THE DISCOVERY.
The wind that evening freshened out of the north-west glare of sunset.
The sky thickened, and some small wings of scud flew south-east, bronzed
by the western splendour dimming fast. The sea ran in a cloudy green,
but without weight, in the light tropic surge.
At sundown Mr. Blundell hailed the royal yard, and the answer, hoarse in
tone as a seagull's scream, was:
'Nothing in sight, sir.'
The mate ordered the man to come down on deck, and half an hour later,
when darkness was on the face of the deep, and the last red scar had
died out of the starless sky, the _Mowbray_ was slopping softly through
the creaming waters, under her mainsail and standing jib.
It was like being hove-to; but she had way, and when Captain Parry
looked over the taffrail, he saw the cold, green lights of the sea
revolving and sliding off in the short spread of yeast the nimble
clipper carried with her.
It drew down a night ghastly with the pallor of the hidden moon. At
about nine o'clock they burnt a flare; the crimson flames rose
quivering, and the smoke drove, black as a thunder-cloud, betwixt the
masts to leeward. The little ship stood out against the night
fire-tinctured.
She looked, with her glowing yellow masts and fiery shrouds, to be built
of flame. The night came in walls of blackness to this wild and
beautiful vision, and the noise of the sea, and the sense of the
infinity of the deep, that was running and seething out of sight, filled
the glowing picture with an entrancing spirit of mystery. You would have
said that she owed her life and light to the sea-gods.
Both Parry and the mate, whilst this flare was burning, repeatedly
directed their night-glasses at the ocean, and, even whilst it burnt, a
man came aft to the call of the mate and sent up a couple of rockets.
The fireballs hissed, burst, and vanished in spangles, darting a lustre
as of lightning across a little space of sky.
The flare crackled, leapt up, smouldered, and was extinguished by a
bucket of water.
A couple of lanterns--bright globular glasses--were lighted, and hung up
in the main rigging, one on each side. This brought the hour to about a
quarter past ten. The sea was again searched, its ghastly face had
stolen out, and the heads of the breaking billows under that thick and
pallid sky were like flashes of guns in mist.
'If the lady isn't in this circle, Captain Parry,' said Mr. Blundell
cheerfully, 'let's hope we'll find her in the next. If the boat's within
ten miles of us they'll have seen our flare and those fireballs.'
'But we are moving through the sea,' said Captain Parry. 'If we make
them a head wind, and continue to sail, how are they to fetch us?'
'The schooner's only just under command, sir. If I heave to the drift
will put me out. With your kind leave I'll go below and get a glass of
grog.'
They both went into the cabin, leaving a man to look out. They were
waited upon by the 'boy,' who was, indeed, a young man of about
eight-and-twenty, with a face full of sallow fluff, and an old man's
look in his eyes and in the contraction of his brows, as though he had
been born in the workhouse and knew life.
But at sea there were but three ratings, and if you don't sign articles
as an able or ordinary seaman, then, if you were eighty years old, and
could scarcely creep over the ship's side with your cargo of scythe and
hour-glass, you'd still be called a boy.
The mate and Captain Parry sat for a little in the cabin, sipping cold
brandy and water.
'Should the men in the boat see our flares and rockets,' said the
captain, 'what will they think of them?'
'They'll approach us to take a look.'
'But if they make out that we are the schooner of their piracy and
murders, will they come on board?'
'She's an open boat, sir, and you have to consider how men will be
driven by exposure. Anyhow,' said Mr. Blundell, 'if we can only coax her
this side the horizon, we may easily keep her in sight till we've worn
them out.'
'I have been thinking of these red-hot skies, too. Will Miss Vanderholt
be able to survive the exposure of even a day and a night?' And Captain
Parry swayed in his chair with the grief of the thought.
'Well,' said the mate, with the note of a stout heart in his voice,
'only a sailor is able to tell a man what ladies really can go through.
Low-class females, emigrants and the like, cave in quickly; they are the
shriekers. They cannot bear terror, and it kills them on rafts and in
boats. But your thoroughbred lady is always the one that I've seen,
heard of, and read of, who has shown a lion's heart and the coldness of
a stone head in shipwreck. If Miss Vanderholt be in the boat, you'll
find that she'll have suffered less than the men.'
A faint smile stirred the lips of Captain Parry; but he grew quickly
grave again, with the distress of his imaginations. At that moment a
hoarse cry in the skylight made them spring to their feet.
