WHEREIN THE “SEVEN SISTERS” ACTS STRANGELY, AND I SIT WAITING FOR THE
MANACLES
An air of westerly wind had risen after meridian and the haar was gone,
so that when I stood at the break of the poop as the brigantine crept
into the channel and flung out billows of canvas while her drunken
seamen quarrelled and bawled high on the spars, I saw, as I imagined,
the last of Scotland in a pleasant evening glow. My heart sank. It was
not a departure like this I had many a time anticipated when I listened
to Uncle Andys tales; here was I with blood on my hands and a guinea to
start my life in a foreign country; that was not the worst of it either,
for far more distress was in my mind at the reflection that I travelled
with a man who was in my secret. At first I was afraid to go near him
once our ropes were off the pawls, and I, as it were, was altogether
his, but to my surprise there could be no pleasanter man than Risk when
he had the wash of water under his rotten barque. He was not only a
better-mannered man to myself, but he became, in half an hour of the
Firth breeze, as sober as a judge. But for the roving gleed eye, and
what I had seen of him on shore, Captain Dan Risk might have passed for
a model of all the virtues. He called me Mr. Greig and once or twice
(but I stopped that) Young Hazel Den, with no irony in the appellation,
and he was at pains to make his mate see that I was one to be treated
with some respect, proffering me at our first meal together (for I was
to eat in the cuddy,) the first of everything on the table, and even
making some excuses for the roughness of the viands. And I could see
that whatever his qualities of heart might be, he was a good seaman, a
thing to be told in ten minutes by a skipper's step on a deck and his
grip of the rail, and his word of command. Those drunken barnacles of
his seemed to be men with the stuff of manly deeds in them, when at his
word they dashed aloft among the canvas canopy to fist the bulging sail
and haul on clew or gasket, or when they clung on greasy ropes and at a
gesture of his hand heaved cheerily with that “yo-ho” that is the chant
of all the oceans where keels run.
Murchison was a saturnine, silent man, from whom little was to be got of
edification. The crew numbered eight men, one of them a black deaf
mute, with the name of Antonio Ferdinando, who cooked in a galley little
larger than the Hazel Den kennel. It was apparent that no two of them
had ever met before, such a career of flux and change is the seaman's,
and except one of them, a fellow Horn, who was foremast man, a more
villainous gang I never set eyes on before or since. If Risk had raked
the ports of Scotland with a fine bone comb for vermin, he could not
have brought together a more unpleasant-looking crew. No more than two
of them brought a bag on board, and so ragged was their appearance that
I felt ashamed to air my own good clothes on the same deck with them.
Fortunately it seemed I had nothing to do with them nor they with me;
all that was ordered for the eking out of my passage, as Risk had
said, was to copy the manifest, and I had no sooner set to that than I
discerned it was a gowk's job just given me to keep me in employ in the
cabin. Whatever his reason, the man did not want me about his deck. I
saw that in an interlude in my writing, when I came up from his airless
den to learn what progress old rotten-beams made under all her canvas.
It had declined to a mere handful of wind, and the vessel scarcely
moved, seemed indeed steadfast among the sea-birds that swooped and
wheeled and cried around her. I saw the sun just drop among blood-red
clouds over Stirling, and on the shore of Fife its pleasant glow. The
sea swung flat and oily, running to its ebb, and lapping discernibly
upon a recluse promontory of land with a stronghold on it.
“What do you call yon, Horn?” I said to the seaman I have before
mentioned, who leaned upon the taffrail and watched the vessel's greasy
wake, and I pointed to the gloomy buildings on the shore.
“Blackness Castle,” said he, and he had time to tell no more, for the
skipper bawled upon him for a shirking dog, and ordered the flemishing
of some ropes loose upon the forward deck. Nor was I exempt from
his zeal for the industry of other folks for he came up to me with
a suspicious look, as if he feared I had been hearing news from his
foremast man, and “How goes the manifest, Mr. Greig?” says he.
“Oh, brawly, brawly!” said I, determined to begin with Captain Daniel
Risk as I meant to end.
