The sun became fainter still, and vanished. Though the air round the dinghy seemed quite clear, the on-coming boats were hazy and dim, and that part of the horizon that had been fairly clear was now blotted out.
The long-boat was leading by a good way. When she was within hailing distance the captain’s voice came.
“Dinghy ahoy!”
“Ahoy!”
“Fetch alongside here!”
The long-boat ceased rowing to wait for the quarter-boat that was slowly creeping up. She was a heavy boat to pull at all times, and now she was overloaded.
The wrath of Captain Le Farge with Paddy Button for the way he had stampeded the crew was profound, but he had not time to give vent to it.
“Here, get aboard us, Mr Lestrange!” said he, when the dinghy was alongside; “we have room for one. Mrs Stannard is in the quarter-boat, and it’s overcrowded; she’s better aboard the dinghy, for she can look after the kids. Come, hurry up, the smother is coming down on us fast. Ahoy!”—to the quarter-boat—“hurry up, hurry up!”
The quarter-boat had suddenly vanished.
Mr Lestrange climbed into the long-boat. Paddy pushed the dinghy a few yards away with the tip of a scull, and then lay on his oars waiting.
“Ahoy! ahoy!” cried Le Farge.
“Ahoy!” came from the fog bank.
Next moment the long-boat and the dinghy vanished from each other’s sight: the great fog bank had taken them.
Now a couple of strokes of the port scull would have brought Mr Button alongside the long-boat, so close was he; but the quarter-boat was in his mind, or rather imagination, so what must he do but take three powerful strokes in the direction in which he fancied the quarter-boat to be.
The rest was voices.
“Dinghy ahoy!”
“Ahoy!”
“Ahoy!”
“Don’t be shoutin’ together, or I’ll not know which way to pull. Quarter-boat ahoy! where are yiz?”
“Port your helm!”
“Ay, ay!”—putting his helm, so to speak, to starboard—“I’ll be wid yiz in wan minute—two or three minutes’ hard pulling.”
“Ahoy!”—much more faint.
“What d’ye mane rowin’ away from me?”—a dozen strokes.
“Ahoy!”—fainter still.
Mr Button rested on his oars.
“Divil mend them—I b’lave that was the long-boat shoutin’.”
He took to his oars again and pulled vigorously.
“Paddy,” came Dick’s small voice, apparently from nowhere, “where are we now?”
“Sure, we’re in a fog; where else would we be? Don’t you be affeared.”
“I ain’t affeared, but Em’s shivering.”
“Give her me coat,” said the oarsman, resting on his oars and taking it off. “Wrap it round her; and when it’s round her we’ll all let one big halloo together. There’s an ould shawl som’er in the boat, but I can’t be after lookin’ for it now.”
He held out the coat and an almost invisible hand took it; at the same moment a tremendous report shook the sea and sky.
“There she goes,” said Mr Button; “an’ me old fiddle an’ all. Don’t be frightened, childer; it’s only a gun they’re firin’ for divarsion. Now we’ll all halloo togither—are yiz ready?”
“Ay, ay,” said Dick, who was a picker-up of sea terms.
“Halloo!” yelled Pat.
“Halloo! Halloo!” piped Dick and Emmeline.
A faint reply came, but from where, it was difficult to say. The old man rowed a few strokes and then paused on his oars. So still was the surface of the sea that the chuckling of the water at the boat’s bow as she drove forward under the impetus of the last powerful stroke could be heard distinctly. It died out as she lost way, and silence closed round them like a ring.
The light from above, a light that seemed to come through a vast scuttle of deeply-muffed glass, faint though it was, almost to extinction, still varied as the little boat floated through the strata of the mist.
A great sea fog is not homogeneous—its density varies: it is honeycombed with streets, it has its caves of clear air, its cliffs of solid vapour, all shifting and changing place with the subtlety of legerdemain. It has also this wizard peculiarity, that it grows with the sinking of the sun and the approach of darkness.
The sun, could they have seen it, was now leaving the horizon.
They called again. Then they waited, but there was no response.
“There’s no use bawlin’ like bulls to chaps that’s deaf as adders,” said the old sailor, shipping his oars; immediately upon which declaration he gave another shout, with the same result as far as eliciting a reply.
“Mr Button!” came Emmeline’s voice.
“What is it, honey?”
“I’m—m—’fraid.”