'There's a big ship a-bearing down upon us!'
The mate rushed up the steps, followed by Captain Parry. The ghostly
sheen of the moon still clouded as with steam the thickness of the
night, and the scene of heaven and sea was mystical with elusive
distance, with the soft near flash of the surge, and the windy chaos of
the horizon.
On the bow, not half a mile distant, was a large pale shape. The
night-glass made her white-hulled, with canvas to her trucks. The
schooner was thrown into the wind. It was clearly the intention of the
stranger to speak the _Mowbray_. Through the small scattering hiss of
the sea on either hand you might have heard the low, constant thunder of
the bow-wave of the ship as she washed through the brine, making a light
for herself with her sides and white heights, but showing no lights. On
a sudden the human silence was broken by a short, gruff command, weak
with distance. The sound might then be heard of yards being swung; ropes
crowed in blocks, parrels creaked on masts, and in a few minutes a large
white ship, with the fires of the sea dripping at her cutwater, lay
abreast of the schooner, all way choked out of her by the backed
topsail.
'Schooner ahoy!'
'Hallo!' shouted Mr. Blundell, sending his voice far into the darkness
over the ship's rail, whence the hail had proceeded.
'What's wrong with you that you are sending up rockets and burning
flares?'
'We are in search of a boat. Have you met with a boat containing eight
men and a lady?'
A short silence ensued.
'What schooner are you?'
'The _Mowbray_, of, and now for, the Thames, when we recover the boat.
What ship are you?'
'The _Georgina Wilde_, Liverpool to Melbourne. I expect your people have
been rescued. We passed a schooner's long-boat yesterday morning, and I
read your name, the _Mowbray_, in her stern sheets.'
'If that's the case,' exclaimed Mr. Blundell quickly to Captain Parry,
'there'll be no good left in this circle job.'
'Has he no more information to give us?' said Captain Parry, with a
hopeless stare at the tall, pale shadow, upon whose decks nothing was
visible in that thickness save a dull, Will-o'-the-wisp-like glimmer
where the binnacle stand stood.
The schooner was hailed again.
'Hallo!' answered Blundell.
'We sighted a derelict yesterday at noon. She was within a mile or two
of the long-boat. Looked like a small brig, timber-laden.'
'How would she bear from us now?' bawled the mate.
It was plain, from the stillness that followed, that the man with the
powerful hoarse voice had walked to his compass-stand to consider the
required bearings. A midnight hush came down upon the deep then, spite
of the plash and gurgle of waters in motion, and of a dull song of wind
up aloft in the rigging of the schooner.
Now it was that a single shaft of moonlight glanced through a rift down
upon the sea, flashing up the rolling head of a surge into a melting
hill of silver. The night seemed to sweep with a deeper dye of blackness
from either hand that pure crystal ray. Yet it made a light, too. It
gave substance and firmness to the visionary ship abeam.
Captain Parry saw a figure coming along the deck from the binnacle to
the rail to hail. He also perceived figures of seamen on the short
topgallant forecastle; likewise he beheld the bowsprit and jibbooms
forking out like a huge spear, poised for hurling in the grasp of a
giant, and betwixt that extreme point of jibboom and masthead floated
symmetric clouds of soft whiteness; but the moonbeam was eclipsed in a
few moments, and the white ship sank back into a vision, glimmering and
scarce determinable.
Again the schooner was hailed.
'The bearings of the derelict,' shouted the voice, in tones of the
volume of a speaking-trumpet, 'will be north-west by north half north,
about. Don't take this as if it was an observation. Try about forty mile
on that course, and if nothing heaves into view, sweep the sea. The
derelict's bound to be afloat. Farewell! Good luck attend you!' Then, a
minute later, 'Swing the main topsail yard! Ease away your weather main
braces!'
The pale and lofty shadow leaned from the damp night breeze, and the
water trembled into fire along the visionary length of her, when, with a
soft stoop of her bow to some invisible heave of the ocean, she broke
her way onwards, dissolving quickly into the night.
'About forty miles distant,' said Mr. Blundell, stepping to the compass.
'Shall we head on a course for her, sir?'
'Oh, most certainly!' answered Captain Parry.
'Better jog along under easy canvas, till it comes daylight, anyhow,'
said the mate.
