Right over the bows on either hand the sky had cleared since the early morning; the fairy drapery of linked, prismatic, shell-like cloud had lifted, leaving the sea-line a dark blue sweep of water against the delicate effulgence of the heavens, and like a star climbing above that most exquisite horizon shone the sail that was approaching us, still distant a fair eight miles, but already distinctly visible from the low altitude of the ‘Bride’s’ quarter-deck. Sir Wilfrid, leaning over the side, sent a long, yearning look at her, then with a glance at the man on the topgallant-yard he walked over to Finn, who had relieved the mate at eight bells, and conversed with him. I got a chair for Miss Jennings, fetched her novel—the end of the first volume of which seemed still as far off as the Cape of Good Hope—and a rug for her feet, and having made her comfortable I loaded a pipe and squatted myself on deck under the lee of the mainmast.

I was not perhaps in the very sweetest of tempers; for though what I had said below might have been a bit provoking, Wilfrid had turned upon me for it a little too hotly methought. This expedition, to be sure, had a special interest for him, as it had a special interest for Miss Jennings; but so far as I was concerned it was a mere sympathetic undertaking. My cousin, to be sure, was ‘wanting’; but that consideration was not going to render any indignation I might unwarily provoke in him the more endurable. My quarrel, however, just then lay with myself. I was beginning to consider that I had joined Wilfrid in this cruise too hurriedly; that had I insisted upon more time for reflection I should have declined the adventure for the very good reason that I was unable to see how I could be of the least use to him in it. The ocean[93] makes people selfish; its monotony presses upon and contracts the mind as its visible girdle circumscribes the sight. Thought is forced inwards, and the intellect devours itself as the monkey eats its tail. I was already pining somewhat for the diversions of the shore. Had I been sensible of any limit to the daily and nightly routine of eating, sleeping, keeping a look-out and discussing probabilities, my humour might have lightened somewhat; but on what date was this voyage to end? Where was this white fabric that was floating in beauty over the quiet waters going to carry me? Heavy clouds of smoke floated from my lips when I thought that for months and months I might be sundered from my club, from the opera, of which I was a very great lover, from the engaging recreation of billiards, from the quarter of a hundred of pleasures with which the idle man of means loads the blunderbuss of life to shoot at and kill the flying hours as they pass.

Poor Wilfrid, though! I thought with a sigh; and an emotion of pity rose in me as a rebuke when I glanced at his long, awkward figure, thought of the bitter heart-ache that left him only when he slept, of his love for his little one, of the dreadful grief and dishonour that had come to him, of this apparently aimless pursuit upon the boundless surface of the ocean of a faithless woman, with the subtle distressing quality of madness in all he did, in all he thought, to make his conduct a sadder thing than can be described.

I peeped round the mast for a short view of Miss Jennings. She seemed to have lighted on a chapter in the novel that was interesting. Under the droop of her long lashes her half-closed violet eyes showed with a drowsy gleam; her profile had the delicacy of a cameo, clear and tender, against the soft grey of the bulwarks past her. Deuced odd, thought I, that I should find her prettiness so fascinating; as though, forsooth, she was the first sweet girl I had ever seen! I filled another pipe and sat awhile puffing slowly, with these lines of haunting beauty running in my head:
Have you seen but a bright lily grow,
Before rude hands have touched it?
Have you marked but the fall of the snow
Before the soil hath smutch’d it?
Have you felt the wool of the beaver?
Or swan’s down ever?
Or have smelt o’ the bud o’ the briar?
Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!

The poet is also the prophet; and maybe, thought I, when old Ben Jonson planned this fairy temple of words, he had his eye on some such another little delicate goddess as that yonder.

But there was to happen presently something of a kind to send sentiment flying.

Bit by bit the cloud-mailed sky had drawn away down into the northward, until far past our mastheads that way it was clear blue[94] heaven with an horizon ruling it of a sort of transparent sharpness that made you imagine you saw the atmosphere beyond through it as though it were the edge of some huge lens. The breeze was weak and the yacht’s pace very leisurely; there were hints of a calm at hand, here and there in certain long glassy swathes which wound like currents amongst the darker shadow of the wrinkling breeze upon the water; to every small roll upon the long sleepy undulation, the main boom swang in with a short rattle of canvas in the head of the sail and a flap or two forwards with the smite of the mast by the square topsail as though there were hands aloft lazily beating a carpet.

