THE MURDERS.
'What's the meaning of this atrocious conduct, men?' shouted Mr.
Vanderholt. 'I am sorry if anything's wrong with you. I am an old
sailor----'
He was interrupted by Captain Glew roaring out: 'Tweed, help me to put
that scoundrel in irons!' And he rushed forward, Tweed following.
'Oh, my God!' cried Mr. Vanderholt; 'stay your hands, men! This is my
ship! I am master here! I'll see your wrongs righted!'
'There'll be murder!' shrieked Miss Vanderholt.
'Go below, for Christ's sake!' roared the distracted man; and, catching
hold of his daughter's arm, he dragged her down the steps into the
cabin.
'No man in this ship puts me in irons,' said the boatswain, showing his
teeth, as he squared up at Captain Glew, with his immensely thick arms
covered with hair, arrows and crucifixes. 'I've been wanting the killing
of you this many a day, you rat! and, as you men hear me, by the living
Lord, I'll kill him if he lays a finger upon me!'
For a few minutes Captain Glew paused, waiting for Mr. Tweed, who had
disappeared. He stood one man to seven; his nostrils were dilated; his
eyes were on fire; his skin was a ghastly white; and his fingers worked
like those of one who plays a piano. His breath flew from him in sharp,
quite audible hissings. He was the incarnation of wrath fiendish above
anything human, and in that pause those of the men who met his gaze
seemed to quail.
Mr. Vanderholt came running from the companion-hatch. His right hand was
in the pocket of his coat.
'What is it, men?' he bawled. 'I am an old sailor, and was a man at sea
when you were boys. Is your pork bad? Is the rest of your food bad?'
'Go and gut yourself!' roared Dabb. 'If that cuckoo had the victualling
of this ship, you had the paying of him; and was there ever a Dutchman
that didn't know good food from bad by the price of it?'
He was proceeding. Gordon, standing alongside, clipped the dog over the
back of his neck, and silenced him.
Mr. Vanderholt swayed speechless on the slightly heaving deck of his
vessel. He was petrified. He stared at the insolent villain; he couldn't
credit his senses.
Indeed, it was shocking that that fine old gentleman, with his full gray
beard, his dignified bearing, his knowledge of life and letters, his
years, his great fortune, should be thus addressed by a brute of the
sea, a scab, a wen of the ocean, who ashore, in liquor, was, of course,
the swaggering, yelping terror of women and little children.
Mr. Tweed came along from the forecastle, grasping an iron bar with
rings upon it The moment the men saw him, three or four--Scott, Toole,
Allan, and another--flung themselves upon him. The irons were sent
whizzing overboard, the man himself was felled to the deck. He rose in a
minute, breathless and mad.
'But you _shall_ come aft. Help me, Tweed!' And the captain, crying this
out in a voice frightful to hear with its tension of passion, flung
himself upon the boatswain.
'The man who moves--the man who interferes with the captain, I'll
shoot!' shouted Vanderholt, pulling out a revolver, a six-barrelled
engine of those days, from his pocket, and taking aim at the crew.
Tweed had sprung upon the boatswain, and now three madmen were
wrestling. A fourth rushed in; he was Simon Toole. He yelled like a
savage as he leapt upon the heaving and writhing group.
'Stand back, or I'll shoot you!' shouted Mr. Vanderholt. 'I have six
men's lives here.'
He saw Toole seize Captain Glew by the throat, and taking aim at the
man, he pulled the trigger. The flash, the report, was followed by a
dying groan, and Tweed, with both hands lifted and clenched, fell, shot
through the head.
At this moment an iron belaying-pin[1] struck Mr. Vanderholt across the
face. It was Maul who hurled it. He flung it with the rage and meaning
of murder, standing not a couple of fathoms away from the unhappy
gentleman, who dropped like a running man when he falls dead from heart
disease.
'You murderous curs!' groaned Captain Glew, falling upon one knee with
his hand to his side.
For a little while they stood raging; their shouts were hoarse and
insane. Legg bawled to them from the helm, and they answered him. You
would have thought that they were breeding some fresh hellish scene of
bloodshed amongst themselves, so flushed, wild, clamorous was the mob of
them, every man trying to drown the other's voice.