The course was shifted, sail trimmed, the gaff foresail was set, and the
schooner, carrying the midnight breeze abeam, slided soundless through
the gloom over the black, wide swell of the sea.
Captain Parry was too anxious to take rest. He lighted a cheroot, and
paced the deck with Mr. Blundell, who had heroically resolved not to
turn in that night--not to turn in at all until the timber-laden
derelict had been sighted, boarded and rummaged.
They kept the lanterns burning in the rigging. They never knew how it
might be with the eight men and the lady, supposing the lady with them.
It is true that the long-boat had been fallen in with adrift; but then,
as Mr. Blundell put it, 'That might be due to an accident, without
signifying that they'd been received on board a ship, and their boat let
go.'
'My own view's this, sir,' said he, as he lighted one of Parry's
cheroots at the glowing tip of the Captain's. 'The men saw that timber
craft, and being scorched with the heat, and wild with cramp, they
resolved to make for the shelter of it, where they could stretch their
arms and take the kinks out of their legs. The painter which held the
boat slipped, and she drifted softly off, and when they saw that she was
gone she was a dozen ships' lengths distant. They could do nothing,
aboard a drowned timberman with empty davits, and a list of perhaps
forty degrees, but let her go. That's my notion. We shall find all hands
aboard. If so, what will you wish me to do, sir?'
'Bring them into this schooner,' answered Captain Parry. 'If they have
murdered Miss Vanderholt, they shall swing for it, by God!'
'But pray consider this, sir,' said Mr. Blundell coolly. 'They are eight
men, daring, defiant devils, no doubt, bullies in the alley, jolly
examples of your Jack Muck. We are seven. To bring them on board we
should be obliged to fetch them. But, sir, we can't leave the schooner
deserted. She might run away from us. She got her liberty once, and the
appearance of the derelict might excite her appetite afresh for
freedom.'
'For God's sake, Mr. Blundell,' broke in Captain Parry, 'don't joke!'
'I mean, sir,' continued Mr. Blundell, in a voice that did him some
honour, as it proved he could be abashed, 'that we should have to leave
three of our people to look after the schooner, so that we should go
four to eight in order to fetch them.'
'We are armed,' exclaimed Captain Parry.
'Two pistols,' said the mate.
'We must bring them aboard--we must bring them aboard!' cried Captain
Parry, in a voice that almost shouted with nerve. 'Will they be
content,' he went on after a hard suck or two at his cigar, 'to continue
washing about in a wreck that might spread under them at any minute like
a pack of cards when they see a schooner alongside willing to receive
them?'
'To be hanged, sir.'
'Who's to tell them _that_ till we've got them under hatches?' said
Captain Parry.
'They know this craft,' said Blundell, in a note of gloom. 'It'll be a
job. Eight of 'em, and only four of us. It'll take us all we know.'
Captain Parry belonged to a fighting profession. When he talked of
boarding the timberman and bringing off the eight men, his imagination
was a little confused. He brandished a sword in fancy; he was followed
by a number of smart men in red coats, and with fixed bayonets. He did
not quite gather that, if he headed the boarders, he should be leading
into glory three timid seamen who were entirely averse to selling their
lives at any price. Moreover, Captain Parry was not a sailor. He could
not imagine how difficult it is to gain the deck of a ship whose people
do not want you. These eight men would, in a deck cargo of timber, find
plenty of materials fit for knocking out the bottom of a boat, and the
brains of those who should venture their noses above the rail.
But it was an idle argument betwixt him and the mate. Were they going to
find the half-foundered brig? Would the eight men be in her? Would Miss
Vanderholt be amongst them?
At daybreak nothing was visible in the telescope from the fore royal
yard. The weather had cleared in the night. It was a strange,
mountainous morning of huge swollen cloud, whose sun-bright bellies
amazingly whitened the silver of that ocean. Now and again, round about
the horizon, a spark of lightning flashed in the heart of a violet
shadow of vapour, and now and again a low note of thunder, distant,
tremulous as an organ strain, rolled across the sea, as though some
huge, deep-throated beast, big as a hill, and couchant behind the
horizon, was being worried.
There was breeze enough to keep the schooner's sails full, and sunrise
found the _Mowbray_ pursuing the course of the night. Captain Parry
refreshed himself with a bucket of cold green brine, and tried to make
some breakfast. Mr. Blundell ate heartily, and again, as they sat at
table, they argued upon the course to adopt should they find the eight
seamen on the wreck.
