An air of westerly wind had risen after meridian and the haar was gone, so that when I stood at the break of the poop as the brigantine crept into the channel and flung out billows of canvas while her drunken seamen quarrelled and bawled high on the spars, I saw, as I imagined, the last of Scotland in a pleasant evening glow. My heart sank. It was not a departure like this I had many a time anticipated when I listened to Uncle Andys tales; here was I with blood on my hands and a guinea to start my life in a foreign country; that was not the worst of it either, for far more distress was in my mind at the reflection that I travelled with a man who was in my secret. At first I was afraid to go near him once our ropes were off the pawls, and I, as it were, was altogether his, but to my surprise there could be no pleasanter man than Risk when he had the wash of water under his rotten barque. He was not only a better-mannered man to myself, but he became, in half an hour of the Firth breeze, as sober as a judge. But for the roving gleed eye, and what I had seen of him on shore, Captain Dan Risk might have passed for a model of all the virtues. He called me Mr. Greig and once or twice (but I stopped that) Young Hazel Den, with no irony in the appellation, and he was at pains to make his mate see that I was one to be treated with some respect, proffering me at our first meal together (for I was to eat in the cuddy,) the first of everything on the table, and even making some excuses for the roughness of the viands. And I could see that whatever his qualities of heart might be, he was a good seaman, a thing to be told in ten minutes by a skipper's step on a deck and his grip of the rail, and his word of command. Those drunken barnacles of his seemed to be men with the stuff of manly deeds in them, when at his word they dashed aloft among the canvas canopy to fist the bulging sail and haul on clew or gasket, or when they clung on greasy ropes and at a gesture of his hand heaved cheerily with that “yo-ho” that is the chant of all the oceans where keels run.
Murchison was a saturnine, silent man, from whom little was to be got of edification. The crew numbered eight men, one of them a black deaf mute, with the name of Antonio Ferdinando, who cooked in a galley little larger than the Hazel Den kennel. It was apparent that no two of them had ever met before, such a career of flux and change is the seaman's, and except one of them, a fellow Horn, who was foremast man, a more villainous gang I never set eyes on before or since. If Risk had raked the ports of Scotland with a fine bone comb for vermin, he could not have brought together a more unpleasant-looking crew. No more than two of them brought a bag on board, and so ragged was their appearance that I felt ashamed to air my own good clothes on the same deck with them.
Fortunately it seemed I had nothing to do with them nor they with me; all that was ordered for the eking out of my passage, as Risk had said, was to copy the manifest, and I had no sooner set to that than I discerned it was a gowk's job just given me to keep me in employ in the cabin. Whatever his reason, the man did not want me about his deck. I saw that in an interlude in my writing, when I came up from his airless den to learn what progress old rotten-beams made under all her canvas.
It had declined to a mere handful of wind, and the vessel scarcely moved, seemed indeed steadfast among the sea-birds that swooped and wheeled and cried around her. I saw the sun just drop among blood-red clouds over Stirling, and on the shore of Fife its pleasant glow. The sea swung flat and oily, running to its ebb, and lapping discernibly upon a recluse promontory of land with a stronghold on it.
“What do you call yon, Horn?” I said to the seaman I have before mentioned, who leaned upon the taffrail and watched the vessel's greasy wake, and I pointed to the gloomy buildings on the shore.
“Blackness Castle,” said he, and he had time to tell no more, for the skipper bawled upon him for a shirking dog, and ordered the flemishing of some ropes loose upon the forward deck. Nor was I exempt from his zeal for the industry of other folks for he came up to me with a suspicious look, as if he feared I had been hearing news from his foremast man, and “How goes the manifest, Mr. Greig?” says he.
“Oh, brawly, brawly!” said I, determined to begin with Captain Daniel Risk as I meant to end.
He grew purple, but restrained himself with an effort. “This is not an Ayr sloop, Mr. Greig,” said he; “and when orders go on theSeven SistersI like to see them implemented. You must understand that there's a pressing need for your clerking, or I would not be so soon putting you at it.”
“At this rate of sailing,” says I, “I'll have time to copy some hundred manifests between here and Nova Scotia.”
“Perhaps you'll permit me to be the best judge of that,” he replied in the English he ever assumed with his dignity, and seeing there was no more for it, I went back to my quill.
It was little wonder, in all the circumstances, that I fell asleep over my task with my head upon the cabin table whereon I wrote, and it was still early in the night when I crawled into the narrow bunk that the skipper had earlier indicated as mine.
Weariness mastered my body, but my mind still roamed; the bunk became a coffin quicklimed, and the murderer of David Borland lying in it; the laverock cried across Earn Water and the moors of Renfrew with the voice of Daniel Risk. And yet the strange thing was that I knew I slept and dreamed, and more than once I made effort, and dragged myself into wakefulness from the horrors of my nightmare. At these times there was nothing to hear but the plop of little waves against the side of the ship, a tread on deck, and the call of the watch.
I had fallen into a sleep more profound than any that had yet blessed my hard couch, when I was suddenly wakened by a busy clatter on the deck, the shriek of ill-greased davits, the squeak of blocks, and the fall of a small-boat into the water. Another odd sound puzzled me: but for the probability that we were out over Bass I could have sworn it was the murmur of a stream running upon a gravelled shore. A stream—heavens! There could be no doubt about it now; we were somewhere close in shore, and theSeven Sisterswas lying to. The brigantine stopped in her voyage where no stoppage should be; a small boat plying to land in the middle of the night; come! here was something out of the ordinary, surely, on a vessel seaward bound. I had dreamt of the gallows and of Dan Risk as an informer. Was it a wonder that there should flash into my mind the conviction of my betrayal? What was more likely than that the skipper, secure of my brace of guineas, was selling me to the garrison of Blackness?
