'"Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine,And all, save the spirit of man, is divine."'
'"Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine,And all, save the spirit of man, is divine."'
'"Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine,And all, save the spirit of man, is divine."'
'"Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine,
And all, save the spirit of man, is divine."'
'I know nothing about the virgins of that island,' said a gentleman; 'but the men who visit your ship, and the men who salute you when you get ashore, are poisonously hideous. They cling like toads to a bed of glorious growths. The spirit of man is not divine at Madeira.'
'I touch nowhere,' said Mr. Vanderholt. 'When our forefoot cuts the zero of the chart, we shift helm for the homeward run.'
He glanced at a clock in the skylight,made a movement, and simultaneously all stood up, and, standing, they drank a final glass of champagne to the safety of the voyage, to Vanderholt's health, to the return of the charming Violet Vanderholt; then, conducted by the owner of the schooner, the guests went on deck, and in a few minutes took their leave.
There was much hand-shaking—all the usual assurances of friendship agitated by leave-taking. Nevertheless, when the company were in their boat, going ashore, one of the gentlemen exclaimed:
'I think Vanderholt must be a selfish old cuckoo to carry away his daughter to the ocean, with no other company but his own grumbling self and Captain Glew.'
'I would not be sailing to the Equator in that schooner for a thousand pounds!' said a lady. 'I should have to be run away with to do such a thing;' and she leered sweetly at a gentleman opposite her.
'They are flourishing their handkerchiefs to us,' cried someone.
All stood up in the boat to wave back.
'For Gord's sake, sit down, ladies andgents! You'll be capsizing of us!' bawled the one-eyed bow oar.
On board the schooner they were getting under weigh. The name of the boatswain—he was also the carpenter—who had shipped to act as second mate whenever his services in this capacity should be required, was Jones. No man blew the boatswain's silver pipe more sweetly. He had sent his lark-like carol to the mastheads, and afar on either hand the streaming river that pure music of the sea thrilled, whilst their guests were making their way ashore.
TheMowbraywas a small ship, but her deep-water men dealt with her as though she had been a thousand-ton Indiaman. The hearties, in their round jackets, sprang, as an echo of the boatswain's roaring cry, to the windlass handles, and in a moment a voice, broken by years of drink and by hailing the deck from immense heights, broke into that most melancholy chorus, 'Across the Plains of Mexico.'
The cherry-faced mate, Tweed, standing in the bows, soon reported the cable up and down; then sail was made. The eager littleship herself broke her anchor out of the London mud, and to the impulse of her mounting standing jib, staysail, and gaff foresail, was, with a clipper's restlessness of spirit in the whole length of her, swiftly turning her head down-stream, whilst a few hands sang 'Old Stormy, he is dead and gone' at the little windlass, lifting the anchor to the cathead.
Before the length of Blackwall Reach had been measured, the schooner was clothed, her seamen coiling down, some attending the sheets—everything quiet and comfortable. The captain stood beside the tiller, conning the little vessel. He was qualified as a pilot for the Thames, and boasted that he could smell his way up and down in the dark—and truly perhaps the nose, in some parts of this noble river, would be as good as the lead, or a buoy, to tell a man where he was. Glew caught the eye of Mr. Vanderholt, who, approaching him, said:
'I am very well pleased. You have chosen well. This is a good company of seamen.'
Captain Glew touched his cap, andcontinued to watch the schooner. She was square-rigged forward, carried topsail, top-gallant-sail, and royal; but there was no good in humbugging with this sort of canvas in a serpentine river that shifts your course for you every two miles by three or four points.
Miss Vanderholt stood at the rail viewing the moving picture round about, with a very pensive face. Her eyes often went to a large vessel at anchor ahead. That full-rigged ship made her think of George. In much such a ship, no doubt, George would return. When? In all probability before her own arrival; and how maddening that would be! For, oddly enough, though it was a long time since they had parted, Miss Violet Vanderholt was quite as much in love with Captain George Parry as ever she was on that day when she and her father saw him off in the East India Docks, when she cried, and he hugged her, and when they had spent half an hour up in a corner all alone in talk as impassioned as ever passed between two lovers.
This must convince us that there wassomething Dutch and solid in the girl's character, for she had had many opportunities to recollect herself and transfer her affection. Though Vanderholt's wealth was not of a size to lead to newspaper paragraphs and to editorial exaggerations, it was, in a quiet way, known and talked about, and people passing his house would look up and nod at it, and say:
'A rich old cock lives there.'
However, Miss Vi's meditations were presently to be interrupted by a scene not very unfamiliar in the River Thames. The wind was west, and it blew a fresh breeze. The ripples rushing to the whipping carried a little edging of foam. Whatever was under canvas, unless it was a barge, or something running in a mile or two of straight water, leaned in shafts of light. You caught the glance of copper sheathing, the sunshine showered in a rainbow glow upon flashes of brackish foam bursting without the life of brine from shearing bows and gliding sides. The smoke ashore blew away quickly, and the heavens remained a beautiful blue, and the sky over the Plaistow Flats shone likethe inside of an oyster-shell with the prismatic hues of a setting of motionless, finely-linked clouds.
