The time slipped by. Life is monotonous at sea, and, though the days seem to have speeded quickly past when one looks back, they appear to be crawling along on all-fours when one looks ahead.[137] We sighted nothing that carried the least resemblance to the vessel we were in chase of. Within a week we spoke two ships, both Englishmen, one a fine tall black clipper craft from Sydney, New South Wales, full of Colonials bound to the old country for a cruise amongst the sights there; the other a little north-country brig laden down to her chain plates in charge of the very tallest man I ever saw in my life, this side I mean of the giants who go on show, with a roaring voice that smote the ear like the blast of a discharged piece; but neither vessel gave us any news of the ‘Shark’; no craft of the kind had been sighted or heard of by either of them.
It was as I expected. For my part the adventure remained a most ridiculous undertaking, and never more so than when I thought of the speck a ship made in the vast blue eye of the wide ocean. We fell in with some handsome breezes for travelling, several of which drove us through it in thunder with a hill of foam on either quarter and an acre of creaming white spreading under the chaste golden beauty the yacht carried on her stem-head. The wind flashed blue into the violet hollows of the canvas, the curves of whose round breasts shone out past the shadowings to the sun, and rang splitting upon the iron taut rigging of the driven craft with joyous hunting-notes in its echoings as though the chase were in view and there were spirits in the air hallooing us into a madder speeding.
Wilfrid and Finn and I hung over the chart, calculating with sober faces, finding our position to be there and then there and then there, till we worked out an average speed from the hour of our departure that caused the skipper to swear if the ‘Shark’ was not already astern of us she could not be very far ahead, unless a great luck of wind had befallen her; a conjecture scarce fair to put down as a basis to build our figures upon, since it was a hundred to one that her fortune in the shape of breezes had been ours. For, be it remembered, we were in a well-scoured ocean; the winds even north of the ‘rains’ and ‘horse-latitudes’ were in a sense to be reckoned on, with the trades beyond as steady in their way as the indication of a jammed dogvane, and the ‘doldrums’ to follow—the equinoctial belt of catspaws and molten calms where one sailor’s chance was another’s the wide world round.
But so reasoned Finn, and I was not there to say him nay; yet it was difficult to hear him without a sort of mental shrug of the shoulders, though it was a talk to smooth down the raven plume of Wilfrid’s melancholy ‘till it smiled.’ My cousin managed very well without his valet, protested indeed that he felt easier in his spirits since the fellow had gone forward, as though, all unconsciously to himself, he had long been depressed by the funeral face of the man.
‘Besides,’ said he, in his simple, knowing way, with a quivering of the lids that put an expression of almost idiot cunning into the short, pathetic peering of his large protruding eyes, ‘he was[138] with me when my wife left my home; he it was who came to tell me that Lady Monson was not to be found; it was he, too, who put Hope-Kennedy’s letter into my hand, though it was picked up by one of the housemaids. These were thoughts that would float like a cloud of hellish smoke in my brain when he was hanging about me, and so I’m glad to have him out of my sight; yes, I’m the better for his absence. And then,’ he added, lowering his voice, ‘his behaviour proves that he is not sound in his mind.’
That Muffin was as well content with the arrangement as his master I cannot say. They kept him at work forward upon small mean jobs, and he seldom came aft unless it was to lend a hand in pulling upon a rope. Yet after a little I would see him in a dog-watch on the forecastle with a huddle of seamen on the broad grin round him. One special evening I remember when the watch had run out into the dusk, and it might have been within half-an-hour of eight-bells, I arrived on deck from the dinner table and heard, as I supposed, a woman singing forward. The voice was a very good clear soprano, with a quality in it that might have made you imagine a middle-aged lady was tuning up. The song was ‘The Vale of Avoca.’ The concertina accompaniment was fairly played. I listened with astonishment for some time, wondering whether Miss Jennings’ maid had got among the men, and then called to Crimp—
‘Who’s that singing?’ said I.
‘Him they’ve nicknamed the mute,’ said he.
‘What, Muffin?’
‘Ay! sounds as if he’d swallowed his sister and she was calling out to be released.’