I clad myself hurriedly and crept cautiously up the companion ladder, and found myself in overwhelming darkness, only made the more appalling and strange because the vessel's lights were all extinguished. Silence large and brooding lay upon theSeven Sistersas she lay in that obscuring haar that had fallen again; she might be Charon's craft pausing mid-way on the cursed stream, and waiting for the ferry cry upon the shore of Time. We were still in the estuary or firth, to judge by the bickering burn and the odors off-shore, above all the odour of rotting brake; and we rode at anchor, for her bows were up-water to the wind and tide, and above me, in the darkness, I could hear the idle sails faintly flapping in the breeze and the reef-points all tap-tapping. I seemed to have the deck alone, but for one figure at the stern; I went back, and found that it was Horn.
“Where are we?” I asked, relieved to find there the only man I could trust on board the ship.
“A little below Blackness,” said he shortly with a dissatisfied tone.
“I did not know we were to stop here,” said I, wondering if he knew that I was doomed.
“Neither did I,” said he, peering into the void of night. “And whit's mair, I wish I could guess the reason o' oor stopping. The skipper's been ashore mair nor ance wi' the lang-boat forward there, and I'm sent back here to keep an e'e on lord kens what except it be yersel'.”
“Are ye indeed?” said I, exceedingly vexed. “Then I ken too well, Horn, the reason for the stoppage. You are to keep your eye on a man who's being bargained for with the hangman.”
“I would rather ken naithin' about that,” said he, “and onyway I think ye're mistaken. Here they're comin' back again.”
Two or three small boats were coming down on us out of the darkness; not that I could see them, but that I heard their oars in muffled rowlocks.
“If they want me,” said I sorrowfully, “they can find me down below,” and back I went and sat me in the cabin, prepared for the manacles.
The place stank with bilge and the odour of an ill-trimmed lamp smoking from a beam; the fragments of the skipper's supper were on the table, with a broken quadrant; rats scurried and squealed in the bulkheads, and one stared at me from an open locker, where lay a rum-bottle, while beetles and slaters travelled along the timbers. But these things compelled my attention less than the skylights that were masked internally by pieces of canvas nailed roughly on them. They were not so earlier in the evening; it must have been done after I had gone to sleep, and what could be the object? That puzzled me extremely, for it must have been the same hand that had extinguished all the deck and mast lights, and though black was my crime darkness was unnecessary to my betrayal.
I waited with a heart like lead.
I heard the boats swung up on the davits, the squeak of the falls, the tread of the seamen, the voice of Risk in an unusually low tone. In the bows in a little I heard the windlass click and the chains rasp in the hawse-holes; we were lifting the anchor.
For a moment hope possessed me. If we were weighing anchor then my arrest was not imminent at least; but that consolation lasted briefly when I thought of the numerous alternatives to imprisonment in Blackness.
We were under weigh again; there was a heel to port, and a more rapid plop of the waters along the carvel planks. And then Risk and his mate came down.
I have seldom seen a man more dashed than the skipper when he saw me sitting waiting on him, clothed and silent. His face grew livid; round he turned to Murchison and hurried him with oaths to come and clap eyes on this sea-clerk. I looked for the officer behind them, but they were alone, and at that I thought more cheerfully I might have been mistaken about the night's curious proceedings.
“Anything wrang?” said Risk, affecting nonchalance now that his spate of oaths was by, and he pulled the rum out of the locker and helped himself and his mate to a swingeing caulker.
“Oh, nothing at all,” said I, “at least nothing that I know of, Captain Risk. And are we—are we—at Halifax already?”
“What do you mean?” said he. And then he looked at me closely, put out the hand unoccupied by his glass and ran an insolent dirty finger over my new-clipped mole. “Greig, Greig,” said he, “Greig to a hair! I would have the wee shears to that again, for its growin'.”
“You're a very noticing man,” said I, striking down his hand no way gently, and remembering that he had seen my scissors when I emerged from the Borrowstouness close after my own barbering.
“I'm all that,” he replied, with a laugh, and all the time Murchison, the mate, sat mopping his greasy face with a rag, as one after hard work, and looked on us with wonder at what we meant. “I'm all that,” he replied, “the hair aff the mole and the horse-hair on your creased breeches wad hae tauld ony ane that ye had ridden in a hurry and clipped in a fricht o' discovery.”
“Oh, oh!” I cried, “and that's what goes to the makin' o' a Mahoun!”
“Jist that,” said he, throwing himself on a seat with an easy indifference meant to conceal his vanity. “Jist observation and a knack o' puttin' twa and twa thegether. Did ye think the skipper o' theSeven Sisterswas fleein' over Scotland at the tail o' your horse?”
“The Greig mole's weel kent, surely,” said I, astonished and chagrined. “I jalouse it's notorious through my Uncle Andy?”
Risk laughed at that. “Oh, ay!” said he, “when Andy Greig girned at ye it was ill to miss seein' his mole. Man, ye might as well wear your name on the front o' your hat as gae aboot wi' a mole like that—and—and that pair o' shoes.”