Just as theMowbraypassed down Bugsby's Reach, opening the long tract of the Woolwich waters beyond, two collier brigs reaching up the river swept into each other with crackling jibbooms. The schooner's road was blocked; her helm was shifted swift as the swallow curves in flight, and then followed a pause which enabled Miss Vanderholt to gain some little insight into the ways of the deep, and the behaviour and speech of those who go down to it for two or three pounds a month.
The two brigs came together with a crash that might have been heard at London Bridge. They butted bow to bow, then, swinging to, locked themselves helplessly broadside to broadside, and began to float shorewards, with sails and heavy pieces of timber falling from aloft, and men, two or three of them wearing tall hats, and shawls round their throats, rushing about the decks in agonies of pantomime. It was a saying that there was no better school than the NorthCountry Geordie for seamanship. Certainly there was no school in which a man learnt more quickly to swear. TheMowbrayfloated close past, and all could be seen. Nothing is more helpless in this world than two ships thus yoked, steering each other ashore, with an occasional drag, or jerk, or butt, that brings a ton of top-hamper crashing about the ears of the profane on deck.
'Let go your tawps'l brace, you blooming old fool! Don't you see it's foul of my mainyard-arm?'
'What in flames are you keeping your jib hoisted for? You're paying her right into me!'
'Jumped if we shan't both go ashore if yer don't starboard yer 'ellum. Why don't you let go yer anchor, you rooting hogs?'
'Yes, and tear my smothered bows out because a crew of dairymen don't know how to steer their ship!'
Then, in the midst of this—crash!—off short like a carrot would snap a yard, or down, torn bodily out by its roots, would fall a gaff, amidst yells of:
'You gutter-sots! You're all drunk this holy day! Suffocate yer, you scabs! Let go yer taws'l halliards! Don't you see they're binding the wessels together by my yard that's gone in the slings?'
But theMowbraywas now on her course; the distance between her and the embracing brigs was fast widening, and articulate oaths had faded into a chorus of indistinguishable shouts. The vessels were doomed. They both drifted ashore abreast of Woolwich, and next day a paper described a fight that was bloody with knives between the two crews, and reported the death of a foolhardy waterman who tried to make peace, clearly with an eye to salvage.
'This,' said Mr. Vanderholt, as theMowbray, rounding into Galleon's Reach, put the brigs out of sight, 'is a sample of the poetry of the sea, Vi. But very few poets have dealt with subjects of this sort. They write of the splendours of the sunset and moon-rise at sea, and such things. Yet, if I were a poet, I would rather choose a subject in those two brigs in the Thames in acollision, going ashore, full of curses, than in all the stars which shine upon the ocean.'
At five o'clock theMowbraylet go her anchor off Gravesend.
It was dark when theMowbraybrought up. The Gravesend lights trembled windily, and there was a dance of lanterns as of fireflies upon the breast of the stream. Mr. Vanderholt had no intention of going ashore. He had ordered Captain Glew to bring up off Gravesend to avoid the risks of the navigation of the river in a dark night. It is not customary for the skippers of yachts to dine with their owners, but Mr. Vanderholt, who was a seaman at heart, who disliked forms and ceremonies, having made up his mind on the matter, had, after speaking a few words to his daughter, walked up to Captain Glew and expressed a wish that he would eat with them at their table. Glew touched his cap without any expression of surprise or emotionof gratitude. He appeared to receive the courtesy as a command, to accept it as he would an order to get the vessel under weigh or shorten sail.
At six o'clock the cabin bell was rung to call them to dinner. Mr. Vanderholt and Captain Glew arrived from the deck, Miss Vanderholt from her cabin. The interior was a pretty little picture of hospitality; two handsome lamps shone purely and brightly. The burnished swing-trays reflected the beams of the lamps. The light glanced dart-like in polished bulkhead and mirror, and shone on silver and damask, and fruit and crystal. The steward appeared with a dish of fish.
'I think you have a pretty good cook in this vessel,' said Vanderholt, examining the fish, as he helped his daughter.
'He served his time in liners, and has done a deal of cooking at sea in his day.'
'I hope he will take some trouble to please the men,' said Mr. Vanderholt. 'It is always bad food for the forecastle, but a bad cook makes bad bad indeed.'
'What do the men get to eat?' asked the young lady.
'The usual ship-going fare, miss,' answered Glew: 'pork, junk, pease-soup, biscuit, and the like.'
'Who keeps the log of this ship?' said Mr. Vanderholt.
'I shall,' said the captain.
'What is a log?' inquired Miss Vanderholt.
'A book, my dear, in which the chief mate of a ship enters daily her situation, the state of the weather, and such observations as he is capable of making.'
'They are not many, or of a poetical order,' said Glew, with his faint taut smile. 'The nearest romantic stroke that I can recollect was this entry: "A dreadful day. At noon precisely the ship blew up, and nobody was left but William Gibson."'
'I suspect, captain,' said Mr. Vanderholt, 'that you will have met with some romantic traverses in your time?'
'I don't recall any,' answered the captain.
