; and so you have it. Now, go forward!" said Mr
Lawrence, and he moved as though about to turn on his heel.
A murmur broke from the men.
"We are not willing to carry this ship to any other port than the port
we agreed to, sir," said Old Jim, speaking with great firmness, the
murmur that had risen behind him having stimulated his fortitude.
"I think you are a mutinous dog," said Mr Lawrence in a snarling,
sarcastic voice, but preserving a frown that was portentous of an
intellectual thunderstorm through the darkness of which the eyes would
flash lightning. "Do you see those men-of-war out yonder? I need but
make a signal to bring an armed crew aboard, and then you shall be
carried into the first port that's convenient and discharged to make
way for a crew of willing men--men willing to obey their commander, who
must be willing to obey his owner."
"There's no good in threatening us with your armed crew. We agreed for
Kingston," said a voice.
"Who said that?" shouted Mr Lawrence, with the blood red in his face.
"Me--Thomas Hanlin," was the answer, and a sailor made two or three
steps and stood close to Old Jim.
"Mr Pledge," cried Mr Lawrence, "clap that man in irons! go and fetch
them, sir!" and rounding again upon the man, and approaching him by
several paces, he pulled the pistol from his pocket and levelling it
direct at the man's head, cried in a tone that left not an instant's
doubt of his resolution in the mind of every man who saw and heard: "If
you utter another syllable I'll send this ball through your brains!"
As he flung himself into this posture of taking aim, with some of the
crew about the caboose cowering as do men who seek to dodge a missile,
whilst Old Jim and the other stood in the foreground steadily staring
at the enraged officer with the blood in his cheeks, Lucy Acton
came on deck, and, standing with her hand upon the companion-way,
wild-eyed, and pale and dishevelled, with a mien of distraction which
was a marvellously true copy of madness in momentary halt, watched the
proceedings.