I happened to be alone on deck after dinner, having left Wilfrid at his diary and Miss Jennings in her cabin, where she had gone to make ready to join me, as she had said. The wreck had faded out before sundown, melting upon the flashing purple under the sinking luminary like the memory of a nightmare off a mind upon which is streaming a light of cheerfulness. The night was clear but dark, with a pleasant wind through whose dryness the stars looked down purely. The yacht was sailing a fair six knots, as I gathered when I stepped from the companion to the lee-rail and peered over in a wool-gathering way at the emerald gushings and eddyings of the phosphoric fires which winked in the cloudy paleness along the bends, and fled into the dimness of glow-worms to the spectral racing of our wake.
I was worried and oppressed by a sort of heaviness of spirits. I had acted a cheerful part at dinner, but there was little of my heart in the tongue I wagged. The recollection of the motionless figure seated upon the wreck, and darker yet, the memory of that bloated, long-haired phantom face sliding in the space of a breath across the gape in the shattered deck, with the sobbing wash of the black water on which it floated to put a dreadful meaning of its own into the livid, nimble vision went for something—nay, went for a good deal, no doubt; but it was the hail that had come from the wreck[148] which mainly occasioned my perplexity and agitation, and, I may add, my depression. Twice now had syllables sounding from where there were no lips to pronounce them reached my ears. Had I alone heard them I should have been alarmed for my reason, not doubting an hallucination, though never for an instant believing in the reality of the utterance; but the voices had been audible to others, they were consequently real, and for that reason oppressive to reflect upon. The shadow of Wilfrid’s craziness lay on his ship; the voyage was begun in darkness, and was an aimless excursion, as I thought, with no more reasonable motive for it than such as was to be found in the contending passions of a bleeding heart. Hence it was inevitable that any gloomy incident which occurred during such an adventure as this should gather in the eye of the imagination a very much darker tincture than the complexion it would carry under sunnier and more commonplace conditions of an ocean run.
Whilst I lay over the rail lost in thought, I was accosted by Finn.
‘Beg pardon, Mr. Monson; couldn’t make sure in this here gloom whether it was you or Sir Wilfrid. May I speak a word with ’ee, sir?’
‘Certainly, Finn.’
‘Well now, sir, if that there old Jacob Crimp ain’t gone and took on so joyful a frame of mind that I’m a land-crab if his sperrits ain’t downright alarming in a man whose weins runs lime-juice!’
‘Old Crimp!’ cried I, ‘what’s the matter with him?’
‘Why, he comes up to me and says, “Capt’n,” he says, “there’s Joe Cutbill, Jemmy Smithers, that funeral chap Muffin, and the t’others who was in the boat that went to the wreck this afternoon, all a-swearing that they heard a voice in the air!” and so saying, he bursts out a laughing like a parrot. “A woice!” says he. “So me and Mr. Monson aren’t the only ones, d’ye see. Damme,” says he, “if it don’t do my heart good to think on’t. There’s the whole bloomin’ boiling of us now,” says he, “to laugh at, capt’n; not Jacob Crimp only,” and here he bursts into another laugh.’
‘What does the old chap want to convey?’ said I.
‘Why, sir, joyfulness as that he no longer stands alone as having heard a woice, for though to be sure you was with him that night, and some sound like to a cuss rose up off yon quarter, he feels like being alone in the hearing of it, for, ye see, a man in his position can’t comfortably hitch on to a gent like you, and it was the harder for him, for that the man at the wheel swore that he never heard the cry.’
‘He is superstitious, like most old lobscousers, no doubt,’ said I. ‘Have the others been talking about this mysterious hail from the wreck?’
‘Ay, sir; ’tis a pity. It’s raised an uneasiness ’mongst the men. There’s that Irish fool O’Connor, him that foundered the “Dago,”[149] going about with his face as long as a wet hammock and swearing that ’taint lucky.’
‘I don’t know about it’s being unlucky,’ said I, ‘but it certainly is most confoundedly curious, Captain Finn.’
I saw him peering hard at me in the dusk. ‘But surely your honour’s not going to tell me there was a woice?’ said he.
‘As we were shoving off,’ said I, ‘We were hailed in God’s name to return. Every man of us in the boat heard it. There were but two bodies in the wreck, as stone dead as if they had died before the days of the flood. What say you to that, Captain Finn?’
He pulled off his hat to scratch his head. After a pause he exclaimed slowly, ‘Well, I’m for leaving alone what isn’t to be understood. There was ghosts maybe afore I was born, but none since; and the dead h’aint talked, to my knowledge, since New Testament times. Old Jamaicy rum isn’t to be had by dropping a bucket over the side, and if a truth lies too deep to be fished up by creeps, better drop it, says I, and fix the attention on something else.’
‘You tell me the men are uneasy?’
‘Ay, sir.’
‘Do you mean all hands?’
‘Well, your honour knows what sailors are. When they’re housed together under one deck they’re like a box of them patent lucifer lights—if one catches, the whole mass is aflame.’
‘It’s a passing fit of superstition,’ said I. ‘Give it time. Best say nothing about it to Sir Wilfrid.’
‘Bless us, no, sir. Sorry it’s raised so much satisfaction in that there old Jacob, though. A laugh in Jacob don’t sound natural. Any sort o’ joyfulness in such a constitution is agin nature.’
At this point Miss Jennings arrived on deck, and Finn, with a shadowy fist mowing at his brow, stepped to the opposite rail, where his figure was easily distinguished by the stars he blotted out.
‘I hope your spirits are better,’ said Miss Laura.
‘I should be glad to turn the silent sailor of that wreck out of my memory; but my spirits are very well.’
