Wehad swept the island out of sight before we left the dinner table. When I came on deck the horizon had closed somewhat upon us. The ocean was a weak blue, and ran with a frosty sparkle into a sort of film or thickness that went all round the sea. The breeze had freshened, and it whipped the waters into little billows, with yearning and snapping heads of foam, and it was pouring its increasing volume into the lofty height and wide expanse of canvas under which the brig was thrusting along in a staggering, rushing way, the glass-smooth curve of brine at the bow breaking abreast of the gangway with a twelve-knot flash of the foam into the throbbing race of the long wake.
We kept her so throughout the afternoon until six o’clock, when the evening began to darken eastward; we then took in the lower and topgallant studding sails, but left her to drag the fore topmast studding sails if she could not carry it, for this was wind to make the most of; we could not, to our impatience, come up with the Horn too soon; many parallels were there for our keel to cut before we should find ourselves abreast of that headland; degrees of latitude lying like hurdles for the brig to take along that mighty and majestic course of ocean.
That same night of the day of our departure from the island, Greaves came out of the cabin and walked the deck with me. He had been amusing himself for an hour below with the company of the Señorita Aurora. From time to time I had watched them through the skylight. He smoked a cigar; a glass of grog stood at his elbow, some wine and ship’s biscuit before the lady. He held a pencil, and from time to time wrote,looking up at her; and she would bend over the paper, read, give him a dignified nod, take the pencil, and herself write.
But it seemed to me that she forced herself to endure this tuition. She held herself as much away from him as the obligation of writing and extending her hand and receiving the paper permitted. This went on till about nine o’clock. The lady then withdrew, and Greaves came on deck as I have said.
“This is fine sailing,” said he.
“Ay, indeed. I would part with some of those dollars below for a month of it.”
“I have been teaching the girl English, and have picked up some Spanish words from her. She is an apt scholar; her mind is as swift as the light in her eyes. It is clever of her to wish to learn English. We can’t be always sending for that fellow Antonio. She seemed astonished when I talked of three months, but she knows—shemustknow—that the run might occupy a vessel more than three months. What change would the skipper of the craft she sailed out of Acapulco in be willing to give out offourmonths, ay, and perhaps five, in a passage to Cadiz?”
“She, perhaps, thought of herself as being without clothes when you talked of three months, and so cried out.”
“Well, it is clever of her to wish to learn English. Here she is, and here she’s likely to remain until we send her ashore in the Downs.”
“But why?”
“Why?”
“Is there no chance of something coming along,” said I, “in which we can send her to a port this side America?”
“She knows there is a big treasure on board.”
“That’s sure.”
“She knows that it is Spanish money, and how got by us.”
“True.”
“Well, now, send her out of this brig with our secret in her head, and we stand to be chased by the chap we put her aboard of.”
“Not if she be an English ship.”
“I’d trust no Englishman in this part of the world. Figure a craft as heavily armed again as our little brig; figurethat, and then count our crew forward there. I’ll have no risks. I’ll speak nothing. We have got what we came to fetch, and this is to be my last voyage. I am a rich man now. There are thirty-six thousand pounds belonging to me below. No,Fielding, the lady will have to go along with us. You shall teach her English, she shall teach me Spanish. She shall pour out tea, act the hostess, sing; the very spirit of melody swells her fine throat every time she opens her lips. She shall make dresses for herself and under-linen.”
“And the two Spaniards?”
“They must go along with us too. They are a worthless, skulking pair of fellows, I fear; but we must keep ’em.”
“They get no dollars?” said I.
“Not so much as shall buy them soap. We have saved their lives; that’s good pay for such service as they’ll render. What shall you do with your money?”
“Well, I have often considered, captain,” I answered. “I believe I shall buy a little house, put what remains out at interest, and go a-fishing for the rest of my days. And you?”
“First of all,” he answered, “I shall knock off the sea. I shall then strike deep inland and look for a little estate in the heart of a midland shire. I do not know that I shall marry. Should I marry, it will be with a lady of my own degree in life. I will play the gentleman only so far as I am entitled by my condition to represent one. I will be no sham. There is no yardarm high enough for the hanging of the men who, having got or inherited money, set up as country gentlemen, still splashed with the mud of the gutter out of which their fathers crawled, shaking themselves—illiterate, vulgar, scorned by the footmen who stand behind their chairs, belly-crawlers, title-lickers, toadies. Faugh! I once made a rhyme on shams—four lines—the only rhymes I ever made in my life:
“Pull up your blinds that all the world may seeThe house you live in and the man you be.The blinds are up, and now the sun hath shone:The house is empty and the man is gone.”
“Pull up your blinds that all the world may seeThe house you live in and the man you be.The blinds are up, and now the sun hath shone:The house is empty and the man is gone.”
“Pull up your blinds that all the world may seeThe house you live in and the man you be.The blinds are up, and now the sun hath shone:The house is empty and the man is gone.”
“By which you mean to imply——” said I.
“By which I mean to imply,” he interrupted, “that if the lines don’t tell their own story they must be deuced bad.”
He stopped to look at the compass. The night was dark, but the dusk had cleared. The clouds raced swiftly over the stars, and the wind blew strong, but with no increase of weight since we had taken in the studding sails. The brig rushed along, leaving a meteor’s line of light astern of her. The dim squares of her royals swayed on high with the floating stroke of a pendulum. I admired the dark and pallid picture of the little fabric speeding lonely through this vast field of night.
Greaves came from the binnacle and stood beside me.
“Fielding,” he exclaimed, with cordiality strong in his voice, “it rejoices my heart when I reflect that I, whose life you saved, should, by a very miracle of chance, be the one man chosen, as it were, to substantially, and I may say handsomely, serve you.”
“I shall walk through my days blessing your name,” said I, grasping the hand he extended. “And how have you repaid me? You have not only preserved me from drowning, you make me easy for the rest of my time.”
“The accounts are squared to my taste,” said he. “I am very well satisfied. To-morrow I shall want you to take stock of the cases in the lazarette. You found them heavy?”
“All, sir.”
“And all are full, no doubt. But you shall make sure for me.”
“I shall want help,” said I. “Whom shall I choose among the crew?”
“It matters not,” he answered. “All hands know the money is there.”
“Yes; but it is anideato them now. When they come to see the sparkle of the white dollars!”
“There is no good in distrusting them,” said he. “I am aware that your fears run that way. When we were outward bound your fears ran in another direction,” he added dryly. “Let me tell you this, whether we choose to trust the men or not, they’re aboard; they man the ship; they are the people who are to navigate her home. Wemusttrust them,” he repeated with emphasis. “In fact,” he continued after a short pause, “I would set an example of good faith by letting them understand how entirely I trust them. Therefore, to-morrow, take Bol and two others of the men who were left aboard me when you went to theCasada, and examine the cases in their presence, you testing, they moving the boxes for you.”
I replied in the customary sea phrase; for this was a direct order, the wisdom of which it was no duty of mine to challenge. Shortly afterward he went below.
