At daybreak next morning I was called up to the Mysterious Man, whom I found standing in a corner of the forecastle holding a loaded revolver in his hand and pointing it threateningly at anyone who approached him.
He had awoke, I was told, made a tour of the ship, and, gaining possession of the weapon belonging to the second engineer, proceeded to fire one chamber point-blank at Thorpe, who was on duty on the bridge. Then, when pursued, he took refuge in the forecastle, where I found him.
On my approach he calmed down immediately, and handed me the revolver as obediently as a child. Somehow I seemed to possess an influence over him which no one else could exercise, and very quickly induced him to return to his bunk, greatly to the satisfaction of the man who had been told off to be his keeper, and who had no doubt slept on duty.
The storm showed no sign of abatement, and laying to as we were we received the full force of the sweeping gale. The skipper was asleep, snoring loudly, as was his wont, therefore I returned to my berth, and for a couple of hours watched the capers of the rats, until the motion of the boat rising and rolling lulled me again to unconsciousness.
Through the whole of the following day we lay off the seaweed-covered relic of the past until, in the red sundown, the wind dropped, and after several attempts the men secured a wire hawser to the battered prow, and when Seal rang, “Full steam ahead,” the Seahorse began slowly to follow in our wake, amid the loud cheering of those on board.
The Mysterious Man stood on the bridge at my side and watched the operation with an expression of complete satisfaction, although more than once, when he believed I was not looking, he would turn and shake his skinny fist at the curious old craft at our stern.
Our progress was slow, for the Thrush was never at any time a fast boat. And with such a dead weight behind her the engineer had to be careful at what pressure he worked our unsafe boilers.
The skipper, after consultation with Thorpe and myself, decided not to make for Valencia but to tow his prize straight to Gibraltar and on to London. As the great black hull with its shroud of marine plants rose and fell behind us it certainly presented more the appearance of Noah’s Ark, as pictorially represented, than of a sea-going vessel. One fact I now discovered that I had not before noticed was that on the bows above the broken figure-head representing a seahorse was a wooden crucifix perhaps two feet high; broken it was true, but still bearing an effigy of the crucifixion, while upon the breast of the seahorse was carved a Maltese cross of similar design to that upon the old silken banner.
The mystery of it all was the sole topic of conversation both on the bridge and in the forecastle. Every man on board tried to obtain some word from the castaway, but in vain. He became tractable, ate well, would not touch grog, but remained always silent. He would stand erect by the capstan in the stern for hours, and with folded arms watch the rolling hulk ploughing her way slowly in the long streak of foam left by our propeller. He still wore his faded velvet breeches, but his bare legs were now covered by a pair of woollen stockings, while in place of his ragged doublet he wore an old pea-jacket, and sometimes an oilskin coat and peaked cap. He still, however, clung to the rusty sword which he had chosen, a blunt but finely-tempered weapon, and often it would be seen poking from beneath his oilskin as he walked the deck.
Once an attempt had been made to trim his long white hair and flowing beard, but this he had resented so vigorously, threatening to spit the man who held the scissors, that the effort had to be abandoned. He thus gave them to understand that although he might accept their modern dress as a loan he would brook no interference with his personal appearance.
Who was he? That was the question which all of us, from Job Seal down to the apprentices, were anxious to solve.
The mystery of the Seahorse was great enough, but that surrounding the unknown man was greater. My own theory regarding the vessel was that in the early seventeenth century she had gone down or aground in shallow water, perhaps in one of the many coves on the Moroccan or Algerian coast, but the high prow and stern being closed down so tight both air and water were excluded. Those on board—fighting men, it seemed—had perished, but the buoyancy of the ship had been preserved, and by some submarine disturbance—volcanic, most probably—it had become released and risen to the surface.
The growth of barnacles, mussels, and weeds over the whole of the vessel from the stumps of her masts caused Seal to believe that she could only have been covered at high tide, and that she must have lain hidden in some well-sheltered spot where the force of the waves had been broken, otherwise she must have been beaten to pieces. He pointed out to me how some of the weed on her was only to be found on rocks covered at high water, yet if the theory were a correct one then she could not have been hidden in the Mediterranean, as it is an almost tideless sea.
Seal suggested that she might have been aground on the coast of Western Morocco, a country but little known to the civilized world although so near one of the greatest trade routes, and that she might have drifted from the Atlantic to the spot where we had discovered her.
This theory seemed the most likely one, although the presence of the Mysterious Man was utterly unaccountable.