The vessel ahead was steering dead for us, her masts in one. She was much smaller than I had supposed from the first glimpse I caught of her from the masthead—a little brig, apparently, her cloths showing out rusty to the brilliance as she neared us, albeit afar they had shone like a star of white fire. Her hull was of a dirty yellow—a sort of pea soup colour, and the foot of her foresail was spread by a bentinck boom. She was without an atom of interest in my eyes—a small foreigner, as I supposed, sluggishly lumbering home to some Spanish or Italian port with her forecastle filled with chocolate-coloured Dagos, and the cabin atmosphere poisonous with the lingering fumes of bad cooking.

Wilfrid and Finn stood looking at her together, the latter raising a glass to his eye from time to time. I knocked the ashes out of my bowl and crossed over to them.

‘It will be strange if she has any news to give us of the “Shark,”’ said I.

‘We will speak her, of course,’ said Wilfrid.

‘Looks as if she meant to give us the stem,’ exclaimed Finn, with a glance aft at the fellow at the helm; ‘she is steering dead on for us as if her course were a bee-line and we were athwart it.’

‘I expect she’ll not be able to talk to you in English,’ said I.

‘What is her country, do you think, Mr. Monson?’ asked Miss Jennings, closing her volume and joining us.

‘Italian. What say you, captain?’

‘Well, I can’t rightly tell what she is,’ he answered, ‘but I know what she ain’t—and that’s English.’ He stepped aft, bent on the ensign, and ran it aloft.

‘Does she see us?’ exclaimed Wilfrid; ‘really she is steering as if she would run us down.’

I took the captain’s glass and brought it to bear. She was bow on, and there was no sign of a head over the forecastle rail—nothing living in the rigging or upon the yards either; the foresail concealed the run of her abaft. ‘She appears derelict,’ said I, ‘with her helm secured amidships, and blowing like the wind—as she listeth.’

‘Time to get out of her road, I think,’ grumbled Finn. ‘Down hellum!’

The turn of a spoke or two brought the stranger on the lee bow.[95] Then it was that, on taking another view of her through the glass, I observed a couple of men standing near a jolly-boat, that swung at a pair of heavy wooden davits like a Nantucket whaler’s on the quarter. One of them wore a red cap resembling an inverted flower-pot; the other, whilst he addressed his companion, gesticulated with inconceivable vehemence.

‘Foreigners of a surety!’ said I; ‘they’ll have no news for us.’

All continued quiet; the two vessels approached each other slowly; the stranger now proving herself, as I had supposed her, a brig of about a hundred and eighty tons, as dirty a looking craft as ever I saw, stained in streaks about the hull, as though her crew washed the decks down with the water in which they boiled their meat; her rigging slack and grey for want of tar; the clews of her sails gaping at a distance from her yardarms; and at her mainmast-head an immense weather-cock, representing a boat with what I supposed to be a saint standing up in it, with gilt enough left upon the metal of which it was formed to flash dully at intervals as the rolling of the vessel swung the sunlight off and on to it. As she lifted to the floating heave of the sea she showed a bottom of ugly green sheathing, rich with marine growths, dark patches of barnacles, sea-moss, and long trailings of weed rising vividly green from the sparkle of the brine.

‘What a very horrid-looking boat,’ observed Miss Jennings.

As the girl said this, I saw the fellow at the stranger’s wheel revolve it with frantic gestures as though some deadly danger had been descried close aboard; the brig came heavily and sluggishly round right athwart our course, showing no colours, and dipping her channels to the run of the folds with the weary motion of a waterlogged vessel, and so lay all aback. Finn looked on, scarcely understanding the man?uvre, then bawled out, ‘Hard down! Hard down! Chuck her right up in the wind! Why, bless my body and soul, what are the fools aiming at?’