It blew so fresh that night and next day, however, that the sea ran too high to enable me to get below among the cases. It was a spell of wild, hard weather for that part of the world, though it never blew so fierce as to oblige us to heave-to.
The gale held steady on the quarter and we stormed along,the white seas rising in clouds as high as the foretop and blowing ahead like vast bursts of steam from the hatchway.
Greaves pressed the brig, and she rushed through the surge in madness. I never before saw a vessel spring through the seas as did theBlack Watchat this time under a single-reefed foresail and double-reefed topsails. She’d be in a smother forward, just a seething dazzle of yeast ’twixt the forecastle rails, everything hidden that way in a snowstorm, so that you’d think the whole length of her was thundering into the boiling whiteness about her bows; but in a breath she’d leap, black and streaming, to the height of the lifting sea, with a toss of the head that filled the wind with crystals and prisms of brine, while a long-drawn whistling and hooting came out of the fabric of her slanting masts, and the water blew forward in white smoke from the gushing scuppers.
Then came a change; the dawn of the third morning painted a delicate lilac along the eastern sky, and when the sun rose over the wide Pacific the morning was one of cloudless splendor.
At eight o’clock Yan Bol came aft to take charge of the deck. I told him that presently we would be going into the lazarette to take stock of the cases of silver, and that the captain would keep a lookout while he was below.
A dull light glittered in the eyes of the big Dutchman. He grinned and said, “Vill not she be a long shob, Mr. Fielding?”
“Yes,” said I.
“How long shall she take a man to gount a tousand dollars? Und dere vhas hoondreds und tousands of dollars to gount below.”
“Do you think I mean to count the dollars?”
“Yaw.”
I arched my eyebrows at him, and then gave him my back.
“Veil, I vhas sorry. I like gounting money. Dere vhas a shoy in der feel of money if so be ash he vhas gold or silver—I do not love copper—dot makes me happier, Mr. Fielding, dan any odder pleasure. Ox me vhy und I tells you? Because vhen I gounts money she vhas mine own. No man gives me his money to gount. She vhas mine own; but leedle I have, and vhen I counts her it vhas after long years, so dot der pleasure vhas all der same as a pipe und a pot to a man vhen he comes out of der lockoop.”
While I breakfasted I enjoyed some conversation in dumb show with the lady Aurora—dumb show for the most part, Ishould say—for a number of English words she now possessed, and I was astonished not more by her memory than by the excellence of her pronunciation. Her knowledge of a single word uttered by me seemed to light up the whole phrase to her perception. Her gaze would continue passionately wistful and expectant whenever she listened with a desire to understand, and whenever she seized or thought she had seized the sense of what was said, a flush visited her cheeks, her whole face brightened.
There was a degree of eagerness in this desire of hers to learn English that was a little perplexing. It was an earnestness, call it an enthusiasm if you will, that went beyond my idea of her need. It was intelligible that she should wish to make herself understood. She would now know that she was to be locked up in a ship with a number of Englishmen for three or four months; what more reasonable than that she should desire to make her wants intelligible without being forced upon so disagreeable and ignorant an interpreter as Antonio, and without seeking expression in grimaces and the lunatic language of the eyebrows, shoulders, and hands? What more reasonable, I ask? But her earnestness, her zeal, her satisfaction when she understood, caused me to wonder somewhat when I thought of her in this way. She was on a desert island a few days ago, with small prospect of deliverance from as frightful a fate as could well befall a woman. For all she knew her mother was drowned; she might be an orphan, and who was to tell what property belonging to her and her mother had sunk in the Spaniard from which she had escaped, supposing that vessel to have foundered? And yet spite of all this her spirits were good, her beauty growing as the lingering traces of her suffering died out. She took an interest in everything her eyes rested upon, questioning me like a child, questioning Greaves, nay, walking forward, as I have told you, to ask Antonio for the English names of things, and all the while her troubles, so far as she was able to express them, did not go beyond an anxiety as to clothes for herself and an eagerness to pick up our tongue.
These thoughts ran in my head as I ate my breakfast, while she talked to me by gesticulation, occasionally uttering a word or two in English, and listening with shining eyes to the sentences I let fall in my own speech. Greaves lay upon a locker. He listened, sometimes smiling, but rarely spoke. He complained this morning of an aching in his side where he hadhurt himself, and said that he feared he had made a mistake in walking yesterday; he was afraid he had overworked the bruised ribs, but he looked well, and when he spoke there was a heartiness in his voice. It was as likely as not that he had angered the bruise by too much walking about the decks, and I advised him to lie up until the pain went.
However, the brig was to be watched while I went into the lazarette with Bol and the others, so I sent Jimmy on deck with a chair, and when I had breakfasted Greaves got up, put his hand upon my shoulder, and together we ascended the companion ladder.
Yan Bol was carpenter as well as bo’sun and sail-maker. I bade him fetch the necessary tools for opening the cases and securing them again. With us went Henry Call and another—I forget who that man was. We lighted a couple of lanterns, and going into the cabin lifted the lazarette hatch that was just abaft the companion steps. The lady Aurora came to the square hole to look at us, and inquired by signs what we were going to do. I shrugged Spanish fashion, and made a face at her, that she might gather that what we were going to do was entirely beyond the art of my shoulders and arms to communicate.
“Doan she shpeak no English, Mr. Fielding?” said Bol, as he handed down his tools to Call, who was already in the lazarette.
“No,” said I.
“Veil, I, Yan Bol, teaches him herself in a month for von of her rings.”
“Over with ye, Bol. Catch hold of this lantern.”
He dropped through the hatch and I followed, and Miss Aurora stood at the edge of the square of the hole, holding by the companion steps and peering down.
There were one hundred and forty cases; we examined every one of them; it was a long job. I felt mighty reluctant at first to let Bol prize open the lids and gaze with the others at the dull, frosty glitter of the long rolls of dollars; but a little reflection made me sensible of the force of Greaves’ argument. If the crew were not to be trusted, what was to be done? And was it not a mere piece of cheap quarter-deck subtlety on my part to hold that theideaof the dollars being aft was not the same asseeingthem?
There was no need to watch very anxiously; the dollars were packed as tightly as though the metal had been pouredred-hot into the cases and hardened in solid blocks. There was never a nail on Bol’s stump-ended fingers that could have scratched a coin out.
“Vhas dere goldt here as veil ash silver?” he inquired.
“No.”
“Oxcuse me, Mr. Fielding, but how vhas you to know?”
“How was anybody to know what these cases contained at all? Shove ahead, will ye, and ask fewer questions. Are we to be here all day?”
It was as hot as fire in this lazarette. Our blood was speedily in a blaze and our clothes soaked. The three Jews who were summoned from the province of Babylon to be hove into a burning furnace suffered not as we did. Bol’s eyes took a gummy look and turned dull as bits of jelly fish; yet the three fellows were perfectly happy in staring at the silver and pulling the cases about. Every time a lid was lifted their heads came together in the sheen of the lantern, and rude sounds of rejoicing broke from them.
“How many sprees goes to each box?”
