Produced by Henry Flower and the Online Distributed

AN OCEAN TRAGEDY

NOVELS, ETC., BY W. CLARK RUSSELL.

Crown 8vo. cloth extra, 3_s._ 6_d._ each; post 8vo. illustrated boards,
2_s._ each; cloth limp, 2_s._ 6_d._ each.

  ROUND THE GALLEY-FIRE.
  IN THE MIDDLE WATCH.
  ON THE FO’K’SLE HEAD.
  A VOYAGE TO THE CAPE.
  A BOOK FOR THE HAMMOCK.
  THE MYSTERY OF THE ‘OCEAN STAR.’
  THE ROMANCE OF JENNY HARLOWE.
  AN OCEAN TRAGEDY.
  MY SHIPMATE LOUISE.
  ALONE ON A WIDE WIDE SEA.
  THE GOOD SHIP ‘MOHOCK.’
  THE PHANTOM DEATH.
  IS HE THE MAN?
  HEART OF OAK.
  THE CONVICT SHIP.
  THE LAST ENTRY.
  THE TALE OF THE TEN.

Crown 8vo. cloth, 3_s._ 6_d._ each.

  A TALE OF TWO TUNNELS.
  THE DEATH SHIP.
  OVERDUE.
  WRONG SIDE OUT. (Also an Edition at 1_s._ net.)
  THE ‘PRETTY POLLY.’ With 12 Illustrations by G. E. ROBERTSON.

Popular Editions, medium 8vo. 6_d._ each.

  THE CONVICT SHIP.
  IS HE THE MAN?

LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS, 111 ST. MARTIN’S LANE, W.C.

  AN OCEAN TRAGEDY
  BY
  W. CLARK RUSSELL

  AUTHOR OF ‘THE FROZEN PIRATE’ ‘THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR’
  ‘A BOOK FOR THE HAMMOCK’ ‘A VOYAGE TO THE CAPE,’ ETC.

  [colophon]

  A NEW IMPRESSION

  LONDON
  CHATTO & WINDUS
  1911

_To HERMAN MELVILLE, Esq._

  _MY DEAR HERMAN MELVILLE_,

_In words of beauty and of kindness you lately wished me health and
content. Health, alas! you cannot give me; but content you have filled
me with. My books have done more than ever I had dared dream, by
winning for me the friendship and approval of the Author of ‘Typee,’
‘Omoo,’ ‘Moby-Dick,’ ‘Redburn,’ and other productions which top the
list of sea literature in the English tongue. I beg you to accept this
dedication as a further public avowal of my hearty admiration of your
genius._

  _In all faithfulness yours,
      W. CLARK RUSSELL._

CONTENTS

  CHAPTER                            PAGE
  I. MY COUSIN                          1
  II. THE ‘BRIDE’                      10
  III. LAURA JENNINGS                  17
  IV. IN THE SOLENT                    27
  V. LONG TOM                          39
  VI. FINN TESTS THE CREW’S SIGHT      50
  VII. SAIL HO!                        58
  VIII. WE SPEAK THE ‘WANDERER’        67
  IX. A SQUALL                         76
  X. I GO ALOFT                        84
  XI. THE PORTUGUESE BRIG              92
  XII. A SECOND WARNING               105
  XIII. I INTERPRET THE WARNING       116
  XIV. MUFFIN GOES FORWARD            126
  XV. I BOARD A WRECK                 136
  XVI. WE SIGHT A SCHOONER-YACHT      147
  XVII. WE RAISE THE SCHOONER         156
  XVIII. IS SHE THE ‘SHARK?’          166
  XIX. A MYSTERIOUS VOICE             178
  XX. MUFFIN IS PUNISHED              188
  XXI. HEAVY WEATHER                  198
  XXII. THE ‘LIZA ROBBINS’            206
  XXIII. THE COLONEL AND HER LADYSHIP 215
  XXIV. THE DUEL                      224
  XXV. THE COLONEL’S FUNERAL          235
  XXVI. WILFRID’S DELUSION            247
  XXVII. A DEAD CALM                  263
  XXVIII. A TERRIBLE NIGHT            274
  XXIX. A VOLCANIC ISLAND             286
  XXX. WE BOARD THE GALLEON           297
  XXXI. THE FIRST NIGHT               308
  XXXII. THE GALLEON’S HOLD           321
  XXXIII. THE SECOND NIGHT            334
  XXXIV. CONCLUSION                   348

AN OCEAN TRAGEDY.

CHAPTER I.

MY COUSIN.

‘Sir Wilfrid Monson, sir,’ exclaimed my man.

It was half-past ten o’clock at night, and I was in my lodgings in Bury
Street, St. James, slippers on feet, a pipe of tobacco in my hand,
seltzer and brandy at my elbow, and on my knees the ‘Sun’ newspaper,
the chief evening sheet of the times.

‘Sir Wilfrid Monson, sir.’

My cousin! thought I, starting, and looking round at my man with a
fancy in me for a moment that he had got the wrong name. ‘Show him in.’

Sir Wilfrid entered in a sort of swift headlong way, full of
nervousness and passion, as was to be seen easily enough; and then he
came to a dead stop with a wild look round the room, as if to make sure
that I was alone, and a frowning stare at my servant, who was lingering
a moment on the threshold as though suddenly surprised out of his
habits of prompt sleek attendance by a fit of astonishment.

He stood about six feet high; he had a slight stoop, and was something
awkward in arms and legs; yet you were sensible of the indefinable
quality of breeding in him the moment your eye took in his form and
face, uncommon as both were. He was forty-four years of age at this
time, and looked fifty. His hair was long and plentiful, but of an iron
grey streaked with soft white. He had a protruding under-lip, and a
nose which might have been broken for the irregularity of its outline,
with unusually high-cut nostrils. His eyes were large, short-sighted,
and grey, luminous and earnest, but with a tremulous lid that seemed
to put a quivering into their expression that was a hint in its way of
cunning and mental weakness. He had a broad, intellectual forehead,
brilliantly white teeth, high cheek bones, a large heavy chin, rounding
into a most delicately moulded throat. He was a man, indeed, at whom,
as a stranger, one might catch one’s self staring as at something
sufficiently puzzling to be well worth resolving. Ill-looking he was
_not_, and yet one seemed to seek in vain for qualities of body or mind
to neutralise to the sight what was assuredly a combination of much
that was uncomely, and indeed, in one or two directions, absolutely
grotesque. But then I had the secret.

The long and short of it was, my cousin, Sir Wilfrid Monson, was not
entirely straight-headed. Everything was made clear to the mind, after
a glance at his strange, weak, yet striking profile, with the hint
that there had been madness in his mother’s family. He was the eighth
baronet, and on his father’s side (and that was my side, I am thankful
to say) all had been sound as a bell; but my uncle had fallen in love
with the daughter of a Scotch peer whose family were tainted with
insanity--no matter her real name: the Lady Elizabeth will suffice. He
was frankly warned by the old Earl, who was not too mad to be candid,
but the lovesick creature grinned in his lordship’s face with a wild
shake of the head at the disclosure, as though he saw no more in it
than a disposition to end the engagement. Then the honest old madman
carried him to a great window that overlooked a spacious sweep of lawn,
and pointed with a bitter smile and a despairful heave of the shoulders
to three women walking, two of whom were soberly clad in big bonnets
and veils down their back, whilst the third, who was between them, and
whose arms were locked in the others’, glided forwards as though her
feet travelled on clockwork rollers, whilst she kept her head fixedly
bent, her chin upon her breast, and her gaze rooted upon the ground;
and as the amorous baronet watched--the Earl meanwhile preserving his
miserable smile as he held his gouty forefinger levelled--he saw the
down-looking woman make an effort to break away from her companions,
but without ever lifting her head.

‘That’s Lady Alice,’ said the Earl, ‘speechless and brainless! Guid
preserve us! And the Lady Elizabeth is her seester.’

‘Ay, that may be,’ answers the other; ‘but take two roses growing side
by side: because some venomous worm is eating into the heart of one and
withering up its beauty, is the other that is radiant and flawless to
be left uncherished?’

‘Guid forbid!’ answered the Earl, and then turned away with a weak
_hech! hech!_ that should have proved more terrifying to one’s
matrimonial yearnings than even the desolate picture of the three
figures stalking the emerald-green sward.