The yacht nimbly answering her helm came to a stand, her square canvas to the mast, her fore and aft sails fluttering.

‘Hail her, Finn!’ cried Wilfrid with excitement.

‘No need, sir; they’re coming aboard,’ answered the captain, and sure enough there were the men, the only two besides the man at the helm who were visible, working like madmen to lower away their jolly-boat. In their red-hot haste they let her drop with a run, and the fat fabric smote the water so heavily that I looked to see her floating in staves alongside. Then down one fall with the agility of a monkey dropped the man in the red nightcap into her and unhooked the blocks, jumping about like a madman. His companion swung himself down by the other fall, and in a trice both men, sitting so far in the head of the boat as to cock her stern high up whilst her nose was nearly under, were pulling for the yacht as though the devil himself were in pursuit of them.

‘What do they want? The “Bride”?’ exclaimed Wilfrid,[96] breaking into a huge roar of laughter, with a slap on his knee. He had been eyeing the approach of the boat with a sort of high, lifting stare—head thrown back, nostrils round and quivering like an impatient horse’s.

‘The desire of the moth for the star!’ said I to Miss Jennings.

‘But the simile won’t hold; yonder red nightcap spoils the fancy of the moth.’

‘Shall we receive them aboard, sir?’ exclaimed Captain Finn.

‘Certainly,’ responded Wilfrid, with another short shout of laughter.

‘Unship that there gangway,’ sung out Finn; ‘the steps over the side, one of ye.’

The two strange creatures pulled with amazing contortions. Small wonder that the heap of child-like disposition that pretty well made up the substance of Wilfrid’s manhood, should have been stirred into extravagant merriment by the wild movements of the two fellows’ bodies, the windmill-like flourishings of their oars, the flopping and flapping of the red cap, the incessant straining and twisting of the chocolate faces over the shoulder to see how they were heading, the shrill exclamations that sounded from the instant the fellows were within ear-shot and that never ceased until they had floundered and splashed alongside.

I never beheld two more hideous men. Their skins were begrimmed with dirt, and their colour came near to the complexion of the negro with sun and weather and neglect of soap; the hair of the seaman that wore the dirty red nightcap fell in snake-like coils upon his back and shoulders, black as tar and shining as grease. He wore thick gold hoops in his ears and a faded blue sash round his waist; his feet were naked, and for the like of them it would be necessary to hunt the forests of Brazil. The other man wore a slouched felt hat, a pair of grey trousers jammed into half Wellington boots, a jacket confined by a button at the neck, the sleeves thrown over his back, whilst his dark arms, naked to the elbows, were hairy as a baboon’s, with a glimpse to be caught of a most intricate network of gunpowder and Indian ink devices covering the flesh to the very finger-nails. This creature had a very heavy moustache, backed by a pair of fierce whiskers, with flashing, though blood-shot eyes, like a blot of ink upon a slice of orange-peel.

We were in a group at the gangway when they came sputtering alongside, flinging down their oars and walloping about in the wildest conceivable scramble as they made fast the painter and clawed their way up; and the instant they were on our deck they both let fly at us in a torrent of words, not attempting to distinguish amongst us, but both of them addressing first one and then another, all with such mad impetuosity of speech, such smiting of their bosoms, such snapping of their fingers and convulsive brandishing of their fists, that the irrecognisable tongue in which they[97] delivered themselves was rendered the most hopelessly confounding language that ever bewildered the ear. It was quite impossible to gather what they desired to state. First they would point to our ensign, then to their brig, then to the long gun upon our forecastle, meanwhile talking with indescribable rapidity. Finn tried to check them; he bawled, ‘Stop! stop! You no speakee English?’ but they only stared and let drive again the moment he ended his question.

‘There’s no good in all this,’ said Wilfrid, ‘we must find out what they want. What the deuce is their language, Charles, d’ye know?’

‘A sort of Portuguese, I imagine,’ said I, ‘but a mighty corrupt specimen of that tongue, I should think.’

‘I will try them in French,’ said he, and approaching the fellow in the red nightcap he bawled in French, with an excellent accent, ‘What is wrong with your ship? What can we do for you?’