'If they've got Miss Vanderholt with them,' said the mate, 'I should
recommend asking them to allow us to receive her aboard--we leaving them
aboard the wreck to be taken off by the next thing that passes.'
'I like that idea,' said Captain Parry; 'it would save bloodshed. We
want nothing but the young lady. They should be glad to get easily rid
of her as a witness. If they are short of food, we can supply them with
stores enough to keep them going for a time that would allow of a
reasonable chance of their being rescued.'
'They'll want provisions, anyhow,' said the mate. 'Stove timbermen float
on their cargo. You need to dive to get at the grub in those derelicts.
I'm counting upon hunger courting them into the schooner without
obliging us to try what coaxing them with four men and two pistols is
going to do.'
They went on deck, and stared at the sea-line through glasses. A little
before noon, just at the moment when Mr. Blundell was coming out of his
cabin with his sextant, a man stationed aloft on the look-out hailed
him.
'What is it?' shouted Blundell, springing through the companion-hatch.
'There is a black object away down upon the port-bow. It looks like a
boat.'
'How does it bear on the bow?' cried Blundell to the little figure
aloft, a sailor with a face set in black whiskers.
He looked to tremble in the heat up there, and his shape, as he stood
erect to the height of the truck, seemed shot with the lights of several
dyes, and against a swollen heap of cloud past him he showed like a
coloured daguerreotype.
'About two points,' was his answer.
Mr. Blundell shifted his helm for it, but, whatever it might be, it was
not yet visible from the deck. The mate got an observation of the sun,
and went below to work it out. When he returned he found Captain Parry
examining a dark object on the bow with a telescope.
'It's a ship's boat most unquestionably,' said the captain, turning to
Mr. Blundell.
The mate was at this instant hailed afresh from the masthead.
'There's another dark object about a point on the weather-bow,' said the
fellow dangling high in air, his hoarse voice softening in falls as it
reached the ear from the hollows of the sails. 'She'll be the wreck,
sir,' he howled, after working away with his glass.
Captain Parry was as pale as the dawn with excitement and expectation.
'I vow to God,' said he, bringing his fist down on the rail, 'I would
certainly lose my left arm with cheerfulness to know at this instant
that Miss Vanderholt is alive and well in the wreck!'
'If she is with them they'll all come aboard together,' said the mate,
with scarce conscious dryness. 'Hunger and thirst will work their way
with beasts, let alone men.'
Little more was said whilst the schooner, driven by a five-knot breeze,
swept in long floating launches down upon the boat that came and went.
There had been wind somewhere, and a small swell rolled in from the
westward, running lightning flashes through the water. No man could say
it was the _Mowbray's_ long-boat till they had luffed and shaken the
wind out of the schooner close alongside the little fabric. Then her
identity was settled by a single glance at her through the glass. The
yacht's name, '_Mowbray_--London,' was painted in large black letters in
the stern-sheets.
'Stand by to hook her,' shouted the mate.
A seaman aft, jumping for a boathook in one of the quarter-boats,
sprang into the little ledge of the main chains. The schooner was
slightly manoeuvred; the boat was brought close alongside and captured.
She was as empty and dry as an old cocoanut-shell.
'What does that signify?' said Captain Parry.
'One of two things, clearly,' answered Blundell. 'Either they have
carried all the stores they left the yacht with aboard the wreck, or the
ship that picked them up emptied her before sending her adrift.'
'Would they let a valuable boat like that go?'
The mate shrugged his shoulders. There are some questions concerning the
sea which even a sailor cannot answer.
'Do you see that her long painter is trailing overboard?' exclaimed
Captain Parry. 'Does it not look as if the knot had unhitched and let
her slip away?'
'But from what, sir? That trailing length of rope might as easily mean
that she was let slip from a ship, as that she slipped of her own accord
from a wreck.'
This talk, uttered swiftly, occupied a minute, whilst they overhung the
rail, looking into the boat alongside.
'We must have her out of that,' said the mate, 'and restore her.'
The man who was hanging to her by the boathook, turning up a face as
dark as a new bronze coin, exclaimed:
'There's something white right aft, jammed away down under them
stern-sheets.'
It was immediately wanted, of course, but the man with the boathook
could not get it and keep a hold of the boat, too; so another man jumped
in and brought up a pocket-handkerchief.