There happened inside this particular week with which I am dealing an incident much too curious not to deserve a place here. All day long it had been blowing a fresh breeze from north-east, but as the sun sank the wind went with him, and about an hour before sunset there was a mild air breathing with scarce weight enough in it to blow the scent off a milkmaid, as sailors say, though it was giving the yacht way as you saw by the creep of the wrinkles at her stem working out from the shadow of the yacht’s form in the water into lines that resembled burnished copper wire in the red western light. Miss Laura and Wilfrid were on deck, and I was leaning over the rail with a pipe in my mouth, all sorts of easy, dreamy fancies slipping into me out of the drowsy passage of the water alongside with its wreath of foam bells eddying or some little cloudy seething of white striking from our wet and flashing side into a surface which hung so glass-like with the crimson tinge in the atmosphere sifting down into it that you fancied you could see a hundred fathoms deep. Presently running my eyes ahead I caught sight of some minute object three or four points away on the weather bow, which every now and again would sparkle like the leap of a flame from the barrel of a musket. I stepped to the companion, picked up the telescope and made the thing out to be a bottle, the[139] glass of which gave back the sunlight in fitful winkings to the twists and turns of it upon the ripples.
‘What are you looking at?’ cried Wilfrid.
‘A bottle,’ I answered.
‘Ho!’ he laughed, ‘what you sailors call a dead marine, ha? What sort of liquor will it have contained, I wonder, and how long has it been overboard?’
The glass I held was Captain Finn’s; it was a very powerful instrument, and the bottle came so close to me in the lenses that it was like examining it at arm’s length.
‘It is corked,’ said I.
‘Can we not pick it up?’ exclaimed Miss Jennings.
‘Oh, but an empty bottle, my dear,’ exclaimed Wilfrid, with a shrug.
I examined it again. ‘I tell you what, Wilfrid; that it is corked should signify there is something in it. Who troubles himself to plug an empty bottle when it is flung overboard unless it is intended as a messenger?’
He was instantly excited. ‘Why, by all means then——,’ he broke off, looking round. The mate had charge; he was sulkily pacing the deck to leeward with a lift of his askew eye aloft and then a stare over the rail, all as regular as the recurrence of rhymes in poetry. ‘Mr. Crimp,’ called Wilfrid. The man came over to us. ‘Do you see that bottle?’
Crimp shaded his eyes and took a steady view of the water towards which my cousin pointed, and then said, ‘Is that there thing flashing a bottle?’
‘Yes, man; yes.’
‘Well, I see it right enough.’
‘Get it picked up, Mr. Crimp,’ said Wilfrid.
The mate walked aft. ‘Down hellum,’ he exclaimed to the fellow who was steering. The wheel was put over and the bottle was brought almost directly in a line with the yacht. The topgallant-sail ‘lifted,’ but what air blew was abaft the beam and the distance was too short to render necessary the handling of the braces and sheets. Crimp went a little way forward and hailed the forecastle, and presently a man stood ready at the gangway with a canvas bucket slung at the end of a line. A very small matter will create a great deal of interest at sea. Had the approaching bottle been a mermaid the group of sailors could not have observed it with livelier attention nor awaited its arrival with brisker expectations. Presently splash! the bottle was cleverly caught, hauled up, dried and brought aft.
‘It’s not been in the water long,’ said I; ‘the wooden plug in the mouth looks fresh.’
‘Mr. Crimp, sing out for a corkscrew,’ cried Wilfrid.
‘No good in that,’ cried I; ‘break the thing. That will be the speediest way to come at its contents.’
I held the bottle to the sun a moment, but the glass was thick[140] and black, and revealed nothing. I then knocked it against the rail, the neck fell and exposed a letter folded as you double a piece of paper to light your pipe with. I pulled it out and opened it; Miss Laura peeped over one shoulder, Wilfrid over the other; his respirations swift, almost fierce. It was just the thing to put some wild notions about the ‘Shark’ into his head. From the forecastle the sailors were staring with all their eyes. The paper was quite dry; I opened it carefully with an emotion of awe, for trifling as the incident was apparently, yet to my fancy there was the mystery and the solemnity of the ocean in it too. Indeed, you thought of it as having something of the wonder of a voice speaking from the blue air when your eye sought the liquid expanse out of whose vast heart the tiny missive had been drawn. It was a rude, hurried scrawl in lead pencil, and ran thus:
‘Brig Colossus. George Meadows, Captain. Waterlogged five days—all hands but two dead; fast breaking up. No fresh water. Raw pork one cask. Who finds this for God’s sake report.’
The word September was added, but the writer had omitted the date, probably could not remember it after spelling the name of the month. I gave Crimp the note that he might take it forward and read it to the men, telling him to let me have it again.