'It was his doing!' said Jones, pointing to the figure of the dying
captain. 'I never wanted it!'
'Anyhow, we're not responsible for _him_,' said Allan, nodding at the
body of the mate. 'Who floored the Dutchman?'
'I did!' yelled Maul.
'He's a killed man,' said Scott, stooping to look at him.
'Water,' whispered Captain Glew.
Toole's eyes were on the captain at the instant, and the ruffian saw the
man's lips move.
'He's spakin'!' he exclaimed, with a face of sudden horror, backing two
or three steps.
Dabb put his ear to the dying man's mouth.
'He asks for water,' said the seaman; and he sprang to the scuttle-butt
and filled a pannikin which stood handily by the side of the dipper,
and, lifting Captain Glew's head, he poured some of the cool drink into
his mouth.
'Drag me out of the sun,' muttered the captain.
'Mike, len's a hand,' called Dabb; and quite gently these two seamen,
who were just now devils, carried the captain aft into the shelter of
the awning, where they left him to lie and expire, with the Union Jack
rolled up as a pillow.
'I never wanted it! I never wanted it!' suddenly broke out the
boatswain, in a deep groaning voice. 'This is a swinging matter. What's
to be done? It's damnation to our souls. Why couldn't ye have let the
old Dutchman be?'
'His pistol was full cock on you, Jim, when I let fly,' answered Maul.
'He's only stunned. Hasn't a man a right to fight for his life? Look at
them barrels!' he added, pointing to the revolver.
'Here comes his daughter,' exclaimed Gordon.
Miss Vanderholt was standing in the companion-way. She wore a straw hat,
and her eyes, under the shadow of the brim and under the fluff of hair
about her brow, looked twice their usual size--strained, unwinking,
blind, with sudden, dreadful amazement, but brilliant as light also with
horror and terror.
She came out of the hatch slowly. Legg, at the helm, with a note of
commiseration, said:
'He's only been knocked down. He shouldn't have got messing about with
firearms amongst a mob of angry men.'
She did not hear him, or, if she did, she did not heed him.
She went straight to her father, making a low wailing or moaning noise
as she walked. The boatswain exclaimed:
'No harm was intended to him, miss. 'Twas him that shot Mr. Tweed.'
She stooped, moaning, but so as to be scarcely audible, and looked
closely into her father's face. He lay on his back, staring with white
eyes, half-closed, at the sky. He had fallen as though shot through the
heart. A great, livid weal, dreadful to see, blackened and lifted his
brow. A little blood that had trickled from one ear lay glazed close
beside the gray hair of his whiskers.
'Is he dead?' she asked, looking round at the men, and speaking in a
voice sunk with fear.
'Let's carry him aft to his cabin. It's not right the young lady should
see him lying there,' said Gordon.
Thereupon, Gordon, Allan, and Jones picked the body up and bore him aft,
followed by Miss Vanderholt, who often staggered as she walked. They got
him into a cabin, and put him down upon a sofa.
'An ugly job!' said one of the seamen.
'Who did it?' the girl asked.
The men made no answer.
'Oh, father!' she cried, trembling violently; then, dropping upon her
knees beside him, she began to free his throat. 'He may only be
stunned,' she said. 'What is to be done? Shall I bathe his face?'
'If he's only stunned, I allow he'll come to all right, if he's left
alone,' said Gordon.
'You'll please to recollect this,' said one of the men: 'he comes
rushing along, with a pistol to shoot us with, and the motive was to
strike the revolver out of his hand before he could send a second shot.
It was him that killed the mate;' and the speaker wheeled on his naked
feet, and went to the companion ladder. He was almost immediately
followed by the others.
The girl was alone with her dead father. But was he dead? He looked so.
Yet the lifeless looks of one in a swoon or in a fit may easily pass as
marks of death. She ran to his cabin, and fetched a bowl, into which she
splashed cold water from a decanter, and for a quarter of an hour she
ceaselessly bathed his face and head. He never stirred. Not the least
sigh escaped him. She could not find his pulse, though she sought for
it, with trembling fingers, about his wrists. His hands were growing
cold, and they lay very dead and heavy in hers, and still she thought,
still she hoped, she prayed.
