The strong wind blew throughout the day and the yacht made a gallant run, floating buoyant in foam from one blue knoll to another, with nothing living outside our decks saving a grey gull that overhung the seething line torn up by the furrow of our keel. A bright look-out was kept aloft; rarely did I send a glance that way but that I saw one or another of the men whose duty lay in overhanging the topgallant-yard sweeping the windy sallow sky against which the ridged horizon was beating, with Wilfrid’s polished, lance-bright tube.
In the first dog-watch before we sat down to dinner the breeze thinned and the ocean flattened out into a softly-heaving surface flowing in folds of tender blue to the dark orange of the west, where lines of the hectic of the crimsoning orb hung like mouldy stains of blood. All cloths were crowded on our little ship, and when after dinner I came on deck I found her sliding through the evening shadow, large and pale, like a body of moon-tinctured mist that floats off some great mountain-top and sails stately on the indigo-blue air, melting as it goes, as our canvas seemed to dissolve to the deepening of the dusk upon its full bosoms. A sailor was playing a concertina forward, and a man was singing to it. Here and there upon the forecastle was a dim grouping of outlines with a scarlet tipping of the darkness by above half-a-score of well-sucked tobacco pipes, making one think of a constellation of fire-flies or of a cluster of riding lights.
I had asked Miss Jennings to join me on deck, but she declined, on the plea—which two or three sneezes emphasised in the most reassuring way—that she felt chilly and was afraid of catching cold. Wilfrid produced his diary again, if a diary it was, and sat writing. I tried to court him into a walk and a smoke, but he said no; he had a fancy for writing just then; it was a humour whose visits were somewhat rare, and therefore, the mood being on him, he wished to encourage it as he had a very great deal to commit to paper.
‘Well,’ said I, ‘I’ll just go and smoke one cigar, and then, with your permission, Miss Jennings, I’ll endeavour to win a six-pence from you at beggar-my-neighbour again, and you shall tell me my fortune once more.’
I yawned as I stepped on deck. Dull enough work, by George! thought I. Only think of this sort of thing lasting till we get to the Cape, with Wilfrid’s intention that even by that time, if we don’t fall in with the ‘Shark,’ little more than a beginning shall have been made! Let me once see the inside of Table Bay and[117] her ladyship may go hang for any further pursuit that I shall be concerned in. The worst of it was that poor Wilfrid’s troubles, warnings, health and the like, engrossed Miss Jennings. Nearly all our talk was about my cousin. I had hoped that the sunshine of her nature, that was bright in her laugh just as you seemed to see it glowing in her hair, would have somewhat cleared the gloom that Wilfrid cast upon our social atmosphere; but she seemed to lie under a kind of spell; it was keen womanly sympathy, no doubt, beautiful for its sincerity, animated too by an honourable sensitiveness—by the feeling, I mean, that the runaway was her sister, and that she to that degree at least shared in the responsibility of the blow that had been dealt the poor fellow’s fond and generous heart. All this was doubtless as it should be; nevertheless her qualities went to fashion a behaviour I could not greatly relish simply because it came between us. Her thoughts were so much with my cousin and her sister’s wrong-doing, that the side of her I was permitted to approach I found somewhat blind.
All was now quiet on deck; the concertina had ceased; the watch below had gone to bed; those who were on duty stowed themselves away in various parts, and sat, mere shapes of shadow, blending with the deep gloom betwixt the bulwarks, nodding but ready to leap to the first call. There were many shooting stars this night; one of them scored the heavens with a bright line that lingered a full ten minutes after the meteor had vanished in a puff of spangles, and it was so glittering as to find a clear reflection in the smooth of the swell where it writhed, broadened and contracted like a dim silver serpent of prodigious length. There was some dew in the air, and the sparkle of it upon the rail and skylight flashed crisply to the stars to the quiet rise and fall of the yacht upon the black invisible heave that yearned the whole length of her, with an occasional purr of froth at the cutwater, and a soft, rippling washing noise dying off astern into the gloom. The phosphorus in the sea was so plentiful that you might have thought yourself inside the tropics. It glared like sheet-lightning under each ebony slope running westwards, and in every small play of froth there was the winking of it like the first scratching of lucifer matches. Under the counter where the wake was the streaming of this light was like a thin sheathing of the water there with gold-beater’s skin, rising and falling, and of a greenish tint, of the light of the moon. The flash of the sea-glow forward when the bow broke the swell would throw out the round of the staysail and jib as though the clear lens of a bull’s-eye lamp had glanced upon the canvas. This greenish, baffling twinkling, this fading and flickering of flames over the side thickened the obscurity to the sight within the rails. Somehow, too, the mystic illumination seemed to deepen the stillness that lay upon the deep, spite of the welter and the breeze that had weight enough to lift a streak of foam here and there. It might be that the sight of those fires made one think of the crackling and noise of flame, so that the very dumbness of the[118] burning lay like a hush upon the darkling surface with nothing aboard us to vex it, for our canvas swelled silent as if carved in mother-of-pearl, and not so much as the chafe of a rope or the stir of a sheave in its block fell from above to trouble the ear.
I spied a figure standing a foot or two before the main rigging, leaning over the side. Not knowing whether Finn or Crimp had the watch, and supposing this man to be one of them, I approached close and peered.
‘Is that you, captain?’ said I, for the shadow of the rigging was upon him to darken him yet.
‘No sir, it’s me, Mr. Monson. Muffin, sir.’
He had no need to mention his name, for his greasy, most remarkable voice, along with its indescribable tone of insincere habitual obsequiousness would have proclaimed him Muffin had he spoken as one of a crowd out of the bottom of a coal mine.
‘Feel sick?’ said I.
‘No, I am obliged to you, sir,’ he answered with a simper in his tone. ‘I am taking the liberty of breathing the hair just a little, sir.’
‘I suppose you’ll not be sorry to get home again, Muffin?’
‘Indeed, sir,’ he exclaimed, ‘I shall be most humbly thankful, I assure you.’
‘You’re an Englishman, aren’t you?’
‘Oh dear yes, quite English, sir. Born at ’ammersmith, sir.’
‘Then you ought to be very fond of the sea.’
‘I should be more partial to it, sir, I believe,’ said he, ‘if it was a river. I have a natural aversion to the hocean, sir. I can swim and I can row. I’ve pulled on the Serpentine, sir, and four years ago I made a voyage to the Continong as far as Cally, and found the water very hentertaining. But there’s so much hocean here, sir, that it’s alarming to think of. On a river, Mr. Monson, sir, one can never seem distant, but here—why, sir, if my mother’s ’ouse was in one of them stars, it couldn’t seem further off, and every day I suppose’ll make the distance greater.’
‘That you must expect,’ said I, turning with a notion of seeking Finn or Crimp.
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he said, ‘but could you tell me what them fires are that’s burning in the water?’
‘Phosphorus,’ said I.
‘Phosphorus?’ he ejaculated as though startled, ‘hoh, indeed sir! And might I wenture to ask why it is that the water don’t put it out?’
‘There are more kinds of fire than one,’ said I, laughing, and not much relishing the prostrative nature of the fellow’s respectfulness I walked aft.
Close to a boat that hung inboards by the davits, only a few strides from where Muffin was standing, I spied another figure standing with his back against the rail. It proved to be Mr. Jacob Crimp.
[119]
‘Plenty of fire in the water to-night,’ said I.
‘Is there?’ he answered, slowly rounding his sturdy little figure to look. ‘I ain’t took notice.’
‘Have you followed the sea many years, Mr. Crimp?’ said I, feeling the need of a chat, and willing moreover to humour the quizzical mood that commonly came to me when I conversed with this sour little chap.
‘Thirty year.’
‘A long spell!’
‘Sight too long.’
‘I suppose you’ll be settling down ashore soon?’
‘Ay, if I ain’t drownded. Then settling ashore with me’ll sinnify a hole in the airth.’
‘Come, come,’ said I, ‘after thirty years of hard labour there’ll be surely dollars enough for a clean shirt and a roof. But you may be married, though?’
‘No I ain’t,’ he answered with a snap like cocking a gun.