'Why, to put one instance as delicately as I can,' said Mr. Vanderholt, filling a silvertankard till it foamed over with India pale ale; 'that extraordinary affair of some early love.' Miss Vi looked extremely confused, and gazed with entreaty at her father. 'The remarkable story, I mean,' continued Vanderholt, bringing out his mouth and nose covered with froth, 'that Mr. Fairbanks told me.'
'And what might the story be, sir?' said Captain Glew, looking blankly.
Miss Vanderholt continued to gaze with entreaty, whilst her father repeated the story. Captain Glew drained his wine-glass, and uttered a dismal laugh, in which his face bore no part.
'Why,' said he, 'that yarn's told of old Jim Dyson, old Captain Dyson, who was found dead in his bed three years ago at the sign of the Sot's Hole, down Limehouse way.'
Miss Vanderholt burst out laughing.
'I wonder Mr. Fairbanks should tell that yarn of me,' continued Captain Glew. 'If my wife gets to hear of it—and there's trouble enough in married life without lies——'
'So the bubbles break as quickly as they are blown,' said Mr. Vanderholt. 'But I confess I never would have thought it of you, Captain Glew.'
After dinner the father and daughter patrolled the deck, warmly wrapped. Mr. Vanderholt smoked an immense pipe that curled from an amber tip at his lips into a richly-bronzed and glowing bowl in his hand. It was early night. The wind was gone, the stream of tide softly shaled along the bends of the schooner in the note of surf washing on shingle heard at a distance. How dismal, flat and gaunt looked the treeless Tilbury shore in that sad light! The very stars shining over it seemed to tremble with the spirit of mud and cold desolation. Shadowy shapes of ships went by, sometimes to a sound of music, as of concertinas and the like; tall phantasmal shapes, lifting spires as delicate as needles to the stars, loomed anear and afar. In the main, silence lay upon that river, with its burden of living freights.
The crew loafed about the schooner's deck forward, and the grumble of their voicescame aft, along with the scent of tobacco-smoke. They slept in a deck-house, with three windows of a side, and spikes of light shot from those windows, occasionally glancing on the figure of a passing man, and falling in streams of radiance upon the bulwarks. Besides this deck-house, the schooner owned a small forecastle, containing three or four bunks.
'I don't know how it may be with you, Vi,' said Mr. Vanderholt, pressing his daughter's arm affectionately against his side, 'but I give you my word I feel better already.'
'That's a good thing,' exclaimed the young lady. 'I wish George were with us.'
'George is not two men. He can't be in India and here at the same time.'
'He ought to be here, by my side,' said Miss Vanderholt. 'Oh, how delicious the voyage would then be! I should not object to your sailing round the world.'
'Make the youngster give up the army. He's got means of his own, andyou'llbe pretty well off, I hope,' said Mr. Vanderholt. 'If you go out to India I shall be alone, andyou'll die of some distemper, engendered by what is there called "a station." No good in titular dignity. The land teems with captains and colonels; and a time may come when a man will be respected because he is not a major-general. It would be different if George was in the Dutch army.'
He was proceeding, when he suddenly stopped, catching a noise of oars on the bow, and suddenly a long, sharp-stemmed boat, apparently a police boat, shot out of the gloom, and a powerful voice hailed:
'Schooner ahoy!'
'Hallo!' answered Captain Glew, who was leaning over the side, at a respectful distance from the father and daughter, furtively smoking a cheroot.
'I want to come aboard of you.'
In a minute the boat was alongside, and a couple of men sprang over the rail.
'What vessel's this?' said one of the men, who, like his companion, wore a tall, glazed hat, and was swathed to the throat in overcoat and shawls.
'TheMowbray, privately owned. What's your business?' said Captain Glew.
'We're Bow Street officers. We're searching the shipping for a man named Simmons. D'ye want to see our warrant?'
'What's he charged with?' said Mr. Vanderholt, coming with his daughter on his arm from the other side of the deck.
'Murder!' was the answer.
Miss Vanderholt screamed. Her father said instantly:
'Search my ship by all means. I hope the man may not be on board of us. If he is, I do not sail. Captain Glew, render these two officers every assistance.'
TheMowbraywas a small vessel, and the search did not take long. The hatches were lifted, the hold explored by lantern-light, the deck-house was rummaged, the whole ship's company was mustered and severally examined. It was strange to see those seamen standing in a line, with the runners in their glazed hats flashing the light of their lanterns over their rough, bearded, weather-blackened faces. They had assented very easily to this mustering and examination, for the man was wanted for murder, and the very name will subdue the roughest, and silence those cursesof the forecastle with which the two Bow Street fellows were the sort of people to have been handsomely assailed by this crew, had they bothered the men with a smaller errand.
They searched the cabins, and, lastly, they entered the little forecastle in which no man had as yet slept. A hole of a seabedroom was this. You could scarcely stand upright in it. The two men descended the short ladder, and Captain Glew stood atop waiting. The bullies of Bow Street swung their lamps carefully. Suddenly one of them, delivering a low gasp, said: 'Catch hold of this light, Tom.' He dropped on his knees, and grabbed at a leg, the foot of which dimly showed under one of the bunks. He hauled with a will, and out came the body of a man or boy, shrieking like a woman in a fit.