These were dim memories, yet they flashed into my head with the
swiftness of thought, along with the workings of the eager conjecture
and lively wonder raised in me by Wilfrid’s visit, and by his peculiar
aspect, too, during the few moments’ interval of pause that followed
his entrance. My servant shut the door; Wilfrid looked to see that it
was closed, then approached me with a sort of lifting of his face as
of a man half choked with a hurry and passion of sentences which he
wants to be quit of all at once in a breath, staggering as he moved,
his right arm outstretched with a rapid vibration of the hand at the
wrist; and, without delivering himself of a syllable, he fell into a
chair near the table, dashing his hat to the floor as he did so, buried
his face in his arms, and so lay sobbing in respirations of hysteric
fierceness.

This extraordinary behaviour amazed and terrified me. I will not deny
that I at first suspected the madness that lurked as a poison in his
blood had suddenly obtained a strong hold, and that he had come to see
me whilst seized with a heavy fit. I put down my pipe and adopted a
steadier posture, so to speak, in my chair, secretly hoping that the
surprise his manner or appearance had excited in my valet would render
the fellow curious enough to hang about outside to listen to what might
pass at the start. I kept my eyes fixed upon my cousin, but without
offering to speak, for, whatever might be the cause of the agitation
that was convulsing his powerful form with deep sobbing breathings, the
emotion was too overwhelming to be broken in upon by speech. Presently
he looked up; his eyes were tearless, but his face was both dusky and
haggard with the anguish that worked in him.

‘In the name of Heaven, Wilfrid,’ I cried, witnessing intelligence
enough in his gaze to instantly relieve me from the dread that had
possessed me, ‘what is wrong with you? what has happened?’

He drew a long tremulous breath and essayed to speak, but was
unintelligible in the broken syllable or two he managed to utter. I
poured what sailors term a ‘two-finger nip’ of brandy into a tumbler,
and added a little seltzer water to the dram. He seized the glass with
a hand that shook like a drunkard’s, and emptied it. But the draught
steadied him, and a moment after he said in a low voice, while he
clasped his hands upon the table with such a grip of each other that
the veins stood out like whipcord: ‘My wife has left me.’

I stared at him stupidly. The disclosure was so unexpected, so wildly
remote from any conclusion my fears had arrived at, that I could only
look at him like a fool.

‘Left you!’ I faltered, ‘what d’ye mean, Wilfrid? Refused to live you?’

‘No!’ he exclaimed with a face darkening yet to the effort it cost
him to subdue his voice, ‘she has eloped--left me--left her baby
for--for--’ he stopped, bringing his fist to the table with a crash
that was like to have demolished everything upon it.

‘It is an abominable business,’ said I soothingly; ‘but it is not to
be bettered by letting feeling overmaster you. Come, take your time;
give yourself a chance. You are here, of course, to tell me the story.
Let me have it quietly. It is but to let yourself be torn to pieces to
suffer your passion to jockey your reason.’

‘She has left me!’ he shrieked, rising bolt upright from his chair, and
lifting his arms with his hands clenched to the ceiling. ‘Devil and
beast! faithless mother! faithless wife! May God----’

I raised my hand, looking him full in the face. ‘Pray sit, Wilfrid.
Lady Monson has left you, you say. With or for whom?’

‘Hope-Kennedy,’ he answered, ‘Colonel Hope-Kennedy,’ bringing out
the words as though they were rooted in his throat. ‘My good friend
Hope-Kennedy, Charles; the man I have entertained, have hunted
with, assisted at a time when help was precious to him. Ay, Colonel
Hope-Kennedy. That is the man she has left me for, the fellow that she
has abandoned her baby for. It is a dream--it is a dream! I loved her
so. I could have kissed her breast, where her heart lay, as a Bible for
truth, sincerity, and all beautiful thought.’

He passed his hand over his forehead and seated himself again, or
rather dropped into his chair, resting his chin upon the palm of his
hand with the nails of his fingers at his teeth, whilst he watched
me with a gaze that was rendered indescribably pathetic by the soft
near-sighted look of his grey eyes under the shadow of his forehead,
that had a wrinkled, twisted, even distorted aspect with the pain his
soul was in. There was but one way of giving him relief, and that was
by plying him with questions to enable him to let loose his thoughts.
He extended his hand for the brandy and mixed himself a bumper. There
was little in spirits to hurt him at such a time as this. Indeed I
believe he could have carried a whole bottle in his head without
exhibiting himself as in the least degree oversparred. This second dose
distinctly rallied him, and now he lay back in his chair with his arms
folded upon his breast.

‘When did your wife leave you, Wilfrid?’

‘A week to-day.’

‘You know, of course, without doubt, that Hope-Kennedy is the man she
has gone off with?’

He nodded savagely, with a smile like a scowl passing over his face.

‘But how do you know for certain?’ I cried, determined to make him talk.

He pulled a number of letters from his side-pocket, overhauled them,
found one, glanced at it, and handed it to me with a posture of the arm
that might have made one think it was some venomous snake he held.

‘This was found in my wife’s bedroom,’ said he, ‘read it to yourself.
Every line of it seems to be written in fire here.’ He struck his
breast with his fist.

What I am telling happened a long time ago, as you will notice
presently. The letter my cousin handed to me I read once and never saw
again, and so, as you may suppose, I am unable to give it as it was
written. But the substance of it was this: It was addressed to Lady
Monson. The writer called her, I recollect, ‘my darling,’ ‘my adorable
Henrietta.’ It was all about the proposed elopement, a complete sketch
of the plan of it, and the one document Sir Wilfrid could have prayed
to get hold of, had he any desire to know what had become of his
wife, and on what kind of rambles she and her paramour had started.
The letter was signed, boldly enough, ‘Frank Hope-Kennedy,’ and was
filled with careful instructions to her how and when to leave her
house. Railroads were few and far between in those days. Sir Wilfrid
Monson’s estate was in Cumberland, and it was a long journey by coach
and chaise to the town that was connected with the metropolis by steam.
But the Colonel had made every arrangement for her ladyship, and it was
apparent from his instructions that she had managed her flight first by
driving to an adjacent village, where she dismissed the carriage with
orders for it to return for her at such and such an hour; then, when
her coachman was out of sight, she entered a postchaise that was in
readiness and galloped along to a town through which the stage coach
passed. By this coach she would travel some twenty or thirty miles,
then post it to the terminus of the line that conveyed her to London.
But all this, though it ran into a tedious bit of description, was but
a part of the gallant Colonel’s programme. Her ladyship would arrive
in London at such and such an hour, and the Colonel would be waiting
at the station to receive her. They would then drive to a hotel out
of Bond Street, and next morning proceed to Southampton, where the
‘Shark’ lay ready for them. It was manifest that Colonel Hope-Kennedy
intended to sail away with Lady Monson in a vessel named the ‘Shark.’
He devoted a page of small writing to a description of this craft,
which, I might take it--though not much in that way was to be gathered
from a landsman’s statement--was a large schooner yacht owned by
Lord Winterton, from whom the Colonel had apparently hired it for an
indefinite period. He assured his adorable Henrietta that he had spared
neither money nor pains to render the vessel as luxurious in _cuisine_,
cabin fittings, and the like as was practicable in a sea-going fabric
in those days. He added that what his darling required for the voyage
must be hastily purchased at Southampton. She must be satisfied with
a very slender wardrobe; time was pressing; the madman to whom the
clergyman who married them had shackled her would be off in wild
pursuit, helter-skelter, flying moonwards mayhap in his delirium on the
instant of discovering that she was gone. Time therefore pressed, and
when once the anchor of the ‘Shark’ was lifted off the ground he had no
intention of letting it fall again until they had measured six thousand
miles of salt water.

I delivered a prolonged whistle on reading this. Six thousand miles
of ocean, methought, sounded intolerably real as a condition of an
elopement. My cousin never removed his eyes from my face while I read.
I gave him the letter, which he folded and returned to his pocket. He
was now looking somewhat collected, though the surging of the passion
and grief in him would show in a momentary sparkle of the eye, in a
spasmodic grin and twist of the lips, in a quick clenching of his
hands as though he would drive his finger-nails into his palms. I
hardly knew what to say, for the letter was as full a revelation of the
vile story as he could have given me in an hour’s delivery, and the
injury and misery of the thing were too recent to admit of soothing
words. Yet I guessed that it would do him good to talk.

‘Have they sailed yet, do you know?’ I inquired.

‘Yes,’ he answered, letting out his breath in a sigh as though some
thought in him had arrested his respiration for a bit.

‘How do you know?’

‘I arrived an hour ago from Southampton,’ he replied, ‘and have got all
the information I require.’

‘There cannot be much to add to what the letter contains,’ said I, ‘It
is the completest imaginable story of the devilish business.’

He looked at me oddly, and then said, ‘Ay, it tells what has happened.
But that did not satisfy me. I have gone beyond that, and know the
place they are making for.’

