MY SHIPMATE LOUISE
VOL. II.
NEW NOVELS AT ALL LIBRARIES.
A FELLOW OF TRINITY. By ALAN ST. AUBYN and WALT WHEELER. 3 vols.
THE WORD AND THE WILL. By JAMES PAYN. 3 vols.
AUNT ABIGAIL DYKES. By GEORGE RANDOLPH. 1 vol.
A WARD OF THE GOLDEN GATE. By BRET HARTE. 1 vol.
RUFFINO. By OUIDA. 1 vol.
London: CHATTO & WINDUS, Piccadilly, W.
MY SHIPMATE LOUISE
The Romance of a Wreck
BY
W. CLARK RUSSELL
[Illustration]
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. II.
London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1890
PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON
CONTENTS
OF
THE SECOND VOLUME
CHAPTER PAGE
XV. A SINGULAR PLOT 1
XVI. WE SIGHT A WRECK 22
XVII. THE ‘MAGICIENNE’ 45
XVIII. ADRIFT 66
XIX. NIGHT 86
XX. I SEARCH THE WRECK 108
XXI. WE SIGHT A SAIL 134
XXII. THE ‘LADY BLANCHE’ 156
XXIII. CAPTAIN BRAINE 178
XXIV. THE CREW OF THE BARQUE 202
XXV. I KEEP A LOOKOUT 223
XXVI. I AM QUESTIONED 245
XXVII. THE BRIG’S LONGBOAT 269
XXVIII. I QUESTION WETHERLY 289
MY SHIPMATE LOUISE
CHAPTER XV
A SINGULAR PLOT
It speedily ran amongst us of the cuddy that the dead sailor who had
been so very impressively interred by old Keeling had returned to the
ship, and was alive in some part of her, secure in handcuffs or in
leg-irons; but so much was made of the fire which had broken out that
Crabb’s reappearance lost as a miracle half the weight it would have
carried had it happened alone. Besides, the sense of the people soon
gathered that the business was a plot which had been managed with
astonishing cleverness, and it all seemed plain as mud in a wine-glass
when the whisper went round that Hemmeridge was under arrest as an
arch-conspirator in the matter. And certainly it made one feel far
from comfortable even to think that for the past weeks a ruffian of a
true piratical complexion had been secreted in the ship’s hold, where
his confederates would keep him supplied with tobacco and the means of
lighting it, and where, in his borings and pryings, he was tolerably
certain to have stumbled upon something inflammatory in the shape of
spirits. Indeed, it made me draw my breath short when my mind went to
the rum puncheons and the powder-magazine below, and to the vision of
Crabb, drunk, stupidly groping with a naked light in his hand, during
some midnight hour, maybe, when we were all in bed.
However, the imagination of the passengers would hardly go to these
lengths. Their thoughts held to the fire, and their talk chiefly
concerned it. When the skipper came below for a glass of grog that
night, the ladies so baited him with questions that one pitied him
almost for not being able to enjoy the privilege of venting his heated
soul in a few strong words.
‘I _cannot_ satisfy myself, Captain Keeling, that the fire is utterly
extinguished,’ said Mrs. Bannister.
‘Might it not burst out again, capting?’ cried Mrs. Hudson. ‘There
should be plenty of pails kept filled with water ready to empty if
smoke is smelt.’
‘Perhaps something may be on fire even now!’ exclaimed Mrs Joliffe,
‘something that doesn’t make a smoke; and how _then_ are the sailors to
tell if all is right in the bottom of the ship?’
‘Captain Keeling,’ cried Mrs. Trevor, ‘is it quite safe to go to bed,
do you think?’
‘If a fire should break out,’ said Miss Hudson in a trembling voice,
as though shudder after shudder were chasing through her, ‘how can we
depend upon being called? It is impossible to hear downstairs what is
going on on deck.’
Poor old marline-spike made a bolt of it at last, fairly turning tail
and rushing up the companion steps when it came to the colonel striking
in and topping off the female broadsides by inquiries of a like nature
delivered at the very height of his pipes.
However, the night passed quietly; and when next morning came and the
people assembled at breakfast, all fear of fire was seemingly gone,
and little more was talked about than Crabb and what his designs had
been, the topic gathering no mean accentuation from the doctor’s vacant
place. Somewhere about ten o’clock I was standing at the taffrail
watching the ship’s wake, that was languidly streaming off in a short
oily surface, and wondering whether, if we were to fall in with nothing
brisker than these faint airs and draughts of wind, all hands would not
have grown white-haired and decrepit by the time we were up with the
Cape, leaving the Indian Ocean and Bombay out of consideration, when
the head-steward came up to me.