'Don't 'urt me! for God's sake, don't 'urt me, gemmen! I meant no 'arm. It was all along of Bill.'
'Is that a woman you've got down there?' sung out Captain Glew.
'Nothing else, by the holy poker!'answered one of the officers, in a voice that trembled with the temper of disappointment.
'Yes, I'm a girl, gemmen. It was all along of Bill. Put me ashore, and I promise never to offend again,' cried the unfortunate little woman, sobbing grievously.
Yet, bedraggled as she was, of a raw, uncouth, mixed look, with her trousers and sailor's jacket, and plentiful black hair loosened by dragging, she showed as a saucy, handsome wench, and the spirit of the devil was in her black eyes when she looked at the Bow Street men.
They all went on deck.
'Thunder of heaven!' cried Mr. Vanderholt, in a voice of horror. 'The murderer is on board our ship! They have got him. So,' he cried in a voice deep with resolution, 'our voyage ends. To-morrow we return home.'
'It's a woman, sir,' said Captain Glew.
'A woman!' shouted Mr. Vanderholt. He quitted his daughter, and strode straight up to the group as they came along, and, putting his face close into the woman's, heexclaimed: 'What are you doing aboard my vessel?'
'It's all along of Bill!' cried the girl. 'I never meant no 'arm, and I can't tell yer what I done it for.'
'Father,' said Miss Vanderholt, approaching the group, and taking a view of the girl by the sheen that floated round about the lighted skylight, 'don't you think it's just possible that this person who's been in hiding for some time may be a little bit hungry and thirsty? Ask her into the cabin. She will tell us her story.'
'Oh, lady, you is kind!' exclaimed the girl, extending both hands towards Miss Violet, and again beginning to cry bitterly.
'This way, then,' said Mr. Vanderholt.
The Bow Street gentlemen descended with the rest. Whether they imagined a scent of crime in this female stowaway, or whether they distinguished a scent of drink in the cabin atmosphere, cannot, after all these years, be settled with any degree of certainty. They seated themselves, and Mr. Vanderholt offered them drink, and they drank, eyeing the girl with very knowinglooks, whilst she told her story in a high, strained voice.
'What are ye?' began Captain Glew.
'I'm barmaid at the One Bell in Cable Street, nigh the London Docks.'
Here she paused, and looked at Miss Violet. The blood was red in her cheeks, and her eyes were wild and wet with tears. Her aspect, in the clear light of the lamp, was extraordinary. She seemed half a gipsy. Her beauty was coarse and masculine; her hair, black as streaming ink, lay upon her back in a wonderful quantity.
'It was all along of Bill,' she went on.
'Who's this bloomed Bill you've been talking about since you was lugged out of it?' said one of the officers.
'The young man I keeps company with,' she answered. 'We fell out because of a sailor man that's aboard this vessel. Fred Maul his name is, and it 'ud have been good for me this blessed night had they strangled him in the hour of his coming into this blistered world. Why,' she cried, turning upon Miss Violet, who shrank a little from the gathering ferocity of thewoman, 'this beast of a Maul comes and 'angs about me, and Bill, he falls jealous. Bill and me 'ad a row over this 'ere Maul. He says to me: "I know the ship he's signed for; yer'd better foller him." "By God!" cries I, mad with feeling thatheoughtn't to have said it, "say that again, and I'll do it." He says it again.' Here the unfortunate woman raised her voice till the little cabin rang; but though the gentlemen of Bow Street shouted, and though Captain Glew and Mr. Vanderholt sought, with a hundred gestures, to subdue her voice, nothing could soften the hysteric, piercing note. 'He s'ys it ag'in, I s'y, and, going away, the unfeeling devil comes back arter ten minutes, and chucks a bundle on to the counter, and says, with a low sneer: "There's your kit. Now go and foller Bill."'
'And so here y'are,' said one of the officers. 'A tidy lot, I allow, for a select hevening party. When I saw her boot, fired if I didn't think it was a man.'
The girl bit upon a sandwich, and glared fiercely at the officers while she chewed.Miss Violet, with the merciful heart of her sex, fetched some hairpins from her cabin, and gave them to the girl, who, with a curtsey, and a smile of shame and thanks, turned to a strip of mirror and swiftly coiled her hair upon her head.
'Go and fetch the young lady's hat,' said Mr. Vanderholt to the steward.
The Bow Street gentlemen, having drunk their glasses of cold brandy and water, got up, saying they must be off.
'Yer'll put me ashore, won't yer?' asked the girl.
'Ay, they'll put you ashore,' said Mr. Vanderholt, slipping a sovereign into the hand of one of them; 'and here's for a knot of gay ribbons for you, miss,' said he, laughing at the figure of the woman, 'when you're clear of this spree, and in petticoats again.'
She thrust the sovereign into her breeches pocket, muttering 'Thank you, sir,' whilst she scowled at the two officers.
'Come along, miss, if you're coming; for we're off,' said one of the men.
The young woman followed them, gazingabout her as she went as though she had only just discovered that she was in a very richly-furnished cabin, and in the presence of a gentleman and a very finely-dressed, handsome young lady. She wore an expression that was like asking 'Where am I? How did I get here? What's it about?' And then, pausing an instant at the foot of the companion-steps, to look at Miss Violet, and say, 'It was all along of Bill; but he'll get it 'ot when I meet him,' she went up the ladder in the wake of Captain Glew.