‘Wilfrid noticed your depression at table, but he attributed it entirely to the dreadful sight you witnessed on the wreck.’ She passed her hand through my arm with a soft impulse that started me into a walk, but there was so much real unconsciousness in her way of doing this—a childlike intimation of her wish to walk without proposing it, and so breaking the flow of our speech at the moment—that for some little while I was scarce sensible that I held her arm, and that I was pacing with her. ‘But I think there is more the matter with you, Mr. Monson,’ she continued, with her face glimmering like pearl in the dusk, as she looked up at me, ‘than meets the ear—I will not say the eye.’
‘The fact is, Miss Jennings,’ said I abruptly, ‘I am bothered.’
‘By what?’
‘Well, what think you of the suspicion which grows in me that this yacht carries along with her, in the atmosphere that enfolds[150] her, some sort of Ariel, whose mission it is to bewilder out of its invisibility the sober senses of men of plain, practical judgment, like your humble servant?’
‘You want to frighten me by pretending that you are falling a little crazy.’
‘No!’
‘Or are you creating an excuse to return home.’
‘No again. How can I return home?’
‘Why, by the first convenient ship we happen to sight and speak. Is this some stratagem to prepare Wilfrid’s mind for your bidding us farewell when the chance happens?’
She spoke with a subdued note and a tremble of fretfulness in it.
‘Suffer me to justify myself,’ said I, and with that I led her to the captain, who stood with folded arms leaning against the rail near the main rigging. ‘Finn!’ He dropped his hands and stood bold upright. ‘Be so good as to tell Miss Jennings what the men are talking about forward.’
‘You mean the woice, sir?’
‘What the men are talking about,’ said I.
‘Well, miss,’ said Finn, ‘as the boat that Mr. Monson had charge of this afternoon was a-leaving the wreck, the men heard themselves hailed by a woice that begged ’em, in God’s name, not to leave the party as called behind. Mr. Monson, sir, you heard it likewise.’
‘I did,’ I answered.
‘Another mystery,’ exclaimed Miss Laura, ‘quite as dismal and astonishing as Muffin’s phosphoric warning.’
‘Thanks, Finn; that’s all I wanted to ask you,’ said I, and we left him to resume our walk.
‘Tell me about this voice,’ said the girl.
I did so, putting plenty of colour into the picture, too, for I wanted her to sympathise with my superstitious mood, whilst up to now there was nothing but incredulity and a kind of coquettish pique in her voice and manner.
‘And you are afraid of this voice, Mr. Monson? I wonder at you!’
‘You should have my full consent to wonder,’ said I, ‘if it were the first time; but there was the other night, you know, with solid, sour, uncompromising old Crimp to hear me witness, and now again to-day, with a boatful of men for evidence.’
‘Really, Mr. Monson, what do you want to make yourself believe?’ she asked, with a tone like a half-laugh in her speech; ‘the dead cannot speak.’
‘So ’tis said,’ I grumbled, sucking hard at my cigar to kindle it afresh.
‘Human syllables cannot be delivered save by human lips. What, then, could have spoken out of the darkness of the sea the other night?’
[151]
‘Does not Milton tell of airy tongues that syllable men’s names?’ said I gloomily.
‘Mr. Monson, I repeat that I wonder at you. How can you suffer your imagination to be cheated by some trick of the senses?’ she laughed. ‘Pray, be careful. You may influence me. Then what a morbid company shall we make? I am sure you would like me to believe in this mysterious voice of yours. But, happily, we Colonials are too young, as a people, to be superstitious. We must wait for our ruined castles, and our moated granges, and our long, echoing, tapestry-lined corridors. Then, like you English, we may tremble when we hear a mysterious voice.’
She started violently as she said this, giving my arm so smart a pull that it instantly brought me to a halt, whilst in a voice of genuine alarm she exclaimed, ‘Good gracious! what is that?’
Her face was turned up towards the weather yardarm of the square topsail, where, apparently floating a little above the studdingsail-boom iron, like to a flame in the act of running down the smoke of an extinguished candle ere firing the wick, shone a pendulous bubble of greenish fire, but of a luminosity sufficiently powerful to distinctly reveal the extremity of the black spar pointing finger-like into the darkness ahead, whilst a large space of the curve of the topgallant-sail above showed in the lustre with something of the glassy, delicate greenness you observe in a midsummer leaf in moonshine. The darkness, with its burden of stars, seemed to press to the yacht the deeper for that mystic light, and much that had been distinguishable outlines before melted out upon the sight.
‘What is it?’ exclaimed Miss Jennings in a voice of consternation, and I felt her hand tighten upon my arm with her fears thrilling through the involuntary pressure.
‘Figure an echoing corridor hung with aged tapestry stirring to cold draughts which seem to come like blasts from a graveyard, a noise as of the distant clanking of chains, and then the apparition of a man in armour, holding up such a lantern as that yonder, approaching you who are spell-bound and cannot move for horror.’ I burst out laughing.
‘What is that light, Mr. Monson?’ she cried petulantly.
‘Why, Miss Jennings,’ I answered, ‘’tis a saint, not a light; a reverend old chap called St. Elmo who transforms himself at pleasure into a species of snapdragon for the encouragement of poor Jack.’
‘See that corposant, sir?’ rumbled Finn out of the darkness.
‘Very well, indeed,’ I answered. ‘Finn has explained,’ I continued; ‘that light is what sailors call a corpusant—sometimes compreesant. If we were Catholics of the Columbian period we should tumble down upon our knees and favour it with a litany or oblige it with a hymn; but being b............