“There’s an Atlantic Ocean of drink in this here case alone.”
“Smite me, but if this gets blown the girls’ll be coming down to meet the brig afore she’s reported.”
“She vhas a handsome coin. I likes to feel her in mine pocket. How much vhas she vurth, Mr. Fielding?”
“All that you shall be able to buy with her. Next case, and bear a hand.”
“How many tousand dollars vhas tdere in all?”
“Enough to stiffen you with sausage and to keep ye oozy with schnapps.”
We worked our way to the bottom case, and every case was chock-a-block, as we say at sea—filled flush—and the dollars by the lantern light resembled exquisitely wrought chain armor. I saw that every case was securely nailed; the boxes were restowed. We then climbed out of the lazarette, and Bol and the others went forward while I put on the hatch, padlocked it, and withdrew the key.
I plunged my fire-red face in water, quickly shifted, and quitted the cabin, tired, burning hot, but very well satisfied with the morning’s work. Greaves was seated in a chair, and Miss Aurora walked the deck, in the shadow of the little awning, pacing the planks abreast of him. Her carriage, to use the old-fashioned word, had she been draped as the beauties of her person demanded, would have been lofty yet flowing,dignified yet easy and floating, graceful as the motions of a dancer who swims from the dance into walking; but the barbaric cut of her gown spoiled all. Never did I behold a woman’s dress so ridiculously shaped. It was a grief to an English eye, for in my country the girls’ costumes were just such as would have hit and sweetened by suggestion the form of Miss Aurora. Well do I remember the English girls’ style of 1815; the neckerchief with its peep of white breast, the girdle under the swelling bosom, the fair up and down fall of drapery thence. Never do I recall that costume, with its hat of chip or leghorn, without a fancy of the smell of buttercups and daisies, the flavor of cream, the scent of a milkmaid fresh from the udder.
I handed the key to Greaves. He put it in his pocket and gazed at me inquiringly.
“It’s all right, sir, to the bottom dollar,” said I.
“Good!” he exclaimed.
“It is so much right,” said I, “that I am disposed to think there is more money than the manifest represents.”
“There are five hundred and fifty thousand dollars in one hundred and forty cases. I wish there may be more, but I suspect the entry was correct. What did the men say?”
“Yan Bol was all a-rumble with questions. There will be much talk forward.”
“There has been much talk aft,” he exclaimed, smiling. “Sailors are human, and those fellows yonder are to pocket twelve hundred dollars apiece besides their wages on this job. Let them talk. Let imagination run away with them. Let the fiddle be jigging in their ears; let their Polls be seated on their knees—in fancy. Keep their hearts willing, for this bucket has to be whipped home.”
The lady Aurora looked and listened as she paced abreast of us. Her eyes, full of light, often rested on me. Greaves ran his gaze slightly over her figure, and, leaning back in his chair and looking away, that she might not suspect he talked of her, said:
“Our dark and lonely friend is mighty full of curiosity. I can believe that Eve was such another. When Eve walked round the apple tree and looked up at the fruit, with her head a little on one side, she wore just the sort of expression the dark and lonely party puts on when she motions a question.”
“Qué hora es, señor?” said the lady.
Greaves made her understand, by pronouncing the word“one” in Spanish and by gesticulating the remainder of his meaning, that it was drawing on to two o’clock.
“She may be hungry,” said I.
“She shall be fed in a few minutes,” said Greaves.
The girl seated herself on the skylight and watched the motion of Greaves’ lips, listening, at the same time, with a little frown of attention to the pronunciation of the words he coolly delivered:
“I was observing,” said he, with an askant glance at her, “that the dark and lonely party is mighty full of curiosity. She tried to pump me about the dollars below; wanted to know what you were doing in the hold; asked the value of the treasure.”
“How did you understand her?”
“She beckoned to Antonio; but when I found she had no more to say thanthat, I sent him forward again with a sea blessing on his head. And when I was taking sights she put out her hand for my quadrant. I let her hold it. She clapped it to her eye—shutting the eye to which she put it, of course—fell to fingering the thing, and I took it from her. I wish she wasn’t so handsome. A little mustache, a pretty shadowing of beard, the Valladolid complexion, and a few chocolate teeth would make the difference I want, to enable me to look my meaning when she teases me with questions. But who could be angry with the owner of those eyes?”
He gazed at her fully. She averted her face suddenly. I fancied I caught a fleeting expression of aversion, or, at all events, of distrust. She flashed her eyes upon me with a gaze as significant as though she understood what Greaves had been talking about, rose from the skylight, and motioned me to walk with her. Greaves left his chair and stepped slowly to the companion way. At this moment Jimmy came along with the cabin dinner. The lady, inclining her face to my ear, spoke low in Spanish, pointed to the cabin skylight, shook her head, then pressed her forefinger to her lip, all which, in plain English, meant: “I don’t like him.” I could have answered that she owed her life to him as master of the ship, and that his offhand manners were British, and meant nothing.
“Dinner,” said I.
“Dinner,” she repeated, smiling.
She repeated the word several times.
“Will you come?” said I.
These words she likewise repeated; then, giving me alittle bow, she extended her hand, that I might conduct her below.
The evening of this same day was soft and beautiful, rich with the lights of heaven; the ocean so calm that some of the most brilliant of the luminaries found reflection in the water—tremulous, wire-like lines of silver; yet had the breeze body enough to give the brig way. It came fanning and breathing cool as dew off the dark surface of the sea, and the refreshment of it after the fiery heat of the day was as drink to the parched throat.
I walked in the gangway, smoking a pipe. It was shortly after eight o’clock. Yan Bol was aft with Greaves. The lady Aurora was in the cabin writing with a pencil. Some seamen were in the bows of the brig; their shadowy figures flitted to and fro, all very quietly. Voices proceeded from the other side of the caboose; the speakers did not probably know that I walked near. I could not choose but listen. One was Antonio, the other Wirtz, and the third Thomas Teach.
“What I don’t understand’s this,” said the voice of Teach. “Th’ole man [meaning Captain Greaves] falls in with that there ship locked up in the island, and boards her. He finds the silver—why didn’t he take it, instead of leaving it with a chance of the vessel going to pieces, or some covey a-nabbing the dollars afore he could come back for them?”
“Dot may seem all right to you,” said Wirtz, “but see here, Tommy; shuppose der captain had took der dollars into der ship he commanded vhen he falls in mit der island; vhat do his crew say? Und vhen he arrives vhat vhas he to do mit der dollars? Gif dem oop to der owners of his ship? By Cott, he see dem dom’d first. If he keep der dollars for himself, how vhas he going to landt dem on der sly mitout der crew asking him for one-half, maybe, and making him like as he can hang himself for der rest? Dot’s vhere she vhas. No, no,” rumbled the man in his deep, Dutch voice, “der capt’n know his beesiness. Dis trip for der dollars vhas vhat you English call shipshape und Pristol fashion.”
“Is the dollars to be run, I wonder, when we gets home?” said Teach.
“Do you mean shmuggled?”