'Let them get clear of the schooner,' said Mr. Vanderholt, casting himself upon a sofa. 'They're not what you would call pickings from the sweetest of the social orders.'
'What did she intend?'
'She couldn't have told you. When women of that sort go mad with jealousy, "stand by," as Jack says. She'd have had Maul's life, perhaps, before we were out of the Channel.'
He was interrupted by a great commotion on deck—loud cries of men, mingled with the yells of a woman.
'Stop here, Violet!' cried Mr. Vanderholt; and he rushed up the steps.
The deck-house door was open. The light of the lantern streamed freely into the air, and illuminated a considerable area of plank, in the midst of which a fight was apparently going on, for it was thence the uproar proceeded. Mr. Vanderholt ran forward, and saw the girl tearing with outstretched claws at one of the men as though she would rend him in pieces. His trouble was to get away. He butted and dodged behind his elbow, shouting: 'S'elp me Bob, Polly, it worn't no fault o' mine'! And then she would shriek out: 'Yer drove me to it! It was along o' you, and not Bill, you sink——' And here she would nearly tear his ear off; and then she got at his hair, whilst the man, never offering to hit her, danced in the light, shouting with pain, and swearing that he had had nothing to do with it.
'Stop it!' roared Captain Glew. 'Is a gentleman's yacht to be disgraced by a stowaway spitfire? Help her into the boat, Mr. Officers;' and plunging, they bore thegirl out of her entangled embrace of Maul, and in a few minutes they were over the side, and gone.
The crew followed Maul into the deck-house, and a grunt of laughter went along with them.
'What have you been a-doing to her?' says one.
'Where's my 'at?' said Maul.
'What do it feel like, Frederick?' sung out a sailor named Legg. 'As if you was married?'
'Never mindher. I'm a-thinking of what I've left behind me, my joys,' exclaimed a seaman.
'I'm durned mighty glad I sold off all my furniture,' said the deep-throated Jack who had on an early occasion made a statement on this subject.
Father and daughter sat in the cabin till half-past ten. Miss Violet was then sleepy, and went to bed. When she left her berth in the morning the schooner was under weigh, storming through Sea Reach, with half a gale of wind astern of her, and a thunderstorm of hell's own hue lancing the landbeyond Canvey Island with lightning that fell in showers of fiery bayonets. It was a majestic, sublime, terrible storm. The girl, standing in the companion-way, was fascinated. The sun peeped at a corner of this purple-black bank of vapour, off which rags of tempest, gilded by his radiance, were blowing sheer across the wind, whilst for miles the edge of the electric mass was a line of glorious light. It was as though a bed of fire lay on top, with the molten stuff darting in flames through the swollen belly; and the thunder roared in rattling broadsides.
The noble, dangerous scene of sky, however, was soon far astern; and the schooner sped on, carving out a grass-green comber with her chisel-like stem, and leaving the tail of a comet blowing in froth behind her. And now did nothing noticeable happen for some days. They met with heavy weather in the Channel. The wind darkened with snow, and theMowbray, under small canvas, ratched, panting over the crazy, choppy sea behind the Goodwins for a board that should open her a free run down the English coast. Miss Violet was rathersea-sick. Strange to say, her father was rather sea-sick, too.
'This motion,' he growled to Captain Glew, whilst he grasped a decanter of brandy by the neck, 'is not an honest heave. I am a good sailor in seas where the head and the stomach swing together, but when the stomach leaps at the head, and the head darts back from the stomach, leaving a sensation of brains in one's very toes, I give up.'
And so saying, he swallowed a glass of brandy, and lay down.
It was now that Miss Vi felt the want of a maid, or, at all events, of a stewardess to attend upon her. But Vanderholt had been dogged and Dutch in this matter when they had talked about the voyage at home. He would have no women, he said; they would be going forward among the men, and breeding trouble. Was it not good for Violet that she should learn to help herself? Could not she do her own hair? Then let her cut it off; it would be growing whilst they were away. These trifles illustrated Mr. Vanderholt's eccentricities asa rich man, and Violet's submissiveness as an only daughter.
However, the fine girl was not so ill but that she could manage for herself. Her nausea had left her, whilst her father still lay grunting, incapable of smoking, and gray as his beard. She waited upon him, and stood upright with ease upon a bounding deck by his side, holding on to nothing but her own hands. He rolled a languid eye of admiration over her.
'I did not bargain for this,' said he, 'or, as God is my witness, we would have joined the hooker at Plymouth.'
'Where are we now?'
'In the Chops, where the Channel always shows its teeth,' answered Mr. Vanderholt, with an ashy grin of nausea.
Vanderholt need not have been ashamed. Nelson, whilst rolling in the Downs, wrote with pathetic irritability to his Emma of his incessant sickness. A man has stepped ashore after a voyage to Australia. Would not you suppose him seasoned? Yet, on crossing the Channel in one of the small steamers, he was more violently sick thanthe most prostrate of the Frenchmen who lay in cloaks, with tureens by their sides, helpless about the decks.