The blood ran to my face at this further revelation of his astuteness. It seemed, then, I carried my identity head and foot, and it was no wonder a halfeyed man like Risk should so easily discover me. I looked down at my feet, and sure enough, when I thought of it now, it would have been a stupid man who, having seen these kenspeckle shoes once, would ever forget them.
“My uncle seems to have given me good introductions,” said I. “They struck mysel' as rather dandy for a ship,” broke in the mate, at last coming on something he could understand.
“And didyouknow Andy Greig, too?” said I. “Andy Greig,” he replied. “Not me!”
“Then, by God, ye hinna sailed muckle aboot the warld!” said the skipper. “I hae seen thae shoes in the four quarters and aye in a good companionship.”
“They appear yet to retain that virtue,” said I, unable to resist the irony. “And, by the way, Captain Risk, now that we have discussed the shoes and my mole, what have we been waiting for at Blackness?”
His face grew black with annoyance.
“What's that to you?” he cried.
“Oh, I don't know,” I answered indifferently. “I thought that now ye had got the best part o' your passage money ye might hae been thinking to do something for your country again. They tell me it's a jail in there, and it might suggest itself to you as providing a good opportunity for getting rid of a very indifferent purser.”
It is one thing I can remember to the man's credit that this innuendo of treachery seemed to make him frantic. He dashed the rum-glass at his feet and struck at me with a fist like a jigot of mutton, and I had barely time to step back and counter. He threw himself at me as he had been a cat; I closed and flung my arms about him with a wrestler's grip, and bent him back upon the table edge, where I might have broken his spine but for Murchison's interference. The mate called loudly for assistance; footsteps pounded on the cuddy-stair, and down came Horn. Between them they drew us apart, and while Murchison clung to his captain, and plied him into quietness with a fresh glass of grog, Horn thrust me not unkindly out into the night, and with no unwillingness on my part.
091
It was the hour of dawn, and the haar was gone.
There was something in that chill grey monotone of sky and sea that filled me with a very passion of melancholy. The wind had risen, and the billows ran frothing from the east; enormous clouds hung over the land behind us, so that it seemed to roll with smoke from the eternal fires. Out from that reeking pit of my remorse—that lost Scotland where now perhaps there still lay lying among the rushes, with the pees-weep's cry above it, the thing from which I flew, our ship went fast, blown upon the frothy billows, like a ponderous bird, leaving a wake of hissing bubbling brine, flying, as it seemed, to a world of less imminent danger, yet unalluring still.
I looked aloft at the straining spars; they seemed to prick the clouds between the swelling sails; the ropes and shrouds stretched infinitely into a region very grey and chill. Oh, the pallor! oh, the cold and heartless spirit of the sea in that first dawning morn!
“It's like to be a good day,” said Horn, breaking in upon my silence, and turning to him I saw his face exceeding hollow and wan. The watch lay forward, all but a lad who seemed half-dozing at the helm; Risk and his mate had lapsed to silence in the cuddy.
“You're no frien', seemingly, o' the pair below!” said Horn again, whispering, and with a glance across his shoulder at the helm.
“It did not look as if I were, a minute or two ago,” said I. “Yon's a scoundrel, and yet I did him an injustice when I thought he meant to sell me.”
“I never sailed with a more cheat-the-widdy crew since I followed the sea,” said Horn, “and whether it's the one way or the other, sold ye are.”
“Eh?” said I, uncomprehending.
He looked again at the helm, and moved over to a water-breaker further forward, obviously meaning that I should follow. He drew a drink of water for himself, drank slowly, but seemed not to be much in the need for it from the little he took, but he had got out of ear-shot of the man steering.
“You and me's the gulls this time, Mr. Greig,” said he, whispering. “This is a doomed ship.”
“I thought as much from her rotten spars,” I answered. “So long as she takes me to Nova Scotia I care little what happens to her.”
“It's a long way to Halifax,” said he. “I wish I could be sure we were likely even to have Land's End on our starboard before waur happens. Will ye step this way, Mr. Greig?” and he cautiously led the way forward. There was a look-out humming a stave of song somewhere in the bows, and two men stretched among the chains, otherwise that part of the ship was all our own. We went down the fo'c'sle scuttle quietly, and I found myself among the carpenter's stores, in darkness, divided by a bulkhead door from the quarters of the sleeping men. Rats were scurrying among the timbers and squealing till Horn stamped lightly with his feet and secured stillness.
“Listen!” said he.
I could hear nothing but the heavy breathing of a seaman within, and the wash of water against the ship's sides.
“Well?” I queried, wondering.
“Put your lug here,” said he, indicating a beam that was dimly revealed by the light from the lamp swinging in the fo'c'sle. I did so, and heard water running as from a pipe somewhere in the bowels of the vessel.
“What's that?” I asked.
“That's all,” said he and led me aft again.
The dawn by now had spread over half the heavens; behind us the mouth of the Firth gulped enormous clouds, and the fringe of Fife was as flat as a bannock; before us the sea spread chill, leaden, all unlovely. “My sorrow!” says I, “if this is travelling, give me the high-roads and the hot noon.”
Horn's face seemed more hollow and dark than ever in the wan morning. I waited his explanation. “I think ye said Halifax, Mr. Greig?” said he. “I signed on, mysel', for the same port, but you and me's perhaps the only ones on this ship that ever hoped to get there. God give me grace to get foot on shore and Dan Risk will swing for this!”
Somebody sneezed behind us as Horn thus rashly expressed himself; we both turned suddenly on the rail we had been leaning against, expecting that this was the skipper, and though it was not Risk, it was one whose black visage and gleaming teeth and rolling eyes gave me momentarily something of a turn.
It was the cook Ferdinando. He had come up behind on his bare feet, and out upon the sea he gazed with that odd eerie look of the deaf and dumb, heedless of us, it seemed, as we had been dead portions of the ship's fabric, seeing but the salt wave, the rim of rising sun, blood-red upon the horizon, communing with an old familiar.
“A cauld momin', cook,” said Horn, like one who tests a humbug pretending to be dumb, but Ferdinando heard him not.
“It might have been a man wi' all his faculties,” said the seaman whispering, “and it's time we werena seen thegether. I'll tell ye later on.”
With that we separated, he to some trivial duty of his office, I, with a mind all disturbed, back to my berth to lie awake, tossing and speculating on the meaning of Horn's mystery.
When I went on deck next morning there was something great ado. We were out of sight of land, sailing large, as the old phrase went, on a brisk quarter breeze with top-sails atrip, and the sky a vast fine open blue. The crew were gathered at the poop, the pump was clanking in the midst of them, and I saw they were taking spells at the cruellest labour a seaman knows.
At first I was noway troubled at the spectacle; a leak was to be expected in old rotten-beams, and I went forward with the heart of me not a pulse the faster.
Risk was leaning over the poop-rail, humped up and his beard on his hands; Murchison, a little apart, swept the horizon with a prospect-glass, and the pump sent a great spate of bilge-water upon the deck. But for a man at the tiller who kept the ship from yawing in the swell that swung below her counter theSeven Sisterssailed at her sweet will; all the interest of her company was in this stream of stinking water that she retched into the scuppers. And yet I could not but be struck by the half-hearted manner in which the seamen wrought; they were visibly shirking; I saw it in the slack muscles, in the heedless eyes.
Risk rose and looked sourly at me as I went up. “Are ye for a job?” said he. “It's more in your line perhaps than clerkin'.”
“What, at the pumps? Is the old randy geyzing already?”
“Like a washing-boyne,” said he. “Bear a hand like a good lad! we maun keep her afloat at least till some other vessel heaves in sight.”
In the tone and look of the man there was something extraordinary. His words were meant to suggest imminent peril, and yet his voice was shallow as that of a burgh bellman crying an auction sale, and his eyes had more interest in the horizon that his mate still searched with the prospect-glass than in the spate of bilge that gulped upon the deck.
Bilge did I say? Heavens! it was bilge no more, but the pure sea-green that answered to the clanking pump. It was no time for idle wonder at the complacence of the skipper; I flew to the break and threw my strength into the seaman's task. “Clank-click, clank-click”—the instrument worked reluctantly as if the sucker moved in slime, and in a little the sweat poured from me.
“How is she now, Campbell?” asked Risk, as the carpenter came on deck.
“Three feet in the hold,” said Campbell airily, like one that had an easy conscience.
“Good lord, a foot already!” cried Risk, and then in a tone of sarcasm, “Hearty, lads, hearty there! A little more Renfrewshire beef into it, Mr. Greig, if you please.”
At that I ceased my exertion, stood back straight and looked at the faces about me. There was only one man in the company who did not seem to be amused at me, and that was Horn, who stood with folded arms, moodily eying the open sea.
“You seem mighty joco about it,” I said to Risk, and I wonder to this day at my blindness that never read the whole tale in these hurried events.
“I can afford to be,” he said quickly; “if I gang I gang wi' clean hands,” and he spat into the seawater streaming from the pump where the port-watch now were working with as much listlessness as the men they superseded.
To the taunt I made no reply, but moved after Horn who had gone forward with his hands in his pockets.
“What does this mean, Horn?” I asked him. “Is the vessel in great danger?”
“I suppose she is,” said he bitterly, “but I have had nae experience o' scuttled ships afore.”
“Scuttled!” cried I, astounded, only half grasping his meaning.
“Jist that,” said he. “The job's begun. It began last night in the run of the vessel as I showed ye when ye put your ear to the beam. After I left ye, I foun' half a dizen cords fastened to the pump stanchels; ane of them I pulled and got a plug at the end of it; the ithers hae been comin' oot since as it suited Dan Risk best, and theSeven Ststersis doomed to die o' a dropsy this very day. Wasn't I the cursed idiot that ever lipped drink in Clerihew's coffin-room!”
“If it was that,” said I, “why did you not cut the cords and spoil the plot?”
“Cut the cords! Ye mean cut my ain throat; that's what wad happen if the skipper guessed my knowledge o' his deevilry. And dae ye think a gallows job o' this kind depends a'thegither on twa or three bits o' twine? Na, na, this is a very business-like transaction, Mr. Greig, and I'll warrant there has been naethin' left to chance. I wondered at them bein' sae pernicketty about the sma' boats afore we sailed when the timbers o' the ship hersel' were fair ganting. That big new boat and sails frae Kirkcaldy was a gey odd thing in itsel' if I had been sober enough to think o't. I suppose ye paid your passage, Mr. Greig? I can fancy a purser on theSeven Sistersupon nae ither footin' and that made me dubious o' ye when I first learned o' this hell's caper for Jamieson o' the Grange. If ye hadna fought wi' the skipper I would hae coonted ye in wi' the rest.”