‘Captain Keeling’s compliments, sir, and he’ll feel greatly hobliged,
providing you’re not hotherwise occupied, by your stepping to his
cabin, sir.’
‘Oh yes, with pleasure,’ said I. ‘Is he alone?’
‘He is not, sir.’
I went down the companion steps, knocked at the captain’s door, and
entered. It was a roomy interior, a very noble ship’s berth, occupying
hard upon the width of the deck right aft, saving, as I have before
described, a sort of small chart-room alongside, bulkheaded off. There
was a large stern window, after the olden fashion, with the blue
line of the horizon gently sliding up and down it, and a shivering
light lifting off the sea to the glass, sharp and of a sort of azure
brilliancy, as though from diamonds set a-trembling. Keeling, in full
fig, his face showing of a dark red against some maple-coloured ground
of bulkhead or ship’s side, was seated at a table. He instantly rose
on my entering, gave me one of his wire-drawn bows, and motioned me
to a seat, thanking me in a few words for coming. On the starboard
hand stood Crabb and the sailmaker, handcuffed, and on either side of
them was a seaman with a cutlass dangling at his hip. On the port hand
sat Dr. Hemmeridge, his legs crossed, his thumbs in the armholes of
his waistcoat, and his head drooped. He was deadly pale, and looked
horribly ill and worried. Near him was one of the sailors, a young
fellow of some seven or eight and twenty, with a quantity of hair
falling over his brow, a straggling beard, and small black eyes, which
roamed swiftly in glances charged methought with the spirit of mutiny
and menace and defiance. Mr. Prance was at the captain’s elbow; and the
third mate was seated at an end of the table with a pen in his hand and
some paper in front of him.
I bowed to Hemmeridge, but he took no notice. Until the captain
addressed me, I stared hard at Crabb; for even now, with the ugly
ruffian standing before me, my mind found it difficult to realise
that he was alive; that the creature I gazed at was the man whom all
hands of us, with an exception or two, supposed overboard a thousand
fathoms deep. There was, besides, the fascination of his ugliness. The
hunch-like curve of his back, his little blood-stained eyes looking
away from his nose, as though they sought to peer at something at the
back of his head, the greasy trail of carroty hair upon his back,
the fragment of nose over his hare-lip, these and the rest of him
combined into the representation of the most extravagantly grotesque,
ill-favoured figure ever witnessed outside the bars of a menagerie. The
sailmaker’s face was as white as one of his bolts of canvas, but it
wore a determined look, though I noticed a quivering in the nostrils of
his high-perched nose, and a constant uneasy movement of the fingers,
as of dying hands plucking at bedclothes.
‘Mr. Dugdale,’ exclaimed old Keeling with the dignity and gravity of
a judge, ‘I’ve taken the liberty to send for you, as I am informed
by Mr. Prance that when that man there’--inclining his head towards
Crabb without looking at him--‘was lying, as it was supposed, dead in
his bunk, you accompanied Mr. Hemmeridge, the ship’s surgeon’--here he
indicated the doctor with a motion of his head but without looking at
him either--‘into the forecastle, and stood for some considerable time
surveying the so-called corpse.’
‘That is quite true,’ said I.
‘Did Mr. Hemmeridge expose the man’s face to you?’
‘He did.’
‘What impression was produced upon your mind by the sight of the--of
the--body?’
Crabb gave a horrible grin.
‘That he was stone-dead, Captain Keeling; so stone-dead, sir, that I
can scarcely credit the man himself is now before me.’
Hemmeridge looked up and fixed his eyes upon me.
‘It is but reasonable I should inform you, Mr. Dugdale,’ continued
old marline-spike, ‘that Mr. Hemmeridge is under arrest on suspicion
of conspiring with Crabb, with Willett, and with Thomas Bobbins’--he
glanced at the man who stood next to the doctor--‘to plunder the ship.
Bobbins has given evidence that leaves me in no doubt as to the guilt
of Crabb and Willett.’
Crabb uttered a curse through his teeth, accompanied with a look at the
young seaman, in the one-eyed gleam of which murder methought was writ
too large to be mistaken for any other intention. Old Keeling did not
heed him.