'There is the Bay of Biscay to come,' said Miss Violet, with a lurking hope that, if her father's sickness continued, he would order Captain Glew to steer for home again.
'Yes, it is not far off, and I hope it may blow a hurricane when we get there, for then I shall be all right. I like a tall sea. Man and boy, I never could stand these rugged little Channel tumblers. Call for the steward, my dear. I want some tea.'
The old gentleman was not very accurate in his description of the state of the ocean, nevertheless. A large and liberal sea was running steadfast, in charging hills of green, which crumbled into foam. The torn scud flew fast. Every hollow was the wide and seething valley of Atlantic waters; and as the hull of the schooner sank into the trough, you might catch in the noise of expiring spray, in the explosion of coloured bubbles, winking like stars in beds of froth, a sound of martial music.
TheMowbraywas making splendid weatherof it. The wind was right abeam. She took the seas in steady lifts and falls. Regularly as the beat of a pulse, the hull would disappear. She seemed a foundered craft, till, in a minute, up she'd soar, with marble-hard breasts of canvas, leaping like some creation or possession of the deep to the height of a surge, bursting the flickering green peak into smoke, which blew away in rainbows whenever the sun rolled out of some solemn-sailing cloud under which the scud was scattering like smoke.
It was half-past eleven o'clock in the morning. Captain Glew, coming below for his sextant, looked in on Mr. Vanderholt, and exchanged a few sentences with him touching affairs aboard. The schooner had been liberally provisioned with fresh meat and loaves of bread for the forecastle use, and, so far, the men had sat down to a fresh mess every day. But carcasses and quarters, ribs and heads, and rumps must, unless they are pickled, soon take a character to call 'avast,' even to a sailor's appetite. Indeed, all the fresh meat was gone. It had been eaten up.
It was the dinner-hour aboard theMowbray—at sea, before the mast, everybody used to sit down and eat his dinner by the sun, at the same time, no matter in what ocean he floated—and three or four men were gathered about the door of the little caboose, waiting to carry the kids into the deck-house.
A hairy, tattooed lump of a man, named Simon Toole, after snuffling a bit, exclaimed:
'If it's to be pay-soup, maties, at the rate of this smell, then I'll tell yer a story it reminds me of. Micky M'Carthy was able seaman on board a brigantine. She foundered in mid-ocean. They'd just time to chuck something to eat and drink into her, and there they was, afloat under a broiling sun. By-'n-by, wan of thim, feeling thirsty, goes for a drink, and what d'ye think they found they had shipped for water, which was all the drink, by gob, they had? Casther-oil, bullies! It was Micky's doing. He had mustook breakers of oil for breakers of water, and then, all hands feeling thirsty, they nearly kilt him.'
'Lads,' said a man named Dabb, 'nowthere's no fresh beef left, I'm a-going to feel hungry.'
'That's nater,' exclaimed Toole; 'knock, and there ain't no room. It's always t'other ways about in this world. What couldn't I sit down and ate? Everything, bedad, but the stuff they're going to give me.'
'The capt'n looks plump,' said Dabb darkly, looking aft at Captain Glew, who stood with a sextant upon the quarter. 'He's fed so well that I'm gorged if he's left any room for a smile in his face.'
'I knew a skipper,' said the cook, lounging half out of the galley-door, and plunging into the conversation a little irrelevantly, 'who used to talk to his ship and his masts as if they was alive. He'd look up at his maintaws'l, and say: "D'ye think you could stand it if I shook a single reef out of yer? Why, then, all right"; and then he'd bawl out the order to the men. Next he'd step back right aft, paying no heed to the fellow at the wheel, and looking aloft, would say to his mizzen taws'l, "I think a reef can come out of you, too. Does the mast feel equal to the strain, d'ye think? Why, then, mylads, jump aloft, and shake a reef out of the mizzen taws'l." He was a queer dawg,' continued the cook—'fat as a slug, and as long in seeing a thing as a balloon's in falling.'
Seeing the captain looking, he slunk back to his coppers.
Presently the pea-soup and pork were ready, the kids were filled, and the hands went to dinner. They sat on sea-chests, the kids were upon the deck, and the sailors plunged their sheath-knives into the pale, fat lumps of meat, and took what they wanted, a few using tin dishes, and some ship's biscuit, as trenchers.
'Blast me!' after a grim silence, presently exclaims James Jones, who had shipped as boatswain and carpenter, 'if I don't think the Dutchman has sneaked us aboard on the cheap. This here's no food for a man.'
He held aloft a morsel of pork, and squinted up at it.
'Yer taste'll grow,' said a sailor, with a sullen laugh. 'The flavour of roast beef ain't out of your mouth yet, Jim.'
'He'll be a mean cuss,' said the boatswain,continuing to squint dangerously at the piece of pork, 'if it's to be no better than this.'
'Here's the yarn of the meanest thing that ever was read of in books,' said a seaman named Mike Scott. 'A man once said to me: "When I was a boy, I stood at my father's gate, with a kitten on my shoulder. A man on horseback stops and says: 'I likes to see little boys kind to animals. Here's a farden for ye, sonny.'" And with that he gives him a button, and then rides off. Who was it, d'ye think? Why, the Dook o' Vellington.'