‘Well, a sailor is a fool to get married,’ said I. ‘Why should a man burthen himself with a wife whose society he cannot enjoy, with whom he accepts all the obligations of a home without the privilege of occupying it, save for a few weeks at a time?’
‘Well, I ain’t married, so I don’t care. It’s nothen to me what other men do. Talk o’ settling! If you come to my berth I’ll show you the fruits of thirty year of sea sarvice; an old chest, a soot or two of clothes, and ’bout as much ready cash as ’ud purchase a dose of ratsbane.’ Here emotion choked him and he remained silent.
At this moment a low, mocking, most extraordinary laugh came out of the blackness upon the sea in the direction I happened to be gazing in. The sound was a distinct ha! ha! ha! and before the derisive, hollow, mirthless note had fairly died off the ear, a brisk angry voice within apparently a pistol-shot of us exclaimed, ‘That yacht is cursed!’ A laugh like the first followed and then all was still.
Crimp started, and I was grateful to heaven he did so, since it was an assurance the noise had been no imagination of my own. I will not deny that I felt exceedingly frightened. My legs trembled like an up-and-down lead line in a strong tideway. It was not only the suddenness, the unexpectedness of such a thing; it was the combination of deep gloom upon the waters, the play of the phosphoric fires there, the oppressive mystery of the sombre vastness stretching from over our rail as it seemed to the immeasurably remote dim lights of heaven lying low upon the edge of the ocean, and languishing in the darkness there.
‘Did you hear it?’ I cried in a subdued voice to Crimp.
‘Ay,’ responded the man in a startled voice. ‘I don’t see anything. Do you?’
I peered my hardest. ‘Nothing,’ I exclaimed. ‘Hush, the cry may be repeated.’
[120]
We strained our eyes and ears too, but all was silent; nor was there any livelier sparkle in the liquid dusk to indicate the dip of an oar or the stirring of the fiery water by a boat’s stem.
‘Did the fellow at the wheel hear it, think you?’ said I.
We both stepped aft, the mate looking to right and left, and even up at the stars overhead as though he feared something would tumble down upon us out of the dark air. He approached the man who was at the helm and said, ‘Thomas, did you hear anybody a-laughing like just now out on the quarter there?’
‘No,’ answered the man.
‘Are ye a bit deaf?’
‘Ne’er a bit.’
‘And you mean to say you heard nothen?’
‘Nothen.’
Grumbling with astonishment and perplexity, Crimp turned to me. ‘If it wur fancy,’ he muttered, ‘call me a dawg’s flea.’
I believe I could see Muffin’s figure still leaning over the rail. Had he heard the voice? As I passed the skylight I looked down and perceived him standing with drooped head and folded arms before Wilfrid in the cabin. My cousin appeared to be giving him some instructions. Advancing yet a little I discovered that what I had taken to be the valet’s figure was merely a coil of rope on a pin, the outline of which was blackened up and enlarged to the proportions and even the posture of a human shape by the illusive character of the obscurity made by the shrouds just there. I threw my half-finished cigar overboard.
‘Enough to make a man feel as if he’d like to be turned in,’ said Crimp. ‘It’s gone blooming cold, han’t it?’
‘It’s the most puzzling thing that ever happened to me,’ said I; ‘but of course if we were in the secret we should find nothing wonderful in it. In the West Indian waters, you know, there is a fish to be caught that talks well enough to put a ship about. Who’s to tell in a midnight blackness of this sort what amazing marine thing may not rise to the surface and utter sounds which an alarmed ear would easily interpret into something confoundedly unpleasant?’
‘What did it say?’ inquired Crimp.
‘Why, after the laugh, “that yacht’s cursed,” then another laugh. So it seemed to me,’ said I, with my eyes going blind against the blackness whence the noise had proceeded.
‘That’s just what I heard,’ said Crimp gruffly, ‘exactly them words. Two ears ain’t a going to get the same meaning out of what’s got no sense in it to start with.’
‘Pooh!’ I exclaimed, mentally protesting against an argument that was much too forcible to be soothing, ‘what could it have been, man, if it were not, say, some great bird, mayhap, flapping past us unseen, and uttering notes which, since they sounded............