'It may be the same as a fit, or a swoon. He has been stunned. If I sit
here patiently, I may see signs of life, and he will come to.'
But, if he should be dead? What would they do with the schooner? What
would they do with her? Terrors shook her; they wrenched her heart, and
she wrung her hands in agony.
If her father was dead, and she quite understood that Captain Glew and
Mr. Tweed were dead, though she but vaguely understood that her father
had shot the mate, and that Captain Glew had been assassinated--if he
was dead, she was alone in the schooner with eight seamen, who had made
outlaws and reckless criminals of themselves by the murders done that
morning.
Meanwhile, on deck, the men were quieting down. Their rude, unreasoning
passions were paling. Consternation was beginning to work in them. They
had gone fearfully and tragically far beyond the unformed wrathful
fancies which were in them when they kicked the mess-kids aft, and when
the Irishman howled at the sight.
The mate lay dead, with a dark purple hole in his forehead, upon the
deck, abreast of the little square of main hatch. Aft, with his head
pillowed on the rolled-up ensign, was the corpse of the captain. These
were sights, coupled with the thought of the dead man below, to drive
the keenest power of realization of what had happened that day into the
mind of an idiot, and there was no idiot in that schooner.
Legg had been relieved at the wheel by Scott.
The _Mowbray_, all this while, was sailing a dead south course for the
Equator--her queer destination--royally clothed; her white breasts of
canvas were swelled with the blue gushing of the wind; her jibs yearned
at their sheets as they rose and sank in a play of soft shadow, with the
airy rise and the seething stoop of the bows.
'There's too much gone and happened this all-fired day,' said Allan,
folding his naked, burnt arms on his breast, and leaning against the
side of his little caboose whilst he eyed askew the body of the mate.
'What's to be done?'
The men came and stood about him.
'It was like forcing of a man's hand,' exclaimed the boatswain. 'I was
never in a mess of this sort afore. But, curse catch me, if an angel
could have stood him--an angel from the skies!' he shouted, lifting up
his two great hands, with a wild melodramatic gesture, to the heavens.
'I couldn't tell you why, but there was hate of us as sailor-men in the
very turn of the rooter's body as he walked the deck. There's but one
remedy for the likes of him, but it's hard upon sailors;' and he smeared
the sweat off his brow, which had taken a scowl dark as thunder.
'I saw that there bleeding old Dutchman a-covering of you, Jim,' said
Maul, pointing to the revolver which yet lay upon the deck. 'There was
no mistaking the meaning in his face. I'd pulled out the pin ready for
whatever was to come along, and, say what yer will, yer owe me your
life.'
'What's to be done?' said the cook. 'All this here moralizing ain't
going to help us. Are them bodies to be left to lie there till they
turn?'
'Don't be in such a smothering hurry!' exclaimed Legg. 'How are ye to
know they're gone home? 'Ere's Bill for chucking of two warm bodies
overboard. Feel their pulses, or try their breath with a piece of glass,
or, maybe, you'll be murdering of them over again.'
'Don't talk of murdering!' said the boatswain savagely. 'That man there
was killed by Mr. Vanderholt.'
'Where are we sailing to?' says Gordon.
'Why!' exclaimed Dabb, sending a pair of drink-stained eyes slowly
travelling over the little ship, 'I'm dumped, mates, if there's e'er a
navigator in the vessel!'
At this juncture Toole and Jones stepped to the body of the mate, and
carried him to the side of the captain, whose form they bent over. The
boatswain went down upon his knees, and looked with a face of hate and
horror at the countenance of the dead man. This was a picture to
handsomely symbolize one large, old, red tradition of the Merchant
Service. Are there any Glews left? So long as they remain in command, so
long will they prove the solvers of the so-called mysteries of the
ocean--the abandoned ship, the boat-load of men whose statements differ,
the stranded body with the wound in its throat.
'These men are dead,' says the boatswain, standing up. 'No use in
letting 'em lie here to shock the female, should she come on deck. Get
'em covered up, and we'll bury 'em this afternoon.'
Toole fetched a small tarpaulin, and hid the bodies.
'How's the Dutchman getting on, I wonder?' said the boatswain.