“You wait wan minit till I find the shawl—here it is, by the same token!—an’ I’ll wrap you up in it.”
He crept cautiously aft to the stern-sheets and took Emmeline in his arms.
“Don’t want the shawl,” said Emmeline; “I’m not so much afraid in your coat.” The rough, tobacco-smelling old coat gave her courage somehow.
“Well, thin, keep it on. Dicky, are you cowld?”
“I’ve got into daddy’s great-coat; he left it behind him.”
“Well, thin, I’ll put the shawl round me own shoulders, for it’s cowld I am. Are y’ hungry, childer?”
“No,” said Dick, “but I’m drefful—Hi—yow——”
“Slapy, is it? Well, down you get in the bottom of the boat, and here’s the shawl for a pilla. I’ll be rowin’ again in a minit to keep meself warm.”
He buttoned the top button of the coat.
“I’m a’right,” murmured Emmeline in a dreamy voice.
“Shut your eyes tight,” replied Mr Button, “or Billy Winker will be dridgin’ sand in them.
“‘Shoheen, shoheen, shoheen, shoheen,Sho—hu—lo, sho—hu—lo.Shoheen, shoheen, shoheen, shoheen,Hush a by the babby O.’”
It was the tag of an old nursery folk-song they sing in the hovels of the Achill coast fixed in his memory, along with the rain and the wind and the smell of the burning turf, and the grunting of the pig and the knickety-knock of a rocking cradle.
“She’s off,” murmured Mr Button to himself, as the form in his arms relaxed. Then he laid her gently down beside Dick. He shifted forward, moving like a crab. Then he put his hand to his pocket for his pipe and tobacco and tinder box. They were in his coat pocket, but Emmeline was in his coat. To search for them would be to awaken her.
The darkness of night was now adding itself to the blindness of the fog. The oarsman could not see even the thole pins. He sat adrift mind and body. He was, to use his own expression, “moithered.” Haunted by the mist, tormented by “shapes.”
It was just in a fog like this that the Merrows could be heard disporting in Dunbeg bay, and off the Achill coast. Sporting and laughing, and hallooing through the mist, to lead unfortunate fishermen astray.
Merrows are not altogether evil, but they have green hair and teeth, fishes’ tails and fins for arms; and to hear them walloping in the water around you like salmon, and you alone in a small boat, with the dread of one coming floundering on board, is enough to turn a man’s hair grey.
For a moment he thought of awakening the children to keep him company, but he was ashamed. Then he took to the sculls again, and rowed “by the feel of the water.” The creak of the oars was like a companion’s voice, the exercise lulled his fears. Now and again, forgetful of the sleeping children, he gave a halloo, and paused to listen. But no answer came.
Then he continued rowing, long, steady, laborious strokes, each taking him further and further from the boats that he was never destined to sight again.
“Is it aslape I’ve been?” said Mr Button, suddenly awaking with a start.
He had shipped his oars just for a minute’s rest. He must have slept for hours, for now, behold! a warm, gentle wind was blowing, the moon was shining, and the fog was gone.
“Is it dhraming I’ve been?” continued the awakened one. “Where am I at all, at all? O musha! sure, here I am. O wirra! wirra! I dreamt I’d gone aslape on the main-hatch and the ship was blown up with powther, and it’s all come true.”
“Mr Button!” came a small voice from the stern-sheets (Emmeline’s).
“What is it, honey?”
“Where are we now?”
“Sure, we’re afloat on the say, acushla; where else would we be?”
“Where’s uncle?”
“He’s beyant there in the long-boat—he’ll be afther us in a minit.”
“I want a drink.”
He filled a tin pannikin that was by the beaker of water, and gave her a drink. Then he took his pipe and tobacco from his coat pocket.
She almost immediately fell asleep again beside Dick, who had not stirred or moved; and the old sailor, standing up and steadying himself, cast his eyes round the horizon. Not a sign of sail or boat was there on all the moonlit sea.
From the low elevation of an open boat one has a very small horizon, and in the vague world of moonlight somewhere round about it was possible that the boats might be near enough to show up at daybreak.
But open boats a few miles apart may be separated by long leagues in the course of a few hours. Nothing is more mysterious than the currents of the sea.
The ocean is an ocean of rivers, some swiftly flowing, some slow, and a league from where you are drifting at the rate of a mile an hour another boat may be drifting two.
