THE FRENCH MATE
I have said that the man, clearly understanding the captain's meaning,
began; but it was not a beginning, nor a middle, nor an end, that could
be set down in black and white in that Frenchman's speech. It was most
barbarous English, yet intelligible when helped along by the captain's
and Hardy's questions. It must be given in plain words to be readable,
and thus spoke that sinister-looking man:
"My name is Pierre Renaud. I am chief mate of the barque that was just
now nearly running into you. We are from Cape Town to Bordeaux. That
dog threatens my throat."
The man flashed the poniards of his eyes at the Newfoundland, who was
like an organ with one key going, trembling in its shaggy and splendid
bulk with a low, sulky, dangerous growling.
"Down!" said the captain, and the animal stretched its fore legs. "What
brings you aboard us?"
"Fear," replied the man, with a slight shrug and a look of arching
eyebrow at his questioner, and a roll of the eye over him, as though he
saw something singular in his face and manner. "A man loves his life
and will jump to save it. I thought we should crush our bows in and
founder."
"You did not stay to help your captain and encourage the men to
preserve your ship," said Captain Layard, dabbing the dog's head to
keep him quiet.
"The captain fell dead in a fright," responded the Frenchman, with
another shrug, "and I chose to save myself."
"I saw a man fall," exclaimed Hardy. "Was that you that rushed along
the poop?"
"How can I answer you?" replied the Frenchman. "We were all rushing."
"The captain fell dead!" said Captain Layard, in a musing way. "It's
evident that French sea-captains die easily. When did you strike this
fog?"
"I cannot say precisely. Some hours since," was the reply. "When we
heard the barking of a dog we knew that a ship was near, and we judged
by the barking that she was approaching. We lighted fires upon the
decks, and when the glare gave us a sight of you the sailors lost their
senses, and ran about shouting and screeching. They were too mad to
obey orders. The captain fell as I ran past him, his hands clasped upon
his heart, and as he had all along complained of the weakness of that
organ, I am certain he died of disease."
"Your countrymen are not good sailors," said Captain Layard.
The Frenchman grinned ghastly, and Sailor rumbled afresh with a
stiffening of his level fore legs as though he must rise.
"If I had been your captain," continued Layard, "I should have saved
my flying-jib boom and topgallantmast, and my sailors would not have
rushed about and torn their throats open with the shrieks of fear--that
womanly spirit!"
His smile was lofty, his self-complacency inexpressible, you guessed if
there had been a mirror at hand he would have admired himself in it.
His talk, but not his face, was past the Frenchman's comprehension.
He rolled his eyes upon Hardy, then upon a decanter half-full of rum,
standing upon a swinging tray, timing the pulse of the sea.
"He asks for a drink, sir," said Hardy.
"Give him a tot," replied Captain Layard, "then let the second mate
tell the bo'sun to find him a hole to lie down in. I don't like his
looks."
He walked abruptly to his berth, followed by the dog, but before he
entered he turned to the animal and exclaimed, "On deck, Sailor, and
keep a lookout till the smother thins," and the Newfoundland sprang up
the steps.
The Frenchman, with a smile at Hardy, touched his brow. The mate,
without noticing the fellow's gesture, took the decanter of rum from
the swing tray and gave him a glass of grog. As he handed the tumbler
to the man, he said:
"Was your captain the man who stood near the mizzen-rigging?"
The Frenchman took a long pull at the glass before answering, and then
said, "Yes."
"Do you think he fell dead, or was he struck down?" said Hardy, looking
critically at the wild and dangerous face, whose eyes stared into the
Englishman's vision with the fixity of a buried bayonet.
"He fell dead," was the answer, and down went the remainder of the grog.
"I believe I saw a man rush from him aft when he fell," said Hardy.
An expression of anger deepened the ugly devil's look of malevolence,
but he held his peace.
"Your captain is dead and you are here," said Hardy. "Your second mate
will take charge of the barque, I suppose?"
"Our second mate was drowned a week after we left the Cape," answered
the Frenchman.
"What will the crew do?"
"They will go to hell!"
"Follow me," said Hardy, and they climbed the companion-steps.
The wind was sleeping. It was now a dead calm, and the fog steeped in
night was lifting into the sight--conquering blackness off an ocean
that seemed to be boiling upon some furnace of earth miles deep. Damp
draughts of air blew with the rolling of the ship, and the canvas beat
out hollow notes like the blasts of guns heard underground. The chief
mate called the name of Mr. Candy, who stepped out of the impenetrable
profound of the quarter.