“Yaw, smuggled’s the word, Yonny,” said Teach.
“Vell, if dey vhas not run dey vhas seized.”
“Who’s a-going to seize ’em?”
“Ox der captain.”
“I’d blow the blooming brains out of any man’s head as laid a finger on my share,” said Teach.
“Yaw, und you gif me der pleasure of seeing you hanging oop by der neck. Den I pulls off my hat, und I say how vhas she oop dere mit you? Vhas he pretty vindy oop dere?”
“When I gets my share,” said Teach, after a pause, “I’m a-going in for a buster. There’ll be no half-laughs and purser’s grins about the gallivanting I’ve chalked out for myself. There’s Galen always a-telling us what he’s going to do with his money; sometimes he’s a-going to buy a share in a vessel; then, no, dumm’d if he is, he’ll buy a house and put his young woman into it; then no, dumm’d if he’ll do that, he’ll clap his money in a bank, and wait till the figures grow big enough to allow of his living like a gent for the remainder of his days.”
“Vhen I gets my money dis vhas my shoke,” said the Dutchman. “My girl shall teach me to eat. She shall puy me a silver fork. By Cott, I drink mine beer out of silver. Every day I hov veal broth, und sausages, peas und salad, stewed apple und ham, und pickled herrings mit smoked beef, und butter und sheese, und I shplits myself mit almonds und raisins.”
“I like the taste of the Dutch!” cried Antonio, in a voice that sounded thin and almost shrill after Wirtz’s. “When I get my money see what it shall bring me; white cod and onions from Galicia, walnuts from Biscay, oranges from Mercia, sausages from Estramadura”—here he loudly smacked his lips—“sweet citrons and iced barley-water and water-melons.Vaya!What have you to say now to your veal broth and salt herrings? And I will have Malaga raisins, and my olives shall come from Seville, and my grapes and figs from Valencia.Vaya!I am a Spaniard, and this is how a Spaniard chooses. All that is good may be had in Madrid, and all that is good will I have when my share is paid me.”
There fell a short silence as of astonishment.
“Share!” cried Wirtz in a low, deep, trembling voice. “Share didt you say? Shpeak again. I like to hear dot verdt vonce more.”
“Share! What share are ye talking about. Ye aint thinking of the dollars below, I hope?” said Teach, in a tone of menace.
“I expect a share,” said the Spaniard.
“Oxpect—say dot again. I likes to hear you shpeak,” saidWirtz, with an accent that made me figure him doubling his fist.
“Aren’t I a sailor on board this ship?” said Antonio.
“Asailor, d’ye call yourself?” cried Teach. “Well,” he snapped, “suppose y’ are, what then?”
“I have a right to a share.”
“And do you tink you get a share?”
“I have a right to a share,” repeated the Spaniard in a sullen note.
“Call her a shoke or I vill fight mit you,” said Wirtz.
“I will not fight,” said the Spaniard in a dogged voice. “I have a right to a share. The capitan will pay me and Jorge. We are sailors with you, and are helping to navigate this brig to your country. The dollars are Spanish; they are money of my own country. The capitan is a gentleman, and will not wrong me and Jorge, and we will receive our share as a part of the crew.”
This was followed by a Dutch oath, by a crash and a low cry.
“Hallo, there—hallo!” I called. “What are you men about there on t’other side the caboose?”
I sprang across the deck, and, by such light as the stars made, beheld Antonio in the act of getting on to his legs.
“Mind! He may have a knife!” shouted Teach. The Spaniard, uttering a malediction, whipped a blade from a sheath that lay strapped to his hip, and flung it upon the deck. The point of the weapon pierced the plank, and the knife stood upright.
“I am no assassin! I do not draw knives upon men!” cried Antonio.
“Who knocked this man down?” I demanded.
“I—Vertz.
“You are a bully and a ruffian. This is a shipwrecked man, scarce recovered from great sufferings. He is half your size, too.”
“He talked of his share, Heer Fielding, und my bloodt poiled. We safe his life, he eats und drinks, und der toyfil has der impudence to talk of his share!”
“Forward there! What is wrong?” cried the voice of Greaves. “Where is Mr. Fielding?”
“Here, sir.”
“What is wrong, I am asking.”
“Come aft to the captain, the three of you,” said I; and I led the way.
All hands were on deck at this hour. The forecastle was roasting, and the watch below lay about the forward part of the decks. The whole crew, therefore, heard the noise, were drawn by it, and followed me as I went aft, Teach loitering in my wake to tell those who brought up the rear that “the blooming Spaniard was swearing he’d a right to a share of the dollars, and that he was bragging as how he meant to spend his money in Madrid on onions and figs, when he was brought up with a round turn by Yonny Vertz’s fist.”
It is strange that unto the eye of memory the picture which the brig at this hour made should stand the most clearly cut, the most sharply defined of all my recollections of her. Why is this? Because, perhaps, of the accentuation that night scene took from the shadowy heap of the men assembled upon the quarter-deck, from the quarrel beside the caboose, from the significance that must come into any sort of difficulty aboard us from the treasure in the lazarette.
The sails soared dark and still in the weak night-wind; a brook-like bubbling noise of water rose from under the bows; the vessel was steeped in the dye of the night; but there was a faint shining in the air round about the illuminated binnacle, and a dim sheen hovered over the cabin skylight. The sea sloped vast and flat to the scintillant wall of the sky. The voices of the men deepened upon the ear the silence out upon the ocean. It was a night to set the mind running upon that saying and realizing it: “And darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
“What’s wrong?” said Greaves.
The shapeless figure of Bol came trudging from the neighborhood of the wheel to listen.
“There’s been some sort of discussion between Wirtz and Antonio,” said I, “and Wirtz knocked the Spaniard down.”
“Captain,” exclaimed Wirtz, “all hands likes to know if der Spaniards you safe shares in der dollars?”
“Who began the row?” said Greaves.
“Señor,” exclaimed Antonio, “I was speaking of the food that we eat in my country——”
“Captain,” bawled Teach, “he was a-bragging of the cod and onions, the nuts and barley-water he meant to treat hisself to out of his share, as he calls it, when he gets to his home.”
“She made mine plood poil,” cried Wirtz; “und he laughs at me vhen I speaks of vhat ve eats in mine own country.”
“Señor,” exclaimed Antonio, “have not Jorge and me a right to a share?”
“Of what?”
“Of the money in the cases—of my country’s money—that you take out of the Spanish ship.”
“Bol shall slit your nose if you talk like that. You rascal! Is it not enough that we have saved your life? And what d’ye mean by your country’s money? Of what country are you?”
“I am of Spain, señor; born at Salamanca.”
“There is no money in your country,” shouted Greaves. “Ye are paupers all, cowards all, sneaks and rogues to a man.” Yan Bol laughed deep. “Speak again of the money below being the money of your country, and we’ll hang ye.”
“Señor,” said Antonio, “am I and Jorge to receive no money for working as sailors in this ship?”
“Not so much as will purchase you a rag to wind round your greasy ankles.”
