I hauled down the shawl from the masthead, carefully unbent, folded, and gave it to Miss Jennings, who stood with Wilfrid watching the Portuguese brig. We had hoisted in our boat, and the men were busy about the decks coiling up after having trimmed sail.

‘Once more heading a fair course for the “Shark,”’ said I with a glance at the compass. ‘This has been a neat morning’s work. A few incidents of the kind should make out a lively voyage.’

‘Oh, but it’s dreadful to think of that poor man having been drowned!’ exclaimed Miss Jennings. ‘I was watching the boat before the gun was fired. In an instant she vanished. She might have been a phantom. She melted out upon the water as a snow-flake would. I pressed my eyes, for I could not believe them at first.’

‘Horrible!’ exclaimed Wilfrid in a hollow, melancholy voice; ‘what had that miserable creature done that we should take his life? Have we insensibly—insensibly—courted some curse of heaven upon this yacht? Who was the villain that did it?’ He wheeled round passionately: ‘Finn—Captain Finn, I say!’ he shouted.

The captain, who was giving directions to some men in the waist, came aft.

‘Who was it that fired that shot, Finn?’ cried my cousin in his headlong way, jerking his head as it were at Finn with the question, whilst his arms and legs twitched and twisted as though to an electric current.

‘A man named O’Connor, Sir Wilfrid,’ responded Finn.

[106]

‘Did he do it expressly, think you?’

‘I wouldn’t like to say that, your honour. The fellow’s a blunderhead. I inquired if there was e’er a man for’ard as could load and sight a cannon, and this chap stands up and says that he’d sarved for three years in a privateer and was reckoned the deadest shot out of a crew of ninety men.’

‘Call him aft,’ said Wilfrid. ‘If he aimed at that boat intentionally it’s murder—call him aft!’

He took some impatient strides to and fro with a face that worked like a ship in a seaway with the conflict of emotions within him, whilst Finn going a little way forward, sung out for O’Connor. Meanwhile we were rapidly widening the distance between us and the brig. I protest it was with an honest feeling of relief that I watched her sliding into a toy-like shape, with promise of nothing showing presently but some radiant film of her topmost canvas in the silver azure that streaked by a hand’s breadth, as it looked, the whole girdle of the horizon; for one was never to know but that her people might send the red-capped man adrift for us to pick up, or worry us in some other way.

Finn arrived, followed by the Irishman who had discharged the gun; his immense black whiskers stood out thick, straight, inflexible as the bristles of a chimney-sweep’s brush, contrasting very extraordinarily with the bright apple-red of his cheeks and the blue, Hibernian, seawardly eye that glimmered under a dense black thatch of brow. He stood bolt upright soldier-fashion, with his arms straight up and down by his side like pump-handles, and fixed an unwinking stare upon whoever addressed him.

‘You fired that gun, Captain Finn says,’ exclaimed Wilfrid.

‘Oi did, your honour.’

‘What made you take aim at the boat?’

‘Your honour, by the holy eleven, I took aim at the brig. There’s something wrong with the pace.’

‘Wrong with the piece. What d’ye mean?’

‘It was cast with a kink, sorr; it dhroops amidships and shoots as Mister Crimp’s larboard oye peeps, your honour, though loike his oye it manes well.’

‘Nonsense,’ I cried, ‘you must have covered the boat to hit it.’

‘By all that’s sacred then,’ cried the man, ‘I had the natest observation of the brig’s maintopmasht as ever oye could bring the muzzle of a pace to soight. The gun was cast with a kink, sorr.’

‘My belief is that you’re utterly ignorant of guns,’ cried Wilfrid. ‘The concussion was fierce enough to shake the yacht to pieces.’

‘’Twas your honour’s design to froighten ’em.’

‘But not to murder them, you dolt!’ shouted Wilfrid. ‘D’ye know I could have you hanged for this.’

‘It was but a haythen Portuguay, sorr,’ answered the fellow, preserving his ramrod-like posture and his unwinking stare.

[107]

‘Tell him to go forward, Finn; tell him to go forward,’ cried Wilfrid, ‘and see that he never has any more to do with that gun on any account whatever, d’ye understand?’

The seaman knuckled his forehead and wheeled round, but methought I could just catch a glimpse past his whisker of a sudden protrusion of the cheek as though he was signalling with his tongue to a brother Jack who was flemish-coiling a rope not very far from where he was standing.

The luncheon bell rang and we went below. At table we could talk of nothing but the unhappy Portuguese whom our round-shot had sent to the bottom. Muffin’s face of respectful horror was a feature of the time which I recall more vividly than even the disaster itself. This man, though he was in attendance on Wilfrid as a valet, regularly stood behind his master’s chair at meals. It was Wilfrid’s whim to have him at hand. He did not offer to wait unless it was to procure anything my cousin might require when the stewards were busy with Miss Jennings and myself, or one or both of them absent. His air of deferential consternation was exceedingly fine as he listened to our talk about the annihilated boat and the foundered foreigner—‘Who,’ said I, with a glance at his yellow visage, the shocked expression of which he tried to smother by twisting his lips into a sort of shape that might pass as a faint obsequious simper and by keeping his eyelids lowered, ‘let us trust was cut in halves, for then his extinction would be painless; for after all, drowning, though it is reckoned an agreeable death after consciousness has fled, is mortal agony, I take it, whilst the sensation of suffocation remains.’

Muffin’s left leg fell away with an exceedingly nervous crooking of it in the trouser, and he turned up his eyes an instant to the upper deck with so sickly a roll, that spite of myself I burst into a laugh, though I swiftly recovered myself.

‘It is strange, Charles,’ exclaimed my cousin in a raven-like note, ‘that a ghastly incident of this kind should sit so lightly on your mind, considering that you have quitted the sea for years and have led a far more effeminate life ashore than I who have been roughing it on the ocean when very likely you were lounging with a bored face in an opera stall or dozing over a cigar in some capacious club arm-chair. Had you been chasing slavers or pitching cannon shot into African villages down to the present moment, I could almost understand your indifference to a business that’s going to haunt me for the rest of my days.’

‘Nonsense!’ I exclaimed, ‘it was a bad job I admit, but a pure accident, not more tragical than had the boat capsized and drowned the man. There would be nothing in a twenty-fold uglier mishap to haunt you. But I’ll tell you what, though,’ I continued, talking on to avert the sentimental argument which I saw strong in Wilfrid’s face, ‘the incident of this morning points a very useful moral.’

‘What moral?’ he demanded.

[108]

‘Why, that we must not be in too great a hurry to speak every sail we sight.’

‘Finn knows my wishes; we must hear all we can about the “Shark,”’ cried Wilfrid warmly.

‘The very vessel that we neglect to speak,’ exclaimed Miss Jennings softly—she had spoken but little, and it was easy to see through the transparency of her unaffected manner that the tragic affair of the morning had made a very deep impression on her—‘might prove the one ship of all we pass that could most usefully direct us.’

‘Two to one!’ said I, giving her a bow and smiling to the look of coy reproach in her charming eyes; ‘of course, Miss Jennings, I have no more to say. At least,’ I added, turning to Wilfrid, ‘on the head of speaking passing ships, though the moral I find in this forenoon trouble is not exhausted.’

‘Well?’ said he a little imperiously, leaning towards me on one elbow with his nails at his lips and the spirit of restlessness quick as the blood in his veins in every lineament.

‘Well,’ said I, echoing him, ‘my suggestion is that your Long Tom’s murderous mission should be peremptorily cut short by your ordering Finn to strike the noisy old barker at once down into the hold, where he’ll be a deuced deal more useful as ballast than as a forecastle toy for the illustration of Irish humour.’

‘No!’ shouted Wilfrid, fetching the table a whack with his fist: ‘so say no more about it, Charles. Strange that you, who should possess the subtlest and strongest of any kind of human sympathy for and with me—I mean the sympathy of blood—should so absolutely fail to appreciate my determination and to accept my purpose! That girl there,’ pointing with his long arm to Miss Laura, ‘can read my heart and, of her sweetness, justify and approve all she finds there. But you, my dear Charles’—he softened his voice though he continued speaking with warmth nevertheless—‘you, my own first cousin, you to whom my honour should be hardly less dear than your own—you would have me abandon this pursuit—forego every detail of my carefully prepared programme—blink with a cynical laziness at my own and my infant’s degradation and turn to the law—to the law forsooth!—for the appeasement or extinction of every just yearning and of every consuming desire of my manhood. No, by G—!’ he roared, ‘fate may be against me, but even her iron hand can be forced by a heart goaded as mine has been and is.’

He rose from the table and without another word went to his cabin.

We had been for some time alone—I mean that Muffin and the stewards had left us. When my cousin was gone I looked at Miss Jennings.

‘Forgive me, Mr. Monson,’ she exclaimed with a little blush and speaking with an enchanting diffidence, ‘but I fear—indeed I am sure, that any, even the lightest, suggestion that runs counter[109] to Wilfrid’s wishes irritates him. And,’ she added almost in a whisper, ‘I think it is dangerous to irritate him.’