'It's a lady's,' said the mate.
'It's Miss Vanderholt's!' exclaimed Captain Parry, observing a small 'V.
V.' in the corner.
Two or three marks of blood stained it, as though the lip, nose, or ear
had slightly bled.
'What does it betoken?' said Captain Parry, looking at the handkerchief,
and speaking softly, as though to himself. 'If it is a memorial, why,
in God's name, should it come to me blood-stained?'
They got the boat aboard; all hands, including Parry, pulling and
hauling at the tackles. When she was chocked, a course was shaped for
the derelict brig, according to the indication of the masthead man. It
was a time of thrilling anxiety for Parry. The handkerchief was no
warrant that the girl had been in the boat. They might have bound her,
and drowned her at the side of the schooner, and yet a handkerchief of
hers might have found its way into the boat. The handkerchief, then,
proved nothing. Nevertheless, Parry found a sinister significance in the
blood-marks. Was not this blood-stained token most tragically
portentous, as the only relic or memorial of his love that the sea had
to offer him? He looked at it, and in the wildness of his heart he made
a meaning of it: it was a farewell to him, a message mute and eloquent;
it said to him that her father was slain, and that she was lost to him
for ever. Thus he stood interpreting the thing.
Shortly after one o'clock the derelict was in view right ahead. The
telescope then easily resolved her. She was a small black brig, with her
lower masts standing and bowsprit gone. She sat tolerably high, but
rolled with the sickly sluggishness of the waterlogged hulk. As the
schooner approached, features of the wreck grew plain. She carried a
deck-load of timber, and her hold was evidently full of timber. By some
desperate gale she had been wrenched till her butts started, her strong
fastenings gave, her topmasts went, and the green seas rushing in,
drowned her into a lifelessness of helm.
On board the schooner they could perceive no wreckage floating near.
What sufferings, obscure and horrible, was that little wreck
memorializing? The phantoms of the imagination peopled her. White-faced
men, dying in squatting postures, were upon the sea-broken deck-load of
timber. There was no captain, no command, the fingers of famine had
effaced distinctions. Then one would die with a groan, falling sideways
with his white eyes glazing to the sun; and another would mutter in
delirium, and call upon the Lord Jesus Christ, and motion with a
ghastly smile to his mother to make haste with the drink of water she
was bringing him.
Phantoms or no phantoms, all were gone. The wreck lay apparently
lifeless, absolutely abandoned, a yawning frame, sodden by weeks of
washing to and fro. Thus it seemed to the eyes aboard the schooner as
she drew closer and closer to the desolate, mournful, storm-broken
fabric.
'There may be rats in that vessel,' said the mate, with a countenance
made up of relief and extreme curiosity; 'but I don't see them, Captain
Parry, neither do I see anything else that's living.'
'A ship has taken them off,' said Captain Parry, in a tone of hopeless
misery; 'and it may be months and years before I find out what is the
fate of Miss Vanderholt.'
They were now within a musket-shot of the wreck. The yacht's way was
arrested, and she seemed to stand at gaze, with her people staring. The
long swell swung a dismal roll into the lifeless hull. A raffle of
rigging lay over her sides, and whenever she rolled away she tore this
gear up from the water as if it had been sea-plants whose roots were a
thousand fathoms deep; it rose hissing to the drag, and sank, like
baffled snakes, when she came wearily over again. It made the heart sick
to watch her, to figure one's self as alone upon her; the loose timbers
clattering through the long, black night, the dark water welling in sobs
alongside, the awful and soul-subduing spirit of stillness that lies in
the sea when its billows are silent, as though the hush in the central
heart of the profound rose like an emanation of wind or vapour, taking
the senses of the lonely one with the maddening undertones of spiritual
utterance.
Mr. Blundell continued to view the wreck through a glass. Captain Parry
stood beside him with tightly-folded arms, death-white with grief and
the sickness of disappointment, and silent.
'There is nobody aboard that vessel, sir.'
'I fear not,' the captain answered in a low voice.
'The only place where people could find shelter,' said the mate, 'is in
that little green deck-house. If there were eight men sitting in the
house, one would have seen us, and all have tumbled out long ago.'
'The long-boat has told us the story,' said the captain. 'They have been
taken on board another vessel. Is Miss Vanderholt with them?'