A half-smothered laugh broke from Wirtz and others.
“We ask, then, that you land us,” said the Spaniard, whose audacity in continuing to address Greaves was scarcely less astonishing than the captain’s extraordinary exhibition of temper and wilder display of words.
“Mind that you are not landed at the bottom of the sea, with a twenty-four pound shot to keep you there,” cried Greaves. “Wirtz, did you knock that man down?”
“Yaw, captain,” responded Wirtz, in a voice that made one guess at the grin upon his face.
“You are a big man, Wirtz, and Antonio is a little man. Wirtz, I wish you may not be a coward at heart. Know you not,” cried Greaves, elevating his voice, “that it is written, ‘Make not an hungry soul sorrowful; neither provoke a man in his distress.’ The soul of Antonio is hungry for dollars and you have made him sorrowful; he is in distress, being shipwrecked and having lost all his clothes, and you have provoked him. Your grog is stopped for a week, Wirtz.”
“By Cott, but dot vhas hardt upon a man,” said the Dutchman.
“Now get forward, all hands,” exclaimed Greaves, “but mark you this; any man who raises his hand against another on board this brig goes into irons and forfeits his share of dollars. This is to be a peaceful and a smiling ship. We are going to get home sweetly and soberly; then comes yourenjoyment—the pleasures of beasts or men, as you choose. Let no man say no to this.”
He walked aft; I thought he would stay to have a word with me. Instead he immediately descended into the cabin. The men moved forward, talking among themselves, some of them laughing.
Yan Bol came up to me and said:
“I tell you vhat, Mr. Fielding, der Captain Greaves vhas a very fine shentleman.”
“Very.”
“How he talks—mine Cott, how he talks! I would gif half mine dollars to talk like dot shentleman.”
“He is an educated man, and speaks well.”
“Yaw, vell indeedt. I like der sheck of Antonio in oxbecting a share. But he oxbects no longer, ha?”
I turned from the Dutchman and looked through the skylight, and saw Greaves sitting at table, leaning his head upon his hand. The lady Aurora continued to write, but once or twice while I watched, she lifted her eyes to look at the captain. I was weary and passed below to go to my cabin. Greaves had left the table and was entering his own berth, as I descended the companion steps. The materials for a glass of grog were on a swing tray. While I mixed myself a tumbler the girl rose and handed me the paper she had been writing upon. The sheets had been torn by Greaves from an old log book, and they were filled by her with Spanish names with their English meanings. I ran my eye over the writing, which was a very neat, clean Spanish hand, and nodded and smiled, and returned the pages to her, sayingBueno. Then emptying my glass I gave her a bow, bade her good-night in Spanish, received her answer of “Good-night, sir,” well expressed in English, and passed into my berth.
Thistime gives a date to a change that came over Greaves. It was the change of sickness. He grew feverish, irritable, fanciful; his appetite fell away; the light in his eyes dimmed; sometimes he would put on a staring look, as though he beheld something beyond that at which he gazed.
I had been struck by his manner, and more by his mannerthan by his speech, when he lectured Wirtz and flung at Antonio, the Spaniard, as you have read in the last chapter. Yet of itself this would not have been a matter to rest very weightily upon my mind, seeing that all along I had considered Greaves as a little, just a little, mad at the root. But soon the incident took significance as being a first lifting of the curtain, so to speak, upon a new and somewhat crazy behavior in my friend. I hoped at first it was the heat that unsettled his nerves and that the Horn would give me back my old, odd, hearty, generous shipmate and messmate. Then I feared that the blow he had dealt himself when he stumbled in the hold of theCasadahad been silently and painlessly working bitter mischief in the organ of the liver, or in parts adjacent thereto. If the liver was hurt the strangeness of the man might be accounted for. I have suffered from the liver in my time, and know what it is to have felt mad; I say I have known moments—O God, avert the like of them from me and those I love—when I could scarce restrain myself from breaking windows, kicking at the shins of all who approached me, knocking my head against the wall, yelling with the yell of one who drops in a fit; and all the while my brain was as healthy as the healthiest that ever filled a human skull, and nothing was wanted but a musketry of calomel pills to dislodge the fiend that was jockeying my liver and galloping the whole fabric of my being down the easy descent.
It will not be supposed that the change in Greaves was sudden. It uttered itself at capricious intervals, and at the beginning was more visible in the mood than in the man.
For example, it was, I think, about four days after the little incident which brings the last chapter to a close. I had charge of the deck from eight to midnight. Miss Aurora had passed half an hour with me, sometimes asking questions by gestures distinguishable by the light of the moon, sometimes attempting strange sentences in English, all the words correctly pronounced, but so misplaced that with true British politeness I was forever breaking into a laugh at her. A moment there had been when she was in earnest. She came to a stand, her face fronting the moon so that I witnessed the working of it, her eyes with a little silver flame in each liquid depth dark as the sea over the side. She spoke in Spanish, with here and there a word of English. It seemed to me she referred to the voyage. I fancied that I worked out of her words the meaning that she desired to continue in the brig, andwas content. How did I gather this, when I tell you in the next breath that I could not understand her? Well, it was myfancyof her meaning that I give you, but whether I understood her or not she motioned with an air of tragic distress, clasped her hands, looked up at the stars, and cried in English, “Sad—sad—not understand—sad.” We then resumed our walk, and presently she left me.
Now it was that Greaves arrived. He smoked a long curled pipe of Turkish workmanship and moved noiseless in slippers. The moonlight whitened his face and silvered his hair and blackened his eyes till, elsewhere, I might have looked twice without knowing him. We were to the southward of the Lima parallel, our course south by west. The Bolivian coast trends inward. Our course gave us to larboard a wide sweep of open ocean and this we should hold down to the latitude of 50°. After which the chance was small of our falling in with anything armed under Spanish colors.
We had made noble progress taking the days all round, and this night we were courtesying onward with a pretty breeze off the larboard beam—a wind that ran the waters gushing white to the bends, and overhead were all the stars and the moon in their midst dimming a circle of them, and under the moon the play of the sea was like a torrent of boiling silver.
“This is a desolate ocean,” said Greaves.
“So much the better for us,” said I.
“Oh, yes, so much the better for us. But the solitude of the sea is a burden that the heart don’t always beat lightly under. Is solitude a material thing? It has the weight of substance when it settles upon the spirits.”
I let him talk on. He was fond of big, fine words, and the stranger he became the more heroic grew his vein.
“Any more rows forward among the men?”
“I have heard of none.”
“I had two men who fought through a voyage. They had sailed together before and fought throughout. ‘They will fight while they meet on earth,’ said the boatswain of the ship to me, ‘and they will fight if they catch sight of each other at the Resurrection.’”He puffed a cloud of smoke upon the wind and looked round the sea. “I am unsettled in my faith,” said he, “I am troubled by doubts. I believe I am almost Roman Catholic, but lack sufficient credulity to enable me to bring up in that faith. I will tell you what I mean to believe in,” continued he, halting in his walk, compelling me to stand, andlooking me full in the face; “I am going to believe in the transmigration of souls.”
