THE FOG.
During the next two days the _Scarrowmania_ shouldered her way
westwards through the big, white-topped combers that rolled down upon
her under a lowering sky before a moderate gale. There were no
luxurious, steam-propelled hotels in the Canadian trade just then, and,
loaded deep with railway metal as she was, she slopped the green seas
in everywhere, and rolled her streaming sides out almost to her bilge.
She also shivered and rattled horribly when her single screw swung
clear and the tri-compound engines ran away.
Wyllard went down to the steerage every now and then, and Agatha, who
contrived to keep on her feet, not infrequently accompanied him. She
was glad of his society, for Mrs. Hastings was seldom in evidence, and
no efforts could get Miss Rawlinson out of her berth. The gale,
however, blew itself out at length, and the evening after it moderated
Agatha was sitting near the head of one fiddle-guarded table in the
saloon waiting for dinner, which the stewards had still some difficulty
in bringing in. Wyllard's place was next to hers, but he had not
appeared yet, nor, as it happened, had the skipper, who, however, did
not invariably dine with the passengers. One of the two doors which
led from the foot of the branching companion stairway into either side
of the saloon stood open, and presently she saw Wyllard standing just
outside it.
He beckoned to the doctor, who sat at the foot of her table, and the
latter merely raised his brows a trifle. He was a rather consequential
person, and it was evident to the girl that he resented being summoned
by a gesture. She did not think anybody else had noticed Wyllard, and
she waited with some curiosity to see what he would do. He made a sign
with a lifted hand, and she felt that the other would obey it, as, in
fact, he did, though his manner was very far from conciliatory. By
dint of listening closely, she could hear their conversation.
"I'm sorry," said Wyllard, "to trouble you just now, and I didn't come
in because that would have set everybody wondering what you were wanted
for; but one of those boys forward has been thrown down the ladder, and
has cut his head."
"Ah!" said the doctor. "I'll see to him--after dinner."
"It's a nasty cut," said Wyllard. "He's losing a good deal of blood."
"Then I would suggest that you apply to my assistant."
"As I don't know where he is, I have come to you."
The doctor made a sign of impatience. "Well," he said, "you have told
me, which I think is as far as your concern in the matter goes. I may
add that I'm not accustomed to dictation on behalf of a steerage
passenger."
Agatha saw Wyllard quietly slip between him and the entrance to the
saloon, but she also saw, as neither of the others apparently did, the
skipper appear a few paces behind them, and glance at them sharply. He
was usually a silent man, at home in the ice and the clammy fog, but
not a great acquisition in the saloon.
"Something wrong down forward, Mr. Wyllard? They were making a great
row a little while ago," he said.
"Nothing very serious," said Wyllard. "One of the boys, however, has
cut his head."
The skipper turned towards the doctor quietly; but Agatha fancied he
had overheard part of the conversation.
"Don't you think you had better go--at once?" he said.
The doctor evidently did, for he disappeared, and Wyllard, who entered
the saloon with the skipper, sat down at Agatha's side.
"How do you do it?" she asked.
"What?" asked Wyllard, attacking his dinner.
"We'll say persuade other folks to see things as you do."
"You evidently mean the skipper, and I suppose you heard something of
what was going on. In this case, as it happens, I'm indebted to his
prejudices. He's one of the old type--a seaman first of all--and what
we call bluff, and you call bounce, has only one effect upon men of his
kind. It gets their backs up."
Agatha fancied that he did not like it, either, but she changed the
subject.
"There really was a row forward," she said. "What was the trouble
over? You were, no doubt, somewhere near the scene of it."
Wyllard laughed. "I sat upon the steerage ladder, and am afraid I
cheered the combatants on. It was really a glorious row. They
hammered each other with tin plates, and some of them tried to use
hoop-iron knives, which fortunately doubled up. They broke quite a few
of the benches, and wrecked the mess table, but so far as I noticed the
only one seriously hurt was a little chap who was quietly looking on."
"And you encouraged them?"
"I certainly did. It was a protest against dirt, disorder, and the
slothfulness that's a plague to the community. Isn't physical force
warranted when there's no other remedy?"
A grey-haired Canadian looked up. "Yes," he said, "I guess it is. The
first man who pulled his gun in British Columbia was hanged right away,
and they've scarcely had to make an example of another ever since,
though it's quite a while ago."