He went to the open skylight, and looked down. He saw the figure of Mr.
Vanderholt lying stiff in death on a sofa locker; his daughter sat
beside him, inclined forwards, resting her chin on her hands, herself,
whilst the boatswain watched, as stirless as the dead.
The seaman stepped back, and walked forward slowly. The sailors, Scott
excepted, were gathered about the deck-house door, holding a council
upon their condition and prospects. There was the hurry of nerve in
their speech, and again one or another would look ahead, or on either
bow. The boatswain, shoving in amongst them, said in his deep voice:
'I'm for getting something to eat. I want my dinner.'
'And I'm for getting something to drink,' said Toole.
The boatswain picked up Mr. Vanderholt's revolver, and, whilst he
examined it, before pocketing it, he said:
'There's no chance of my bossing you, lads. I'll never do more than
advise you. But let me give you this counsel: of course there'll be
drink for the cabin somewhere aft. We're entitled to our allowance of
rum, anyhow, and if we add a bottle or two of the cabin stuff to that
allowance, who's a-going to miss it? That's not counsel, you say--no,
but _this_ is: don't none of you go and get drunk. I vow to God the
first man that falls insensible I'll chuck overboard. We're murderers
and pirates--d'ye know that?' he roared, with a ferocious look at the
men--a look that might have convinced shrewder perceptions than those
about him that he was going mad--'and we're to take care, if we don't
want to swing, that we're not found out. Can ye guess what swinging's
like? Many's the time I've thought of it--of the gray, wet morning, and
their coming in to fetch you to be hanged, and their making your arms
fast astern, with a parson walking in front reading about death; then
the standing upon the trap-door, and the crowds of faces--my God!--all
looking at you, and, worst of all, the awful feeling that a man must
have when the cap's drawed down, and he stands awaiting!'
'There's no call to keep on, Jim,' said Dabb; 'we don't want to be
hanged, and we don't mean to do it. And who's a-going to fall down dead
drunk, and act the beast, as you says, a-seeing how it stands with us?'
'Let's get something to eat,' said the boatswain. 'Jim,' said he,
turning to Gordon, 'you know the ropes aft. Bring something for'ard from
the Dutchman's pantry fit for the men to sit down to.'
'Am I to bring any drink?' says Gordon.
'What have they got down there?' asked Maul.
'There's some cases of bottled ale.'
'Bring eight bottles for'ards,' said the boatswain. 'Joe, go you along
and lend him a hand.'
Gordon and Dabb walked aft, and disappeared down the companion-hatch.
The others trudged about their deck-house door, passing and repassing
each other in short look-out walks, their heads sunk, their backs bowed,
and their hands plunged deep in their breeches pockets.
After some time, Gordon and the other arrived with their arms full of
bottles of beer and preserved meats, and delicate cabin eatables out of
the pantry. It was broiling hot. Mike Scott at the helm bawled to them
to bring him a bottle. He swilled the foaming draught down out of a
pannikin in a sort of dance of ecstasy.
'What's the young woman a-doing of?' asked the boatswain, following
Gordon into the deck-house.
'She was sitting by her father's body when we entered. She jumps up as
if she'd been stabbed, and says in a little shriek: "What do you men
want?" I answered in the kindest voice I've got: "We're not here to hurt
you, miss. The men are hungry, and want food, and I've come to fetch 'em
some--food and a little beer. What can I get for you, miss?" says I.
"This is the luncheon-hour. Let me spread the table for you." She shook,
and held out her hands as though shoving me away. How could she sit down
and eat with him lying there? Indeed, it went against me to name it,
Jim. It was flung cruelly hard. I never see such a forehead as the poor
old bloke's got.'
'By the vart of me oath, then,' exclaimed Toole--for now all hands had
swarmed into the deck-house--'Maul took aim at the pistol, and never
meant to kill him!'
They were hungry and thirsty, a rough, red-handed mob of seamen. They
sat down upon their chests, and ate and drank, one taking a plateful of
food to the helmsman, and whilst they dined they discoursed upon what
was to be done.