He started as to a sudden access of temper and determination, and said:
'Blundell, give me two of your men, and lower that boat. I'll board the
brig. I may find something to give us a clue.'
'Put one of the revolvers in your pocket, sir,' said Mr. Blundell.
A boat was lowered, and two men and Captain Parry, armed, entered her.
All was lifeless aboard the wreck. It would have been ridiculous, then,
to suspect an ambush. She had old-fashioned channels, platforms by which
her lower rigging was extended and secured to dead-eyes. These platforms
remained. The hulk would souse them, hissing, and lift them seething and
streaming, but through long intervals they would sway dry with pendulum
regularity.
'The main chains will be your only chance, sir,' said one of the
seamen. 'Am I to go on board with ye?'
'If you will.'
'Then, Tom, when we're out of it, shove off for God's sake, and keep her
clear of them chains. If they come down upon you, your life and the boat
ain't worth a drowned cockroach.'
Watching his chance with great patience, Captain Parry sprang. He
stumbled; but a wild flourish of his arm brought his hand safely to an
iron belaying-pin in the rail above. He seized another hard by, and,
lifting his knees to the rail, gained the deck.
He stood holding on. The peculiar jerky rolling of the hull threatened
to throw him, until a minute or two of sympathetic feeling _into_ the
life of the fabric should have put some government of it into his legs.
The sailor had easily followed.
Captain Parry was looking at the forepart of the vessel, which was a
horrible litter and muddle of heaped-up timber and smashed caboose, when
his companion muttered in his ear in a low growl:
'My God, master, there's a living man!'
A living man it was, standing right in the door of the deck-house. He
was a seaman, and carried a strange face to those who looked at him,
though one might have said he should be familiar enough to anybody
belonging to the schooner _Mowbray_. He was James Jones, the boatswain
of the yacht. His cheeks were gaunt and grimy, and his eyes blazed in
their hollows. His hair lay in streaks over his ears, and down the back
of his head, as though to repeated greasy tuggings and pullings. He was
without his coat, and his great muscular arms were bare to above the
elbow.
Captain Parry recoiled a step, thrusting his hand into the pocket where
the pistol lay. He suspected this man to be one of the eight, and that
the seven would burst out in a minute.
'I'm damned if ye ain't come just in the nick of time!' said Jones; and
his grin, and exhibition of yellow fangs, and his dirty skin and flaming
eyes, made his face horrible. 'I tell ye what I've just found out. There
ain't no death! "How do I know that?" says you. Why, ye see, a man
ain't dead till he dies, and when he's dead death ain't got no existence
for him. D'ye see it?' said he with an inimitable leer.
Captain Parry saw that he was mad, but in the moment of detecting this
he observed something more. Behind the madman, looking over his
shoulders, stood Miss Vanderholt. She was robed in white, and wore a
small straw hat. She was pale, as though exhausted, perhaps from the
want of food or drink; otherwise, but for her impassioned transforming
gaze, she looked as though she had but now come with Captain Parry to
view the wreck.
'Oh, Violet, my dear one! Violet, I have found you!' cried Parry, and he
rushed towards her.
She shrieked, standing still and clasping her hands, and looking up to
God.
'There's no admission 'ere!' roared the madman, barricading the door by
extending his arms. 'This is a royal yacht. Why don't you cast your eyes
aloft and view the Royal Standard a-flying? The Princess Victoria is
within. Didn't I know her gracious mother, the Duchess? I'm an English
sailor, and I'm loyal to my native country. God save the King!'
Saying which, he turned and bowed with every mark of profound veneration
to Miss Vanderholt.
'Let me pass, man!' cried Captain Parry, pulling out his revolver and
hustling the powerful fellow.
'Hide it!' screamed Violet; 'he is mad! He has been kind to me! Oh, my
God! George, am I dreaming? Is it you in the flesh, or am I mad, too?'
She put her hands to her eyes, and reeled to a stanchion, against which
she leaned. The madman continued to barricade the door, both huge arms
extended.
'Look here,' cried Parry, almost as mad as the seaman he confronted,
with impatience, infuriated by this hellish lunatic obstruction, wild to
clasp the girl, whose reel and motion of hands had stabbed his heart;
'we want to get at this young lady at once, to take her on board yonder
schooner. Make way, for God's sake! I'll hear all about your views on
death when we're comfortable aboard that vessel.'