A slight warm breeze was frosting the water, blending moonshine and star shimmer; the ocean lay like a lake, yet the nearest mainland was perhaps a thousand miles away.
The thoughts of youth may be long, long thoughts, but not longer than the thoughts of this old sailor man smoking his pipe under the stars. Thoughts as long as the world is round. Blazing bar rooms in Callao—harbours over whose oily surfaces the sampans slipped like water-beetles—the lights of Macao—the docks of London. Scarcely ever a sea picture, pure and simple, for why should an old seaman care to think about the sea, where life is all into the fo’cs’le and out again, where one voyage blends and jumbles with another, where after forty-five years of reefing topsails you can’t well remember off which ship it was Jack Rafferty fell overboard, or who it was killed who in the fo’cs’le of what, though you can still see, as in a mirror darkly, the fight, and the bloody face over which a man is holding a kerosene lamp.
I doubt if Paddy Button could have told you the name of the first ship he ever sailed in. If you had asked him, he would probably have replied: “I disremimber; it was to the Baltic, and cruel cowld weather, and I was say-sick—till I near brought me boots up; and it was ‘O for ould Ireland!’ I was cryin’ all the time, an’ the captin dhrummin me back with a rope’s end to the tune uv it—but the name of the hooker—I disremimber—bad luck to her, whoever she was!”
So he sat smoking his pipe, whilst the candles of heaven burned above him, and calling to mind roaring drunken scenes and palm-shadowed harbours, and the men and the women he had known—such men and such women! The derelicts of the earth and the ocean. Then he nodded off to sleep again, and when he awoke the moon had gone.
Now in the eastern sky might have been seen a pale fan of light, vague as the wing of an ephemera. It vanished and changed back to darkness.
Presently, and almost at a stroke, a pencil of fire ruled a line along the eastern horizon, and the eastern sky became more beautiful than a rose leaf plucked in May. The line of fire contracted into one increasing spot, the rim of the rising sun.
As the light increased the sky above became of a blue impossible to imagine unless seen, a wan blue, yet living and sparkling as if born of the impalpable dust of sapphires. Then the whole sea flashed like the harp of Apollo touched by the fingers of the god. The light was music to the soul. It was day.
“Daddy!” suddenly cried Dick, sitting up in the sunlight and rubbing his eyes with his open palms. “Where are we?”
“All right, Dicky, me son!” cried the old sailor, who had been standing up casting his eyes round in a vain endeavour to sight the boats. “Your daddy’s as safe as if he was in hivin; he’ll be wid us in a minit, an’ bring another ship along with him. So you’re awake, are you, Em’line?”
Emmeline, sitting up in the old pilot coat, nodded in reply without speaking. Another child might have supplemented Dick’s enquiries as to her uncle by questions of her own, but she did not.
Did she guess that there was some subterfuge in Mr Button’s answer, and that things were different from what he was making them out to be? Who can tell?
She was wearing an old cap of Dick’s, which Mrs Stannard in the hurry and confusion had popped on her head. It was pushed to one side, and she made a quaint enough little figure as she sat up in the early morning brightness, dressed in the old salt-stained coat beside Dick, whose straw hat was somewhere in the bottom of the boat, and whose auburn locks were blowing in the faint breeze.
“Hurroo!” cried Dick, looking around at the blue and sparkling water, and banging with a stretcher on the bottom of the boat. “I’m goin’ to be a sailor, aren’t I, Paddy? You’ll let me sail the boat, won’t you, Paddy, an’ show me how to row?”
“Aisy does it,” said Paddy, taking hold of the child. “I haven’t a sponge or towel, but I’ll just wash your face in salt wather and lave you to dry in the sun.”
He filled the bailing tin with sea water.
“I don’t want to wash!” shouted Dick.
“Stick your face into the water in the tin,” commanded Paddy. “You wouldn’t be going about the place with your face like a sut-bag, would you?”
“Stick yours in!” commanded the other.
Mr Button did so, and made a hub-bubbling noise in the water; then he lifted a wet and streaming face, and flung the contents of the bailing tin overboard.
“Now you’ve lost your chance,” said this arch nursery-strategist, “all the water’s gone.”
“There’s more in the sea.”
“There’s no more to wash with, not till to-morrow—the fishes don’t allow it.”