‘It will be six thousand miles distant, anyhow,’ said I.

‘Quite. The villain reasoned with a pair of compasses in his hand. It
is Cape Town--the other side of the world; when ’tis ice and northern
blasts with us, it is the fragrance of the moon-lily and a warm heaven
of quiet stars with them.’

He struck the table, smothering some wild curse or other behind his set
teeth, next leaped from his chair and fell to pacing the room, now and
again muttering to himself with an occasional flourish of his arm. I
watched him in silence. Presently he returned to the table and mixed
another glass of liquor. He sat lost in thought for a little, then,
with a slow lifting of his eyes, till his gaze lay steadfast on me, he
said: ‘Charlie, I am going to follow them to Cape Town.’

‘In some South African trader?’

‘In my yacht. You know her?’

‘I have never seen her, but I have heard of her as a very fine vessel.’

‘She sails two feet to the “Shark’s” one,’ he exclaimed, with a
queer gleam of satisfaction glistening in the earnest stare he kept
fastened on me. ‘I gave her square yards last year--you will know what
a great hoist of topsail, and a big squaresail under it, and a large
topgallantsail should do for such a model as the “Bride.” The “Shark”
is fore and aft only.’ He fetched his leg a smack that sounded like the
report of a pistol. ‘We’ll have ’em!’ he exclaimed, and his face turned
pale as he spoke the words.

‘Let me understand you,’ said I; ‘you propose to sail in pursuit of the
Colonel and your wife?’

He nodded whilst he clasped his hands upon the table and leaned forward.

‘What proof have you that they have started for Cape Town?’

He instantly answered: ‘The captain of the “Shark” is a man named
Fidler. My captain’s name is Finn. His wife and Mrs. Fidler are
neighbours at Southampton, and good friends. Mrs. Fidler told my
captain’s wife that her husband was superintending the equipment of
Lord Winterton’s yacht for a voyage round the world, and that the first
port of call would be Table Bay. She knew that the “Shark” had been let
by Winterton to a gentleman, but at the time of her speaking to Mrs.
Finn she did not know his name.’

‘You said just now,’ I exclaimed, ‘that you had assisted this fellow,
Hope-Kennedy, when help was precious to him. I suppose you mean that
you lent him money? How can he support the expense of a yacht, for, if
I remember rightly, the “Shark’s” burthen is over two hundred tons?’

‘I lent him money before I was married; within the last three years
he has come into a fortune of between eighty and a hundred thousand
pounds.’

I paused a moment and then said, ‘Have you thoroughly considered this
project of chasing the fugitives?’

His eyes brightened to a sudden rage, but he checked the utterance of
what rose to his lips and said with a violent effort to subdue himself:
‘I start the day after to-morrow.’

‘Alone?’

‘No, my sister-in-law will accompany me;’ then, after a breath or two,
‘_and you_.’

‘I?’

‘Oh,’ he cried, ‘it would be ridiculous in me to expect you to say at
once that you will come; but before I leave this room I shall have your
promise.’ And as he said this he stretched his arms across the table
and took my hand in both his and fondled it, meanwhile eyeing me in the
most passionate, wistful manner that can be imagined.

‘Wilfrid,’ said I softly, touched by his air and a sort of beauty as I
seemed to think that came into his strange face with the pleading of
it, ‘whatever I can do that may be serviceable to you in this time of
bitter trial, I _will_ do. But let me reason with you a little.’

‘Ay, reason,’ he responded, relinquishing my hand and folding his arms,
and leaning back in his chair.

‘I have been a sailor in my time, as you know,’ said I, ‘and have some
acquaintance with the sea, even though my experience goes no further
than a brief spell of East African and West Indian stations; and,
therefore, forgive me for inquiring your expectations. What do you
suppose? The “Shark” will have had three days’ start of you.’

‘Five days,’ he interrupted.

‘Five days, then. Do you expect to overhaul her at sea, or is it your
intention to crowd on to the Cape, await her arrival there, or, if
you find that she has already sailed, to follow her to the next port,
providing you can learn it?’

‘You have named the programme,’ he answered. ‘I shall chase her. If I
miss her I shall wait for her at Table Bay.’

‘She may get there before you,’ I said, ‘and be under way for another
destination whilst you are still miles to the nor’ard.’

‘No,’ he cried hotly, ‘we shall be there first; but we shall not need
to go so far. Her course must be our course, and we shall overhaul her;
don’t doubt that.’

‘But put it,’ said I, ‘first of all, that you _don’t_ overhaul her. You
may pass her close on a dark night with never a guess at her presence.
She may be within twenty miles of you on a clear, bright day, and not
a creature on board suspect that a shift of helm by so much as half a
point would bring what all hands are dying to overhaul within eyeshot
in half an hour.’

He listened with a face clouded and frowning with impatience; but I was
resolved to weaken if I could what seemed to me an insane resolution.

‘Count upon missing her at sea, for I tell you the chances of your
picking her up are all against you. Well, now, you arrive at Table Bay
and find that the “Shark” sailed a day or two before for some port of
which nobody knows anything. What will you do then? How will you steer
your “Bride”? For all you can tell, this man Hope-Kennedy may make for
the Pacific Islands by way of Cape Horn, or he may head north-east for
the Mozambique and the Indian waters, or south-east for the Australias.
It is but to let fly an arrow in the dark to embark on such a quest.’

He lay back looking at me a little without speaking, and then said, in
a more collected manner than his face might promise, ‘I may miss this
man upon the high seas; I _may_ find his yacht has arrived and gone
again when I reach Table Bay; and I _may not_ know, as you say, in what
direction to seek her if there be no one in Cape Town able to tell
me what port she has started for; but’--he drew a deep breath--‘the
pursuit gives me a chance. You will admit that?’

‘Yes, a chance, as you say.’

‘A chance,’ he continued, ‘that need not keep me waiting long for it to
happen. D’ye think I could rest with the knowledge that that scoundrel
and the woman he has rendered faithless to me are close yonder?’ he
exclaimed, pointing as though there had come a vision of the Atlantic
before his mind’s eye, and he saw the yacht afloat upon it. ‘Who’s to
tell me that before the month is out our friend the Colonel will not be
drifting somewhere fathoms deep with a shot through his heart?’

‘If you catch him you will shoot him?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘And Lady Monson?’

He looked down upon his hands without answering.

‘I am a single man,’ said I, ‘and am, therefore, no doubt disqualified
from passing an opinion. But I vow to heaven, Wilfrid, if my wife
chose to leave me for another man, I would not lift a finger either
to regain her or to avenge myself. A divorce would fully appease me.
Who would not feel gay to be rid of a woman whose every heart-throb
is a dishonour? What more unendurable than an association rendered an
incomparable insult, and the basest lie under heaven, by one’s wife’s
secret abhorrence and her desire for another?’

On a sudden he sprang to his feet as though stabbed. ‘Cease, for
Christ’s sake!’ he shouted. ‘The more truthful your words are, the more
they madden me. If I could tear her from me,’ clutching at his breast
in a wild, tragical way--‘if I could cleanse my heart of her as you
would purify a vessel of what has lain foul and poisonous in it; if
disgust would but fall cool on my resentment and leave me loathing her
merely; if--if--if! But it is _if_ that makes the difference betwixt
hell and heaven in this bad world of unexpected things.’ He sat afresh,
passing the back of his hand over his brow, and sighing heavily. ‘There
is no _if_ for me,’ said he. ‘I love her passionately yet, and so hate
her besides that----’ He checked himself with a shake of the head.
‘No, no, perhaps not when it _came_ to it,’ he muttered as though
thinking aloud. ‘We are wasting time,’ he cried, pulling out his watch.
‘Charlie, you will accompany me?’

‘But you say you start the day after to-morrow?’

‘Yes.’

‘From Southampton?’

‘Yes.’

‘And, should you find the “Shark” gone when you arrive at the Cape----’

‘Well?’

‘Ay,’ said I, ‘that’s just it. We should be like Adam and Eve, with all
the world before us where to choose.’

‘Charlie, will you come? I counted upon you from the moment of forming
my resolution. You have been a sailor. You are the one man of them all
that I should turn to in such a time as this. Say you will come. Laura
Jennings, my wife’s--my--my sister-in-law I mean--will accompany us.
Did I tell you this? Yes; I recollect. She is a stout-hearted little
woman, as brave as she is beautiful, and so shocked, so shocked!’ He
clasped his hands upon his brow, lifting his eyes. ‘She would pass
through a furnace to rescue her sister from this infamy. Come!’

‘You give me no time.’