“Oh, you’ll wish to choose your next body before deciding, won’t you?” said I. “You wouldn’t be a flea or a cockroach?”
“The flea and perhaps the cockroach have short lives,” said he gravely, “and the next entry might be into something noble. But stop till I tell you why I am going to believe in the transmigration of souls. I had a dream a few nights since. I dreamt that I was a Jewess. I beheld my face in a glass and admired it vastly. My eyes flashed and were full of fire; my lips were scarlet. I wore something white about my head. I knew that I was a Jewess. Shadowy faces of many races of people approached, looked me close in the eye, felt my face with their hands, accosted me, and I could not speak. I was suffocated with the want of speech. But on a sudden I obtained relief. I opened my mouth and spoke, and the words I spoke were Hebrew.”
“D’ye know Hebrew?” said I.
“A stupid question to ask a sailor.”
“How do you know you spoke in Hebrew?”
“Because it wasn’t Greek; because it wasn’t Welsh; because—because—man, it was just Hebrew.”
“And how does transmigration offer here?” said I.
“I was my own soul, informing the body of a Jewess. My soul, of course, couldn’t utter itself, as it was fresh from the body of an Englishman, until it had filled up, as smoke might, every cranny and brain cell of the shape it possessed; until it had penetrated to the crypts and dark foundations of the woman’s heart. Then, seeking vent, my soul broke through the lips of the Jewess. In what tongue, d’ye ask? In what but the tongue of her nation?”
“This,” thought I, “is the lady Aurora’s doing. She it is who’s the Jewess of my poor friend’s dream. The fiery eyes, if not the scarlet lips, are hers, and hers the arrest and suffocation of speech.”
But I guessed it would anger him to put this; yet it grieved me to hear this nonsense in his mouth, and the more because his looks by the moon, that shone upon us while he discoursed, gave a gloomy accentuation of—what shall I call it? not yet madness; not yet craziness; let me rather speak of it as wildness—to his words.
He walked with me for above an hour, talking on this absurdity of transmigration, and reasoning illogically, andoften with irreverence, on points relating to the salvation of man. It is a bad sign when religion gets into a man’s head and acidly turns into windiness and nightmare imaginations, as a sweet milk hardens into curdy flatulence in the belly of the suckling.
I sought to shift the helm of his mind by talking about the dollars below; by speaking about the crew and my secret distrust of Yan Bol; by calling his attention to the look of his brig as she floated, with aslant spars, through the moonlight, flowing lengths of the sails curving in alabaster beyond the shadow in their hollows, the water, black as ink under her bowsprit, pouring aft in fire and snow. But all to no purpose. He looked and seemed not to see; he repeated, in a mouthing, absent way, my sentences about Bol and other matters, and immediately struck back again into his talk about heaven, his soul, the Jewess he had dreamt of, and the like.
But, even without seeing him, even without hearing him, I should have known that there was something wrong with the man by the behavior of his dog. I do not say that all dogs have souls; but I am as sure that Galloon had a soul of his own, after its kind, as that my eyes are mates. As a change slowly came over Greaves, so slowly changed Galloon. I would notice the dog watching his master’s face at table, and found a score of human emotions in the creature’s expression. I’d see him lying at Greaves’ door if the captain was within, when formerly he would be on deck cruising about among the men or skylarking aft with me. If I called him, he’d come slowly. There was no more capering up to me, no more buoyant greetings, no leapings and lickings and short, eager yelps of salutation in response to the many things I’d say to him. We make much of human love, I would think while caressing the dog or looking at him, and the love of man we call a passion; but the love of the dog we call an instinct. Yet is not the instinct nobler than the passion? Purity it has that is faultless. Is human passion pure to faultlessness? There is selfishness in human passion, but the love of yonder dog for its master is without selfishness. Many qualities enter into the passion of love; but the love of yonder dog is a primary quality in him. It is as gold among metals. Supposing analysis possible, then analyze the brute’s affection, and you find not a hair’s weight, not a dust-grain’s bulk, of vitiating element.
The lady Aurora was quick to notice the change in Greaves.Her lids moved swiftly upon her eyes, and their lashes were a veil, and she had an art of glancing without seeming to glance. She did not like him, and would not appear to see him more often than courtesy obliged. Her rapid glances, therefore, on occasions when she would have found other occupation for her eyes, told me that she was struck by the man’s looks, that she wondered at them and guessed their significance. I was no doctor. For all I could tell she might have some knowledge under that head. I fancied this from her manner of looking at Greaves.
So one day, when she and I were alone in the cabin, Bol on the lookout above, and the captain in his berth, I endeavored to converse with her about my friend; but to no purpose. Intelligibility vanished in signs, shakes of the head, dumb pointings to the brow and ribs. She had, indeed, picked up a little English. She was able to pronounce the names of various articles of food, also had several English nautical terms at her tongue’s end; but when it came to trying to talk about Greaves’ state of health, there was nothing for it but to crook our brows, hunch our backs, and work meaning into nonsense with postures.
Yet I managed to discover that the lady and I were agreed in this; that Greaves had received some internal injury from his fall, that it was slowly sickening him, and affecting his mind.
Nevertheless, he went about as usual, punctually took sights, attended at meals, was up and down during the day and night. He was very rational in all the orders he gave to the men, in all direct instructions to me respecting shipboard discipline and routine. It was by fits and starts that his growing wildness showed, and always when he had me alone; and then the matter of his discourse was dreams and religion and death. Not that he talked as though he supposed his end was approaching; upon his words lay no shadow of the melancholy that is cast by the dread event when the heart knows, dimly and mysteriously, that it is coming. He chattered as if for argument’s sake; postulated to disprove his own assertions, but he was seldom logical, often devout, filled to the very twang of his nose with fervor, and at other times, and on a sudden, as impious as young John Bunyan.
What think you of this character of a seaman, of a plain north-country merchant seaman;youwhose ideas of the nautical man are gotten from Smollett’s studies, from thedelightful portraits of dear Captain Marryatt? But, Jack, bless ye!you, who have been to sea,youwho have sailed ten times round the world, who have swung your hammock in a score of forecastles, and who have outweathered Satan himself in a dozen different aspects of ship’s captains,you, mate, will approve this sketch, will recognize its truth, will tell the landlubbers that at sea are many varieties of men—men who swear not, who are gentle, faithful in their duty below; men who are a little crazy, who drink deeply and are devils in their thoughts and madmen in their behavior, but trucklers and slaverers to those who hire them; men who are hearty, pimpled, broad of beam, verdant with the grog blossom and green in naught else, moist in the weather eye, and bow-legged by great seas.
One Sunday morning, when we had left the island a little more or less than three weeks behind us, Greaves said to me at the breakfast table:
“I shall hold divine service this morning on deck.”
I stared, but said nothing.
“I’ll read a portion of the Church of England liturgy to the men,” said he, “and a chapter out of the Bible. What chapter do you recommend?”
I was at a loss.
“Give them something interesting,” said I, “something that will carry them along with you.”
