A large French fishing-lugger was drifting northward on the ebb tide with its sails flapping idly against the spars. It had been a fine morning, and the Captain, a man from Fecamp, where every boy that is born is born a sailor, had been fortunate in working his way in clear weather across the banks that lie northward of the Thames. He had predicted all along in a voice rendered husky by much shouting in dirty weather that the fog-banks would be drifting in from the sea before nightfall. And now he had that mournful satisfaction which is the special privilege of the pessimistic. These fog-banks, the pest of the east coast, are the materials that form the light fleecy clouds which drift westward in sunny weather like a gauze veil across the face of the sky. They roll across the North Sea from their home in the marshes of Holland on the face of the waters, and the mariner, groping his way with dripping eyelashes and a rosy face through them, can look up and see the blue sky through the rifts overhead. When the fog-bank touches land it rises, slowly lifted by the warm breath of the field.
On the coast-line it lies low; a mile inland it begins to break into rifts, so that any one working his way down one of the tidal rivers, sails in the counting of twenty seconds from sunshine into a pearly shadow. Five miles inland there is a transparent veil across the blue sky slowly sweeping toward the west, and rising all the while, until those who dwell on the higher lands of Essex and Suffolk perceive nothing but a few fleecy clouds high in the heavens.
The lugger was hardly moving, for the tide had only turned half an hour ago.
“Provided,” the Captain had muttered within the folds of his woollen scarf rolled round and round his neck until it looked like a dusky life-belt—“provided that they are ringing their bell on the Shipwash, we shall find our way into the open. Always sea-sick, this traveller, always seasick!”
And he turned with a kindly laugh to Loo Barebone, who was lying on a heap of old sails by the stern rail, concealing as well as he could the pangs of a consuming hunger.
“One sees that you will never be a sailor,” added the man from Fecamp, with that rough humour which sailors use.
“Perhaps I do not want to be one,” replied Barebone, with a ready gaiety which had already made him several friends on this tarry vessel, although the voyage had lasted but four days.
“Listen,” interrupted the Captain, holding up a mittened hand. “Listen! I hear a bell, or else it is my conscience.”
Barebone had heard it for some time. It was the bell-buoy at the mouth of Harwich River. But he did not deem it necessary for one who was a prisoner on board, and no sailor, to interfere in the navigation of a vessel now making its way to the Faroe fisheries for the twentieth time.
“My conscience,” he observed, “rings louder than that.”
The Captain took a turn round the tiller with a rope made fast to the rail for the purpose, and went to the side of the ship, lifting his nose toward the west.
“It is the land,” he said. “I can smell it. But it is only the Blessed Virgin who knows where we are.”
He turned and gave a gruff order to a man half hidden in the mist in the waist of the boat to try a heave of the lead.
The sound of the bell could be heard clearly enough now—the uncertain, hesitating clang of a bell-buoy rocked in the tideway—with its melancholy note of warning. Indeed, there are few sounds on sea or land more fraught with lonesomeness and fear. Behind it and beyond it a faint “tap-tap” was now audible. Barebone knew it to be the sound of a caulker's hammer in the Government repairing yard on the south side. They were drifting past the mouth of the Harwich River.
The leadsman called out a depth which Loo could have told without the help of line or lead. For he had served a long apprenticeship on these coasts under a captain second to none in the North Sea.
He turned a little on his bed of sails under repair, at which the Captain had been plying his needle while the weather remained clear, and glanced over his shoulder toward the ship's dinghy towing astern. The rope that held it was made fast round the rail a few feet away from him. The boat itself was clumsy, shaped like a walnut, of a preposterous strength and weight. It was fitted with a short, stiff mast and a balance lug-sail. It floated more lightly on the water than the bigger vessel, which was laden with coal and provender and salt for the North Atlantic fishery, and the painter hung loose, while the dinghy, tide-borne, sidled up to stern of its big companion like a kitten following its mother with the uncertain steps of infancy.
The face of the water was glassy and of a yellow green. Although the scud swept in toward the land at a fair speed, there was not enough wind to fill the sails. Moreover, the bounty of Holland seemed inexhaustible. There was more to come. This fog-bank lay on the water halfway across the North Sea, and the brief winter sun having failed to disperse it, was now sinking to the west, cold and pale.
“The water seems shallow,” said Barebone to the Captain. “What would you do if the ship went aground?”
“We should stay there, mon bon monsieur, until some one came to help us at the flood tide. We should shout until they heard us.”
“You might fire a gun,” suggested Barebone.
“We have no gun on board, mon bon monsieur,” replied the Captain, who had long ago explained to his prisoner that there was no ill-feeling.
“It is the fortune of war,” he had explained before the white cliffs of St. Valerie had faded from sight. “I am a poor man who cannot afford to refuse a good offer. It is a Government job, as you no doubt know without my telling you. You would seem to have incurred the displeasure or the distrust of some one high placed in the Government. 'Treat him well,' they said to me. 'Give him your best, and see that he comes to no harm unless he tries to escape. And be careful that he does not return to France before the mackerel fishing begins.' And when we do return to Fecamp, I have to lie to off Notre Dame de la Garde and signal to the Douane that I have you safe. They want you out of the way. You are a dangerous man, it seems. Salut!”
And the Captain raised his glass to one so distinguished by Government. He laughed as he set his glass down on the little cabin table.
“No ill-feeling on either side,” he added. “C'est entendu.”
He made a half-movement as if to shake hands across the table and thought better of it, remembering, perhaps, that his own palm was not innocent of blood-money. For the rest they had been friendly enough on the voyage. And had the “Petite Jeanne” been in danger, it is probable that Barebone would have warned his jailer, if only in obedience to a seaman's instinct against throwing away a good ship.
He had noted every detail, however, of the dinghy while he lay on the deck of the “Petite Jeanne”; how the runner fitted to the mast; whether the halliards were likely to run sweetly through the sheaves or were knotted and would jamb. He knew the weight of the gaff and the great tan-soddened sail to a nicety. Some dark night, he had thought, on the Dogger, he would slip overboard and take his chance. He had never looked for thick weather at this time of year off the Banks, so near home, within a few hours' sail of the mouth of Farlingford River.
If a breeze would only come up from the south-east, as it almost always does in the............