‘Time! You have all to-morrow. You may easily be on board by four
o’clock in the afternoon on the following day. Time! A sailor knows
nothing of time. I must have you by my side, Charlie. We shall meet
them, and I shall need a friend. The support and help of your company,
too----’

‘Will your yacht be ready for sea by the day after to-morrow?’

‘She is ready now.’

‘Your people will have worked expeditiously,’ said I, fencing a little,
for he was leaning towards me and devouring me with his eyes, and I
found it impossible to say yes or no right off.

‘Will you come?’

‘How many form your party?’

‘There is myself, there is Laura, then you, then a maid for my
sister-in-law, and my man, and yours if you choose to bring him.’

‘In short, there will be three of us,’ said I; ‘no doctor?’

‘We cannot be too few. What would be the good of a doctor? Will you
come?’

‘Do you sleep in town to-night?’

‘Yes,’ he replied, naming a hotel near Charing Cross.

‘Well, then, Wilfrid,’ said I, ‘you must give me to-night to think the
thing over. What are your plans for to-morrow?’

‘I leave for Southampton at ten. Laura arrives there at six in the
evening.’

‘Then,’ said I, ‘you shall have my answer by nine o’clock to-morrow
morning. Will that do?’

‘It _must_ do, I suppose,’ said he wearily, moving as if to rise, and
casting a dull, absent sort of look at his watch.

A quarter of an hour later I was alone.

CHAPTER II.

THE ‘BRIDE.’

Time was when I had been much thrown with my cousin. I had served in
the Royal Navy for a few years, as I have said, but abandoned it on
my inheriting a very comfortable little fortune from my father, who
survived my mother a few months only. I say I quitted the sea then,
partly because I was now become an independent man, partly because
I was comparatively without influence and so found the vocation
unpromising, and partly because my frizzling equatorial spells of
service had fairly sickened me of the life.

It was then that Wilfrid, who was a bachelor, and my senior by some ten
years or thereabouts, invited me down to Cumberland, where I hunted
and shot with him and passed some merry weeks. He took a great liking
to me, and I was often with him, and we were much together in London.
There came a time, however, when he took it into his head to travel.
He thought he would go abroad and see the world; not Paris, Brussels,
and Rome, but America and the Indies and Australia--a considerable
undertaking in those ambling days of the tea waggon and the cotton
kettle-bottom, when the passage from the Thames to Bombay occupied four
months, and when a man who had made a voyage round the world believed
he had a right to give himself airs.

Well, my cousin sailed; I went down to Gravesend with him and bade him
good-bye there. His first start was for New York, and then he talked
of proceeding to the West Indies and afterwards to the Cape, thence to
India or Australia, and so on. He was away so long that the very memory
of him grew dim in me, till one day I heard some men in a club that I
belonged to speaking about the beautiful Lady Monson. I pricked up my
ears at this, for Monson is my name and the word caught me instantly,
and, gathering from the talk that one of the group, a young baronet
with whom I was well acquainted, could satisfy my curiosity about the
lady, I waited till he was alone and then questioned him.

He told me that Lady Monson was my cousin’s wife; Sir Wilfrid had
met her at Melbourne and married her there. She was the daughter of
a squatter, a man of small beginnings, who had done amazingly well.
She was exceedingly beautiful, my young friend assured me. He had met
her twice at county balls, and had never seen her like for dignity,
grace, and loveliness of form and face. He told me that she was very
fond of the sea, so some friends or acquaintances of hers had informed
him, and that, to gratify her taste in this way, Sir Wilfrid sold his
cutter--a vessel of twenty tons, aboard which I had made one or two
excursions with him--and replaced her by a handsome schooner which he
had rechristened the ‘Bride.’ I understood from the young baronet that
my cousin and his wife were then away cruising in the Mediterranean.

I had not before heard of Wilfrid’s marriage, and, though for the
moment I was a little surprised, and perhaps vexed, that he had never
communicated so interesting a piece of news as this to me, who, as a
blood relation and an intimate friend, had a claim upon his candour and
kindness, yet on reflection I judged that his memory had been weakened
by separation as mine had; and then I considered that he was so much
engrossed by his wife as to be able to think of little besides, whilst,
though he had then been married many months, he had apparently spent
with Lady Monson a good deal of his time out of England.

About six weeks before the opening of this story I met him in Bond
Street. I was passing him, for time and travel had wonderfully changed
him, and in his long hair and smooth face I must certainly have
failed, in the hurry of the pavement, to have recognised the cropped
and bewhiskered young fellow whom I had taken leave of at Gravesend,
but for his starting and his peculiar way of peering at me. My rooms
were conveniently near; I carried him to them, and a couple of hours
passed whilst he told me of his adventures. I noticed that he said
much less about his wife than I should have expected to hear from him.
He referred to her, indeed; praised her beauty, her accomplishments,
with an almost passionate admiration in his way of speaking, yet I
remarked a sort of uneasiness in his face too, a kind of shadowing as
though the having to speak of his wife raised thoughts which eclipsed
or dimmed the brightness of the holiday memories he was full of. Still
I was so little sure that when I came to think it over I was convinced
it was mere fancy on my part, or at the worst I took it that, though
he was worth ten thousand a year, she might be making him uneasy by
extravagance, or there might have been a tiff between them before
leaving his home to come to London, the memory of which would worry a
man of his temperament, a creature of nerves, and tainted besides, as
you know. He told me he was in London for a couple of days on a matter
of business, and that he had asked Lady Monson to accompany him, but
she had said it vexed her to leave her baby for even a day, and that it
was out of the question to subject the bairn to the jolting, risks, and
fatigue of a long journey. He looked curiously as he said this, but the
expression fled too nimbly from his face to be determinable.

What was I doing? When would it suit me to visit him? If I had no
better engagement would I return with him? But, though I had missed
nothing of the old cordiality in his greeting and in his conversation
that had reference to our bygone jinks and to his travels, his
invitation--if invitation it could be called--was lifeless. So much so,
indeed, that it was as good or bad as his telling me he did not want me
_then_, however welcome I might be by-and-by. We parted, and I did not
see or hear of him again until he came, as I have related, to tell me
that his wife had eloped with Colonel Hope-Kennedy.

I had now to decide how to act, and I was never more puzzled or
irresolute in the whole course of my life. Had he proposed an ocean
cruise as a mere yachting trip, I should have accepted the offer right
out of hand.

The sea, as a vocation, I did not love; but very different from the
discipline of a man-of-war’s quarter-deck, and the fever-breeding
tedium of stagnant and broiling stations, was the business of
navigating the blue brine in a large richly-equipped yacht, of
chasing the sun as one chose, of storing one’s mind with memories of
the glittering pageantry of noble and shining rivers, and green and
sparkling scenes of country radiant and aromatic with the vegetation
of tropic heights and distant sea-board cities, past the gleam of
the coral strand with a scent of sandalwood in the offshore breeze,
and boats of strange form and rig, gay as aquatic parrots, sliding
along the turquoise surface to the strains of a chant as Asiatic as
the smell of the hubble-bubble. No man ever loved travel more than I;
only, unfortunately, in my time, when I had the right sort of health
and spirit for adventure, journeys by land and by sea were tedious and
fatiguing. Very few steamers were afloat: one might have sought in vain
for a propeller to thrash one to the world’s end with the velocity of
a gale of wind. I had often a mind, after Wilfrid had started on his
voyage to various parts of the world, to follow his example; but I
would shake my head when I came to think of the passenger ship, the
chance of being locked up for months with a score or two of people,
half of whom might prove disagreeable, not to mention indifferent
food and a vile ship’s cook, with weeks of equatorial deadness, and
everything to be gone through again as one went from place to place by
sea, and myself companionless the while.

But a yachting cruise was another matter, and I say I should have
accepted Wilfred’s proposal without an instant’s reflection, even if
I had had to be on board by noon next day, but for the extraordinary
_motive_ of the trip. It was very plain that he had no clear perception
of his own programme. He talked as though everything that happened
would correspond with his anticipations. He seemed cocksure, for
instance, of overhauling the ‘Shark’ in mid-ocean, when in reality the
possibility of such an encounter was so infinitesimally small that no
man in his senses would dream of seriously entering it as an item in
his catalogue of chances. Then, supposing him to miss the ‘Shark,’ he
was equally cocksure of arriving at Table-Bay before her. The ‘Bride’
might be the swifter vessel, but the course was six thousand miles and
more; the run might occupy two and perhaps three, ay, and even four
months, and, though I did not make much of the ‘Shark’s’ five days’
start, yet, even if the ‘Bride’ outsailed her by four feet to one, so
much of the unexpected must enter as conditions of so long a run and so
great a period of time--calms, headwinds, disaster, strong favourable
breezes for the chased, sneaking and baffling draughts of air for the
pursuer--that it was mere madness to reckon with confidence upon the
‘Bride’s’ arrival at Cape Town before the ‘Shark.’ So that, as there
was no certainty at all about it, what was to follow if my cousin
found that the runaways had sailed from Cape Town without leaving the
faintest hint behind them as to their destination!

Moreover, how could one be sure that the Colonel and Lady Monson would
not change their minds and make for American or Mediterranean ports?
Their determination to put the whole world between them and England
was not very intelligible, seeing that our globe is a big one, and
that scoundrels need not travel far to be lost to the eye. If Lady
Monson discovered that she had left behind her the remarkable letter
which Wilfrid had given to me to read, then it would be strange if she
and the Colonel did not change their programme, unless, indeed, they
supposed that Wilfrid would never dream of following them upon the high
seas.

But these were idle speculations; they made no part of my business.
Should I accompany my cousin on as mad an undertaking as ever passion
and distraction could hurry him into? I was heartily grieved for the
poor fellow, and I sincerely desired to be of use to him. It might be
that after we had been chasing for a few weeks his heart would sicken
to the sight hour after hour of the bare sea-line, and then perhaps,
if I were with him, I might come to have influence enough over his
moods to divert him from his resolution, and so steer us home again;
for I would think to myself, grant that we fall in with the ‘Shark,’
what can Wilfred do? Would he arm his men and board her? Yachtsmen are
a peaceful body of sea-farers, and before it could come to a boarding
match and a hand-to-hand fight, he would have to satisfy his crew that
they had signed articles to sell their lives as well as work his ship.
To be sure, if the yachts fell within hail and Sir Wilfrid challenged
the Colonel, the latter would not, it may be supposed, decline the duel.

But, view the proposal as I might, I could see nothing but a mad
scheme in it; and I think it must have been two o’clock in the morning
before I had made up my mind, so heartily did I bother myself with
considerations; and then, after reflecting that there was nothing to
keep me in England, that my cousin had come to me as a brother and
asked me in a sense to stand by him as a brother, that the state of
his mind imposed it almost as a pious obligation upon me to be by his
side in this time of extremity and bitter anguish, that the quest was
practically so aimless--the excursion was almost certain to end on this
side the Cape, or, to put it at the worst, to end at Table Bay, which,
after all, would prove no formidable cruise, but, on the contrary, a
trip that must do me good and kill the autumn months very pleasantly--I
say that, after lengthily reflecting on these and many other points and
possibilities of the project, I made up my mind that I would sail with
him.

Next morning I despatched my man with a note--a brief sentence: ‘_I
will be on board to-morrow by four_,’ and received Wilfrid’s reply,
written in an agitated sprawling hand: ‘_God bless you! Your decision
makes a double-barrelled weapon of my purpose. I have not slept a wink
all night--my fifth night of sleeplessness; but I shall feel easier
when the clipper keel of the “Bride” is shearing through it in hot
and sure pursuit. I start in a quarter of an hour for Southampton.
Laura will be overjoyed to hear that you are to be one of us; from
the moment of my determining to follow that hell-born rascal she has
been exhorting me to choose a companion--of my own sex, I mean, but
it would have to be you or nix. My good angel be praised, ’tis all
right now! We’ll have ’em, we’ll have ’em! Mark me! Would to heaven
the pistol-ball had the power to cause in the heart of a ruffian and
a seducer the intolerable mental torments he works for another ere it
fulfilled its mission by killing him!_’ He signed himself, ‘_Yours ever
affectionately._’

Wild as the tone of this note was, it was less suggestive of excitement
and passion and restlessness than the writing. I locked it away, and
possess it still, and no memorial that I can put my hand on has its
power of lighting up the past. I never look at it without living
again in the veritable atmosphere and colour and emotions of the
long-vanished days.

Being a bachelor, my few affairs which needed attention were speedily
put in order. My requirements in regard to apparel for a voyage to the
Cape I exactly knew, and supplied them in three or four hours. The
railroad to Southampton had been opened some months, so I should be
spared a long and tiresome journey by coach. By ten o’clock that night
I was ready bag and baggage--a creditable performance in a man who for
some years had been used to a lounging, inactive life. I offered to
take my servant, but he told me he was a bad sailor and afraid of the
water, and was without curiosity to view foreign parts; so I paid and
discharged him, not doubting that I should be able to manage very well
without a man; and, leaving what property I could not carry with me in
charge of my landlord, I next morning took my departure for Southampton.

I believe I did not in the least degree realise the nature of the queer
adventure I had consented to embark on until I found myself in a wherry
heading in the direction of a large schooner-yacht that lay a mile away
out upon Southampton Water. She was the ‘Bride,’ the boatman told me,
and the handsomest vessel of her kind that he knew.

‘A finer craft than the “Shark”?’ said I.

‘Whoy yes,’ he answered, ‘bigger by fourteen or fifteen ton, but Oi
dunno about _foiner_. The “Shark” has the sweeter lines, Oi allow; but
that there “Bride,”’ said he with a toss of his head in the direction
of the yacht, sitting with his back upon her as he was, ‘has got the
ocean-going qualities of a line-of-battle ship.’

‘Take a race between them,’ said I, ‘which would prove the better ship?’

‘Whoy, in loight airs the “Shark,” Oi daresay, ’ud creep ahead. In
ratching, too, in small winds she’d go to wind’ard of t’other as
though she was warping that way. But in anything loike a stiff breeze
yonder “Bride” ’ud forereach upon and weather the “Shark” as easy as
swallowing a pint o’ yale, or my name’s Noah, which it ain’t.’

‘The “Shark” has sailed?’

‘Oy, last week.’

‘Where bound to, d’ye know?’

‘Can’t say, Oi’m sure. Oi’ve heerd she was hired by an army gent, and
that, wherever his cruise may carry him to, he ain’t going to be in a
hurry to finish it.’

‘Does he sail alone? Or, perhaps, he takes his wife or children with
him?’

‘Well,’ said the waterman, pausing on his oars a minute or so with
a grin, whilst his damp oyster-like eyes met in a kind of squint on
my face, ‘the night afore the “Shark” sailed Oi fell in with one of
her crew, a chap named Bobby Watt; and on my asking him if this here
military gent was a-going to make the voyage alone he shuts one oye
and says “Jim,” he says, Jim being one of my names, not Noah, “Jim,”
says he, “when soldiers go to sea,” says he, “do they take pairosols
with ’em? and are bonnet boxes to be found ’mongst their luggage? Tell
ye what it is, Jim,” he says, “they can call yachting an innocent
divarsion, but bet your life, Jim,” says he, “’taint all as moral as it
looks!” by which Oi understood,’ said the waterman, falling to his oars
again, ‘that the military gent hain’t sailed alone in the “Shark,” nor
took his wife with him neither, if so be he’s a wedded man.’

We were now rapidly approaching the ‘Bride,’ and as there was little
to be learnt from the waterman, I ceased to question him, whilst I
inspected the yacht as a fabric that was to make me a home for I knew
not how long. Then it was, perhaps, that the full perception of my
undertaking and of my cousin’s undertaking, too, for the matter of
that, broke in upon me with the picture of the fine vessel straining
lightly at her cable, whilst past her ran the liquid slope into airy
distance, where, in the delicate blue blending of azure radiance
floating down and mingling with the dim cerulean light lifting off the
face of the quiet waters, you witnessed a faint vision of dashes of
pale green and gleaming foreshore, with blobs and films of land beyond,
swimming, as it seemed, in the autumn haze and distorted by refraction.
It was the Isle of Wight, and the shore on either hand went yawning to
it till it looked a day’s sail away; and I suppose it was the sense
of distance that came to me with the scene of the horizon past the
yacht, touched with hues illusive enough to look remote, that rendered
realisation of Wilfrid’s wild programme sharp in me as I directed a
critical gaze at the beautiful fabric we were nearing.

And beautiful she was--such a gallant toy as an impassioned sweetheart
would love to present to the woman he adored. In those days the memory
of the superb Baltimore clippers and of the moulded perfections of the
schooners which traded to the Western Islands and to the Mediterranean
for the season’s fruits, was still a vital inspiration among the
shipwrights and yacht-builders of the country. I had never before seen
the ‘Bride,’ but I had no sooner obtained a fair view of her, first
broadside on, then sternwise, as my boatman made for the starboard
gangway, than I fell in love with her. She had the beam and scantling
of a revenue cutter, with high bulwarks, and an elliptical stern, and
a bow with the sheer of a smack, but elegant beyond expression with
its dominating flair at the catheads, where it fell sharpening to a
knife-like cutwater, thence rounding amidships with just enough swell
of the sides to delight a sailor’s eye.

The merest landsman must instantly have recognised in her the fabric
and body of a sea-going craft of the true pattern. This was delightful
to observe. The voyage might prove a long one, with many passages of
storm in it, and the prospect of traversing the great oceans of the
world; and one would naturally want to make sure in one’s floating
home of every quality of staunchness and stability. A vessel, however,
of over two hundred tons burthen in those times was no mean ship.
Crafts of the ‘Bride’s’ dimensions were regularly trading as cargo and
passenger boats to foreign parts; so that little in my day would have
been made of any number of voyages round the world in such a structure
as Sir Wilfrid’s yacht. It is different now. Our ideas have enlarged
with the growth of the huge mail boat, and a voyage in a yacht driven
by steam and of a burthen considerably in excess of many West Indiamen,
which half a century ago were regarded as fine large ships, is
considered a performance remarkable enough to justify the publication
of a book about it, no matter how destitute of interest and incident
the trip may have proved. The fashion of the age favoured gilt, and
forward and about her quarters and stern the ‘Bride’ floated upon the
smooth waters all ablaze with the glory of the westering sun striking
upon the embellishments of golden devices writhing to the shining form
of the semi-nude beauty that, with arms clasped Madonna-wise, sought
with an incomparable air of coyness to conceal the graces of her form
under the powerful projecting spar of the bowsprit; whilst aft the
giltwork, in scrolls, flowers, and the like, with a central wreath as
a frame for the virgin-white letters of the yacht’s name, smote the
satin surface under the counter with the sheen of a sunbeam. All this
brightness and richness was increased by her sheathing of new copper
that rose high upon the glossy bends, and sank with ruddy clearness
under the water, where it flickered like a light there, preserving yet,
even in its tremulous waning, something of the fair proportions of the
submerged parts.

The bulwarks were so tall that it was not until I was close aboard I
could distinguish signs of life on the yacht. I then spied a head over
the rail aft watching me, and on a sudden there sprang up alongside of
it a white parasol edged with black, and the gleam as it looked of a
fair girlish face in the pearly twilight of the white shelter. Then,
as I drew close, the man’s head uprose and I distinguished the odd
physiognomy of my cousin under a large straw hat. He saluted me with a
gloomy gesture of the hand, with something, moreover, in his posture
to suggest that he was apprehensive of being observed by people aboard
adjacent vessels, though I would not swear at this distance of time
that there was anything lying nearer to us than half a mile. You would
have thought some one of consequence had died on board, all was so
quiet. I lifted my hat solemnly in response to Wilfrid’s melancholy
flourish, as though I was visiting the craft to attend a funeral; the
boat then sheered alongside, and, paying the waterman his charges, I
stepped up the short ladder and jumped on deck.

CHAPTER III.

LAURA JENNINGS.

Sir Wilfrid was coming to the gangway as I entered, leaving his
companion, whom I at once understood to be Miss Laura Jennings,
standing near the wheel. He grasped my hand, gazing at me earnestly a
moment or two without speaking, and then exclaimed in a low faltering
voice, ‘You are the dearest fellow to come! you are the dearest fellow
to come! Indeed it is good, true, and noble of you.’

He then turned to a man dressed in a suit of pilot-cloth, with brass
buttons on his waistcoat and a round hat of old sailor fashion on his
head, who stood at a respectful distance looking on, and motioned to
him. He approached.

‘Charles, this is Captain Finn, the master of the yacht. My cousin, Mr.
Monson.’

Finn lifted his hat with a short scrape of his right leg abaft.

‘Glad to see you aboard, sir, glad to see you aboard,’ said he, in a
leather-lunged note that one felt he had difficulty in subduing. ‘A
melancholy errand, Mr. Monson, sir, God deliver us! But we’re jockeying
a real sweetheart, your honour, and if we ain’t soon sticking tight to
Captain Fidler’s skirts I don’t think it’ll be for not being able to
guess his course.’

He shook his head and sighed. But there lay a jolly expression in his
large protruding lobster-like eye that twinkled there like the flame
of a taper--enough of it to make me suspect that his mute-like air and
Ember-week tone of voice was a mere piece of sympathetic acting, and
that he was a merry dog enough when Wilfrid was out of sight.

‘See Mr. Monson’s luggage aboard, captain,’ said my cousin, ‘and stowed
in his cabin, and then get your anchor. There’s nothing to keep us now.’

‘Ay, ay, sir.’

‘Step this way, Charlie, that I may introduce you to my sister-in-law.’

He passed his arm through mine and we walked aft, but I noticed in him
a certain manner of cowering, so to speak, as of one who fears that
he is being watched and talked about--an involuntary illustration of
profound sensitiveness, no doubt, for, as I have said, the yacht lay
lonely, and he was hardly likely to dread the scrutiny of his own men.

The girl he introduced me to seemed about nineteen or twenty years
old. Lady Monson had been described to me as tall, stately, slow in
movement, and of a reposeful expression of face that would have been
deemed spiritless in a person wanting the eloquence of her rich and
tropic charms: so at least my club friend the young baronet had as good
as told me; and it was natural perhaps that I should expect to find her
sister something after her style in height and form, if not in colour.

Instead, she was a woman rather under than above the average stature,
fair in a sort of golden way, by which I wish to convey a complexion of
exquisite softness and purity, very faintly freckled as though a little
gold-dust had been artfully shaken over it--a hue of countenance, so
to speak, that blended most admirably with a great quantity of hair
of a dark gold, whereof there lay upon her brow many little natural
curls and short tresses which her white forehead, shining through them,
refined into a kind of amber colour. Her eyes were of violet with a
merry spirit in them, which defied the neutralising influence of the
sorrowful expression of her mouth. By some she might have been held a
thought too stout, but for my part I could see nothing that was not
perfectly graceful in the curves and lines of her figure. I will not
pretend to describe how she was dressed; in mourning I thought she was
at first when she stood at a distance. She was sombrely clad, to keep
Wilfrid’s melancholy in countenance perhaps, and I dare say she looked
the sweeter and fairer for being thus apparelled, since there is no
wear fitter than dark clothes for setting off such skin and hair as
hers. Indeed, her style of dress and the fashion of her coiffure were
the anticipation of a taste of a much later date. In those days women
brushed their hair into a plaster-like smoothness down the cheeks, then
coiled it behind the ear, and stowed what remained in an ungainly lump
at the back of the head, into which was stuck a big comb. The dress,
again, was loose about the body, as though the least revelation of the
figure were an act of immodesty, and the sleeves were what they called
_gigots_; all details, in short, combining to so ugly a result as to
set me wondering _now_ sometimes that love-making did not come to a
dead stand. Miss Laura Jennings’s dress was cut to show her figure.
The sleeves were tight, and I recollect that she wore gauntlet-shaped
gloves that clothed her arm midway to the elbow.

This which I am writing was my impression, at the instant, of the girl
with whom I was to be associated for a long while upon the ocean, and
with whom I was to share in one adventure, at all events, which I do
not doubt you will accept as amongst the most singular that ever befell
a voyager. She curtsied with a pretty old-world grace to Wilfrid’s
introduction, sending at the same time a sparkling glance full of
spirited criticism through the fringe of her lids, which drooped with a
demureness that was almost coquettish, I thought. Then she brightened
into a frank manner, whilst she extended her hand.

‘I am very pleased to meet you, Mr. Monson; glad indeed to feel sure
_now_ that you will be of our party. Sir Wilfrid has talked of you much
of late. You have acted far more kindly than you can imagine in joining
us.’

‘We have a fine vessel under us, at all events, Miss Jennings,’ said
I, with a look at the unsheltered decks which stretched under the
declining sun white as freshly-peeled almonds. ‘She seems to have been
born with the right kind of soul, Wilfrid; and I think if your skipper
will tell her quietly what is expected of her she will fulfil your
utmost expectations.’

He forced a melancholy smile which swiftly faded, and then, with a
start and a stare over the rail on either hand, he exclaimed, ‘It
makes me uneasy to be on deck, d’ye know. I feel--though ’tis stupid
enough--as if there were eyes _yonder_ and _yonder_ on the watch. This
restlessness will pass when we get to sea. Let us go below, dinner will
be ready by half-past five,’ pulling out his watch, ‘and it is now a
little after four.’

He took his sister-in-law’s hand in a brotherly, boyish way, and the
three of us descended.