'Not a vord agin the Dook. He's my godfather,' said a man.
'I'm a-going to complain of this meat,' said the boatswain, starting up.
Retaining the piece on the end of his knife, he stepped out of the house, and walked aft.
Captain Glew saw him coming, yet did not look towards him. On the contrary, he began to take sights. Yet, as though he carried a slip of looking-glass in the side of his nose, he saw the man approaching, and he did not want to see that the boatswain held, on a level with his face, a piece ofmeat at the end of his knife, to guess that his errand was thunder-charged with the old-fashioned forecastle growl. The captain's face was incapable of any play of expression. It was hard beyond the holding of any further meaning the man's spirit or heart could put into it. But his eyes could look all the abominations of a tyrannical soul; and when he perceived the boatswain approaching, his right eye gazed with a devilish malice at the sun through the little telescope attached to his sextant.
Many minutes passed before he heeded the man, who had drawn close and stood waiting to be noticed. A huddle of heads, all looking in one direction, with but one leg exposed, as though the crew had been changed into one of those many-headed giants you read of in fairy tales, embellished the deck-house door. The red-faced mate stood near the helm. Presently, the captain, with his eye still gummed to his sextant, seemed to see the man.
'What d'yer want, Jones?'
'I'd like yer to taste this piece of meat, sir. It isn't fit food for men.'
Captain Glew slowly let his sextant sink from his eye, and exclaimed:
'Jones, I shipped you for a respectable, quiet sailor. This is a gentleman's yacht. Don't disturb our quiet by anything in the South Spainer or Cape Horn way.'
'Yacht or no yacht, cap'n, this is strong meat, killed diseased; the sorter stuff, if consumed, to lay the whole ship's company low with the sickness the beast died of. Smell of it.'
He offered the knife, with the pork on it, to the captain.
'The fault is in the cooking,' said the captain; 'it always is; it always will be. Go and growl to Allan.'
'Is the rest of the pork to be like this?' said Jones, taking the dollop off the point of his knife, and seeming to weigh it in the palm of his gigantic, tar-stained hand.
'Go forward and finish your dinner, Jones, and leave me to get an observation,' said Captain Glew, with a very forbidding glance.
He applied his sextant once more to his eye, walking a little way aft.
The boatswain stood looking from him to the piece of pork, and from the piece of pork to him; then saying, 'There goes my dinner,' he jerked the pale, rather bluish lump over the side, and rolled forward.
Next day they broached a cask of beef for the forecastle. The meat proved fairly sweet, and that and a kidful of currant-dumplings kept the men quiet. But on the following day the bad pork was served out again. Captain Glew refused to hear the boatswain on the subject, and those of the men who could not swallow the meat made shift for a meal with pea-soup and ship's biscuit.
Not a word of this trouble, which Captain Glew must have known was charged with one of the deadliest of all ocean menaces, reached Mr. Vanderholt.
'I'll not have him worried,' said Glew to the mate. 'If you sent them a Mansion House tuck-out, the fiends would growl,tell you it wasn't Galapagos turtle, and that they'd hooked better salmon out of cans. I'm responsible for the stores. I knew what I was about when I ordered them. Surely you know Humph Lyons, the ships' chandler in Dock Street, Limehouse? He's shipped for me before, and he's likewise shipped for my owners, and I've never heard a murmur against him.'
'Was that the Lyons an action was brought against for selling condemned Admiralty stores as good food for merchant sailors?' said Mr. Tweed, with a grin.
'It was his brother,' said Captain Glew. 'A man can't be responsible for his relations.'
'As to relations,' said Mr. Tweed, 'a man may try his darned hardest to be all that's right, and in conformity with the law and piety, and still find himself adrift at the end. I remember a skipper saying to me: "It's all very well to say, 'Honour thy father and thy mother,' but I knew a man who all his life did his fired best to honour his father, and when his mother lay dying she told him, with the tears running over her cheeks,that the man he'd been a-honouring all his life had never been his father at all!"'
Here the groggy little man set up so loud a laugh that Captain Glew walked away, and the conversation came to an end.
The days passed. TheMowbraybroke the seas of the Bay clothed to her royal yard. Blue sky was over her, and sunshine bright as that of the English June lighted up the rolling ocean. By this time Mr. Vanderholt was perfectly recovered, and had ceased to apologize to Captain Glew for being sea-sick. He smoked his long pipe. He stalked the deck arm-in-arm with his daughter. He repeatedly asked her and Captain Glew how they thought he was looking; and Captain Glew swore that in all his life he had never seen any gentleman pick up so surprisingly fast.
'I'm quite sure,' the captain said, 'Miss Vanderholt will agree with me, sir, when I say that you're looking ten years younger this same day than at the hour of your starting.'
Miss Violet smiled, and Vanderholt strokedhis beard, and grinned till his eyes faded into little wrinkles.