“He has two pounds of my money,” I answered; “at least I've saved the other two if we fail to reach Halifax.”
At that he laughed softly again.
“It might be as well wi' Risk as wi' the conger,” said he, meaningly. “I'm no' sae sure that you and me's meant to come oot o' this; that's what I might tak' frae their leaving only the twa o' us aft when they were puttin' the cargo aff there back at Blackness.”
“The cargo!” I repeated.
“Of course,” said Horn. “Ye fancied they were goin' to get rid o' ye there, did ye? I'll alloo I thought that but a pretence on your pairt, and no' very neatly done at that. Well, the smallest pairt but the maist valuable o' the cargo shipped at Borrowstouness is still in Scotland; and the underwriters 'll be to pay through the nose for what has never run sea risks.”
At that a great light came to me. This was the reason for the masked cuddy skylights, the utter darkness of theSeven Sisterswhile her boats were plying to the shore; for this was I so closely kept at her ridiculous manifest; the lists of lace and plate I had been fatuously copying were lists of stuff no longer on the ship at all, but back in the possession of the owner of the brigantine.
“You are an experienced seaman—?”
“I have had a vessel of my own,” broke in Horn, some vanity as well as shame upon his countenance.
“Well, you are the more likely to know the best way out of this trap we are in,” I went on. “For a certain reason I am not at all keen on it to go back to Scotland, but I would sooner risk that than run in leash with a scoundrel like this who's sinking his command, not to speak of hazarding my unworthy life with a villainous gang. Is there any way out of it, Horn?”
The seaman pondered, a dark frown upon his tanned forehead, where the veins stood out in knots, betraying his perturbation. The wind whistled faintly in the tops, theSeven Sistersplainly went by the head; she had a slow response to her helm, and moved sluggishly. Still the pump was clanking and we could hear the water streaming through the scupper holes. Risk had joined his mate and was casting anxious eyes over the waters.
“If we play the safty here, Mr. Greig,” said Horn, “there's a chance o' a thwart for us when theSeven Ststerscomes to her labour. That's oor only prospect. At least they daurna murder us.”
“And what about the crew?” I asked. “Do you tell me there is not enough honesty among them all to prevent a blackguardly scheme like this?”
“We're the only twa on this ship this morning wi' oor necks ootside tow, for they're all men o' the free trade, and broken men at that,” said Horn resolutely, and even in the midst of this looming disaster my private horror rose within me.
“Ah!” said I, helpless to check the revelation, “speak for yourself, Mr. Horn; it's the hangman I'm here fleeing from.”
He looked at me with quite a new countenance, clearly losing relish for his company.
“Anything by-ordinar dirty?” he asked, and in my humility I did not have the spirit to resent what that tone and query implied.
“Dirty enough,” said I, “the man's dead,” and Horn's face cleared.
“Oh, faith! is that all?” quo' he, “I was thinkin' it might be coinin'—beggin' your pardon, Mr. Greig, or somethin' in the fancy way. But a gentleman's quarrel ower the cartes or a wench—that's a different tale. I hate homicide mysel' to tell the truth, but whiles I've had it in my heart, and in a way o' speakin* Dan Risk this meenute has my gully-knife in his ribs.”
As he spoke the vessel, mishandled, or a traitor to her helm, now that she was all awash internally with water, yawed and staggered in the wind. The sails shivered, the yards swung violently, appalling noises came from the hold. At once the pumping ceased, and Risk's voice roared in the confusion, ordering the launch of the Kirkcaldy boat.
When I come to write these affairs down after the lapse of years, I find my memory but poorly retains the details of that terrific period between the cry of Risk and the moment when Horn and I, abandoned on the doomed vessel, watched the evening fall upon the long Kirkcaldy boat, her mast stepped, but her sails down, hovering near us for the guarantee of our eternal silence regarding the crime the men on her were there and then committing. There is a space—it must have been brief, but I lived a lifetime in it—whose impressions rest with me, blurred, but with the general hue of agony. I can see the sun again sailing overhead in the arching sky of blue; the enormous ocean, cruel, cold, spread out to the line of the horizon; the flapping sails and drumming reef-points, the streaming halliards and clew-garnets, the spray buffeting upon our hull and spitting in our faces like an enemy; I hear the tumult of the seamen hurrying vulgarly to save their wretched lives, the gluck of waters in the bowels of the ship, the thud of cargo loose and drifting under decks.
But I see and hear it all as in a dream or play, and myself someway standing only a spectator.
It seemed that Risk and his men put all their dependence on the long-boat out of Kirkcaldy. She was partly decked at the bows like a Ballantrae herring-skiff, beamy and commodious. They clustered round her like ants; swung her out, and over she went, and the whole hellish plot lay revealed in the fact that she was all found with equipment and provisions.
Horn and I made an effort to assist at her preparation; we were shoved aside with frantic curses; we were beaten back by her oars when we sought to enter her, and when she pushed off from the side of theSeven Sisters, Dan Risk was so much the monster that he could jeer at our perplexity. He sat at the tiller of her without a hat, his long hair, that was turning lyart, blown by the wind about his black and mocking eyes.
“Head her for Halifax, Horn,” said he, “and ye'll get there by-and-by.”
“Did I ever do ye any harm, skipper?” cried the poor seaman, standing on the gunwale, hanging to the shrouds, and his aspect hungry for life.