"This man," said Hardy, talking in the skylight sheen, "is mate of the
barque we were foul of just now. Take him forward to the bo'sun and
find him a bed anywhere, and food if he needs it."
"I don't need it," said the Frenchman.
"Come along," said Mr. Candy, and they disappeared.
Hardy paused to listen and peer. There was nothing to see, but he
might have heard a sound of weeping all about, as though old ocean
was mourning over its blindness. He then went to bed, but not to
sleep right away. The Frenchman's insolent touching of his brow had
accentuated his own deep suspicion of the captain's sanity, and very
grave, though perplexed, reflection attended his thoughts of Layard,
and the tragically perilous situation of the ship in charge of a
lunatic so subtly mad that no one but his chief officer might have
understanding enough to see how it was with him.
At eight bells in the middle watch he was aroused by Mr. Candy, and
was on deck in a minute or two, for he was a smart man all around; the
first at the yard-arm in reefing when his duties had carried him there,
the first to spring to the cry, no matter the command, swift in relief,
and for ever on the alert whilst the responsibility of life, cargo,
and fabric was his. The fog was still very thick, but a thin wind had
sprung up out of the east, and the streaming of the waters was like the
shaling of a summer tide upon shingle. The braces had been manned when
this weak air came, and the yards swung to hold the maintopsail aback;
the ship rolled gently under the arrest of her canvas, and there was
nothing to see and nothing to do but let the fog soak into the spirits.
"A spare bunk in the forecastle has been found for the French mate,"
Candy had said. The fellow had grumbled, muttered that he had been
an officer on board his own vessel, and deserved better usage. Candy
said he was lucky to save his life, and to find a bed in a British
forecastle. The Frenchman growled that he considered himself important
enough to sleep in the cabin.
"What did you say to that?" Hardy had asked.
"I said, 'You be damned!'" Candy replied.
Not until five bells, half-past six, in Hardy's watch did the fog show
signs of breaking up. It thinned in places, and presently through the
stretching ceiling of it the cold, pale dawn looked down upon the
sea, and made it piebald with granite-coloured spaces. The breeze
then freshened and the fog began to fly. Columns of it moved away
stately like pillars of sand on the desert; it swept in Titan cobwebs
between the masts; it sped like silken veils streaming from viewless
fleeting spirits over the trucks. Wide vistas opened to windward;
large blue eyes, soft with the moistness of their light, floated upon
the trembling eastern brine. The sun darted a pale yellow lance, and
as the captain put his head through the companion-hatch the scene of
deep, saving a blankness in the west, opened around, and it was a
shining morning with a bright sun and a blue sea and an azure sky and a
pleasant breeze of wind.
Scarcely had the captain's head shown when Hardy, looking seawards over
the quarter, exclaimed:
"There's the barque that fouled us last night, sir. She's got a wift at
her mizzen-peak."
She could be no other vessel than the barque; the morning light was
strong and she lay within a mile, and you could see that she had lost
her foretopgallantmast and jib-booms. Her maintopsail was aback; she
had clearly hove to after losing her mate and splintering clear of the
ship and the smother. Her backed topsail curved inwards like carved
ivory, her ruddy sheathing flashed its wet length to the sun as the
heave rolled her light, tall shape, with its slanting stare of black
ports, upon the wide white line that girdled her.
"Why is she flying that gamp?" said the captain, taking a telescope out
of the companionway; but before he levelled it at the ship he sent a
glance full of scrutiny aloft to gather if his vessel had been hurt in
the night, which was distinctly professional and sane, and quite enough
to have convinced the Jacks that the "old man" knew the time of day,
even if they suspected that the compass of his mind was wrong by points.
The gamp, as he termed the wift, consisted of the French flag stopped
in the middle, that is, bound by a rope yarn into the appearance of a
gamp umbrella. It tumbled at its block, and was a syllable of sea talk
signifying "help!" The skipper whistled to his dog, which had kept a
brave lookout throughout the night without relief, and which, seated on
the heel of the starboard cathead, seemed to be listening with a grave
countenance to the remarks of an ordinary seaman who was addressing
him. The beautiful and dutiful creature came bounding aft and pawed his
master to the shirt-front, rising nearly his height.
"You had better lower a boat and go and see what that fellow wants,"
said the captain, and he motioned the dog into the cabin and told it to
wait there for breakfast.
"They're lowering a boat, and mean to come aboard of us," exclaimed
Hardy, whose eyes were on the barque.
A boat dropped awkwardly from the vessel's tall side, and in a minute
or two the gold of brandished oars sparkled upon the delicate
feathering of the water. The men were washing down aboard the _York_.