One fine hot morning, when theMowbraywas far to the southward of the Madeira parallels, Mr. Vanderholt and his daughter came on deck from the breakfast-table, and seated themselves under the shelter of a short awning. The young lady held a novel. Mr. Vanderholt smoked his immense and richly-coloured pipe. Captain Glew passed them in short to-and-fro look-out excursions; and forward the little ship carried a busy face, with seamen at work on the hundred jobs which, fair or foul, a vessel exacts from her crew at sea. A soft wind blew. The sky was capacious with the clarity of the horizon, and wondrous lofty with light cloud, resembling froth that dries in curls upon a beach.
A ship was in sight on the starboard quarter, going away north-west, under square yards. Her spires trembled in the moist, rich distance, as though they were rays of starlight, twisting, burning, dying. She had been too far off to signal, nor did Mr. Vanderholt seem particularly anxious thatthe safety and whereabouts of his little ship should be reported at home.
'Who is troubling his head about us, do you think?' he had said to his daughter on one occasion when this question of reporting had arisen between him and Glew. 'I am not insured. No man in the city is concerned for me. And of our friends, how many are thinking of us?'
And he held up two fingers with a satirical smile, as though he should say, 'D'ye think two are thinking of us?'
'If George returns before we do,' Miss Vi had said in reply, 'I should like him to know that all was well with us down to the date on which we were last heard of.'
'We'll signal steam,' had been old Vanderholt's answer. 'Anything blown along by canvas will not arrive at home very much earlier than we shall.'
Now, on this morning—this fine hot morning—they sat together in very comfortable deck-chairs, one trying to read a novel, the other finding his tobacco delicious in the open air. Presently, directing her eyes at some men who sat at work stitching upona sail near the galley, Miss Vanderholt said:
'How could any man be a sailor! How could you have survived such a horrible life! See how hard those men are kept at work all day; and at night they have to watch, wet or dry, for four hours at a time.'
'Ay; and the colder it is, and the damper it is, and the more abominable in a general way the whole precious weather is, the harder they have to watch,' answered Vanderholt.
'Have sailors no amusements?' inquired his daughter.
'How do sailors amuse themselves, Glew?' called Mr. Vanderholt.
And the man, arresting his look-out walk, stood up before father and daughter.
'By growling, sir,' answered Glew.
Miss Vanderholt did not like the expression that entered Captain Glew's eyes when he made that answer.
'A happy, well-disciplined crew are the jolliest company of men in the world,' said Mr. Vanderholt. 'They have plenty to eat, no rent to pay, dollars for the girls at theend of the voyage, and they behold the wonders of the world at the cost of the ship-owner—poor fellow! For diversions, think—they dance in the dog-watch, they sing songs and tell stories, they play at cards, they fight——'
'A little, sir,' said Captain Glew.
'We made a sport of fighting in our time,' said Vanderholt. 'We'd take two men, and nail them face to face on a sea-chest, with long spikes driven through the stern of their trousers. It was good sport.'
He opened his mouth to let out a cloud, smiling at some forecastle recollections, which perhaps caused him to regret that his daughter was present, for he found Glew a good listener.
'Sailors take some pleasure in cards,' said Captain Glew. 'I remember, when I was second-mate of a ship, having occasion to go forward. It was night, a dead calm; a frightful thunderstorm was about us; the lightning was hissing like snakes all over everything that was metal aloft, and every crash of thunder was like the splitting of the heavens by God's own hand in wrath. Itook a peep down the forecastle, and in the midst of this tremendous commotion, which was fit to subdue the heart of the stoutest, sat four sailors at a chest, playing at cards, a lighted candle in a bottle in the midst of them, all so intent on the game that they heard and saw nothing.'
'Sail-ho!' at this moment sang out a fellow aloft, on the little top-gallant yard.
'Where away?' shouted Glew, with the sharp of his hand to his mouth.
'Right ahead, sir!' cried down the seaman, in a sort of chant.
'If she's going to England you shall make our number, Glew—for George's sake,' said Mr. Vanderholt, looking at his daughter.
Just then the boatswain hailed the sailor on the top-gallant yard, and gave him some directions.
'That Jones is a fine-looking man,' said Mr. Vanderholt; 'such as he should never want a ship. What's his nation?'
'London, sir.'
'A mighty nation!' exclaimed Miss Violet.
'Which does not believe in a God,' saidVanderholt, 'though it worships a Madonna called Our Lady of Threadneedle Street.'
'There's many a pilgrim always bound to that shrine,' said Captain Glew, trying to smile.
'I am of Dutch extraction,' continued Mr. Vanderholt; 'but never dropped the letter H, nor found the V's and W's difficult. I have out-generationed that trouble of the foreigner. But why is it that the Cockney should drop his H? You speak of London. Think of the number of H's which are dropped in it every day!'
'George once made a pun,' exclaimed Miss Vanderholt. 'We were talking of a certain young lady, and I said: "Do you observe that she drops her H's?" "Her sister does worse," he answered. "Address her and she drops her eyes."'
Captain Glew again tried to smile. Mr. Vanderholt, expelling a great cloud of smoke, burst in:
'Yes; and I'll tell you what those girls' father once said to me at an evening party. He took me aside, and said: "Did you ever 'ear of that fine riddle in rhyme supposed tohave been written by Lord Byron, though it's attributed to a lady? I'll tell it you," and my friend, with a grave face, began: