I was up and about a great deal during the night. It was not only that the heat murdered sleep; there was something so ominous in the profound stillness which fell upon our little ship that the mind found itself weighed down as with a sense of misgiving, a dull incommunicable dread of approaching calamity. Of the dead calm at sea I was by no means ignorant; in African and West Indian waters I had tasted of the delights of this species of stagnation over and over again. One calm, I remember, came very close to realising Coleridge’s description, or rather the description that the poet borrowed from the narrative of old Sir Richard Hawkins preserved in the foxed and faded pages of the Rev. Samuel Purchas. The water looked to be full of wriggling fiery creatures burning in a multitude of colours till the surface of the sea resembled a vast, ghastly prism reflecting the lights of some hellish principality, deep sunk in the dark brine. But I never recollect the ocean until this night as without some faint heave or swell; yet after the weak draught of air had utterly died out, somewhere about midnight, the yacht slept upon a bosom as stirless as the surface of a summer lake. There was not the slightest movement to awaken an echo in her frame, to run a tremor through her canvas, to nudge the rudder into the dimmest clanking of its tiller chains. The effect of such a hush as this at sea is indescribable. On shore, deep in the country, far distant from all hum of life, the stillness of night is a desired and familiar condition of darkness; it soothes to rest; whatever vexes it is a violence; the sweeping of a gale through hissing and roaring trees, the thunder of wind in the chimney, the lashing of the windows with hail and rain, the red belt of lightning to whose view the bedroom glances in blood to the eye of its disturbed occupant; all this brings with it an element of fear, of something unusual, out of keeping, out of nature almost. But at sea it is the other way about. ’Tis the dead calm that is unnatural. It is as though the mighty forces of heaven and ocean had portentously sucked in their breath in anticipation of the shock of conflict, as a warrior fills his lungs to the full and then holds his wind whilst he waits the cry of charge.

I tried to sleep, but could not, and hearing one o’clock struck on the forecastle, dropped out of my bunk for ten minutes of fresh air on deck. Cutbill sat with his back against the table; the small flame of the lamp that hung without the least vibration from the cabin ceiling gleamed in the sweat-drops that coated his face as though oil had been thrown upon him. I said softly, pausing a moment to address him: ‘A wonderfully still night, Cutbill.’

[264]

‘Never remember the like of it, sir,’ he answered in a whisper that had a note of strangling in it, with his effort to subdue his natural tempestuous utterance.

‘All quiet aft?’

‘As a graveyard, sir.’

‘In case Sir Wilfrid Monson should look out and see you, what excuse for being here has Captain Finn provided you with?’

‘I’m supposed to be watching the bayrometer, sir. If Sir Wilfrid steps out I’m to seem to be peering hard at that there mercury, then to go on deck as if I’d got something to report.’

‘Oh, that’ll do, I dare say,’ I exclaimed. ‘He may wonder but that must not signify. Heaven grant, Cutbill, that I am unnecessarily nervous; but we’re a middling full ship; it is the right sort of night, too, to make one feel the hugeness of the ocean and the helplessness of sailors when deprived of their little machinery for fighting it; and what I say is, a misgiving under such circumstances ought to serve us as a conviction—so keep a bright look-out, Cutbill. Nothing is going to happen, I dare say; but our business is to contrive that nothing shall happen.’

The huge fellow lifted his enormous hand very respectfully to his glistening forehead, and I passed on to the deck.

The moon shone brightly and her reflection lay upon the sea like a league-long fallen column of silver, with the ocean going black as liquid pitch to the sides of the resplendent shaft. Not a wrinkle tarnished that prostrate pillar of light; not the most fairy-like undulation of water put an instant’s warping, for the space of a foot, into it. I set the mainmast head by a star and watched it, and the trembling, greenish, lovely point of radiance hung poised as steadfastly on a line with the truck as though it were some little crystal lamp fixed to an iron spike up there.

I spied Jacob Crimp near the wheel, but I had come up to breathe and not to talk. I desired to coax a sleepy humour into me and guessed that that end would be defeated by a chat with the surly little sailor, with whom I rarely exchanged a few sentences without finding myself drifting into an argument. So I lay over the rail striving to cool my hot face with the breath off the surface of the black profound that lay like a sheet of dark, ungleaming mirror beneath. On a sudden I heard a great sigh out in the gloom. It was as though some slumbering giant had fetched a long, deep, tremulous breath in a dream. I started, for it had sounded close, and I looked along the obscure deck forward as if, forsooth, there was any sailor on board whose respiration could rise to such a note as that! In a moment I spied a block of blackness slowly melting out like a dye of ink upon the indigo of the water with the faint flash of moonlight off the wet round of it. A grampus! thought I; and stared about me for others, but no more showed, and the prodigious midnight hush seemed to float down again from the stars like a sensible weight with one wide ripple from where the great[265] fish had sunk, creeping like a line of oil to the yacht’s side and melting soundlessly in her shadow.

This grave-like repose lasted the night through, and when early in the morning, awakened by the light of the newly risen sun, I mounted to the deck, I found the ocean stretched flat as the top of a table, the sky, of a dirty bluish haze, thickening down and merged into the ocean line so that you couldn’t see where the horizon was, save just under the sun where the head of the misty white sparkle in the water defined the junction. It baffled and bothered the sight to look into the distance, so vaporous and heavy it all was, with a dull blue gleam here and there upon the water striking into the faintness like a sunbeam into mist, and all close to, as it seemed, though by hard peering you might catch the glimmer of the calm past the mixture of hazy light and hues where sea and sky seemed to end.

Jacob Crimp had charge. I asked him if all had been quiet below in the cabin.

‘Ay,’ he answered, ‘I’ve heard of nothen to the contrairy. Her ledship came on deck during the middle watch and had a bit of a yarn with me.’

‘Indeed!’ said I.

‘Yes, she scared me into a reg’lar clam. I was standing at the rail thinking I see a darkness out under the moon as if a breath of wind were coming along, and a woice just behind me says, “What’s your name?” Nigh hand tarned my hair white to see her, so quiet she came and her eyes like corposants.’

‘What did she talk about?’ said I in a careless way.

‘Asked what the sailor was a-sitting in the cabin for. “To prevent murder being done,” says I. “Murder?” says she. “Yes,” says I, “and to prewent this wessel from being set on fire and blown to yellow blazes,” says I, “for God knows,” says I, “what weight of gunpowder ain’t stowed away forrard.” “Who’s a-going to do all this?” says she; so I jist told her that Sir Wilfrid had been took worse, and that the order had come forward that the cabin was to be watched.’

‘What did she say to that?’ I exclaimed.

‘Why, walked to t’other side of the deck and sot down and remained an hour, till I reckoned that when she went below she must ha’ been pretty nigh streaming with dew.’

‘What do you think of the weather, Mr. Crimp?’

‘It’s agin nature,’ he answered. ‘Like lying off Blackwall for smoothness. ’Taint going to last, though. Nothing that’s agin nature ever do, whether it’s weather, or a dawg with two tails, or a cat with eight legs.’

‘I wish you were a magician,’ said I, ‘I’d tassel your handkerchief for a strong breeze. A roasting day with a vengeance, and the first of a long succession, I fear.’

At breakfast I told Miss Laura of Lady Monson’s visit on deck in the middle watch, and the mate’s blunt statement to her. ‘It[266] was a mighty dose of truth to administer,’ said I. ‘She will pass some bad quarters of an hour, I fear. Think of old Jacob talking to her of murder and fire, and explosions unto yellow blazes, whatever that may mean, with her husband sleeping right abreast of her cabin and armed, as she must know.’

‘Has he those pistols?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I answered; ‘I gave the case to one of the stewards to return to him, and now I am sorry I did so.’

‘Of course Henrietta will be frightened,’ she exclaimed. ‘I do not envy her in her loneliness. Why should she refuse to see me? I easily understand her objection to showing herself on deck by daylight; but I am her sister; I could sit with her; I could be company for her, win her, perhaps,’ she said with a wistful look, ‘to something like a gentle mood.’ She sighed deeply and continued: ‘Wilfrid scared me yesterday. There was that in his face which shocked me, but I could not explain what it was. Yet I am not the least bit afraid he will commit any deed of violence. Let him be twenty times madder than he now is, his heart is so tender, his spirit so boylike, pure, honourable, there is so much of sweetness and affection in his nature that I am certain his cruellest delirium would be tempered by his qualities.’

I was grateful to her for thus speaking of my poor cousin, but I could not agree with her. The qualities she pinned her faith to had suffered him at all events to shoot Colonel Hope-Kennedy and to make nothing of the man’s death. Yet, thought I, looking at her, seeing how this sweet little creature values, and to a large extent understands him, what devil’s influence was upon the loving, large-hearted, childlike man when he chose the other one for his wife? But, fond of him and sorry for him as I was, I could not have wished it otherwise—for my sake at all events; though on her part it would have made her ‘her ladyship’ and found her a husband whose brain I don’t doubt might year by year have grown stronger in the cheerful and fructifying light of her cordial, sympathetic, radiant character.

I looked in upon him after breakfast. Miss Laura wished to accompany me, but I advised her to delay her visit until I had ascertained for myself how he did. He was lying in his bunk, a large pipe in his mouth, at which he pulled so heartily that his cabin was dim with tobacco smoke. His cheek was supported by his elbow and his eyes fixed upon his watch, a superb gold time-keeper that dangled at the extremity of a heavy chain hitched to a little hook screwed into the deck over his head. On the back of this watch were his initials set in brilliants, and these gems made the golden circle show like a little body of light as it hung motionless before his intent gaze. He did not turn his head when I opened the door, then looked at me in an absent-minded way when I was fairly entered.

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed languidly, ‘it is you, Charles. You promised to sit with me awhile last night.’

[267]

‘I did, but the heat below was unendurable. It is no better now. The temperature of this cabin must be prodigious. What calculations are you making?’ said I.

‘None,’ he answered. ‘I have slung the watch to observe if there is any movement in the yacht. She is motionless. Mark it. There is not a hairbreadth of vibration. We are afloat, of course?’ he said, suddenly looking at me.

‘I hope so,’ said I. ‘Afloat? Why, what do you suppose, Wilf? That we’ve gone to the bottom?’

‘It would be all one for me,’ he answered with a deep sigh, and then applying himself to his pipe again with a sort of avidity that made one think of a hungry baby sucking at a feeding bottle. He clouded the air with tobacco smoke and said: ‘I am heartily weary of life.’

‘And why?’ cried I: ‘because we are in a dead calm with the equator close aboard. The very deep is rotting. A calm of this kind penetrates through the pores of the skin, enters the soul and creates a thirsty yearning for extinction. Being younger than you. Wilf, I give myself another twelve hours, and then, if no breeze blows, I shall, like you, be weary of life and desire to die.’

‘It is easily managed,’ said he.

‘Yes,’ cried I, startled, ‘no doubt; but the weather may change, you know.’ And not at all relishing his remark nor the looks that accompanied it, I seized my hat and fell to fanning the atmosphere with the notion of expelling some of the tobacco smoke through the open porthole.

‘I am of opinion,’ said he, puffing and dropping his words alternately with the clouds he expelled whilst he kept his eyes fixed upon his watch, ‘that, spite of the arguments of the divines, life is a free gift to us to be disposed of as we may decide. Nature is invariably compensative. We are brought into this world without our knowledge, and therefore, of course, without our consent, d’ye see, Charles,’ and here he rolled his eyes upon me, ‘and by way of balancing this distracting obligation of compulsory being, nature says you may do what you like with existence: keep it or part with it.’

‘I say, Wilfrid,’ said I, ‘there are surely more cheerful topics for an equinoctial dog-day than this you have lighted on. Don’t speculate, my dear fellow; leave poor old nature alone. Take short views, and let the puzzling distance unfold and determine itself to your approach. It is the wayfarers who decline to look ahead, who whistle as they trudge along the road of life. The melancholy faces are those whose eyes are endeavouring to see beyond the horizon towards which they are advancing. Tell me now—about this cabin door of yours. My dear fellow, it must be big enough this morning to enable you to pass through; so come along on deck, will you, Wilfrid?’

‘Damn it, how blind you are!’ he exclaimed.

‘No, I’m not,’ said I.

[268]

‘D’ye mean to say that you can’t see what’s happened to me since we last met?’

‘What now, Wilfrid?’

‘What now?’ he shouted. ‘Why, man, I can’t stand upright.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Because I’m too tall for this cabin,’ he answered in a voice of passion and grief.

‘Pray when did you find that out?’ said I.

‘On rising to dress myself this morning,’ he answered, ‘I was obliged to clothe myself in my bunk. What a dreadful blow to befall a man! I can’t even quit my bed now, and everything I want must be handed to me.’

Well, well! thought I; God mend him soon. Hot as it was, a chill ran through me to the crazy, wistful, despairful look he directed at me, and I was oppressed for a moment with the same sickness of heart that had visited me during my interview with him on the preceding day.

‘I had resolved to sell the “Bride,”’ said he mournfully, putting his pipe into a shelf at the back of him and folding his hands, which seemed to me to have grown thin and white during the past few days, upon his breast, ‘but I shan’t be able to do so now.’ I was silent. ‘She will have to be broken up,’ he added.

‘Nonsense!’ I exclaimed.

‘But I say yes!’ he suddenly roared; ‘how the devil else am I to get out of her?’

‘Oh, I see!’ I answered soothingly, ‘I forgot that. But, Wilf, since you’re too big to use this cabin, for the present only, for I am certain you will dwindle to your old proportions before long, don’t you think you ought to have an attendant constantly with you, some one at hand sitting here to wait upon you?’

‘Why, yes,’ said he, ‘no doubt of it. I am almost helpless now. But I’ll not have that rascal Muffin.’

‘No, no,’ said I. ‘Nor would the stewards make the sort of servants you want. If I were in your place I should like to be waited on by a couple of jolly hearty sailors, fellows to take turn and turn about in looking after me, chaps with their memories full of long yarns, unconventional, sympathetic, no matter how rough their manners, agile, strong as horses, with lively limbs, used to springing about. One or two such men are to be met forward amongst your crew.’............