“I want to wash,” grumbled Dick. “I want to stick my face in the tin, same’s you did; ’sides, Em hasn’t washed.”
“Idon’t mind,” murmured Emmeline.
“Well, thin,” said Mr Button, as if making a sudden resolve, “I’ll ax the sharks.” He leaned over the boat’s side, his face close to the surface of the water. “Halloo there!” he shouted, and then bent his head sideways to listen; the children also looked over the side, deeply interested.
“Halloo there! Are y’aslape— Oh, there y’are! Here’s a spalpeen with a dhirty face, an’s wishful to wash it; may I take a bailin’ tin of— Oh, thank your ’arner, thank your ’arner—good day to you, and my respects.”
“What did the shark say, Mr Button?” asked Emmeline.
“He said: ‘Take a bar’l full, an’ welcome, Mister Button; an’ it’s wishful I am I had a drop of the crathur to offer you this fine marnin’.’ Thin he popped his head under his fin and went aslape agin; leastwise, I heard him snore.”
Emmeline nearly always “Mr Buttoned” her friend; sometimes she called him “Mr Paddy.” As for Dick, it was always “Paddy,” pure and simple. Children have etiquettes of their own.
It must often strike landsmen and landswomen that the most terrible experience when cast away at sea in an open boat is the total absence of privacy. It seems an outrage on decency on the part of Providence to herd people together so. But, whoever has gone through the experience will bear me out that in great moments of life like this the human mind enlarges, and things that would shock us ashore are as nothing out there, face to face with eternity.
If so with grown-up people, how much more so with this old shell-back and his two charges?
And indeed Mr Button was a person who called a spade a spade, had no more conventions than a walrus, and looked after his two charges just as a nursemaid might look after her charges, or a walrus after its young.
There was a large bag of biscuits in the boat, and some tinned stuff—mostly sardines.
I have known a sailor to open a box of sardines with a tin-tack. He was in prison, the sardines had been smuggled into him, and he had no can-opener. Only his genius and a tin-tack.
Paddy had a jack-knife, however, and in a marvellously short time a box of sardines was opened, and placed on the stern-sheets beside some biscuits.
These, with some water and Emmeline’s Tangerine orange, which she produced and added to the common store, formed the feast, and they fell to.
When they had finished, the remains were put carefully away, and they proceeded to step the tiny mast.
The sailor, when the mast was in its place, stood for a moment resting his hand on it, and gazing around him over the vast and voiceless blue.
The Pacific has three blues: the blue of morning, the blue of midday, and the blue of evening. But the blue of morning is the happiest: the happiest thing in colour—sparkling, vague, newborn—the blue of heaven and youth.
“What are you looking for, Paddy?” asked Dick.
“Say-gulls,” replied the prevaricator; then to himself: “Not a sight or a sound of them! Musha! musha! which way will I steer—north, south, aist, or west? It’s all wan, for if I steer to the aist, they may be in the west; and if I steer to the west, they may be in the aist; and I can’t steer to the west, for I’d be steering right in the wind’s eye. Aist it is; I’ll make a soldier’s wind of it, and thrust to chance.”
He set the sail and came aft with the sheet. Then he shifted the rudder, lit a pipe, leaned luxuriously back and gave the bellying sail to the gentle breeze.
It was part of his profession, part of his nature, that, steering, maybe, straight towards death by starvation and thirst, he was as unconcerned as if he were taking the children for a summer’s sail. His imagination dealt little with the future; almost entirely influenced by his immediate surroundings, it could conjure up no fears from the scene now before it. The children were the same.
Never was there a happier starting, more joy in a little boat. During breakfast the seaman had given his charges to understand that if Dick did not meet his father and Emmeline her uncle in a “while or two,” it was because he had gone on board a ship, and he’d be along presently. The terror of their position was as deeply veiled from them as eternity is veiled from you or me.
The Pacific was still bound by one of those glacial calms that can only occur when the sea has been free from storms for a vast extent of its surface, for a hurricane down by the Horn will send its swell and disturbance beyond the Marquesas. De Bois in his table of amplitudes points out that more than half the sea disturbances at any given space are caused, not by the wind, but by storms at a great distance.
But the sleep of the Pacific is only apparent. This placid lake, over which the dinghy was pursuing the running ripple, was heaving to an imperceptible swell and breaking on the shores of the Low Archipelago, and the Marquesas in foam and thunder.