The cabin was as shining and sumptuous an interior as ever I was
in, or could imagine, indeed, of a yacht’s internal accommodation.
Mirrors, hand-painted bulkheads, combinations of gilt and cream,
thick carpets, handsome lamps, silver swinging-trays, and twenty more
elegancies which I will not bore you with, made you feel, as you stood
at the foot of the companion steps, as though you had entered some
delicious, sparkling, fragrant little drawing-room. The bedrooms were
at each extremity. The berth allotted to me was a roomy, airy apartment
forward, with a stout bulkhead at the end of the short passage that
effectually closed this part of the craft from whatever might be
amidships and beyond. There was a stand of arms fixed here, and my
thoughts instantly went to Colonel Hope-Kennedy and Lady Monson, and
the crew of the ‘Shark,’ as I counted twenty fowling-pieces with long
polished barrels and bright stocks, with hooks alongside from which
hung a number of cutlasses and pistols of the sort you then found in
the small-arms chests aboard men-of-war. The pattern of these weapons
persuaded me that they had been collected in a hurry, purchased out
of hand off some Southampton or Gosport dealer in such ware. They can
signify but one sort of business, thought I; but, bless my heart! does
he _seriously_ entertain notions of boarding if we fall in with the
craft? And do his men suspect his intentions? And has he provided for
all things by shipping a fighting crew?

I peered into my berth, saw that it would make me as comfortable a
sea bedroom as it was possible to desire, and returned to the cabin,
where Wilfrid and Miss Jennings were sitting, he at a small table right
aft, sprawling upon it with his elbow, his chin in his hand, his face
gloomy with melancholy and anger, and his eyes fixed upon a porthole
through which he might just get a glimpse of green shore with a tremble
of water yellow under the western light steeping to it; she near him
on a short sofa, with her back against the vessel’s side, toying with
her hat which lay in her lap, so that I was now able to see that she
was indeed a very sweet woman to the topmost curl of gold that gleamed
upon her head. Indeed, you seemed to witness her charms as in a light
of her own making. There was something positively phosphoric in the
irradiation on her face and hair, as though in sober truth they were
self-luminous. A couple of fellows were bringing my luggage down the
hatch, but very quietly. I knew they were getting the anchor on deck
by the dim _chink chink_ of the windlass pawls, but I could hear no
other sounds, no singing out of orders, nothing save the pulsing of the
windlass barrel to indicate that we were about to start. There was an
element of solemnity in this our first step, at all events, along the
prodigious liquid highway we were about to enter that was not a little
irksome to me. After all, it was not _my_ wife who had run away, and
whom I was starting in pursuit of, and, though I keenly sympathised
with my cousin, it was impossible that I could feel or look as though I
was broken down by grief.

‘We are not a numerous party,’ said I, in a hearty way, seating myself,
‘one less, indeed, than we bargained for, Wilfrid, for I am without a
servant. My fellow funked the very name of salt water, and there was no
time to replace him.’

‘There are two stewards to wait upon you, and my own valet besides,’
said Wilfrid, bringing his eyes with an effort from the porthole,
through which he was staring, to my face. ‘Trust me to see that you are
made perfectly comfortable.’

‘My dear fellow--_comfortable_! Why this is palatial!’ I cried, with a
comprehensive sweep of my hand round the cabin; ‘much too luxurious, in
my humble opinion; don’t you think so, Miss Jennings? Only figure all
these fine things going down to swell the navies that lie green on the
Atlantic ooze.’

‘The “Bride” is a lovely boat,’ she answered, ‘and very swift, Wilfrid
says.’

‘Swift enough to serve my turn, I expect,’ said he, with what the
Scotch call a _raised_ look coming into his face.

‘But why not come on deck?’ said I; ‘no fear of being noticed, Wilfrid.
Who is there to see us, and who is there to care if anybody _should_
see us?’

He drew his tall, awkward figure together with a shake of the head.

‘Get you on deck by all means, Charles, and take Laura with you if
she will go. I have occupation to last me until the dinner-bell in my
cabin.’

‘Will you accompany me, Miss Jennings?’ said I.

‘Indeed I will,’ she exclaimed with an alacrity that exhibited her as
little disposed as myself to rest passive in the shadow of my cousin’s
heavy, resentful melancholy.

He seized my hand in both his as I rose to escort the girl on deck.
‘God bless you once again, my dear boy, for joining us. Presently I
shall feel the stronger and perhaps the brighter for having you by my
side.’ He looked wistfully, still holding my hand, at Miss Jennings, as
though he would address a word to her too, but on a sudden broke away
with a sigh like a sob, and walked hastily to the after passage, where
his cabin was.

In silence, and much affected, I handed the girl up the companion
steps. Gay and glittering as was the cabin, its inspirations were
but as those of a charnel-house compared with the sense of life and
the quickness of spirit you got by mounting on deck and entering the
shining atmosphere of the autumn afternoon, with the high blue sky
filled with the soft and reddening light of the waning luminary,
whilst already the land on either side was gathering to its green and
gold and brown the tender dyes of the evening. The distance had been
clarified by a small easterly air that had sprung up since I first
stepped on board, and the Isle of Wight hung in a soft pure mass of
many dyes upon the white gleam of the water that brimmed to it. There
was a large frigate, as I imagined her, drawing slowly up past Gosport
way, heading westwards, and the eye fastened upon her with a sort of
wonder; for, though she looked to be hull down, and the merest toy,
and indistinguishable by the careless glance as a sail, yet she was
too defined to pass for a cloud either, whilst the silver brightness
seemed impossible in canvas, and you watched her with a fancy in you
of a large bland star that would be presently afloat in the blue; and
sparkling there on the brow of the rising night. There were a few
vessels of different kinds anchored off Southampton, and the scene in
that direction looked wonderfully fair and peaceful, with the spars of
the craft gilt with sunshine, and a flash in their hulls where paint or
glass caught the declining beam, and past them the higher reaches of
the light blue water with the twinkling of little sails that carried
the gaze shorewards to the town.

All this my sight took in quickly. The men had quitted the windlass,
and were making sail upon the yacht nimbly, but so quietly, even with
a quality of stealth in their manner of pulling and hauling, that we
could not have been a stiller ship had we been a privateersman getting
under way on a dark night with a design of surprising a rich fabric or
of escaping a heavily-armed enemy. They looked a stout crew of men,
attired without the uniformity that is usual in yachting companies in
these days, though the diversity of dress was not sufficiently marked
to offend. I gathered that the vessel carried a mate as well as a
captain, and detected him in the figure of a sturdy little fellow,
with a cast in his eye and a mat of red hair under his chin, who stood
betwixt the knightheads forward, staring aloft at a hand on the topsail
yard. Captain Finn saluted the girl and me with a flourish of a hairy
paw to his hat, but was too full of business to give us further heed.

‘We shall be under way very soon now, Miss Jennings,’ said I; ‘it is a
strange voyage that we are undertaking.’

‘A sad one too,’ she answered.

‘You show a deal of courage in accompanying Wilfrid,’ I exclaimed.

‘I hesitated at first,’ said she, ‘but he seemed so sure of overtaking
the “Shark,” and pressed me so earnestly to join him, believing that
the sight of me, or that by my pleading to--to--’ She faltered,
flushing to the eyes, and half turned from me with such a tremulous
parting of her lips to the gush of the mild breeze, which set a hundred
golden fibres of her hair dancing about her ears, that I expected to
see a tear upon her cheek when she looked at me afresh. I pretended to
be interested in nothing but the movements of the men who were hoisting
the mainsail.

‘What do _you_ think of the voyage, Mr. Monson?’ she exclaimed after a
little pause, though she held her face averted as if waiting for the
flush to fade out of her cheeks.

‘It bothers me considerably,’ I answered; ‘there is nothing to make
heads or tails of in it that I can see.’

‘But why?’ and now she stole a sidelong look at me.

‘Well, first of all,’ I exclaimed, ‘I cannot imagine that there is the
faintest probability of our picking up the “Shark.” She may be below
the horizon, and we may be sailing three or four leagues apart for
days at a stretch, and neither ship with the faintest suspicion of the
other being close. The ocean is too big for a hunt of this sort.’

‘But suppose we _should_ pick her up, to use your term, Mr. Monson?’

‘Suppose it, Miss Jennings, and add this supposition: that the gallant
Colonel’--she frowned at his name, with a sweet curl of horror on her
lip as she looked down--‘who will long before have twigged us, declines
to heave-to or have anything whatever to do with us; what then?’

‘I suggested this to your cousin,’ she answered quickly; ‘it is a most
natural objection to make. He answered that if the “Shark” refused to
stop when he _hailed_ her--that is the proper term, I know--he would
compel her to come to a stand by continuing to fire at her, even if it
came to his sinking her, though his object would be to knock her mast
down to prevent her from sailing.’