He paused, and smiled approvingly. "A mess of any kind worries us, and
we don't take long to straighten it out. Same feelings in the Germans
and Scandinavians. I'll say that for them, any way. Your friends
swept up the steerage?"
"They took the Slavs and Jews, and pitched them down the second hatch
on to the orlop deck. Things will go smoothly now our crowd are on
top."
"Your crowd?" said Agatha.
The Canadian nodded. "That's what he meant," he said. "There are two
kinds of folks you and the rest of them are dumping into Canada. One's
the kind that will get up and hustle, break land, and build new
homes--log at first, frame and stone afterwards. They go on from a
quarter-section and a team of oxen to the biggest farm they can handle,
and every fresh furrow they cut enriches all of us. The other kind
want to sit down in the dirt and take life easily, as they've always
done. The dirt worries everybody else, and we've no use for them. By
and bye our Legislature will have to wake up and stop them getting in."
He went on with his dinner after this, but his observations left Agatha
thoughtful. She was, for one thing, beginning to understand one side
of her companion's character. He, it seemed, stood for practical
efficiency. There was a driving force in him that made for progress
and order. It was apparently his mission to straighten things out.
Some folks of his kind, she reflected, now and then made a good deal of
avoidable trouble; but there was in this man, at least, a
half-whimsical toleration, which rendered that an unlikely thing in his
particular case. Besides, she had already recognised that she was in
some respects fortunate in having such a man for her companion.
Her deck chair was always set out in the most sheltered and comfortable
place. If there was anything to be seen, a cargo boat plunging along
forecastle under, or a great iron sailing ship thrashing out to the
westwards, with the spray clouds flying about her hove up weather side,
he almost invariably appeared with a pair of powerful glasses. She was
watched over, her wishes anticipated, and the man was seldom
obtrusively present when she felt disposed to talk to somebody else.
It struck her that she had thought a good deal about him during the
last few days, and rather less than usual about Gregory, which was
partly why she did not walk up and down the deck with him, as usual,
after dinner that evening.
Three or four days later the _Scarrowmania_ ran into the Bank fog, and
burrowed through it with whistle hooting dolefully at regular
intervals. Now and then an answering ringing of bells came out of the
clammy vapour, and the half-seen shape of an anchored schooner loomed
up, rolling wildly on grey slopes of sea. Once, too, a tiny dory, half
filled with lines and buoys, slid by plunging on the wash flung off by
the _Scarrowmania's_ bows, and Agatha understood that the men in her
had escaped death by a hairsbreadth. They were cod fishers, Wyllard
told her, and he added that there was a host of them at work somewhere
in the sliding haze. She, however, fancied, now and then, that the fog
had a depressing effect on him, and that when the dory lay beneath the
rail there had been a somewhat unusual look in his face.
Then a breeze came out of the north-west, with the sting of the ice in
it, but the fog did not lift, and the _Scarrowmania_ plunged on through
it with spray-wet decks and the grey seas smashing about her bows. It
was bitterly cold and clammy, the raw wind pierced to the bone, but the
voyage was, at least, rapidly shortening, and one evening Agatha paced
the deck with Wyllard in a somewhat curious mood. Perhaps it was
merely the gloom re-acting upon her, for she was looking forward to the
landing with a certain half-conscious shrinking.
They stopped by the rails presently, looking out upon the tumbling seas
that rolled out of the sliding haze tipped with livid froth, and the
dreariness of the surroundings intensified the girl's depression.
There was something unpleasantly suggestive in the sight of the fog
that hid everything, for she had of late been troubled with a
half-apprehensive longing to see what lay before her. In the
meanwhile, she noticed the look-out standing, a lonely, shapeless
figure, amidst the spray that whirled about the plunging bows. By and
bye she saw him turn and wave an arm apparently towards the bridge
behind her, and she heard a hoarse, wind-out cry. What it meant she
could not tell, but in another moment the _Scarrowmania's_ whistle
shrieked again.
Then a grey shape burst out of the vapour, and grew with astonishing
swiftness into dim tiers of slanted sailcloth swaying above a strip of
hull that moved amidst a broad white smear of foam. It was a brig
under fore-course and topsails, and as Agatha watched her she sank to
her tilted bowsprit, and a big grey and white sea foamed about her bows.