‘Bobbins’s story,’ he continued, ‘is to this effect: that Crabb was to
swallow a potion which would produce the appearance of death; that the
sailmaker was to have a hammock weighted, shaped, and in all respects
equipped to resemble the one in which Crabb would be stitched up: that
in the dead of night, when the ship was silent, and the deck forward
vacant, the sham hammock was to be placed upon the fore-hatch by the
sailmaker and Bobbins, and the cover containing that man’--inclining
his head at Crabb--‘conveyed into the sailmaker’s cabin, where it
was to be cut open, the man freed, and secreted in the berth till
consciousness had returned, and he was in a fit state to seize the
first opportunity of sneaking into the hold. All this was done,’ old
Keeling went on, Mr. Prance meanwhile looking as grave as an owl over
the skipper’s shoulder, whilst every now and again a hideous grin
would distort Crabb’s frightful mouth, though the sailmaker continued
to stare at the captain with a white and determined countenance, and
Hemmeridge to listen with a frowning worried look, his leg that crossed
the other swinging like a pendulum. ‘The man Crabb got into the hold,
was supplied with food and drink by Willett and Bobbins, and with tools
to enable him to break into the mail-room’----
‘And I’d ha’ done it too,’ here interrupted Crabb in a voice like a saw
going through a balk of timber, ‘if it hadn’t been for the stinking
smoke of them blasted blankets.’
‘This inquiry,’ continued Keeling, ‘now entirely concerns Mr.
Hemmeridge. You tell me, Mr. Dugdale, that Crabb seemed to you as a
stone-dead man.’
‘The devil himself couldn’t ha’ told the difference,’ bawled Crabb.
‘_He’s_ not in it,’ insolently motioning with his elbow towards the
doctor. ‘Wouldn’t that blooming Bobbins ha’ said so?’ and he darted
another murderous glance at the hairy young sailor.
‘I can assure you, Captain Keeling,’ said I, ‘that the man was
perfectly dead. There is not a shadow of a doubt in my mind that Mr.
Hemmeridge was fully convinced the body was a corpse. Convinced,
captain, but dissatisfied too; and perhaps,’ said I, with a glance at
Crabb, ‘it is a pity for more sakes than one that he did not carry out
his idea of a post-mortem examination.’
‘Mr. Dugdale,’ exclaimed Hemmeridge in a low, deep, trembling voice,
‘before God and man, I am innocent; and I hope to live to call Captain
Keeling to account for this monstrous slander, this enormous suspicion,
this dishonourable and detestable accusation.’
‘I’ve never heered,’ said the man named Bobbins, in a long-drawn
whining voice, ‘that this gent was consarned. I remembered Crabb asking
what was to be done if so be the surgeon should cut him up to see what
he died of, and Mr. Willett kissed the Bible afore Crabb and me to
this: that if the surgeon made up his mind to open Crabb, Willett was
to show him the bottle of physic, and to tell him that Crabb had took
it for some bad complaint, and that, though he might look dead, he
worn’t so.’
Crabb hove a fearful curse at the man. The bushy-whiskered sailor who
guarded him on the right significantly put his hand upon the hilt of
his cutlass whilst he said something to him under his breath.
‘This is new to me,’ exclaimed Keeling, screwing his eye gimlet-fashion
into the face of Bobbins, and then letting it drop, as if satisfied.
‘Mr. Hemmeridge, I have _suspected_ you, sir; but it’s a little soon
for you to talk of my having _accused_ you. You are a medical man. If
anybody knows death by looking upon it you should. Yet, though this man
Crabb is merely counterfeiting death, you come aft to me and report him
dead! What am I to infer? Your ignorance or your guilt, sir?’
‘Captain Keeling,’ cried I, ‘believe me when I promise you the man
was not _counterfeiting_ death. He was to all intents and purposes
a corpse. How was this brought about? Surely by no exercise of his
own art. The look of the eye--the droop of the jaw--the hue of the
skin--Captain Keeling, it was death to the sight: no counterfeit--an
effect produced by something much more powerful than the effort of such
a will as that man has;’ and I pointed with my thumb at Crabb, who
told me with a curse to mind my own business.
‘Mr. Dugdale, I thank you,’ said Hemmeridge, bowing to me.
Captain Keeling held up a long thin phial about three-quarters full of
a dark liquor. I had not before noticed it.
‘This has been produced,’ said he, ‘by the man Bobbins, who states that
it is the stuff which Crabb swallowed, and which caused the death-like
aspect you saw in him.’ He put the bottle down; then clenching his
fist, smote the table violently. ‘I cannot credit it!’ he cried.
‘I cannot be imposed on. Am I to believe that there is any drug in
existence which will produce in a living being the exact semblance of
death?’
‘Oh, I think so, sir,’ said Prance, speaking mildly.
Hemmeridge sneered.