‘I have no wish to irritate him, believe me, Miss Jennings,’ said I. ‘I desire to be of some practical help, and my recommendations have no other motive. But I give you my word if this sort of thing goes on I shall grow selfish, nay, alarmed if you like. I certainly never anticipated these melodramatic displays, these tragic rebukes, when I accepted his offer of the voyage. Pray consider: if Wilf, poor fellow, should grow worse, if his actions should result in exhibiting him as irresponsible, what’s to be done? Heaven forbid that I should say a word to alarm you—’ she shook her head with a smile: I was a little abashed but proceeded nevertheless—‘we are not upon dry land here. The ocean is as full of the unexpected as it is of fish. Finn is a plain steady man with brains enough, but then he is not in command in the sense that a captain is in command when we speak of a ship whose skipper is lord paramount. He will obey as Wilfrid orders, and I say, Miss Jennings, with all submission to your engaging, to your beautiful desires as a sister, that if Wilfrid’s humour is going to gain on him at the rate at which I seem to find it growing, it will be my business, as I am certain it will be my duty for everybody’s sake as well as for yours and his own, so to contrive this unparalleled pursuit as to end it swiftly.’

She was silent—a little awed, I think, by my emphatic manner, perhaps by a certain note of sternness, for I had been irritated, besides being nervous; and then, again, my distaste for the trip worked very strongly in me whilst I was talking to her.

We were a somewhat gloomy ship for the rest of the day. I noticed that the seamen wore tolerably grave faces at their several jobs, and it was easy to gather that, now they had had time to digest the incident of the morning, it was as little to their taste as it was to ours aft. Indeed it was impossible to tell what kind of omen they might manufacture out of so tragic an affair. Sailors were very much more superstitious in those days than they are now; the steam fiend has wonderfully cleared the atmosphere of the forecastle, and the sea-goblin has long since made his final dive from the topgallant-rail to keep company with the mermaid in her secret bower of coral in a realm fathoms deep beneath the ocean ooze. O’Connor tried very hard to look as if he felt that on the whole he almost deserved to be hanged for his blundersome extermination of the Portugee heathen; at least this seemed his air when, as he sat stitching on a sail in the waist, he suspected a quarterdeck gaze to be directed at him. But it is hard for a man with merry blue eyes and cheeks veritably grinning with ruddiness in the embrace of a huge hearty pair of carefully doctored whiskers to look contrite. The Irishman did his best, but I laughed to see how the instant he forgot his part nature jovially broke out in him again.

Crimp had charge that afternoon, and when I arrived on deck with a cigar in my mouth, leaving Miss Jennings and her maid hanging together over a hat whose feather in some way or other[110] had gone wrong, I asked the mate what was his opinion of the accident of the morning.

‘Ain’t got any opinion about it at all,’ he answered.

‘It was an accident, let us believe,’ said I.

‘Pure hignorance more like,’ he answered. ‘That there O’Connor’s regularly ate up with pride. He’s all bounce. Says he’s descended from kings and if he had his rights he’d be at the head o’ Ulster or some such place as that ’stead of an able seaman. He know anything ’bout firing off cannons!’ making a horrible face and going to the side to spit.

‘Did they understand what you said aboard the brig when you talked to them from the boat?’

‘Ne’er a word.’

‘Was the red-capped man hurt?’

‘Dazed. Eyes pretty nigh out on’s cheeks. He was too full o’ salt water to curse, I allow, so when we hauled him into the boat he fell on his knees and prayed. A bloomin’ poor job; a measly mean business! Knocking of a boat to pieces an’ drownding of a man. What’s the good o’ that there gun? Only fit to kick up a plaguey shindy. Next time it may bust and then, stand by! for I once see an explosion.’

‘Is there anything wrong with the piece as O’Connor suggests!’ said I, much enjoying the old chap’s sourness, which I may say was not a little in harmony with my mood that afternoon.

‘Couldn’t tell if ye offered me all ye was worth. My business ain’t guns. I shipped to do my bit and my bit I’ll do, but the line’s chalked a mighty long way this side o’ hordnance.’

I walked on to the forecastle to inspect the gun for myself. O’Connor watched me with the whole round of his face, broad and purple as the rising moon. The gun was of an elderly fashion, but it looked a very substantial weapon, with a murderous grin in the gape of it and a long slim throat that warranted a venomous delivery. The kink the Irishman spoke of was altogether in his............