In those days they carried a head pump which they rigged, and the
bright water was passed in buckets and sluiced over the planks, the
boatswain standing by and giving the scrubbers heart by his inspiriting
cries, roars, and oaths. It was a common scene of shipboard life, full
of colour, movement, and business.
Hardy looked along the decks for the French mate, but did not see him.
The captain exclaimed, "We'll send the fellow aboard in his boat. A
good riddance. How some faces damn the souls which animate them! You
seldom err in judging of a man by his looks. The expression is formed
by the character. But affliction may deceive you, I allow; a harelip,
for example, or a cock-eye."
"Shall I pass the word for the Frenchman, sir?" said Hardy.
"Oh, yes! oh, yes, rout him out of it!" answered the captain, smiling
with that air of superiority which would have convicted him in the eyes
of a keeper.
The word was passed, and the Frenchman, with the aspect of a pirate
in a boy's book, rose through the scuttle as the boat came alongside.
The man who had steered her scrambled into the mizzen-chains and
sprang on to the quarter-deck with a salute of French courtesy. He was
close-shaven and dark, habited in loose blue breeches and a jumper,
and looked a good sailor spite his nationality, that was as marked in
gesture and bearing as though branded on his brow.
"Can I speak to the captain?" said he, looking from Hardy to the
skipper. His broken English was good.
"Glad you speak my tongue," said the captain. "What do you want?"
"I have served in American ships and can speak English," answered
the man. "I am brother of the captain of that barque. He was stabbed
last night and is dead. Our second mate, too, is dead. The first mate
is missing. I'll swear he killed my poor brother, and then drowned
himself. We are without a navigator. What are we to do?"
"You shall have a navigator," exclaimed Captain Layard, and he looked
toward the forecastle, but the Frenchman had disappeared.
The man bowed and said, "It was a cold-blooded assassination. They had
been quarrelling all the voyage. The villain chose the right moment,
and the sea is easier than the guillotine."
"I saw your captain fall," said Hardy, "and the man that killed him is
aboard us."
The fellow started, and so did his eyeballs in their sockets as he
flashed them eagerly and fiercely along the decks where the sailors
were scrubbing, and the boatswain encouraging them with the pleasant
promptings of the British forecastle: "Scrub it out of 'em, my lads.
D'ye want to drown the ship, you sojer? Slap it along the lee-coaming
and be damned to you, Dick! Ain't it as thick as yer eyebrows there?
Hurry up, hurry up with them buckets. Are we a hexcavator with the
steam turned off?"
"A hand fetch that Frenchman out of the fok'sle and bring him aft,"
shouted Hardy.
"What do you mean to do with him?" asked the captain.
"I will call the crew together and consider," answered the man with a
hideously significant glance at the main yard-arm.
"If you hang him," said the captain, "who'll navigate you?"
The fellow folded his arms tightly upon his breast and sank his head,
sending a level look of patient hate through his eyelashes toward the
forecastle.
"What's your rating aboard your ship?" inquired the captain.
"Boatswain, sir," was the answer, and the man did not turn his head to
say it.
The dog at this moment came out of the cabin and stood with his fore
feet on the plank at the coaming, staring at his master. He seemed
to plead. The human spirit could not be more eloquent in the gaze;
but the captain did not heed him, for just then the man who had been
sent to fetch the Frenchman was coming aft, shoulder to shoulder with
the Frenchman himself. The men forgot to scrub; the head pump ceased
to gush; the boatswain left off conjuring and damning. All eyes were
turned aft. The silence of a moment fell upon the ship, and nothing
broke it but the low growling of the Newfoundland.
The Frenchman, fresh from the forecastle, was ghastly pale; his walk
was defiant; when abreast of the main-hatchway he came more quickly
than his companion, who stopped. He walked up close to the boatswain of
the barque and said, in his native tongue:
"Well!"
The other dropped his arms; his hands were clenched, his eyes charged
with that deadly cold light of hate which is more dangerous and fearful
than the flame of fury. He spoke slowly in French, and what he said was
this:
"You did not drown yourself, I see, after assassinating my brother."
"You lie in your throat! I sprang to save my life. Your brother is a
live man for me."
"Liar, and villain, and execrable coward!"
He stepped to the rail and said to the men, in French of course--but
you shall be told what he said:
"The assassin is in this ship. He pretends that he sprang for his life;
he killed my brother, our navigator, and would have consigned us,
helpless, to the desolation of the sea."
He returned, and was followed by a howl of passion from the boat
alongside.