‘A semblance of death,’ roared old Keeling, twisting round upon his
chief mate, ‘capable of deceiving the eye--the practised eye of a
medical man? You may give me a dose of laudanum, and I may look dead
to you, sir, but not to Mr. Hemmeridge yonder. No, sir; I am not to be
persuaded,’ and here he brought his fist down upon the table again.
‘It is either gross ignorance or direct connivance, and I mean to be
satisfied--I mean to sift it to the bottom--I mean to get at the truth,
by----!’
His face was full of blood, and he puffed and blew like a swimmer
struggling for his life.
‘You’ve got the truth, and be so-and-so to you,’ broke in Crabb.
The armed sailor ground his elbow into the fellow’s ribs.
‘I am merely here to answer your questions, Captain Keeling,’ said I,
‘and must apologise for taking a single step beyond the object you
had in calling me to you; but at least permit me to ask, cannot Mr.
Hemmeridge explain the nature of the drug contained in that bottle?’
‘I do not know what it is,’ exclaimed Hemmeridge.
‘Suppose, sir,’ said Mr. Prance, ‘we give Crabb another dose; then
you’ll be able to judge for yourself.’
‘You don’t give me no more doses!’ said Crabb. ‘Try it on yourselves.’
The captain sat a little, looking at me vacantly, lost in thought. He
suddenly turned to Hemmeridge.
‘You are at liberty, sir; I remove the arrest.’
‘And is that all?’ exclaimed the other, after a brief pause, viewing
him steadily. ‘I must have an apology, sir; an apology ample, abundant,
satisfying.’
‘I will see you’--began old Keeling, then checked himself. ‘You can
leave this cabin, sir.’
Hemmeridge rose from his chair. ‘I leave this cabin, sir,’ said he,
‘and I also leave my duties. Professionally, I do no more in this
ship, sir. You have disgraced, you have dishonoured me. But,’ said
he, shaking his finger at him, ‘you shall make me amends at Bombay,
sir--you shall make me amends at Bombay!’
He stalked from the cabin, old Keeling watching him with a frown, but
in silence.
‘Captain,’ I exclaimed, rising as the door closed behind the doctor,
‘I am persuaded that Mr. Hemmeridge is innocent of all participation in
this bad business. You have on board a gentleman who, I believe, has a
very extensive knowledge of drugs and herbs and the like--I mean Mr.
Saunders. It is just possible he might know the nature of the contents
of that bottle.’
Keeling reflected a minute, and then said: ‘Mr. Prance, send my
compliments to Mr. Saunders, and ask him to my cabin.’
The mate went out; I was following him.
‘Pray, stay a little, Mr. Dugdale,’ said the skipper.--‘Men, take those
fellows forward.--Remain where you are,’ he added, turning to Bobbins.
A seaman flung open the door, and Crabb and the sailmaker passed out,
followed by the second armed sailor, who silenced some blasphemous
abuse that Crabb had paused to deliver, by giving him a shove that
drove him headlong into the cuddy.
‘I am sorry to detain you, Mr. Dugdale,’ said the captain. ‘Mr.
Saunders is a rather nervous gentleman, and it might be agreeable to
him to find you here.’
‘You do not detain me, Captain Keeling. This is an amazing business,
almost too wonderful in its way to believe in. Have you ascertained how
Crabb became possessed of that magical drug?--and magical it must be,
captain, for I give you my word that never showed any corpse deader
than that fellow when Hemmeridge removed the canvas from his face.’
‘I beg your honour’s pardon,’ exclaimed Bobbins, preserving his
lamenting and whining voice, and knuckling his forehead as he spoke,
whilst I could see old Keeling lifting his eyes to him with disgust
and aversion strong in his purple countenance. ‘Mr. Willett told me
that Crabb ’ud say he’d got that there stuff off a travelling Jew that
he fell in with at some Mediterranean port. He bought two lots of it,
and tried a dose on a man who took it unbeknown, reckoning it good for
spasms. He believed as it had killed the chap, sich was his corpse-like
swound; but he come to all right arter four-and-twenty hours, and niver
knowed nothen about it, and believed it still to be Monday when it were
Toosday. This put the scheme he tried on here into his head.’
‘Has he ever attempted anything of the same sort before?’ inquired
Keeling.
‘I dunno, sir. He’s a bad un. It ’ud make a marble heffigy sweat to
hear him talk in his sleep.’
There was a knock at the cabin door, and Mr. Prance ushered in Mr.
Saunders. The little chap looked very small as he entered, holding his
large hat in his hand. He was pale, and stared up at us with something
of alarm as we rose to his entrance, the skipper giving him the same
hide-bound bow that he had greeted me with.