"Aren't we dreadfully near?" she asked.
Wyllard did not answer. He was gazing up at the bridge, and once more
the whistle hurled out a great warning blast. It hardly seemed to her
that the two vessels could pass clear of each other. Then Wyllard laid
a hand upon her shoulder.
"The skipper's starboarding. We'll go round her stern," he said.
His grasp was reassuring, and she watched the straining curves of
canvas and line of half-submerged hull. It rose with streaming bows,
swung high above the sea, sank again, and vanished with bewildering
suddenness into a belt of driving fog. She was not sure that there had
been any peril, but it was certainly over now, and she was rather
puzzled by her sensations when Wyllard had held her shoulder. For one
thing, she had felt instinctively that she was safe with him. She,
however, decided not to trouble herself about the reason for this, and
by and bye she looked up at him. The expression she had already
noticed was once more in his face.
"I don't think you like the fog any more than I do," she said.
"No," said Wyllard, with a quiet forcefulness that almost startled her.
"I hate it."
"Why do you go as far as that?"
"It recalls something that still gives me a very bad few minutes every
now and then. It has been worrying me again to-night."
"I wonder," said Agatha simply, "if you would care to tell me?"
The man looked down on her with a little wry smile. "I haven't told it
often, but you shall hear," he said. "It's a tale of a black failure."
He stretched out a hand and pointed to the sliding fog and ranks of
tumbling seas. "It was very much this kind of night, and we were
lying, reefed down, off one of the Russians' beaches, when I asked for
volunteers. I got them--two boats' crews of the finest seamen that
ever handled oar or sealing rifle."
"But what did you want them for?"
"A boat from another schooner had been cast ashore. It was blowing
tolerably hard, as it usually does where the Polar ice comes down into
the Behring Sea. They'd been shooting seals from her. We meant to
bring the men off if we could manage it."
"Wouldn't one boat have been enough?"
"No," said Wyllard drily, "we had three, and I think that was one cause
of the trouble. There was one from the other schooner. You see, those
seals belonged to the Russians, and we free-lances could only shoot
them clear off shore. I'm not sure that the men in the wrecked boat
had been fishing outside the limit."
Agatha did not press for further particulars, and he went on:
"We managed to make a landing, though one boat went up bottom
uppermost," he said. "I fancy they must have broken or lost an oar
then. We also got the wrecked men, but we had trouble while we were
getting the boats off again. The surf was running in savagely, and the
fog shut down solid as a wall. Any way, we pulled off, and went out
with a foot of water in us, while one of the rescued men took my oar
when I let it go."
"Why had you to let it go?"
Wyllard laughed in a rather grim fashion.
"I got my head laid open with a sealing club," he said. "Some of the
rest had their scratches, but they managed to row. For one thing, they
knew they had to. They had reasons for not wanting to fall into the
Russians' hands. Well, we cleared the beach, and once or twice as I
tried to bale there was a shout somewhere near us, and the loom of a
vanishing boat. It was all we could make out, for the sea was slopping
into her, and the spray was flying everywhere. If there had only been
two boats we'd probably have found out our misfortune, and perhaps have
set it straight. As it was, we couldn't tell it was the same boat that
had hailed us."
He broke off for a moment, and then added quietly, "Two boats reached
the schooners. There was a nasty sea running then, and it blew
viciously hard next day. There were three men in the other."
"Ah," said Agatha, "they were drowned?"
Wyllard made a little forceful gesture. "I'm not quite sure. That's
the trouble. At least, the boat was nowhere on the beach next day, and
it's difficult to see how they could have faced the sea that piled up
when the gale came down. In all probability, they had an oar short,
and she rolled them out when a comber broke upon her in the darkness."
The girl saw him close one hand tight as he added, "If one only knew!"
"What would have befallen them if they'd got ashore?"
"It's difficult to say. In a general way, they'd have been handed over
to the Russian authorities. Still, sealers poaching up there have
simply disappeared."
He stopped again, and glanced out at the gathering darkness. "Now," he
added, "you see why I hate the fog."
"But you couldn't help it," said Agatha.
"Well," said Wyllard, "I asked for volunteers, and the money that's now
mine came out of those schooners. It's just possible those men are
living still--somewhere in Northern Asia. I only know they
disappeared."