‘They will all have perished by this time, no doubt,’ said Wilfrid in his most raven-like note.
‘Think of them with raw pork only! The meat crystallised with salt, the hot sun over their heads, not a thimbleful of fresh water, the vessel going to pieces plank by plank, the horrible anguish of thirst made maddening by the mockery of the cold fountain-like sounds of that brine there flowing in the hold or washing alongside with a champagne-like seething! Oh,’ groaned I, ‘who is that home-keeping bard who speaks of the ocean as the mother of all? The mother! A tigress. Why, if old Davy Jones be the devil, Jack is right in finding an abode for him down on the ooze there. Mark how the affectionate mother of all torments its victims with a hellish refinement of cruelty before strangling them! how—if the land be near enough—she will fling them ashore, mutilated, eyeless, eaten, in horrid triumph and enjoyment of her work, that we shuddering radishes may behold and understand her power.’
‘Cease, for God’s sake!’ roared Wilfrid; ‘you’re talking a nightmare, man! Isn’t the plain fact enough?’ he cried, picking up the broken bottle and flinging it in a kind of rage overboard, ‘why garnish?’
‘I want to see the ocean properly interpreted,’ I cried. ‘Your poetical personifications are claptrap. Great mother, indeed! Great grandmother, Wilfrid. Mother of whales and sharks, but when it comes to man——’
‘Oh, but this is impiety, Mr. Monson,’ cried Miss Laura, ‘it is really dangerous to talk so. One may think—but here we are upon[141] the sea, you know, and that person you spoke of just now (pointing down) might with his great ears——’
‘Now, Laura, my dear,’ broke in Wilfrid, ‘can’t we pick up a wretched bottle and read the melancholy message it contains without falling ill of fancy?’ He went to the skylight—‘Steward, some seltzer and brandy here! Your talk of that salt pork,’ he continued, coming back to us, ‘makes my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. I would give much for a little ice, d’ye know. Heigho! Big as this ocean is, I vow by the saints there’s not room enough in it for the misery there is in the world!’ with which he set off pacing the deck, though he calmed down presently over a foaming glass; but he showed so great a dislike to any reference to the bottle and its missive that, to humour him, Miss Jennings and I forbore all allusion to the incident.
It was next forenoon, somewhere about the hour of eleven o’clock, that the lookout man on the topgallant yard—whom I had noticed playing for some time the polished tubes, which glanced like fire in his lifted hands as he steadied the glass against the East—suddenly bawled down with a voice of excitement, ‘Sail ho!’
Wilfrid, who was lounging on the skylight, jumped off it; I pricked up my ears; Miss Laura hollowed her gloved hands to take view of the man aloft.
‘Where away?’ cried Finn.
‘Right ahead, sir.’
‘What do you make her out to be?’
The seaman levelled the telescope again, then swinging off from the yard by his grip of the tie, he sung out, ‘She looks to be a wreck, sir. I don’t make out any canvas set.’
‘She’ll be showing afore long, your honour,’ said Finn, and he cast his eye upon the water to judge of our speed.
All night long it had blown a weak wind, and the draught was still a mere fanning, with a hot sun, that made the shelter of the awning a necessary condition of life on deck by day; a clear, soft, dark-blue sky westwards, and in the east a broad shadowing of steam-like cloud with a hint in the yellow tinge of it low down upon the sea of the copper sands of Africa, roasting noons and shivering midnights, fever and cockroaches, and stifling cabins. So that, merely wrinkling through it as we were, it was not until we had eaten our lunch, bringing the hour to about a quarter before two o’clock, that the vessel sighted from aloft in the morning had risen above the rim of the ocean within reach of a glass directed at her over the quarterdeck rail.
‘It will be strange,’ said I, putting down the telescope after a long stare at her, ‘if yonder craft don’t prove the “Colossus.” Look at her, Wilfrid. A completer wreck never was.’
He seized the glass. ‘By George, then,’ he cried, ‘if that’s so the two men that paper spoke of may be still alive. I hope so, I hope so. We owe heaven a life, and it is a glorious thing to[142] succour the perishing.’ His hand shook with excitement as he directed the glass at the vessel.
Points of her stole out as we approached. She had apparently been a brig. Both masts were gone flush with the deck, bowsprit too, channels torn from their strong fastenings, and whole lengths of bulwark smashed level. I supposed her cargo to have been timber, but her decks showed bare, whence I gathered that she was floating on some other sort of light cargo—oil, cork; no telling what indeed............