All in a minute, and just as the man was posting himself again in
dramatic attitude close to the murderer, the huge Newfoundland, with
an indescribable roar of rage, sprang with the whole weight of his
body upon the French mate, and bore him to the deck with a thump of
lead, like the fall of a twelve-pounder ball, and they thought that the
brute's teeth had met in the wretch's throat. Hardy and the captain
made a rush and dragged the animal off the fallen man, and the captain,
grasping the creature by the coat of his neck, hauled him, growling
fiercely, to the companion, and drove him below.
The man rose; his nose was bleeding, and after he had run the length of
his sleeve along it his face looked like a decapitated head placed on
the upright body it had been struck from.
"I want to swing my yards," said Captain Layard. "I've been hove to
all night through you. Take that man away; I don't parley-vous myself,
and don't follow your talk. He'll navigate you home; he looks a good
navigator." And he smiled with some sense of superiority of meaning,
which made his face fitter for comedy than for the tragedy of this
passage.
The French boatswain swept his hand with an infuriate motion toward the
rail.
"If I go with this man he will kill me," said the blood-stained French
mate.
"Not he. The ship wants a navigator," replied Captain Layard, with a
cheerfulness supremely inconsequential.
"If you do not come," said the French boatswain, in his native speech,
"I will call the men up, and they will throw you into the boat."
"Why can't you speak in English?" said Captain Layard. "He'll
understand you, and we can follow your meaning."
The French mate turned on his heel and was beginning to walk slowly
forward. As a cat springs when started by a dog, so sprang the barque's
boatswain upon his brother's murderer. With the strength of the fiends
before they were cast out he rushed the bleeding scoundrel to the rail
and yelled to his men. The French mate grasped the mizzen-shrouds and
struggled and kicked in awful silence; but in less than a minute three
stout sailors, out of the four who manned the boat's oars, swarmed up.
Eight enraged hands then tore the French mate from the mizzen-rigging
as the sweep of the hurricane uproots a tree. All in a heap,
struggling, wrestling, groaning, they got him past the after-swifter,
and to an order, shrieked through his teeth by the French boatswain,
they hoisted him lengthwise to the rail, and dropped him into the boat.
The French boatswain then made a sort of salaam bow to the captain and
Hardy, and the whole four disappeared in the twinkling of an eye over
the side amid shouts of laughter from the seamen who had been washing
down the decks.
"Get all sail upon her, Mr. Hardy," said Captain Layard; "but I shall
keep my topsail to the mast for awhile until I see what they mean to do
with that barque."
The sailors dropped their buckets and scrubbing-brushes, and fell to
howling at the halliards. Topgallant and royal-yards rose, the mainsail
was left to swing with its clews aloft, and the _York_ was now a
full-rigged ship, hove to, but clothed to her trucks, leaning with the
swell as though by swaying she was knitting her frame together for the
start.
A ship when under sail on the ocean is alive; watch her closely and
you will discover that she has human intelligence in her methods of
helping, and at the same time influencing, the reason that governs
the helm and incarnate walks the quarter-deck or bridge. It was about
a quarter-past seven; the sailors resumed the business of washing
down; the decks sparkled as the brine flashed along the planks, and
the boatswain stimulated this sweetening process by the inspiriting
language of the land of the slush-lamp. The captain stood right aft
watching the receding figure of the barque's fat boat. The placid
heave of the deep was crisped by the delicate crumbling foam curling
from low, blue brows to the gentle gushing of the pleasant breeze,
like some scene of swelling land enamelled with white flowers; the
blankness to leeward had melted into azure, and it was all blueness and
brightness, and you heard a song that was sweet with its summer note
upon the harp-strings of the lofty spars.
"What will they do with him?" said the captain, going to the companion
and resting his hand upon it as though in a moment he would descend.
"I am wondering, sir," answered Hardy, who stood near. "I should not
like to be in the power of that bo'sun after I had killed his brother."
"Death drugs revenge; I would not kill my enemy," said the captain,
putting on one of those incommunicable looks which always alarmed Hardy
with thoughts of the ship's safety. "I would keep my brother's murderer
alive--at sea. There is the middle-watch and the ghastly face of the
moon! Whispers aloft and God's eye in every star! The ghostly figure
should walk the quarter-deck with the assassin, should enter his berth
with him, and sit beside his bunk and watch him. That is the revenge
that kills the soul--the very thought makes me sweat."
His face changed into an expression of agitation, and with a sudden
hurry he disappeared down the companion-steps.