Occasionally the boatswain would step out and look around. The wind was
slack, the fiery eye of heaven was eating it up, and the sea waved in
dull shades of satin and silver in winding dyes of faint violet and
glassy brightness, as though a current ran; it sheeted with colours
faint with tropic heat into the now visionary distance where sea and sky
were blent.
'What are we to do with this vessel, and how are we to manage for
ourselves?' said the boatswain, who sat on a chest with a tin of
preserved meat between his knees. 'That's the question.'
'Ain't this moist stuff veal and 'am?' Whatever it is, it's blooming
nice,' said a sailor.
'Joe, knock the 'ead off this 'ere bottle for me; you've got the knack.'
'Isn't there no port to which we could carry this craft and dispose of
her, and then disperse?' said Allan, the cook. 'She might go for a song,
for me. We only want our wages.'
'Where's the port without a fired consul?' said Maul. 'I'll tell ye what
'd happen: they'd ask questions, a file of soldiers 'ud come aboard, us
men 'ud be marched off into a fortress, and lie in cells fourteen or
twenty foot under the sea. There our beards would grow, our bones would
wear out our shirts, and all the music ye'd get, mates, would be the
clank of chains.'
'No port for me!' said Toole. 'I'm for kaping on the say, and being
found in a situation of disthress.'
'We must agree to one yarn, and stick to it. What about the lady?' said
Dabb.
'Do she know what's happened?' said Maul. 'How it came about, I mean?
Then she couldn't say nothing agin our yarn.'
'Tell'e what, my lads,' said the boatswain, looking thoughtfully around
him, 'I'm not at all sure that the right tack don't lie in our up and
telling the truth, explaining how we was exasperated, and proving that
the deaths was accidental.'
'You're a-going to prove nothing accidental out of that bloke's knife,'
said Dabb, with a dry, uncomfortable laugh, nodding at Toole.
'As good an accident as Maul's murtherous belaying-pin, and be damned to
ye!' exclaimed the Irishman. 'Brothers, I'm thinking Joe there would
have me be the only hanged man of this company. Is that because I'm a
furriner?'
His eyes, fiercely squinting, met in Dabb's hot face. The seamen began
to cut up tobacco, and then they lurched to the galley to light their
pipes. The boatswain, pipe in mouth, stood in the waist, looking round
him and aloft.
The little ship lay nearly becalmed. The sails swayed idly, fanning
sweet draughts athwartships. The boatswain walked to the binnacle, and
said, after looking at the card:
'There's no call now, Mike, to keep her heading for the Equator. I'm
for giving my stern to this here boiling.'
'What's settled?' said Scott.
'Nothing.'
'I don't see,' said the man irritably, 'how anything's to be settled in
this here roasting heat, and them two bodies side by side there. Him in
the cabin's alone enough to take the curl out of a man's spirit. To
think of him, with half a fathom of death, blue as ink, across his brow,
and himself a-walking these very decks but just a little while gone!
Three! It's too many!'
'One was the Dutchman's job,' answered the boatswain. 'But see here! Are
ye afraid?'
'Afraid o' what?'
'Well, only that you're talking as if the ghosts of them bodies had
jockeyed the yard-arms of your mind, and was close reefing your
intellect.'
'I don't like dead bodies,' said Scott; 'and of all the dead bodies
a-going,' he added, with a countenance of gloomy ferocity, 'the least I
like is murdered bodies. Why don't ye get 'em cleared out overboard,
Jim, and sweeten the little hooker? Do human blood smell? Something that
my nose never tasted afore came along not long since in a breath o'
wind.'
The boatswain went to the tarpaulin, pulled it aside, and examined the
two dead faces.
'Dead they are,' said he, with a shiver of sick disgust.
He walked forward, and presently a few of the men came to the tarpaulin,
carrying hammocks, twine, sinkers for the clews. They made despatch.
Captain Glew, blind with death, threatened them as malevolently as in
life, with his upper lip lifted and stiffened, exposing a snarling grin
of fangs. The other poor wretch lay composed; the grog-blossoms had
faded. His cheek was as pale as moonlight, and the expression was a
smile.
Before stitching up the bodies, they emptied the pockets. Captain Glew
had a silver watch and chain, a leather pocket-book, a silver-mounted,
wooden pipe, a bunch of keys, and other odds and ends. The mate
likewise owned a watch and a hair chain, tipped with gold--a woman's
gift, no doubt.
