THE STRUGGLE IN THE CABIN, AND AN EERIE SOUND OF RUNNING WATER
The place stank with bilge and the odour of an ill-trimmed lamp smoking
from a beam; the fragments of the skipper's supper were on the table,
with a broken quadrant; rats scurried and squealed in the bulkheads,
and one stared at me from an open locker, where lay a rum-bottle,
while beetles and slaters travelled along the timbers. But these
things compelled my attention less than the skylights that were masked
internally by pieces of canvas nailed roughly on them. They were not
so earlier in the evening; it must have been done after I had gone to
sleep, and what could be the object? That puzzled me extremely, for it
must have been the same hand that had extinguished all the deck and mast
lights, and though black was my crime darkness was unnecessary to my
betrayal.
I waited with a heart like lead.
I heard the boats swung up on the davits, the squeak of the falls, the
tread of the seamen, the voice of Risk in an unusually low tone. In the
bows in a little I heard the windlass click and the chains rasp in the
hawse-holes; we were lifting the anchor.
For a moment hope possessed me. If we were weighing anchor then my
arrest was not imminent at least; but that consolation lasted briefly
when I thought of the numerous alternatives to imprisonment in
Blackness.
We were under weigh again; there was a heel to port, and a more rapid
plop of the waters along the carvel planks. And then Risk and his mate
came down.
I have seldom seen a man more dashed than the skipper when he saw me
sitting waiting on him, clothed and silent. His face grew livid; round
he turned to Murchison and hurried him with oaths to come and clap eyes
on this sea-clerk. I looked for the officer behind them, but they were
alone, and at that I thought more cheerfully I might have been mistaken
about the night's curious proceedings.
“Anything wrang?” said Risk, affecting nonchalance now that his spate of
oaths was by, and he pulled the rum out of the locker and helped himself
and his mate to a swingeing caulker.
“Oh, nothing at all,” said I, “at least nothing that I know of, Captain
Risk. And are we--are we--at Halifax already?”
“What do you mean?” said he. And then he looked at me closely, put out
the hand unoccupied by his glass and ran an insolent dirty finger over
my new-clipped mole. “Greig, Greig,” said he, “Greig to a hair! I would
have the wee shears to that again, for its growin'.”
“You're a very noticing man,” said I, striking down his hand no way
gently, and remembering that he had seen my scissors when I emerged from
the Borrowstouness close after my own barbering.
“I'm all that,” he replied, with a laugh, and all the time Murchison,
the mate, sat mopping his greasy face with a rag, as one after hard
work, and looked on us with wonder at what we meant. “I'm all that,”
he replied, “the hair aff the mole and the horse-hair on your creased
breeches wad hae tauld ony ane that ye had ridden in a hurry and clipped
in a fricht o' discovery.”
“Oh, oh!” I cried, “and that's what goes to the makin' o' a Mahoun!”
“Jist that,” said he, throwing himself on a seat with an easy
indifference meant to conceal his vanity. “Jist observation and a knack
o' puttin' twa and twa thegether. Did ye think the skipper o' the _Seven
Sisters_ was fleein' over Scotland at the tail o' your horse?”
“The Greig mole's weel kent, surely,” said I, astonished and chagrined.
“I jalouse it's notorious through my Uncle Andy?”
Risk laughed at that. “Oh, ay!” said he, “when Andy Greig girned at ye
it was ill to miss seein' his mole. Man, ye might as well wear your name
on the front o' your hat as gae aboot wi' a mole like that--and--and
that pair o' shoes.”
The blood ran to my face at this further revelation of his astuteness.
It seemed, then, I carried my identity head and foot, and it was no
wonder a halfeyed man like Risk should so easily discover me. I looked
down at my feet, and sure enough, when I thought of it now, it would
have been a stupid man who, having seen these kenspeckle shoes once,
would ever forget them.
“My uncle seems to have given me good introductions,” said I. “They
struck mysel' as rather dandy for a ship,” broke in the mate, at last
coming on something he could understand.
“And did _you_ know Andy Greig, too?” said I. “Andy Greig,” he replied.
“Not me!”
“Then, by God, ye hinna sailed muckle aboot the warld!” said the
skipper. “I hae seen thae shoes in the four quarters and aye in a good
companionship.”
“They appear yet to retain that virtue,” said I, unable to resist the
irony. “And, by the way, Captain Risk, now that we have discussed the
shoes and my mole, what have we been waiting for at Blackness?”
His face grew black with annoyance.
“What's that to you?” he cried.
“Oh, I don't know,” I answered indifferently. “I thought that now ye had
got the best part o' your passage money ye might hae been thinking to do
something for your country again. They tell me it's a jail in there,
and it might suggest itself to you as providing a good opportunity for
getting rid of a very indifferent purser.”
It is one thing I can remember to the man's credit that this innuendo
of treachery seemed to make him frantic. He dashed the rum-glass at
his feet and struck at me with a fist like a jigot of mutton, and I had
barely time to step back and counter. He threw himself at me as he had
been a cat; I closed and flung my arms about him with a wrestler's grip,
and bent him back upon the table edge, where I might have broken his
spine but for Murchison's interference. The mate called loudly for
assistance; footsteps pounded on the cuddy-stair, and down came Horn.