Both men shook their heads and broke out together afresh. It was amazing that they should go on jabbering as though we perfectly understood them when one glance at our faces should have assured them that they might as well have addressed the deck on which they stood.

‘Try ’em in Latin, Wilf,’ cried I.

He addressed a few words to them in that tongue, but his English accent extinguished the hint or two they might have found in the words he employed had he pronounced them in South European fashion, and after glaring at him a moment with a deaf face the red-capped man stormed forth again into a passion of speech accompanied by the most incredible gesticulations, pointing to his brig, to our flag, to the cannon as before, winding up in the delirium of his emotion by flinging his cap down on deck and tearing a handful of hair out of his head.

Our crew were all on deck and had come shouldering one another aft as far as they durst, where they stood looking on, a grinning, hearkening, bewhiskered huddle of faces. I thought it just possible that one of them might understand the lingo of our grimy and astonishing visitors, and suggested as much to Captain Finn. He called out, ‘Do any one of you men follow what these chaps are a-saying?’

A fellow responded, ‘It’s Portugee, sir. I can swear to that, though I can’t talk in it.’

‘Try them in Italian, Laura,’ said Wilfrid.

She coloured, and in a very pretty accent that floated to the ear like the soft sounds of a flute after the hoarse, hideous, and howling gibberish of the two Dagos, as I judged them, she asked if they were Portuguese. The eyes of the fellow in the slouched hat flashed to a great grin that disclosed a very cavern of a mouth under his moustache widening to his whiskers, and he nodded violently. She asked again in Italian what they required, but this fell[98] dead. They did not understand her, but possibly imagining that she could comprehend them they both addressed her at once, raising a most irritating clattering with their tongues.

‘It looks to me,’ said Finn, ‘as if it was a case o’ mutiny. Don’t see what else can sinnify their constant pointing to that there gun and our flag and then their brig.’

I sent a look at the vessel as he spoke, and took notice now of a number of heads along the line of the main-deck rail, watching us in a sort of ducking way, by which I mean to convey a kind of coming and going of those dusky nobs which suggested a very furtive and askant look-out. She was not above a quarter of a mile off; the wheel showed plain and the man at it kept his face upon us continuously, whilst his posture, Liliputianised as he was, betrayed extraordinary impatience and anxiety. The craft lay aback, the light wind hollowing her sails in-board and her ugly besmeared hull rolling in a manner that I suppose was rendered nauseous to the eye by her colour, her form, her frowsy, ill-cut canvas and her sheathing of sickly hue, foul with slimy weed and squalid attire of repulsive sea-growth upon the long and tender lifting and falling of the sparkling blue. There were some white letters under her counter, but though I took a swift peep at them through Finn’s telescope the shadow there and the long slant of the name towards the sternpost rendered the words indecipherable. The glass showed such heads along the rail as I could fix to be strictly in keeping with the filth and neglect you saw in the brig and with the appearance of the two men aboard of the schooner. Most of them might have passed for negroes. There were indications of extreme agitation amongst them, visible in a sort of fretful flitting, a constant looking up and around and abaft in the direction of the man at the wheel.

I thought I would try my hand with the red-capped worthy, and striding up to him I sung out ‘Capitano?’

He nodded, striking himself, and then, pointing to his companion, spoke some word, but I did not understand him. By this time the crew had come shoving one another a little further aft, so that we now made a fair crowd all about the gangway; every man’s attention was fixed upon the two Portuguese. It was so odd an experience that it created a sort of licence for the crew, and Finn was satisfied to look on whilst first one and then another of our men addressed the two fellows, striving to coax some meaning out of them by addressing them in ‘pigeon’ and other forms of English, according to that odd superstition current amongst seaman that our language is most intelligible to foreigners when spoken in a manner the least intelligible to ourselves.

We of the quarterdeck were beginning to grow weary of all this. The hope of being able to pick up news of the ‘Shark’ had gone out of Wilfrid’s mind long ago; the humour, moreover, of the two creatures’ appearance and appare............