“Right,” he exclaimed, with a little light of vivacity in his somewhat sunken and somewhat leaden eye, “what d’ye say to a fight out of Joshua?”
“I do not think,” I answered, “that a good fight out of Joshua could be bettered.”
“I’ll give ’em that chapter,” said he, “in which the son of Nun corks the five kings up in a cave and then hangs them. Not that there’s any moral that I can see in that sort of narrative. It is an Ebrew Gazette extraordinary—a pitiful, bloody business from beginning to end. But if the reading of a chapter of it causes even one of the sailors to take an interest in the Bible I shall have done some good.”
“So you will.”
“Do you know the men’s persuasions?”
“Not I, captain.”
“The Spaniards are Roman Catholics, of course. The Dutchmen and the others will be of us if they’re of anything. When you go on deck tell Bol to see that the crew clean themselves, and let him muster and bring them aft for divine service at half-past ten.”
“Ay, ay, sir.”
Miss Aurora sat over against me at this meal as at most others; she stared at me as though something was wrong. I did not wonder; I had been unable to conceal my astonishment at Greaves’ orders for divine service. Down to this moment he had never read a prayer to the men, never exhibited the least disposition to do so, never imported the faintest shadow of anything religious into the dull and swinish routine of the brig. It was somewhat late in the day to lay up onthattack, methought. But it was for me to obey, and I went on deck, leaving Greaves sitting. Miss Aurora followed, and touched my elbow as I passed through the companion hatch.
“What is it?” said she, in English.
“Nothing, nothing,” I answered, smiling and shaking my head, for it would have given me a deal too much to act, with Yan Bol and the fellow at the wheel as spectators, to gesticulate Greaves’ intention to collect all hands to prayers.
“No danger?” said she, speaking again in English.
“No, no,” I responded heartily.
She touched her forehead, clasped her hands, and turned up her eyes to heaven with one of her incomparable expressions of tragic melancholy, sighed heavily, and returned to the cabin.
“Bol,” said I, stepping up to the great Dutchman where he stood near the wheel, “you will see that the men clean themselves and muster aft by half-past ten for divine service.”
“What’s dot?” said he.
“Prayers.”
He looked at Teach, who was at the helm, and a smile crawled over his face, as wind creeps over a surface of sea. His smile wrinkled his massive visage to the line of his hair.
“Brayers, Mr. Fielding! Dot vhas strange after all dese months. For vhat vhas ve to pray now dot der dollars vhas on boardt?”
“Reason the matter with the captain, if you choose. You have your instructions.”
“Ay, ay, sir. Mr. Fielding, may I hov a verdt mit you?”
He spoke respectfully, and moved from the wheel. He was a man I had been careful to give a wide berth to throughout the voyage; but also was he a man whom, for my own peace sake, I had been at some pains not to give offense to. The familiarity of the fellow was Dutch. I never could make sure that it was more than a characteristic of his countrymen with him, and that he meant insolence when he spoke insolently. I bore in mind, moreover, that secretly he, and no doubt the rest of the crew, viewed me as an interloper—as one who would, probably, share far more handsomely than they in the treasure without having entered at Amsterdam or having formed a part of the original scheme of the expedition. This consideration, then, made me wary in my relations with Yan Bol.
He moved from the wheel out of earshot of the fellow there, and said, in a rumbling voice of subdued thunder:
“I oxbects dot der captain vhas not fery vell, Mr. Fielding?”
“He is not very well.”
“She vhas a bad shob if he vhas to took und die.”
“Yaw; but what is it you wish to say to me?”
“I hov nothing to say, Mr. Fielding, oxcept vhat I hov said. Der men likes to know how her captain vhas. Vhen I goes forwardt und tells dem dot dey most lay aft und bray, dey vhas for vanting to know if der captain vhas all right mit his headt. Oxcuse me, Mr. Fielding, but vhas it all right mit der captain’s headt?”
“We are talking of the captain,” said I.
“Ay, ay, sir; and I shpeaks mit all respect. You vhas first mate; I oct second. It vhas right ve shpeaks together, vhen der capt’n’s health vhas in trouble.”
“You are able to judge of his state as well as I, Bol.”
“No; you live close mit him. My end of der ship vhas yonder.”
His voice seemed to deepen yet as he spoke these words, while he pointed with his vast square hand to the forecastle. I held my peace, sending a look to windward and at the wheel, as a hint to him to go. He stood a while viewing me and appearing to consider, all with a heavy Dutch leisureliness of manner and expression, as though his thoughts rose slow, like whales, to the surface of his intelligence, spouted, and sunk before he could harpoon them; then, saying, “Vell, brayers at half-past ten. Dot vhas a strange idea now der money vhas on boardt,” he walked forward.
This being Sunday morning, the men had nothing to do, and lounged about the galley, smoking and conversing. I watched Bol approach them. He stood abreast of a knot and delivered his orders.ThatI gathered from the stares, the starts, the hoarse laugh, the rude forecastle joke sent in agrowling shout across to a mate at a distance. A little later, however, the fellows came together in a body, somewhat forward of the caboose, some of them out of my sight until my steps carried me to the gangway. Yan Bol stood among them. It was clear to me that they were talking over this new scheme of a prayer meeting aft. I kept well away, and heard nothing but the rumbling of their voices; but it was easy to guess that the most of their talk ran on the captain’s health and intellect, and I reckoned that, if they had already noticed any strangeness in him, this call to prayers would go further to prove him mad in their eyes than the insanest shipboard order he could have delivered.
Some while, however, before there was need for Bol to send the men to clean themselves, Jimmy came out of the cabin and said that the captain wished to speak to me. The morning was fine, the breeze steady, and the sea smooth. The deck was to be safely left for a short interval. I called an order to the helmsman and went below.
Greaves was pacing the cabin floor. The lady Aurora was in her berth, perhaps at her devotions. Galloon was upon a chair, wistfully watching his master as he measured the cabin.
Greaves’ face worked with excitement and agitation; his walk was equally suggestive of distress and disorder. Were there such a thing as news at sea, I might have supposed that something heart-shaking had come to him.
“Fielding,” he cried, as I stood viewing him from the bottom of the companion ladder, “I can’t read prayers to the men. The devil’s right. He’s put it into my head that I’m too wicked, that I’ve been too great a sinner in the past, and am still altogether too vile to read prayers.”
“Do not attempt to do so then,” said I.
“I might be struck dead for profanity,” said he. “There’s a feeling here”—he laid his hand upon his heart—“that warns me I shall drop if I open my lips in the recital of a prayer to the men. Look how nervous I am!” he exclaimed, with a wild, hard smile; and approaching me close he extended his hands, which trembled violently, and then, turning up the palms, he disclosed the channels or lines in them wet with perspiration. “Tell the men,” said he, “that I am too ill to read prayers. Next Sunday, perhaps——”
He threw himself upon a locker, and hid his face upon the table. I watched him for a few minutes, then, going on deck, beckoned to Bol and told him there would be no prayers thatmorning. The Dutchman threw a suspicious look at the skylight and walked forward.