He grew purple, but restrained himself with an effort. “This is not
an Ayr sloop, Mr. Greig,” said he; “and when orders go on the _Seven
Sisters_ I like to see them implemented. You must understand that
there's a pressing need for your clerking, or I would not be so soon
putting you at it.”
“At this rate of sailing,” says I, “I'll have time to copy some hundred
manifests between here and Nova Scotia.”
“Perhaps you'll permit me to be the best judge of that,” he replied in
the English he ever assumed with his dignity, and seeing there was no
more for it, I went back to my quill.
It was little wonder, in all the circumstances, that I fell asleep over
my task with my head upon the cabin table whereon I wrote, and it was
still early in the night when I crawled into the narrow bunk that the
skipper had earlier indicated as mine.
Weariness mastered my body, but my mind still roamed; the bunk became
a coffin quicklimed, and the murderer of David Borland lying in it; the
laverock cried across Earn Water and the moors of Renfrew with the voice
of Daniel Risk. And yet the strange thing was that I knew I slept and
dreamed, and more than once I made effort, and dragged myself into
wakefulness from the horrors of my nightmare. At these times there was
nothing to hear but the plop of little waves against the side of the
ship, a tread on deck, and the call of the watch.
I had fallen into a sleep more profound than any that had yet blessed my
hard couch, when I was suddenly wakened by a busy clatter on the deck,
the shriek of ill-greased davits, the squeak of blocks, and the fall of
a small-boat into the water. Another odd sound puzzled me: but for the
probability that we were out over Bass I could have sworn it was the
murmur of a stream running upon a gravelled shore. A stream--heavens!
There could be no doubt about it now; we were somewhere close in shore,
and the _Seven Sisters_ was lying to. The brigantine stopped in her
voyage where no stoppage should be; a small boat plying to land in
the middle of the night; come! here was something out of the ordinary,
surely, on a vessel seaward bound. I had dreamt of the gallows and of
Dan Risk as an informer. Was it a wonder that there should flash into my
mind the conviction of my betrayal? What was more likely than that the
skipper, secure of my brace of guineas, was selling me to the garrison
of Blackness?
I clad myself hurriedly and crept cautiously up the companion ladder,
and found myself in overwhelming darkness, only made the more appalling
and strange because the vessel's lights were all extinguished. Silence
large and brooding lay upon the _Seven Sisters_ as she lay in that
obscuring haar that had fallen again; she might be Charon's craft
pausing mid-way on the cursed stream, and waiting for the ferry cry upon
the shore of Time. We were still in the estuary or firth, to judge
by the bickering burn and the odors off-shore, above all the odour of
rotting brake; and we rode at anchor, for her bows were up-water to
the wind and tide, and above me, in the darkness, I could hear the
idle sails faintly flapping in the breeze and the reef-points all
tap-tapping. I seemed to have the deck alone, but for one figure at the
stern; I went back, and found that it was Horn.
“Where are we?” I asked, relieved to find there the only man I could
trust on board the ship.
“A little below Blackness,” said he shortly with a dissatisfied tone.
“I did not know we were to stop here,” said I, wondering if he knew that
I was doomed.
“Neither did I,” said he, peering into the void of night. “And whit's
mair, I wish I could guess the reason o' oor stopping. The skipper's
been ashore mair nor ance wi' the lang-boat forward there, and I'm sent
back here to keep an e'e on lord kens what except it be yersel'.”
“Are ye indeed?” said I, exceedingly vexed. “Then I ken too well, Horn,
the reason for the stoppage. You are to keep your eye on a man who's
being bargained for with the hangman.”
“I would rather ken naithin' about that,” said he, “and onyway I think
ye're mistaken. Here they're comin' back again.”
Two or three small boats were coming down on us out of the darkness; not
that I could see them, but that I heard their oars in muffled rowlocks.
“If they want me,” said I sorrowfully, “they can find me down below,”
and back I went and sat me in the cabin, prepared for the manacles.