'There's no blooming man,' shouted the madman, 'a-going to approach the
Princess Victoria without falling down upon his bended knees and
crawling to her feet, as the custom is at St. James's Palace!'
Miss Vanderholt went into hysterics. She shrieked with laughter; she
sobbed as if her heart was breaking.
'I think you'd better go down upon your knees, sir,' said the sailor who
had accompanied Parry. 'Here, my lad,' said he, crooking his finger into
a fish-hook at the man, 'you just make way for the gent to crawl to her
Gracious 'Ighness, and whilst he's kow-towing, give me that there yarn
of yourn about death.'
He winked at the captain, who sank upon his knees. The scene was
grotesque, tragic, extraordinary. The boatswain watched the figure of
the captain with fiery suspicion whilst he passed on all fours through
the door of the deck-house. Miss Vanderholt was still in hysterics.
'Damn the ruffian! I can't stand it!' shouted the captain, and he sprang
to his feet and clasped the girl.
But the madman had begun to state his queer paradox with fearful
earnestness to the seaman, who had fixed him with a stare, and was, with
singular judgment in a common fool of a drunken sailor, drawing him out
of sight of the couple.
Miss Vanderholt lay in her lover's arms, weeping and laughing; but a few
kisses and murmurs of devotion produced a very good effect. She
controlled herself, and then they were able to talk in swift questions
and eager answers. Outside the madman continued to argue with the sailor
on the subject of death.
'There ain't no death!' he roared, with all the strength of his throat.
'D'ye call it a good job, mate? Here stands the man as has got rid of
the terror of the world. Hark you, bully! Ye can turn in now without
fearing to die. It'll do away with prayers, for there ain't no death!'
Thus he raved, whilst inside, the girl, in the embrace of her
sweetheart, talked in a score of feverish questions and answers. She was
white, but clearly not from want of food. Up in a corner of the
deck-house stood a little load of tins of meat and biscuit, removed
from the _Mowbray's_ hold by her revolted men. In another corner was the
long-boat's big breaker, and a pannikin at hand for a drink.
'Let's get away from this wreck,' said Parry, clasping the girl's hand.
'Yet, what a wonderful meeting!' he cried, devouring her with his eyes.
'What a miraculous deliverance! Oh, the hand of God is in it, and I am
grateful--I am grateful!'
They moved towards the door, and the madman saw them coming.
'Look here,' he cried, making for them in a jump or two, with an air so
menacing that Parry's hand instantly sought his pistol. 'No man walks
alongside the Princess Victoria aboard this Royal yacht. Her 'Ighness
the Duchess taught me how to behave myself in the eye of Royalty when I
was a young un, and this is how it's done,' said he, giving Captain
Parry a shove that drove him some feet from Miss Vanderholt; then,
stepping in front of the girl, he bowed low, with all those marks of
abject veneration which had distinguished his former obeisance, and
saying, 'If your Royal 'Ighness will now step out,' he moved backwards.
But a long plank lay athwart his path; the captain and the seaman saw
what was to happen; the madman fell heavily backwards over it.
'Bring the boat alongside, Jim!' bawled the sailor. 'This is the Ryle
yacht. See the Standard a-flying? The Princess Victoria is aboard, and
we've got to back her into the boat according to the custom of the Court
of St. James's Palace.'
The boatswain was up again, and, flourishing his hand, he cried:
'Right!'
'You leave him to me, sir,' said the sailor, with a half-wink at Captain
Parry, who was absolutely at a loss.
He would not for a million have shot the unhappy madman, and yet he
durst not approach Miss Vanderholt whilst that huge and brawny lunatic
watched him.
The seaman in the boat concluded that his shipmate had lost his mind.
'What the blooming blazes,' he thought to himself, 'is Bill a-jawing
about, with his Ryle yachts and Ryle Standards?'
And he looked right up into the sky.
'Stand by now, Tom, to receive her Ryle 'Ighness!' shouted the sailor,
with a glance at the madman. 'As her 'Ighness must go first, there's no
harm, I hope,' said he, 'in her walking face foremost?'
'She always do,' shouted the boatswain. 'Bow her to the rail, and hand
her over.'
Nothing could have been better. The swell gave them a good deal of
trouble, but two of them were sailors, and presently Miss Vanderholt was
in the boat. Captain Parry sprang into the chains, and, watching his
opportunity, leapt, and was by his sweetheart's side in a minute.