‘Is Mr. Saunders acquainted with the story of this business, Mr.
Prance?’ old Keeling inquired.
‘Yes, sir,’ replied the mate. ‘I gave him the substance of it in a few
words as we came along.’
‘It is extremely startling,’ said the little man, climbing on to the
chair into which old Keeling had waved him, and dangling his short legs
over the edge as a small boy might.
‘Your knowledge of drugs and medicines, Mr. Saunders, is, I believe,
very considerable?’ said the skipper. The little fellow bowed. ‘This,’
said Keeling, holding up the phial, ‘is a drug, the stupefying effects
of which, I am informed, are so remarkable that any one who takes it
entirely loses animation, and presents such an aspect of death as will
deceive the eye of the most expert medical practitioner. Is such a
thing conceivable, Mr. Saunders?’
The little man reflected very earnestly for some moments, with his eyes
fixed upon Keeling. He then asked Mr. Prance to hand him the phial,
which he uncorked, and smelt and tasted.
‘I cannot be positive,’ he exclaimed, with a slow, wise shake of
his large head; ‘but I strongly suspect this to be what is known as
_morion_, the death-wine of Pliny and Dioscorides. Mr. Dugdale, observe
the strange, peculiar faint smell--what does it suggest?’
I put the bottle to my nose and sniffed. ‘Opium will it be, Mr.
Saunders?’
‘Just so,’ he cried. ‘Captain Keeling, smell you, sir.’
The old skipper applied the bottle to his nostrils and snuffled a
little. ‘I should call this a kind of opium,’ said he.
‘If,’ exclaimed Mr. Saunders, ‘it be morion, as I believe it is, it
is made from the mandragora or mandrake of the kind that flourishes
in Greece and Palestine and in certain parts of the Mediterranean
seaboard.’
‘But am I to understand,’ said Keeling, ‘that a dose of it is going to
make a man look as dead as if he were killed?’
‘The effect of morion,’ responded Mr. Saunders, ‘is that of suspended
animation, scarcely distinguishable from death.’
‘Could it deceive a qualified man such as Dr. Hemmeridge?’ demanded the
skipper.
‘I should think it very probable,’ answered little Saunders cautiously;
‘in fact, sir, as we have seen, he _was_ deceived by the effects of
that drug, be it morion or anything else.’
‘You can go forward,’ said the captain to Bobbins.
The fellow flourished a hand to his brow and left the cabin.
‘Mr. Saunders, I am obliged to you, sir, for your information,’
continued old Keeling. ‘I trust to have your opinion confirmed either
in Bombay or in London. To me it seems a very incredible thing. Mr.
Dugdale, I thank you for the trouble you have given yourself to attend
here.’
He bowed; and little Saunders and myself, accompanied by Mr. Prance,
entered the cuddy.
‘A most extraordinary business altogether,’ cried the little man: ‘it
is wonderful enough, supposing the stuff to be morion, that a common
sailor should be in possession of such a drug; but much more wonderful
yet that it should occur to him to employ it as an instrument in
probably the most audacious project ever adventured on board ship.’
‘Hemmeridge might have opened Crabb,’ said I.
‘Well, the rogue foresaw it, and provided against it, as we know,’
exclaimed Mr. Prance. ‘There is pocketable booty in the mail-room to
the value of hard upon a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. A man like
Crabb will run risks for such plunder, Mr. Dugdale. If the sailmaker
had kept his word and produced the bottle to Hemmeridge, the doctor
would have been pretty sure to stay his hand.’
‘Why, likely as not,’ I exclaimed: ‘but tell me, Mr. Prance--that
fellow Bobbins seems to have been coaxed very easily into peaching.’
‘Ay,’ said he; ‘there’d been an ugly quarrel between him and Willett
ten days ago. I believe the rascal would not have split whilst Crabb
lay snug and secret in the hold, but on his showing himself, Bobbins
took fright, thought of his neck, and being actuated besides by hatred
of Willett, came forward and volunteered the whole yarn.’
‘And how is he to be served?’ inquired Mr. Saunders.
‘Left to be at large, sir,’ answered the mate; ‘and punishment enough,
too, as any one may suppose, of a false-hearted, lily-livered shipmate
who has to swing his hammock three or four months among a forecastle
full of hands. For my part,’ added he with a laugh, ‘if I were that
miscreant, I’d rather be snug in irons along with Willett and the
cast-eyed pirate, stowed safe out of sight.’
He entered his cabin, and Mr. Saunders and I stepped on to the
quarter-deck.