'These things shall be put into their cabins,' said the boatswain. 'He's
left a widow and young uns.'
'Are we going to bury 'em in their clothes?' said Toole.
'Holes and all,' answered Legg, with a significant glance at the
sheath-knife on the Irishman's hip.
In a few minutes the two bodies made their last plunge, amidst the
silence of the seamen, some of whom, nevertheless, continued to smoke,
and the bubbles which flashed to the surface were as lasting a memorial
of the dead twain's resting-place as any gravestone which could have
been erected ashore for dogs to smell at.
A light air from the south-west was coming along, over the burnished
heave, in a delicate blue film, with feelers and crawlers of the draught
tarnishing the water in front of the breeze-line in catspaws.
'Shall we stick this vessel's head north?' said the boatswain, and now
all hands came together in the gangway close beside the bulwark-rail,
whence the bodies had sped; there was to be a discussion over every
suggestion.
'If we go north, where's it to carry us to?' said Gordon.
'Out of this heat, anyhow,' answered the boatswain.
'We ought to make up our minds,' said the cook, with an uneasy look at
the sea. 'We're just that sort of craft which is sure to excite notice.
"Hallo," they sings out, "a yacht all this way down here!" and they
comes sheering alongside to hail and take a look.'
'I'm not for going any further to the s'uth'ard,' said the boatswain
doggedly.
After a great deal of talk, during which the galley was repeatedly
visited for pipe-lights, they agreed to head the vessel north, if for no
other reason than that of temperature. So the helm was put hard up, and
the little vessel wore. When the ropes had been coiled down and the
decks cleared, the boatswain called Gordon and Scott, who by this hour
was relieved at the helm. These two men seemed the most respectable of
the clan, perhaps the fittest for the mission the boatswain had now in
his mind.
'Mates,' said he, dropping his words between hard sucks at an inch of
sooty pipe, 'there's a difficulty in the cabin that's got to be made an
end of. The Dutchman must be buried. Now, the three of us had better go
below, with sail-cloth and twine, and stitch him up to the satisfaction
of his daughter. I'd give this hand,' said he, holding up a paw as big
as a boxing-glove, 'if he hadn't been killed. He had meant to get his
dinner off our junk and pork to-day. It was the captain kept him in
ignorance of our condition.'
'He'd have shot as many of us as there was balls in his pistol,' said
Scott.
'You're right,' said the boatswain, as though he found something to
rally him in that thought. 'Let's get what's wanted, my lads, and make
an end.'
The dead man was alone when they entered the cabin. The ghastly hue of
the blow that had killed him was fading. One hand lay upon his beard,
and he seemed in thought.
'Quick, now,' says the boatswain, 'whilst the lady's out of sight.'
They emptied his pockets, putting everything they found upon the table,
then quickly fell to swathing and stitching. In the midst of this work
Gordon violently started, and cried out, muttering, 'Lor', how she took
me!' Miss Vanderholt stood near him. She was painfully white, and her
eyes were swollen almost to concealment. Yet anyone capable of
interpreting human expression must have found a subtle token of
resolution in her features, shadowy marks of firmness, as though the
countenance was struggling to take its presentment from the spirit. This
might be visible sooner to the eye of sympathy than to the vision of the
head.
'Are you going to bury him?' she exclaimed, in a low, trembling voice.
'Yes, miss,' said the boatswain, rearing himself, and backing and
looking at her.
'Is there no one who can read a prayer from the service over him?' said
the girl.
The men looked at one another, shaking their heads, and then the
boatswain said:
'Tell 'e what, lads: we'll stitch the poor gentleman up ready, and
leave him a-bit, whilst the lady says a prayer by his side. It'll do him
more good than any prayer that's a-going to come from us, whether we
reads it, or whether we imagines it.'
Miss Vanderholt took a step to her father and kissed him, then, weeping
silently, went to the foremost end of the cabin, and stood waiting.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] A belaying-pin is a bar of wood or metal. It fits in a rail, and is
used for making a rope fast to. When of wood it is heavy enough, when of
metal deadly as a weapon or a missile.