“Ye never got the chance, Port Glesca,” cried back Risk, hugging the tiller of the Kirkcaldy boat under his arm. “I'll gie ye a guess—
Come-a-riddle, come-a-riddle, come-a-rote-tote-tote—
Oh to bleezes! I canna put a rhyme till't, but this is the sense o't—a darkie's never deaf and dumb till he's deid. Eh! Antonio, ye rascal!”
He looked forward as he spoke and exchanged a villainous laugh with the cook, his instrument, who had overheard us and betrayed.
“Ye would mak' me swing for it, would ye, John Horn, when ye get ashore? That's what I would expect frae a keelie oot o' Clyde.”
It is hard to credit that man could be so vile as this, but of such stuff was Daniel Risk. He was a fiend in the glory of his revenge upon the seaman who had threatened him with the gallows; uplifted like a madman's, his face, that was naturally sallow, burned lamp-red at his high cheek-bones, his hale eye gloated, his free hand flourished as in an exultation. His mate sat silent beside him on the stern-thwart, clearing the sheets: the crew, who had out the sweeps to keep the boat's bows in the wind, made an effort to laugh at his jocosities, but clearly longed to be away from this tragedy. And all the time, I think, I stood beside the weather bulwark, surrendered to the certainty of a speedy death, with the lines of a ballad coming back again and again to my mind:
An' he shall lie in fathoms deep,The star-fish ower his een shall creep.An' an auld grey wife shall sit an' weepIn the hall o' Monaltrie.
I thrust that ungodly rhyme from me each time that it arose, but in spite of me at last it kept time to the lap of a wave of encroaching sea that beat about my feet.
My silence—my seeming indifference—would seem to have touched the heart that could not be affected by the entreaties of the seaman Horn. At least Risk ceased his taunts at last, and cast a more friendly eye on me.
“I'm saying, Greig,” he cried, “noo that I think o't, your Uncle Andy was no bad hand at makin' a story. Ye've an ill tongue, but I'll thole that—astern, lads, and tak' the purser aboard.”
The seamen set the boat about willingly enough, and she crept in to pick me off the doomed ship.
At that my senses cleared like hill-well water. It was for but a second—praise God! my instincts joyed in my reprieve; my hand never released the cleat by which I steadied myself. I looked at Horn still upon the lower shrouds and saw hope upon his countenance.
“Of course this man comes with me, Captain Risk?” said I.
“Not if he offered a thousand pounds,” cried Risk, “in ye come!” and Murchison clawed at the shrouds with a boat-hook. Horn made to jump among them and, with an oath, the mate thrust at him with the hook as with a spear, striking him under the chin. He fell back upon the deck, bleeding profusely and half insensible.
“You are a foul dog!” I cried to his assailant. “And I'll settle with you for that!”
“Jump, ye fool, ye, jump!” cried Risk impatient.
“Let us look oot for oorselves, that's whit I say,” cried Murchison angry at my threat, and prepared cheerfully to see me perish. “What for should we risk oor necks with either o' them?” and he pushed off slightly with his boat-hook.
The skipper turned, struck down the hook, and snarled upon him. “Shut up, Murchison!” he cried. “I'm still the captain, if ye please, and I ken as much about the clerk here as will keep his gab shut on any trifle we hae dune.”
I looked upon the clean sea, and then at that huddle of scoundrels in the Kirkcaldy boat, and then upon the seaman Horn coming back again to the full consciousness of his impending fate. He gazed upon me with eyes alarmed and pitiful, and at that I formed my resolution.
“I stick by Horn,” said I. “If he gets too, I'll go; if not I'll bide and be drowned with an honest man.”
“Bide and be damned then! Ye've had your chance,” shouted Risk, letting his boat fall off. “It's time we werena here.” And the halliards of his main-sail were running in the blocks as soon as he said it. The boat swept away rapidly, but not before I gave him a final touch of my irony. From my pocket I took out my purse and threw it upon his lap.
“There's the ither twa, Risk,” I cried; “it's no' like the thing at all to murder a harmless lad for less than what ye bargained for.”
He bawled back some reply I could not hear, and I turned about, to see Horn making for the small boat on the starboard chocks. I followed with a hope again wakened, only to share his lamentation when he found that two of her planks had been wantonly sprung from their clinkers, rendering her utterly useless. The two other boats were in a similar condition; Risk and his confederates had been determined that no chance should be left of our escape from theSeven Sisters.
It was late in the afternoon. The wind had softened somewhat; in the west there were rising billowy clouds of silver and red, and half a mile away the Kirkcaldy boat, impatient doubtless for the end of us, that final assurance of safety, plied to windward with only her foresail set. We had gone below in a despairing mind on the chance that the leakage might be checked, but the holes were under water in the after peak, and in other parts we could not come near. An inch-and-a-half auger, and a large bung-borer, a gouge and chisel in the captain's private locker, told us how the crime had been committed whereof we were the victims.
We had come on deck again, the pair of us, without the vaguest notion of what was next to do, and—speaking for myself—convinced that nothing could avert our hurrying fate. Horn told me later that he proposed full half a score of plans for at least a prolongation of our time, but that I paid no heed to them. That may be, for I know the ballad stanza went in my head like a dirge, as I sat on a hatch with the last few days of my history rolling out before my eyes. The dusk began to fall like a veil, the wind declined still further. Horn feverishly hammered and caulked at the largest of the boats, now and then throwing the tools from him as in momentary realisations of the hopelessness of his toil that finally left him in despair.