Emmeline’s rag-doll was a shocking affair from a hygienic or artistic standpoint. Its face was just inked on, it had no features, no arms; yet not for all the dolls in the world would she have exchanged this filthy and nearly formless thing. It was a fetish.
She sat nursing it on one side of the helmsman, whilst Dick, on the other side, hung his nose over the water, on the look-out for fish.
“Why do you smoke, Mr Button?” asked Emmeline, who had been watching her friend for some time in silence.
“To aise me thrubbles,” replied Paddy.
He was leaning back with one eye shut and the other fixed on the luff of the sail. He was in his element: nothing to do but steer and smoke, warmed by the sun and cooled by the breeze. A landsman would have been half demented in his condition, many a sailor would have been taciturn and surly, on the look-out for sails, and alternately damning his soul and praying to his God. Paddy smoked.
“Whoop!” cried Dick. “Look, Paddy!”
An albicore a few cables lengths to port had taken a flying leap from the flashing sea, turned a complete somersault and vanished.
“It’s an albicore takin’ a buck lep. Hundreds I’ve seen before this; he’s bein’ chased.”
“What’s chasing him, Paddy?”
“What’s chasin’ him?—why, what else but the gibly-gobly-ums!”
Before Dick could enquire as to the personal appearance and habits of the latter, a shoal of silver arrow heads passed the boat and flittered into the water with a hissing sound.
“Thim’s flyin’ fish. What are you sayin’—fish can’t fly! Where’s the eyes in your head?”
“Are the gibblyums chasing them too?” asked Emmeline fearfully.
“No; ’tis the Billy balloos that’s afther thim. Don’t be axin’ me any more questions now, or I’ll be tellin’ you lies in a minit.”
Emmeline, it will be remembered, had brought a small parcel with her done up in a little shawl; it was under the boat seat, and every now and then she would stoop down to see if it were safe.
Every hour or so Mr Button would shake his lethargy off, and rise and look round for “sea-gulls,” but the prospect was sail-less as the prehistoric sea, wingless, voiceless. When Dick would fret now and then, the old sailor would always devise some means of amusing him. He made him fishing-tackle out of a bent pin and some small twine that happened to be in the boat, and told him to fish for “pinkeens”; and Dick, with the pathetic faith of childhood, fished.
Then he told them things. He had spent a year at Deal long ago, where a cousin of his was married to a boatman.
Mr Button had put in a year as a longshoreman at Deal, and he had got a great lot to tell of his cousin and her husband, and more especially of one, Hannah; Hannah was his cousin’s baby—a most marvellous child, who was born with its “buck” teeth fully developed, and whose first unnatural act on entering the world was to make a snap at the “docther.” “Hung on to his fist like a bull-dog, and him bawlin’ ‘Murther!’”
“Mrs James,” said Emmeline, referring to a Boston acquaintance, “had a little baby, and it was pink.”
“Ay, ay,” said Paddy; “they’re mostly pink to start with, but they fade whin they’re washed.”
“It’d no teeth,” said Emmeline, “for I put my finger in to see.”
“The doctor brought it in a bag,” put in Dick, who was still steadily fishing—“dug it out of a cabbage patch; an’ I got a trow’l and dug all our cabbage patch up, but there weren’t any babies—but there were no end of worms.”
“I wish I had a baby,” said Emmeline, “andIwouldn’t send it back to the cabbage patch.”
“The doctor,” explained Dick, “took it back and planted it again; and Mrs James cried when I asked her, and daddy said it was put back to grow and turn into an angel.”
“Angels have wings,” said Emmeline dreamily.
“And,” pursued Dick, “I told cook, and she said to Jane, daddy was always stuffing children up with—something or ’nother. And I asked daddy to let me see him stuffing up a child—and daddy said cook’d have to go away for saying that, and she went away next day.”
“She had three big trunks and a box for her bonnet,” said Emmeline, with a far-away look as she recalled the incident.
“And the cabman asked her hadn’t she any more trunks to put on his cab, and hadn’t she forgot the parrot cage,” said Dick.
“I wishIhad a parrot in a cage,” murmured Emmeline, moving slightly so as to get more in the shadow of the sail.
“And what in the world would you be doin’ with a par’t in a cage?” asked Mr Button.
“I’d let it out,” replied Emmeline.
“Spakin’ about lettin’ par’ts out of cages, I remimber me grandfather had an ould pig,” said Paddy (they were all talking seriously together like equals). “I was a spalpeen no bigger than the height of me knee, and I’d go to the sty door, and he’d come to the door, and grunt an’ blow wid his nose undher it; an’ I’d grunt back to vex him, an’ hammer wid me fist on it, an’ shout ‘Halloo there! halloo there!’ and ‘Halloo to you!’ he’d say, spakin’ the pigs’ language. ‘Let me out,’ he’d say, ‘and I’ll give yiz a silver shilling.’
“‘Pass it under the door,’ I’d answer him. Thin he’d stick the snout of him undher the door an’ I’d hit it a clip with a stick, and he’d yell murther Irish. An’ me mother’d come out an’ baste me, an’ well I desarved it.
“Well, wan day I opened the sty door, an’ out he boulted and away and beyant, over hill and hollo he goes till he gets to the edge of the cliff overlookin’ the say, and there he meets a billy-goat, and he and the billy-goat has a division of opinion.
“‘Away wid yiz!’ says the billy-goat.
“‘Away wid yourself!’ says he.
“‘Whose you talkin’ to?’ says t’other.
“‘Yourself,’ says him.
“‘Who stole the eggs?’ says the billy-goat.
“‘Ax your ould grandmother!’ says the pig.
“‘Ax me ouldwhichmother?’ says the billy-goat.
“‘Oh, ax me——’ And before he could complete the sintence ram, blam, the ould billy-goat butts him in the chist, and away goes the both of thim whirtlin’ into the say below.
“Thin me ould grandfather comes out, and collars me by the scruff, and ‘Into the sty with you!’ says he; and into the sty I wint, and there they kep’ me for a fortni’t on bran mash and skim milk—and well I desarved it.”
They dined somewhere about eleven o’clock, and at noon Paddy unstepped the mast and made a sort of little tent or awning with the sail in the bow of the boat to protect the children from the rays of the vertical sun.
Then he took his place in the bottom of the boat, in the stern, stuck Dick’s straw hat over his face to preserve it from the sun, kicked about a bit to get a comfortable position, and fell asleep.
He had slept an hour and more when he was brought to his senses by a thin and prolonged shriek. It was Emmeline in a nightmare, or more properly a day-mare, brought on by a meal of sardines and the haunting memory of the gibbly-gobbly-ums. When she was shaken (it always took a considerable time to bring her to, from these seizures) and comforted, the mast was restepped.
As Mr Button stood with his hand on the spar looking round him before going aft with the sheet, an object struck his eye some three miles ahead. Objects rather, for they were the masts and spars of a small ship rising from the water. Not a vestige of sail, just the naked spars. It might have been a couple of old skeleton trees jutting out of the water for all a landsman could have told.
He stared at this sight for twenty or thirty seconds without speaking, his head projected like the head of a tortoise. Then he gave a wild “Hurroo!”
“What is it, Paddy?” asked Dick.
“Hurroo!” replied Mr Button. “Ship ahoy! ship ahoy! Lie to till I be afther boardin’ you. Sure, they are lyin’ to—divil a rag of canvas on her—are they aslape or dhramin’? Here, Dick, let me get aft wid the sheet; the wind’ll take us up to her quicker than we’ll row.”
He crawled aft and took the tiller; the breeze took the sail, and the boat forged ahead.
“Is it daddy’s ship?” asked Dick, who was almost as excited as his friend.
“I dinno; we’ll see when we fetch her.”
“Shall we go on her, Mr Button?” asked Emmeline.
“Ay will we, honey.”
Emmeline bent down, and fetching her parcel from under the seat, held it in her lap.
As they drew nearer, the outlines of the ship became more apparent. She was a small brig, with stump topmasts, from the spars a few rags of canvas fluttered. It was apparent soon to the old sailor’s eye what was amiss with her.
“She’s derelick, bad cess to her!” he muttered; “derelick and done for—just me luck!”
“I can’t see any people on the ship,” cried Dick, who had crept forward to the bow. “Daddy’s not there.”
The old sailor let the boat off a point or two, so as to get a view of the brig more fully; when they were within twenty cable lengths or so he unstepped the mast and took to the sculls.
The little brig floated very low on the water, and presented a mournful enough appearance; her running rigging all slack, shreds of canvas flapping at the yards, and no boats hanging at her davits. It was easy enough to see that she was a timber ship, and that she had started a butt, flooded herself and been abandoned.
Paddy lay on his oars within a few strokes of her. She was floating as placidly as though she were in the harbour of San Francisco; the green water showed in her shadow, and in the green water waved the tropic weeds that were growing from her copper. Her paint was blistered and burnt absolutely as though a hot iron had been passed over it, and over her taffrail hung a large rope whose end was lost to sight in the water.
A few strokes brought them under the stern. The name of the ship was there in faded letters, also the port to which she belonged. “Shenandoah. Martha’s Vineyard.”
“There’s letters on her,” said Mr Button. “But I can’t make thim out. I’ve no larnin’.”
“I can read them,” said Dick.
“So c’n I,” murmured Emmeline.
“S-H-E-N-A-N-D-O-A-H,” spelt Dick.
“What’s that?” enquired Paddy.
“I don’t know,” replied Dick, rather downcastedly.
“There you are!” cried the oarsman in a disgusted manner, pulling the boat round to the starboard side of the brig. “They pritind to tache letters to childer in schools, pickin’ their eyes out wid book-readin’, and here’s letters as big as me face an’ they can’t make hid or tail of them—be dashed to book-readin’!”
The brig had old-fashioned wide channels, regular platforms; and she floated so low in the water that they were scarcely a foot above the level of the dinghy.
Mr Button secured the boat by passing the painter through a channel plate, then, with Emmeline and her parcel in his arms or rather in one arm, he clambered over the channel and passed her over the rail on to the deck. Then it was Dick’s turn, and the children stood waiting whilst the old sailor brought the beaker of water, the biscuit, and the tinned stuff on board.
It was a place to delight the heart of a boy, the deck of theShenandoah; forward right from the main hatchway it was laden with timber. Running rigging lay loose on the deck in coils, and nearly the whole of the quarter-deck was occupied by a deck-house. The place had a delightful smell of sea-beach, decaying wood, tar, and mystery. Bights of buntline and other ropes were dangling from above, only waiting to be swung from. A bell was hung just forward of the foremast. In half a moment Dick was forward hammering at the bell with a belaying pin he had picked from the deck.
Mr Button shouted to him to desist; the sound of the bell jarred on his nerves. It sounded like a summons, and a summons on that deserted craft was quite out of place. Who knew what mightn’t answer it in the way of the supernatural?
Dick dropped the belaying pin and ran forward. He took the disengaged hand, and the three went aft to the door of the deck-house. The door was open, and they peeped in.
The place had three windows on the starboard side, and through the windows the sun was shining in a mournful manner. There was a table in the middle of the place. A seat was pushed away from the table as if some one had risen in a hurry. On the table lay the remains of a meal, a teapot, two teacups, two plates. On one of the plates rested a fork with a bit of putrifying bacon upon it that some one had evidently been conveying to his mouth when—something had happened. Near the teapot stood a tin of condensed milk, haggled open. Some old salt had just been in the act of putting milk in his tea when the mysterious something had occurred. Never did a lot of dead things speak so eloquently as these things spoke.
One could conjure it all up. The skipper, most likely, had finished his tea, and the mate was hard at work at his, when the leak had been discovered, or some derelict had been run into, or whatever it was had happened—happened.
One thing was evident, that since the abandonment of the brig she had experienced fine weather, else the things would not have been left standing so trimly on the table.
Mr Button and Dick entered the place to prosecute enquiries, but Emmeline remained at the door. The charm of the old brig appealed to her almost as much as to Dick, but she had a feeling about it quite unknown to him. A ship where no one was had about it suggestions of “other things.”
She was afraid to enter the gloomy deck-house, and afraid to remain alone outside; she compromised matters by sitting down on the deck. Then she placed the small bundle beside her, and hurriedly took the rag-doll from her pocket, into which it was stuffed head down, pulled its calico skirt from over its head, propped it up against the coaming of the door, and told it not to be afraid.
There was not much to be found in the deck-house, but aft of it were two small cabins like rabbit hutches, once inhabited by the skipper and his mate. Here there were great findings in the way of rubbish. Old clothes, old boots, an old top-hat of that extraordinary pattern you may see in the streets of Pernambuco, immensely tall, and narrowing towards the brim. A telescope without a lens, a volume of Hoyt, a nautical almanac, a great bolt of striped flannel shirting, a box of fish hooks. And in one corner—glorious find!—a coil of what seemed to be ten yards or so of black rope.
“Baccy, begorra!” shouted Pat, seizing upon his treasure. It was pigtail. You may see coils of it in the tobacconists’ windows of seaport towns. A pipe full of it would make a hippopotamus vomit, yet old sailors chew it and smoke it and revel in it.
“We’ll bring all the lot of the things out on deck, and see what’s worth keepin’ an’ what’s worth leavin’,” said Mr Button, taking an immense armful of the old truck; whilst Dick, carrying the top-hat, upon which he had instantly seized as his own special booty, led the way.
“Em,” shouted Dick, as he emerged from the doorway, “see what I’ve got!”
He popped the awful-looking structure over his head. It went right down to his shoulders.
Emmeline gave a shriek.
“It smells funny,” said Dick, taking it off and applying his nose to the inside of it—“smells like an old hair brush. Here, you try it on.”
Emmeline scrambled away as far as she could, till she reached the starboard bulwarks, where she sat in the scupper, breathless and speechless and wide-eyed. She was always dumb when frightened (unless it were a nightmare or a very sudden shock), and this hat suddenly seen half covering Dick frightened her out of her wits. Besides, it was a black thing, and she hated black things—black cats, black horses; worst of all, black dogs.
She had once seen a hearse in the streets of Boston, an old-time hearse with black plumes, trappings and all complete. The sight had nearly given her a fit, though she did not know in the least the meaning of it.
Meanwhile Mr Button was conveying armful after armful of stuff on deck. When the heap was complete, he sat down beside it in the glorious afternoon sunshine, and lit his pipe.
He had searched neither for food or water as yet; content with the treasure God had given him, for the moment the material things of life were forgotten. And, indeed, if he had searched he would have found only half a sack of potatoes in the caboose, for the lazarette was awash, and the water in the scuttle-butt was stinking.
Emmeline, seeing what was in progress, crept up, Dick promising not to put the hat on her, and they all sat round the pile.
“Thim pair of brogues,” said the old man, holding a pair of old boots up for inspection like an auctioneer, “would fetch half a dollar any day in the wake in any sayport in the world. Put them beside you, Dick, and lay hold of this pair of britches by the ends of em’—stritch them.”
The trousers were stretched out, examined and approved of, and laid beside the boots.
“Here’s a tiliscope wid wan eye shut,” said Mr Button, examining the broken telescope and pulling it in and out like a concertina. “Stick it beside the brogues; it may come in handy for somethin’. Here’s a book”—tossing the nautical almanac to the boy. “Tell me what it says.”
Dick examined the pages of figures hopelessly.
“I can’t read ’em,” said Dick; “it’s numbers.”
“Buzz it overboard,” said Mr Button.
Dick did what he was told joyfully, and the proceedings resumed.
He tried on the tall hat, and the children laughed. On her old friend’s head the thing ceased to have terror for Emmeline.
She had two methods of laughing. The angelic smile before mentioned—a rare thing—and, almost as rare, a laugh in which she showed her little white teeth, whilst she pressed her hands together, the left one tight shut, and the right clasped over it.
He put the hat on one side, and continued the sorting, searching all the pockets of the clothes and finding nothing. When he had arranged what to keep, they flung the rest overboard, and the valuables were conveyed to the captain’s cabin, there to remain till wanted.
Then the idea that food might turn up useful as well as old clothes in their present condition struck the imaginative mind of Mr Button, and he proceeded to search.
The lazarette was simply a cistern full of sea water; what else it might contain, not being a diver, he could not say. In the copper of the caboose lay a great lump of putrifying pork or meat of some sort. The harness cask contained nothing except huge crystals of salt. All the meat had been taken away. Still, the provisions and water brought on board from the dinghy would be sufficient to last them some ten days or so, and in the course of ten days a lot of things might happen.
Mr Button leaned over the side. The dinghy was nestling beside the brig like a duckling beside a duck; the broad channel might have been likened to the duck’s wing half extended. He got on the channel to see if the painter was safely attached. Having made all secure, he climbed slowly up to the main-yard arm, and looked round upon the sea.