Between them they drew us apart, and while Murchison clung to his
captain, and plied him into quietness with a fresh glass of grog, Horn
thrust me not unkindly out into the night, and with no unwillingness on
my part.
[Illustration 091]
It was the hour of dawn, and the haar was gone.
There was something in that chill grey monotone of sky and sea that
filled me with a very passion of melancholy. The wind had risen, and the
billows ran frothing from the east; enormous clouds hung over the land
behind us, so that it seemed to roll with smoke from the eternal fires.
Out from that reeking pit of my remorse--that lost Scotland where now
perhaps there still lay lying among the rushes, with the pees-weep's cry
above it, the thing from which I flew, our ship went fast, blown upon
the frothy billows, like a ponderous bird, leaving a wake of hissing
bubbling brine, flying, as it seemed, to a world of less imminent
danger, yet unalluring still.
I looked aloft at the straining spars; they seemed to prick the clouds
between the swelling sails; the ropes and shrouds stretched infinitely
into a region very grey and chill. Oh, the pallor! oh, the cold and
heartless spirit of the sea in that first dawning morn!
“It's like to be a good day,” said Horn, breaking in upon my silence,
and turning to him I saw his face exceeding hollow and wan. The watch
lay forward, all but a lad who seemed half-dozing at the helm; Risk and
his mate had lapsed to silence in the cuddy.
“You're no frien', seemingly, o' the pair below!” said Horn again,
whispering, and with a glance across his shoulder at the helm.
“It did not look as if I were, a minute or two ago,” said I. “Yon's a
scoundrel, and yet I did him an injustice when I thought he meant to
sell me.”
“I never sailed with a more cheat-the-widdy crew since I followed the
sea,” said Horn, “and whether it's the one way or the other, sold ye
are.”
“Eh?” said I, uncomprehending.
He looked again at the helm, and moved over to a water-breaker further
forward, obviously meaning that I should follow. He drew a drink of
water for himself, drank slowly, but seemed not to be much in the need
for it from the little he took, but he had got out of ear-shot of the
man steering.
“You and me's the gulls this time, Mr. Greig,” said he, whispering.
“This is a doomed ship.”
“I thought as much from her rotten spars,” I answered. “So long as she
takes me to Nova Scotia I care little what happens to her.”
“It's a long way to Halifax,” said he. “I wish I could be sure we were
likely even to have Land's End on our starboard before waur happens.
Will ye step this way, Mr. Greig?” and he cautiously led the way
forward. There was a look-out humming a stave of song somewhere in the
bows, and two men stretched among the chains, otherwise that part of the
ship was all our own. We went down the fo'c'sle scuttle quietly, and
I found myself among the carpenter's stores, in darkness, divided by a
bulkhead door from the quarters of the sleeping men. Rats were scurrying
among the timbers and squealing till Horn stamped lightly with his feet
and secured stillness.
“Listen!” said he.
I could hear nothing but the heavy breathing of a seaman within, and the
wash of water against the ship's sides.
“Well?” I queried, wondering.
“Put your lug here,” said he, indicating a beam that was dimly revealed
by the light from the lamp swinging in the fo'c'sle. I did so, and heard
water running as from a pipe somewhere in the bowels of the vessel.
“What's that?” I asked.
“That's all,” said he and led me aft again.
The dawn by now had spread over half the heavens; behind us the mouth of
the Firth gulped enormous clouds, and the fringe of Fife was as flat
as a bannock; before us the sea spread chill, leaden, all unlovely. “My
sorrow!” says I, “if this is travelling, give me the high-roads and the
hot noon.”
Horn's face seemed more hollow and dark than ever in the wan morning. I
waited his explanation. “I think ye said Halifax, Mr. Greig?” said he. “I
signed on, mysel', for the same port, but you and me's perhaps the only
ones on this ship that ever hoped to get there. God give me grace to get
foot on shore and Dan Risk will swing for this!”
Somebody sneezed behind us as Horn thus rashly expressed himself; we
both turned suddenly on the rail we had been leaning against, expecting
that this was the skipper, and though it was not Risk, it was one whose
black visage and gleaming teeth and rolling eyes gave me momentarily
something of a turn.
It was the cook Ferdinando. He had come up behind on his bare feet, and
out upon the sea he gazed with that odd eerie look of the deaf and dumb,
heedless of us, it seemed, as we had been dead portions of the ship's
fabric, seeing but the salt wave, the rim of rising sun, blood-red upon
the horizon, communing with an old familiar.
“A cauld momin', cook,” said Horn, like one who tests a humbug
pretending to be dumb, but Ferdinando heard him not.
“It might have been a man wi' all his faculties,” said the seaman
whispering, “and it's time we werena seen thegether. I'll tell ye later
on.”
With that we separated, he to some trivial duty of his office, I, with
a mind all disturbed, back to my berth to lie awake, tossing and
speculating on the meaning of Horn's mystery.