“It's no use, Mr. Greig,” he cried then, “they did the job ower weel,” and he shook his fist at the Kirkcaldy boat. He checked the gesture suddenly and gave an astonished cry.
“They're gone, Greig,” said he, now frantic. “They're gone. O God! they're gone! I was sure they couldna hae the heart to leave us at the last,” and as he spoke I chanced to look astern, and behold! a ship with all her canvas full was swiftly bearing down the wind upon us. We had been so intent upon our fate that we had never seen her!
I clambered up the shrouds of the main-mast, and cried upon the coming vessel with some mad notion that she might fancy theSeven Sistersderelict. But indeed that was not necessary. In a little she went round into the wind, a long-boat filled with men came towards us, and twenty minutes later we were on the deck of theRoi Rouge.
While it may be that the actual crisis of my manhood came to me on the day I first put on my Uncle Andrew's shoes, the sense of it was mine only when I met with Captain Thurot. I had put the past for ever behind me (as I fancied) when I tore the verses of a moon-struck boy and cast them out upon the washing-green at Hazel Den, but I was bound to foregather with men like Thurot and his friends ere the scope and fashion of a man's world were apparent to me. Whether his influence on my destiny in the long run was good or bad I would be the last to say; he brought me into danger, but—in a manner—he brought me good, though that perhaps was never in his mind.
You must fancy this Thurot a great tall man, nearly half a foot exceeding myself in stature, peak-bearded, straight as a lance, with plum-black eyes and hair, polished in dress and manner to the rarest degree and with a good humour that never failed. He sat under a swinging lamp in his cabin when Horn and I were brought before him, and asked my name first in an accent of English that was if anything somewhat better than my own.
“Greig,” said I; “Paul Greig,” and he started as if I had pricked him with a knife.
A little table stood between us, on which there lay a book he had been reading when we were brought below, some hours after theSeven Sistershad gone down, and the search for the Kirkcaldy boat had been abandoned. He took the lamp off its hook, came round the table and held the light so that he could see my face the clearer. At any time his aspect was manly and pleasant; most of all was it so when he smiled, and I was singularly encouraged when he smiled at me, with a rapid survey of my person that included the Hazel Den mole and my Uncle Andrew's shoes.
A seaman stood behind us; to him he spoke a message I could not comprehend, as it was in French, of which I had but little. The seaman retired; we were offered a seat, and in a minute the seaman came back with a gentleman—a landsman by his dress.
“Pardon, my lord,” said the captain to his visitor, “but I thought that here was a case—speaking of miracles—you would be interested in. Our friends here”—he indicated myself particularly with a gracious gesture—“are not, as you know, dropped from heaven, but come from that unfortunate ship we saw go under a while ago. May I ask your lordship to tell us—you will see the joke in a moment—whom we were talking of at the moment our watch first announced the sight of that vessel?”
His lordship rubbed his chin and smilingly peered at the captain.
“Gad!” he said. “You are the deuce and all, Thurot. What are you in the mood for now? Why, we talked of Greig—Andrew Greig, the best player ofpasse-passeand the cheerfullest loser that ever cut a pack.”
Thurot turned to me, triumphant.
“Behold,” said he, “how ridiculously small the world is.Ma foi!I wonder how I manage so well to elude my creditors, even when I sail the high seas. Lord Clancarty, permit me to have the distinguished honour to introduce another Greig, who I hope has many more of his charming uncle's qualities than his handsome eyes and red shoes. I assume it is a nephew, because poor Monsieur Andrew was not of the marrying kind. Anyhow, 'tis a Greig of the blood, or Antoine Thurot is a bat! And—Monsieur Greig, it is my felicity to bid you know one of your uncle's best friends and heartiest admirers—Lord Clancarty.”
“Lord Clancarty!” I cried, incredulous. “Why he figured in my uncle's log-book a dozen years ago.”
“A dozen, no less!” cried his lordship, with a grimace. “We need not be so particular about the period. I trust he set me down there a decently good companion; I could hardly hope to figure in a faithful scribe's tablets as an example otherwise,” said his lordship, laughing and taking me cordially by the hand. “Gad! one has but to look at you to see Andrew Greig in every line. I loved your uncle, lad. He had a rugged, manly nature, and just sufficient folly, bravado, and sinfulness to keep a poor Irishman in countenance. Thurot, one must apologise for taking from your very lips the suggestion I see hesitating there, but sure 'tis an Occasion this; it must be a bottle—the best bottle on your adorable but somewhat ill-found vessel. Why 'tis Andy Greig come young again. Poor Andy! I heard of his death no later than a month ago, and have ordered a score of masses for him—which by the way are still unpaid for to good Father Hamilton. I could not sleep happily of an evening—of a forenoon rather—if I thought of our Andy suffering aught that a few candles and such-like could modify.” And his lordship with great condescension tapped and passed me his jewelled box of maccabaw.
You can fancy a raw lad, untutored and untravelled, fresh from the plough-tail, as it were, was vastly tickled at this introduction to the genteel world. I was no longer the shivering outlaw, the victim of a Risk. I was honoured more or less for the sake of my uncle (whose esteem in this quarter my father surely would have been surprised at), and it seemed as though my new life in a new country were opening better than I had planned myself. I blessed my shoes—the Shoes of Sorrow—and for the time forgot the tragedy from which I was escaping.