Hardy watched the French boat draw alongside the barque. He wondered
that the captain should have left the deck at such a time; it was
another illustration of his insanity, no doubt. "He has gone to see to
little Johnny, perhaps," the mate thought, what had happened having
faded in the chaotic muddle of his reason. Here was Captain Layard, who
was determined to make a swift passage, keeping his ship hove to and
going below to talk to his bright-haired boy, to help him dress maybe,
and to muse in lopsided moralising over the medicine chest.
He took the glass, and levelled it at the barque, and saw the boat
slowly ascending in spasmodic jerks to the davits. A few men dragged
at the falls, and upon the port quarter of the poop the rest of the
ship's company apparently had assembled, and were clearly discussing
the recapture of the mate with the heat and passion of the French when
excited. They gesticulated, they surged and reeled, and Hardy again
saw one or another of them fling his hand in the direction of the fore
yard-arm.
He could not see if the mate stood amongst them, and all forward was
vacant deck, pulsating with the shadow of swinging sail. There was
nothing else in sight all away round the girdle of the deep, though
this was a frequented sea; and the two vessels, to a distant eye, might
have seemed abandoned, so aimless was the look they got from the white
cloths incurving to the masts.
About ten minutes after the boat had been hoisted, Hardy, who continued
to watch the barque through the glass, saw several men go forward, and
shortly after a man got into the fore-rigging, and crawled aloft and
gained the fore-yard. The powerful lenses brought the barque close, and
Hardy easily saw, as he followed the man sliding to the yard-arm, that
he carried a tail-block in his hand. He made this block fast to the
extremity of the yard, and whilst he was doing this another man got
into the fore-rigging holding a line, the end of which he gave to the
fellow on the yard, who rove it through the block, and then came into
the fore-rigging grasping the line, and both men descended to the deck.
Hardy rushed to the companionway and shouted down the hatch, taking his
chance of the skipper hearing him, "They are going to hang that mate
who killed the captain!"
A moment or two later up came Captain Layard.
"What's that you sang out?" he cried. "What's wrong? I'm with Johnny."
"Look for yourself, sir," answered Hardy, and he gave the glass to
him. The captain pointed it. Mad or not mad, he knew what a yard-arm
whip was, and what in this case it signified. He saw a crowd of men on
the forecastle; he distinguished the figure of the mate, with his arms
pinioned behind him, standing within a fathom of the rail rounding to
the forecastle break. As he gazed he saw a man bandage the wretch's
eyes with a red handkerchief. The same man next secured the end of the
line to the man's neck, and the captain, with the telescope at his eye,
began to mutter, and Hardy saw that his face had turned a greenish
yellow, but he could not understand what he said, nor clearly perceive,
as did the captain, all that was happening aboard that tragic barque,
with its wift at the gaff-end beating the air like a human arm in agony.
In the captain's glass the bulk of the forecastle crowd melted and
could not be seen on the main-deck. One who was left--and the muttering
captain thought that he was the boatswain--held a book and seemed to
be reading from it. The two men kept the barque's victim pinned to
the rail; the man who was reading closed his book and raised his arm
straight up, looking toward the main-deck. The two men sprang back from
the murderer, whose figure soared aloft, a ghastly shape of man flying
wingless to the yard-arm.
"O my God!" cried Hardy, who saw it, and the crew of the _York_,
watching that picture of short shrift and flying form, groaned and
cursed with British hatred of the sudden execution, made dastardly by
numbers.
They could see the man rushed to the nape of his neck to the yard-arm
block, then fall, bringing up with a sudden belaying of that
gallows-rope, and the hanging man began to swing like a pendulum of
death midway betwixt the yard-arm and the feathering surface of the sea.
"Suppose he didn't do it?" said Captain Layard, letting the telescope
sink and turning his face slowly to Hardy, who thought, even in that
moment of horror and astonishment, that the captain had spoken nothing
saner since the voyage began. "Fill on your topsail," continued the
captain, in a trembling voice, his face distorted by passions and
fancies beyond the penetration of reason. "I wouldn't have Johnny
see that sight; they'll keep him swinging till he has ticked out the
minutes his soul has taken to arrive in hell. Fill on your topsail,
sir. And what'll the beggars do? They'll wait for help to come along."
The mate was walking a little way forward, and the captain, with his
back upon the barque, stood muttering to himself. It was a pleasant
breeze, and the ship took the weight of the sunlit gush of blue wind
with a buoyant heel, and then she broke the waters at the bow. In two
hours the barque was glimmering like the crest of a sea in the liquid
ether far and far astern. Her topsail was still aback, and doubtless,
as Captain Layard had said, she was waiting for the help that must soon
come along.