The main point which puzzled Seal, I think, was what he should do with the gold. He regarded the poor old fellow as a gibbering idiot, and had but little to do with him. Customs officers and lunatics were the bluff old seaman’s pet abominations. He would probably have liked to claim the hoard of gold himself if it were not for the existence of one with a prior claim to it, and once or twice he expressed to me an anxiety as to what his owners would say to it all. They were skinflints of the worst type, and would, I expected, probably lay claim to it themselves.
Steaming slowly we passed the Gib. and made a straight course for Cape St. Vincent, which we sighted at dawn one rainy morning, then hugging the Portuguese coast we safely passed the mouth of the Tagus, being hailed more than once by other craft, the skippers all asking us with humorous banter what we had in tow.
Fortunately the weather had improved greatly, and even as we traversed the Bay of Biscay we had no reason to complain, for the old Seahorse rode proudly in our wake, rocking a good deal on account of its house-like shape, but nevertheless giving Seal the greatest satisfaction.
“It’ll make ’em open their eyes, doctor, when we tow ’er up the Thames,” he often said, as he paced his bridge and looked at her straining on the hawser.
Never a day passed but I occupied myself diligently with the documents and manuscripts that had fallen into my hands, but I am fain to confess that beyond what I have already explained to the reader I discovered absolutely nothing. Although I had passed my final examination and could write M.D. after my name, my book-learning was not sufficiently deep that I could decipher and understand those crabbed old screeds.
I showed them to the Mysterious Man, hoping that they would attract his attention and give me some clue to their meaning, but he remained quite passive when he saw them, and turning upon his heel looked out through the round port-hole.
I certainly was very anxious to get back to London to obtain some opinion upon the big vellum book in which Bartholomew da Schorno declared there was a secret that would be discovered hereafter. My voyage, besides being a pleasant one, had been full of excitement, for we had found an object the like of which no living eye had seen, together with an individual who was a complete and profound mystery.
The weather was all that could be desired when we entered the Channel, keeping close in to the coast of Normandy as far as Dieppe, and then taking a direct course across to Beachy Head, where we were signalled as homeward bound. When, however, we were off Folkestone, about nine o’clock one night, a squall struck us so suddenly that even Job Seal was unprepared for it. The glass had fallen rapidly, he had noticed, but such a heavy squall as it proved to be was not to be expected at that season of the year. Within a quarter of an hour a terrific sea was running, and the Thrush seemed ever and anon thrown almost on her beam-ends. I noticed that Seal’s face for the first time during our trip betrayed some anxiety, and not without cause, for he suddenly exclaimed:?—
“Ah! just as I expected. Blister my kidneys, doctor, but we’ve no bloomin’ luck. That hawser’s parted!”
I turned quickly to look astern, and there, sure enough, the Seahorse was adrift and out of our wake. Until that moment the strain on the hawser had kept her comparatively steady, but the instant the steel cable had broken she pitched upon her beam-ends, burying her nose deep into the angry waves.
We both stood gripping a rail and watching, neither of us uttering a word.
For perhaps five minutes the antique vessel strove again and again to right herself, until one wave greater than the others crashed over her high stern. From where we stood we could hear the breaking of glass and the shivering of the heavy timbers that, half rotten, now broke up like matchwood.
Then almost immediately the saloon which we had explored began to fill, and slowly before our eyes she went down stern first.
The men, watching like ourselves, set up a howl of disappointment, and Seal gave vent to a volley of nautical expressions which need not here be repeated; but the Mysterious Man, who had also noticed the disaster, began dancing joyously and cutting capers on the deck, heedless of the storm raging about him. It was evident that the final disappearance of the Seahorse gave him the utmost satisfaction.
As for ourselves, we gazed with regret upon the mass of floating timbers that were swept around us. It was to our bitter chagrin that, after towing that relic of a bygone age all those miles at a cost of fuel and time, we had lost her almost at the mouth of the Thames.
But regret was useless. The Seahorse, with its freight of crumbling skeletons, had gone down again, and would certainly never reappear. So Job Seal drew his oilskin closer around him, lamented his infernal luck, and, recollecting the thousand odd pieces of gold in his cabin, turned and gave an order to the helmsman which caused the bows of the Thrush to run nearer towards the dark line of England’s cliffs between Folkestone and Dover.
Lights white and green were beginning to show in the distance, those of other ships passing up and down Channel, and as I stood by his side in my dripping oilskins I congratulated myself that if we weathered the squall I should be safely back in London in a very few hours, with as strange a story to tell as any man had related.