They birled the bottle between them, Clancarty and Thurot, myself virtually avoiding it, but clinking now and then, and laughing with them at the numerous exploits they recalled of him that was the bond between us; Horn elsewhere found himself well treated also; and listening to these two gentlemen of the world, their allusions, off-hand, to the great, their indications of adventure, travel, intrigue, enterprise, gaiety, I saw my horizon expand until it was no longer a cabin on the sea I sat in, with the lamplight swinging over me, but a spacious world of castles, palaces, forests, streets, churches, casernes, harbours, masquerades, routs, operas, love, laughter, and song. Perhaps they saw my elation and fully understood, and smiled within them at my efforts to figure as a little man of the world too—as boys will—but they never showed me other than the finest sympathy and attention.
I found them fascinating at night; I found them much the same at morning, which is the test of the thing in youth, and straightway made a hero of the foreigner Thurot. Clancarty was well enough, but without any method in his life, beyond a principle of keeping his character ever trim and presentable like his cravat. Thurot carried on his strenuous career as soldier, sailor, spy, politician, with a plausible enough theory that thus he got the very juice and pang of life, that at the most, as he would aye be telling me, was brief to an absurdity.
“Your Scots,” he would say to me, “as a rule, are too phlegmatic—is it not, Lord Clancarty?—but your uncle gave me, on my word, a regard for your whole nation. He had aplomb—Monsieur Andrew; he had luck too, and if he cracked a nut anywhere there was always a good kernel in it.” And the shoes see how I took the allusion to King George, and that gave me a flood of light upon my new position.
I remembered that in my uncle's log-book the greater part of the narrative of his adventures in France had to do with politics and the intrigues of the Jacobite party. He was not, himself, apparently, “out,” as we call it, in the affair of the 'Forty-five, because he did not believe the occasion suitable, and thought the Prince precipitous, but before and after that untoward event for poor Scotland, he had been active with such men as Clancarty, Lord Clare, the Murrays, the Mareschal, and such-like, which was not to be wondered at, perhaps, for our family had consistently been Jacobite, a fact that helped to its latter undoing, though my father as nominal head of the house had taken no interest in politics; and my own sympathies had ever been with the Chevalier, whom I as a boy had seen ride through the city of Glasgow, wishing myself old enough to be his follower in such a glittering escapade as he was then embarked on.
But though I thought all this in a flash as it were, I betrayed nothing to Captain Thurot, who seemed somewhat dashed at my silence. There must have been something in my face, however, to show that I fully realised what he was feeling at, and was not too complacent, for Clancarty laughed.
“Sure, 'tis a good boy, Thurot,” said he, “and loves his King George properly, like a true patriot.”
“I won't believe it of a Greig,” said Captain Thurot. “A pestilent, dull thing, loyalty in England; the other thing came much more readily, I remember, to the genius of Andrew Greig. Come! Monsieur Paul, to be quite frank about it, have you no instincts of friendliness to the exiled house? M. Tête-de-fer has a great need at this particular moment for English friends. Once he could count on your uncle to the last ditch; can he count on the nephew?”
“M. Tête-de-fer?” I repeated, somewhat bewildered.
“M. Tête-de-mouche, rather,” cried my lord, testily, and then hurried to correct himself. “He alluded, Monsieur Greig, to Prince Charles Edward. We are all, I may confess, his Royal Highness's most humble servants; some of us, however—as our good friend, Captain Thurot—more actively than others. For myself I begin to weary of a cause that has been dormant for eight years, but no matter; sure one must have a recreation!”
I looked at his lordship to see if he was joking. He was the relic of a handsome man, though still, I daresay, less than fifty years of age, with a clever face and gentle, just tinged by the tracery of small surface veins to a redness that accused him of too many late nights; his mouth and eyes, that at one time must have been fascinating, had the ultimate irresolution that comes to one who finds no fingerposts at life's cross-roads and thinks one road just as good's another. He was born at Atena, near Hamburg (so much I had remembered from my uncle's memoir), but he was, even in his accent, as Irish as Kerry. Someway I liked and yet doubted him, in spite of all the praise of him that I had read in a dead man's diurnal.
“Fi donc! vous devriez avoir honte, milord,” cried Thurot, somewhat disturbed, I saw, at this reckless levity.
“Ashamed!” said his lordship, laughing; “why, 'tis for his Royal Highness who has taken a diligence to the devil, and left us poor dependants to pay the bill at the inn. But no matter, Master Greig, I'll be cursed if I say a single word more to spoil a charming picture of royalty under a cloud.” And so saying he lounged away from us, a strange exquisite for shipboard, laced up to the nines, as the saying goes, parading the deck as it had been the Rue St. Honoré, with merry words for every sailorman who tapped a forehead to him.
Captain Thurot looked at him, smiling, and shrugged his shoulders.
“Tête-de-mouche!There it is for you, M. Paul—the head of a butterfly. Now you—” he commanded my eyes most masterfully—“nowyouhave a Scotsman's earnestness; I should like to see you on the right side.Mon Dieu, you owe us your life, no less; 'tis no more King George's, for one of his subjects has morally sent you to the bottom of the sea in a scuttled ship. I wish we had laid hands on your Risk and his augers.”
But I was learning my world; I was cautious; I said neither yea nor nay.