After this incident anxiety increased upon me until it became indescribably great. I had supposed that the hurt Greaves had done himself, through the connection which exists between the liver and the brain, affected his mind; but now, when he was growing worse, I reckoned he had struck his head as well as his side. Be this as it will, his intellect was giving way, his health every day decaying, and I say that when I grew sensible of this, when I understood that unless he took a turn and mended apace he must die, anxiety made my days bitter.
My old fear of the crew revived. That fear had been hushed somewhat by the behavior of the men, but it grew clamorous when I thought of Greaves as dead and buried in the sea, of the treasure of half a million of dollars in the lazarette, of myself as standing alone in the brig, with no man in authority to support me, without even the moral backing of good-will I might have got from the men had I shipped at Amsterdam and formed one of the Tulp party.
The dead days became dreams and visions to my memory when I thought backward and recalled theRoyal Brunswicker, Captain Spalding, my arrival in the Downs, the gibbet on the sand hills, the press-gang, the long outward passage to the island, and the hopes and fears which came and went when Greaves talked rationally of the dollars, then irrationally of dreams and the like, and so on, and so on. I did pray very eagerly in my heart that he would be spared. Indeed, I loved the man. He had saved my life, he had enriched me, he had proved a generous, cordial, and cheery shipmate and messmate. I say I loved him, and on several occasions, when I was on deck alone, walking out the weary hours of the night watch, did I look up at the stars and ask of God to deliver my friend from the death whose hand was closing upon him. These petitions would I murmur till my eyes were wet. It was hard that he should be called away in the prime of his time, after years of the stern and barren servitude of the sea, at the moment when a noble prize, gained, as I would think, with high adventurous skill, was his.
But I never could discover, at this time at all events, that he had the smallest idea he was in a bad way. What was visible to me and the sailors, to the Spanish lady, yes, and to his own dog, himself did not see—at least, by never a word that fell from his lips did he give me to guess he knew he wasill. Sometimes he’d complain of weakness and keep his bed; he’d wonder what had become of his appetite, that was all; he never went further. It was I, mainly, who took sights and kept the ship’s reckoning, who, in fact, navigated the brig, and did the work of her master. Miss Aurora’s sympathies with him were strong at the start—that is, when she saw how ill he was and how his illness was increasing upon him. She’d make efforts to anticipate his wants at table; with her own hands she’d boil chocolate for him in the caboose and bring it to the cabin; she let me understand she wished to nurse him. But whether it was because of simple dislike, or because his poor head, muddling the fine woman whom he had rescued with the speechless Jewess of his dream, excited in him some inscrutable fear or aversion I know not; he would have nothing to say to her, looked away when she spoke, repelled whatever she offered, often shrank when she approached—was so crazily discourteous, in a word, that I was obliged to take the girl aside and, by signs and such words as were now current between us, advise her to keep clear of him.
As toher, she spent much of her time in sewing and in attempting to master the English tongue out of some books which I borrowed from Greaves’s cabin, and with such help as I had time to give her. We had plenty of needles and thread on board. Greaves, before his illness grew, had given Miss Aurora a handsome roll of pure white duck, or drill—I forget now which it was—to do what she pleased with. I had found some remnants of bunting, of different colors, that she might amuse herself, if she chose, with Greaves’s notion of trimming her dresses; then I had borrowed a thimble from the forecastle. You will suppose that it was not atightfit; but she managed with it. And so she went to work, sewing in the cabin or in her own berth; and I see her now, with my mind’s eye, as she sits under the skylight, stitching away like any seamstress earning a living, the jewels upon her fingers flashing as her hand rises and falls.
One morning she came out of her berth dressed in a gown of her own manufacture. It was built on original lines, and it suited her. I believe she had shaped it to enable her to get about with ease, to allow her to step without inconvenience up the companion ladder and through the hatch, to pass through the cabin betwixt the table and the lockers without being dragged, and sometimes held, by the folds of her skirt, and to freely move in her little bedroom. The dress she had beencast away in had hardly permitted this liberty. It was voluminous enough to have yielded her three clinging skirts; it caught the wind when she was on deck, and blew out like a topsail in a squall when the yard is on the cap. I admired her vastly in this costume of her own making. The cut answered something to my own taste in female apparel; the waist rose high, the sleeves were tight, the dip and swell of her shape were defined. I had always suspected that a nobly proportioned woman lay awkwardly hid in the dress that had heretofore clothed her, and I guessed I had been right when I looked at her this morning and marked the curve of the breast, the width of the shoulders, the fine, swinging, lofty carriage.
The dress was snow white; it fell in with the color of her face. Her cheeks seemed the whiter for the whiteness of her clothes. She had trimmed her dress with triple lines of red bunting, and, for my part, I should never want to see a prettier or more effective gown on a maiden for sea use.
She stood in the door of her berth, looking archly at me. Galloon growled, scarce knowing her for the moment. Greaves was in his berth, for by this time he was ailing badly. She looked down her dress, colored slightly, then walked up to me and said:
“How you like it? How you like it?” turning herself about a little coquettishly.
Admiration will often make a man laugh; and I laughed to see her in that dress and laughed to hear her address me in English; and laughed yet again, but always admiringly, at her spirited, courting manner of turning her figure about, that I might get a view of her clothes.
“It is very good, indeed,” said I.
“Si, it is very good,” she repeated after me.
She then sought to express herself further, and, failing, signed to let me know that she had now two dresses, and that presently she would have three. I pronounced some word of applause in Spanish, which she obliged me to repeat, that I might catch the correct pronunciation, and we then sat down to breakfast.
I have told you that she wore some very handsome rings, and on this occasion it was that I took particular notice of a remarkable ring which she carried on her left hand. She followed my gaze, and stretched out her hand to my face. I imagined she intended that I should kiss her hand, for I was a fool in the customs of nations, and honestly knew not but thata man’s kissing a woman’s hand thus held out to him, almost to his lips, as it were, was some Spanish fashion of significant civility which she would expect me to attend to; so I bent my head and put my mouth to her hand.
She colored, her eyes flashed, she looked confused; then smiled, shook her head, and pointed to the ring. I was young and ingenuous, and the blood rose to my face when I understood that I had blundered; but I held my peace, and looked at the ring. A moment later she pulled it off and put it into my hand. It was a very rich ring, formed of ten precious stones of different sorts and a medallion of the crucifix. I turned it about, admiring it. She watched me earnestly, and then, with a smile and a sigh, said:
“You are not Catolique.”
“No,” said I.
She motioned to let me know she could tell as much by my ignorance of the use of that ring; and then, taking the thing from me, she went through a pretty and dramatic pantomime, reciting “Aves” while she touched the ring, and winding up with a sentence out of the “Paternoster.” She put on the ring after she had made an end of her pretty pantomime, and, looking again at me earnestly, repeated, with the same dramatic sigh:
“You are not Catolique.”
“No,” said I.
“You will be Catolique?” she exclaimed, in very fairly pronounced English, still wearing a wistful and impassioned expression.