The madman overhung the rails, staring greedily. He knuckled his brow as
one who would drive a pain out of his brain, then began to laugh when
Captain Parry jumped into the boat.
'Bring him along, Bill. You lay he'll know what to do!' cried the sailor
in the boat.
'Her Ryle 'Ighness commands you to attend her, sir,' said the seaman.
'Step right over the side into the chains, and don't jump back'ards.'
The boatswain drew himself stiffly erect, and, after gazing aloft at the
vision of the Standard, which blew in rich folds under the swelling
clouds to his insane eye, he exclaimed:
'Who's going to look after her Royal 'Ighness's yacht if I leave her?'
'She'll lie quiet enough, mate, till you return,' said the sailor.
'Hark! Her Ryle 'Ighness is a-calling of you.'
'Pray attend upon me! I command your presence in this boat!' cried the
girl in the loudest, most imperious voice her condition would permit her
to manage.
The poor creature bowed low over the rail, then in silence dropped into
the chains, followed by the sailor, and in a minute or two both were
seated in the boat.
All went quietly. The boatswain shifted restlessly in his seat, with a
grin of stupefaction. His burning eyes rolled over the _Mowbray_, and
again and again he pulled his hair with hands that sweated like tallow.
Miss Vanderholt's first exclamation, when she was handed over the side,
was, 'My father! my poor father!' And she began to cry. The dreadful
scene rose before her mental vision, and she shook with old sensations
of terror.
Captain Parry, passing his arm through hers, gently and tenderly led her
below. She had been too much moved to address Mr. Blundell, and for a
little while she needed the privacy of the cabin and her lover's
company. Presently, whilst they sat below, she told Captain Parry the
story of the mutiny, and her adventures down to this hour.
It seems that some of the men were for going away at once in the
long-boat, after scuttling the yacht; others were for letting her lie
afloat; but all were agreed that she must be abandoned. Then Miss
Vanderholt found out that they were undecided what they should do with
her. Most of them, she gathered, were for leaving her in the yacht, to
take her chance of being picked up.
'Why not?' said they. 'We can shorten sail for her before we leave. We
can lash the helm amidships. She's got plenty to eat and drink. She
can't come to hurt in these waters, and is bound to be rescued.'
But the boatswain, who had grown ferocious in temper, and had manifested
many symptoms of insanity, swore that she should not be abandoned to her
fate. She was an Englishwoman; he was an English seaman. By God! he
would brain any man who talked of leaving the poor young lady alone to
wash about in the schooner.
She told Captain Parry that this Jones overawed the men, and they seemed
to treat him as though his madness made him superior to themselves. They
all left in the long-boat. The boatswain next morning went quite mad,
and took Miss Vanderholt to be the Princess Victoria. He bowed humbly to
her in the boat; he would sometimes kneel to her. He whipped a straw hat
off a man's head to shade her with.
His hallucination was, fortunately, a sober one. He supposed the men to
be the crew of the cutter of some Royal yacht or other, and himself in
command, seeking the vessel that her Gracious Highness, as he frequently
called her, might sail round the world. A man cut his finger in opening
a tin, and the young lady gave him her handkerchief to bind the wound.
He left it in the boat.
When they fell in with the derelict they were exhausted with the
scorching heat and the exposure by night, and determined to take shelter
and rest aboard, and signal for help, if help should heave into view.
They emptied the long-boat; but that same evening of their entering the
derelict, about an hour before sundown, a small brigantine leisurely
came flapping down upon them, and seven men entered the long-boat and
rowed for her, leaving the boatswain and the young lady to their fate.
Not until long afterwards was it discovered that this brigantine was a
Frenchman, that her crew had mutinied, and sent her captain and mate
adrift, and that, though they perceived the figures of the boatswain and
the young lady on the brig, yet, on the _Mowbray's_ men telling them
that one could bear witness to the mutiny, and that the other was a
dangerous madman, they put their helm up and sailed away.
Before the set of sun the _Mowbray_ was heeling to a fresh breeze; every
cloth that could draw was driving her cutwater through it, and her
clipper-stem rose the white brine raving to her hawse-pipes. She seemed,
like those on board, to have got the scent, and to know that she was
going home.
THE END.
BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.
[Illustration: Decoration]