Then he abruptly commenced to talk of something else, and by and bye
Agatha went down to the saloon, where Miss Rawlinson, who had not been
much in evidence during the voyage, presently made her appearance.
"Aren't you going into the music-room to play for Mr. Wyllard--as
usual?" she said.
Agatha was almost disconcerted. She had fallen into the habit of
spending half an hour or longer in the little music-room every evening,
with Wyllard standing near the piano; but now her companion's question
seemed to place a significance upon the fact.
"No," she said, "I don't think I am."
"Then the rest of them will wonder it you have fallen out with him."
"Fallen out with him?"
Winifred laughed. "They've naturally been watching both of you, and,
in a general way, there's only one decision they could have arrived at."
Agatha flushed a little, but her companion went on:
"I don't mind admitting that if a man of that kind was to fall in love
with me, I'd black his boots for him," she said. Then she added, with
a whimsically rueful gesture, "Still, it's most unlikely."
Agatha looked at her with a little glint in her eyes.
"He is merely Gregory's deputy," she said, with a sub-conscious feeling
that the epithet was not a remarkably fortunate one. "In that
connection, I should like to point out that you can estimate a man's
character by that of his friends."
"Oh," said Winifred, "then if Mr. Wyllard's strong points are merely to
heighten Gregory's credit, I've nothing more to say. Anyway, I'll
reserve my homage until I've seen him. Perfection among men is scarce
nowadays."
She turned away, and left Agatha thoughtful. In the meanwhile, Mrs.
Hastings came upon Wyllard in the music-room. There was just then
nobody else in it.
"You look quite serious," she said.
"I've been thinking about Miss Ismay and Gregory," said Wyllard. "In
fact, I feel a little anxious about them."
"In which way?"
"Without making any reflections upon Gregory, I somehow feel sorry for
the girl."
Mrs. Hastings nodded. "As a matter of fact, that's very much what I
felt from the first," she said. "Still, you see, there's the important
fact that she's fond of him, and it should smooth out a good many
difficulties. Anyway, what we can call the material ones won't count.
She's evidently rather a courageous person."
The man sat silent a moment or two. "I wasn't troubling about them,"
he said. "I was wondering if she really could be fond of him. It's
some years since she was much in his company."
"Hawtrey is not a man to change."
"That," said Wyllard, "is just the trouble. I've no doubt he's much
the same, but one could fancy that Miss Ismay has changed a good deal
since she last saw him. She'll look for considerably more than she was
probably content with then."
"In any case, it isn't your affair."
"In one sense it certainly isn't; but I can't help feeling a little
troubled about the thing. You see, Gregory is quite an old friend."
"And the girl is going out to marry him," said Mrs. Hastings.
Wyllard rose. "That," he said, "is quite uncalled for. I would like
to assure you of it."
He went out, and the lady sat still in a reflective mood.
"If she begins to compare him with Hawtrey, there can be only one
result," she said.
The fog had almost gone next morning, and pale sunshine streamed down
upon a froth-flecked sea. A bitter wind, however, still came out of
the hazy north, and the _Scarrowmania's_ plates were crusted with ice
where the highest crests of the tumbling seas reached them. The spray
also froze, and the decks grew slippery, until when darkness came
nobody but the seamen faced the stinging cold. Agatha felt the engines
stop late that night, and when she went out next morning the decks were
white, and she could see dim ghosts of sliding pines through a haze of
falling snow. It grew bewilderingly thick at times, but the steamer
slid on through it with whistle hooting, and when at last towards
sunset the snow cleared away Agatha stood shivering under a deck-house,
looking about her with a curiously heavy heart.
A grey haze stretched across the great river, which was also dim and
grey, and odd wisps of pines rose raggedly beneath the white hills that
cut against a gloomy, lowering sky. Deck-house, boat, and stanchion
dripped, and every now and then the silence was broken by a doleful
blast of the whistle. Nothing moved on the still, grey water; there
was no sign of life ashore; and they seemed to be steaming into a great
desolation.
By and bye, Wyllard appeared from somewhere, and after a glance at her
face slipped his hand beneath her arm, and led her down to the lighted
saloon. Then her heart grew a little lighter. Once more she was
conscious of an unreasoning feeling that she was safe with him.