I checked a smile at the expression ‘knock her mast down,’ and then
caught myself running my glance round in search of any hint of ordnance
of a persuasive kind; and now it was that I noticed for the first
time, secured amidships of the forecastle, and comfortably housed and
tarpaulined, something that my naval instincts were bound to promptly
interpret into a _Long Tom_, and of formidable calibre too, if the
right sort of hint of it was to be obtained out of its swathing. I
also observed another feature that had escaped me: I mean a bow-port
on either side the bowsprit--a detail of equipment so uncommon in a
pleasure craft as to force me to the conclusion that the apertures had
been quite newly cut and fitted.

I uttered a low whistle, whilst I found my companion’s gaze rooted upon
me with the same critical attention in the spirited blue gleam of it I
had before noticed.

‘Well!’ said I, taking a bit of a breath, ‘upon my word, though, I
should not have thought he had it in him! Yes, yonder’s a remedy,’ I
continued, nodding in the direction of the forecastle, ‘to correspond
with Wilfrid’s intentions if he’s fortunate enough to fall in with the
“Shark.” Will _she_ be armed, I wonder? It would then make the oddest
of all peppering matches.’

‘If the yacht escapes us, we are certain to meet with her at the Cape,’
said Miss Jennings.

It was idle to argue on matters of seamanship with the pretty creature.

‘Wilfrid has said little on the subject to me,’ I remarked. ‘He was
dreadfully overcome when he called to ask me to accompany him. But it
is good and brave of you to enter upon this wild experiment with a
womanly and a sisterly hope of courting the fugitive back to her right
and only resting-place. My cousin will receive her, then?’

‘He means to come between her and the consequences of her--of her
folly,’ said she, colouring again with a flash in her eye and a steady
confrontment of me, ‘let the course he may afterwards make up his mind
to pursue be what it will.’

I saw both distress and a little hint of temper in her face, and
changed the subject.

‘Have you been long in England?’

‘I arrived three months ago at Sherburne Abbey’ (my cousin’s seat in
the North). ‘You know I am an Australian?’

‘Yes, but not through Wilfrid, of whose marriage I should have learned
nothing but for hearing it talked about one day in a club. A young
baronet who had met Lady Monson was loud in her praises. He described
her as a wonderfully beautiful woman, but dark, with fiery Spanish eyes
and raven tresses’; and here I peeped at her own soft violet stars and
sunny hair.

‘Yes, she is beautiful, Mr. Monson,’ she answered sadly, ‘too beautiful
indeed. Her face has proved a fatal gift to her. What madness!’ she
exclaimed, whispering her words almost. ‘And never was there a more
devoted husband than Wilfrid. And her baby--the little lamb! Oh, how
could she do it! how could she do it!’

‘With whom has the child been placed?’ said I.

‘With a cousin--Mrs. Trevor.’

‘Oh, I know, a dear good creature; the bairn will be in excellent
hands.’

‘Sir Wilfrid was too affectionate, Mr. Monson. You know,’ she
continued, looking at me sideways, her face very grave, ‘if you
have ceased to love or to like a person, your aversion will grow in
proportion as he grows fond of you. It is not true, Mr. Monson, that
love begets love. No; if it were true, my sister would be the happiest
of women.’

‘Have you met Colonel Hope-Kennedy?’

‘Oh yes, often and often. He was a very constant visitor at Sherburne
Abbey.’

‘Pretty good-looking?’

‘Tall, very gentlemanly, not by any means handsome to my taste, but I
have no doubt many women would think him so.’

‘The name is familiar to me, but I never met the man. Did he live in
the North?’

‘No; whenever he came to Sherburne Abbey he was your cousin’s guest.’

Phew! thought I. ‘And, of course,’ I said, willing to pursue the
subject afresh, since it did not seem now to embarrass her to refer
to it, whilst I was curious to learn as much of the story as could be
got, ‘my cousin had no suspicion of the scoundrelism of the man he was
entertaining.’

‘No, nor is he to be blamed. He is a gentleman, Mr. Monson, and, like
all fine, generous, amiable natures, very, very slow to distrust
persons whom he has honoured with his friendship. When he came to me
with the news that Henrietta had left him I believed he had gone
_utterly_ mad, knowing him to be just a _little_’--she hesitated, and
ran her eyes over my face as though positively she halted merely to
the notion that perhaps _I_ was a trifle gone too; and then, clasping
her hands before her, and hanging her head so as to look as if she was
speaking with her eyes closed, she went on: ‘I was much with Henrietta,
and often when Colonel Hope-Kennedy was present. I had ridden with
them, had watched them whilst they played billiards--a game my sister
was very fond of--observed them at the piano when she was singing and
he turning the music, or when she accompanied him in a song; he sang
well. But--it might be, it is true, because I was as unsuspicious as
Wilfrid--yet I declare, Mr. Monson, that I never witnessed even so
much as a look exchanged between them of a kind to excite a moment’s
uneasiness. No! Wilfrid cannot be charged with blindness; the acting
was as exquisite as the object was detestable.’ And she flushed up
again, half turning from me with a stride towards the rail and a
wandering look at the green country, which I accepted as a hint that
she wished the subject to drop.

The yacht was now under way. They had catted, and were fishing the
anchor forwards; I noticed that the man I had taken to be the mate had
arrived aft and was at the wheel. The vessel’s head was pointing fair
for the Solent, and already you heard a faint crackling sound like a
delicate rending of satin rising from under the bows, though there was
so little weight in the draught of air that the ‘Bride’ floated without
the least perceptible list or inclination, spite of all plain sail
being upon her with the exception of the top-gallant sail.

‘Fairly started at last, Miss Jennings,’ said I.

She glanced round hastily as though disturbed in an absorbing reverie,
smiled, and then looked sad enough to weep, all in a breath.

Well, it was a solemn moment for her, I must say. She had her maid with
her, it is true; but she was the only lady on board. There was none of
her own quality with whom she could talk apart--no other woman to keep
her in countenance, so to speak, with the sympathy of presence and sex;
she was bound on a trip of which no mortal man could have dated the
termination--an adventure that might carry her all about the world for
aught she knew, for, since she was fully conscious of the very variable
weather of my cousin’s mind, to use the old phrase, she would needs be
too shrewd not to conjecture that many wild and surprising things were
quite likely to happen whilst the power of directing the movements of
the yacht remained his.

And then, again, she was in quest of her sister, without a higher hope
to support her than a fancy--that was the merest dream to my mind,
when I thought of the little baby the woman had left behind her, to
say nothing of her husband--that her passionate entreaties backing
Wilfrid’s appeals might coax her ladyship to quit the side of the
gallant figure she had run away with.

Just then the merry silver tinkling of a bell smartly rung sounded
through the open skylight, and at the same moment the form of a neat
and comely young woman arose in the companion hatch.

‘What is it, Graham?’ inquired Miss Jennings.

‘The first dinner-bell, Miss. The second will ring at the half-hour.’

The girl pulled out a watch of the size of a thumbnail and exclaimed,
‘It is already five o’clock, Mr. Monson. It cannot be a whole hour
since you arrived! I hope the time will pass as quickly when we are at
sea.’

She lingered a moment gazing shorewards, sheltering her eyes
sailor-fashion with an ungloved hand of milk-white softness, on which
sparkled a gem or two; then, giving me a slight bow, she went to
the companion and stepped down the ladder with the grace and ease
of a creature floating on wings. Ho, ho! thought I, she will have
her sea-legs anyhow; no need, therefore, Master Charles, to be _too_
officious with your hand and arm when the hour of tumblefication
comes. But that she was likely to prove a good sailor was a reasonable
conjecture, seeing that she was comparatively fresh from probably a
four months’ passage from Melbourne.

I followed her after a short interval, and then to the summons of
the second dinner-bell entered the cabin. The equipment of the table
rendered festal the sumptuous furniture of this interior with the
sparkle of silver and crystal, and the dyes of wines blending with
the central show of rich flowers. The western sunshine lay upon the
skylight, and the atmosphere was ruddy with it. One is apt to be
curious when in novel situations, and I must confess that yachting in
such a craft as this was something very new to me, not to speak of the
uncommon character one’s experiences at the onset would take from the
motive and conditions of the voyage; and this will prove my apology for
saying that, whilst I stood waiting for Wilfrid and his sister-in-law
to arrive, I bestowed more attention, furtive as it might be, upon
the two stewards and my cousin’s man than I should have thought of
obliging them with ashore. The stewards were commonplace enough, a pair
of trim-built fellows, the head one’s face hard with that habitual air
of solicitude which comes at sea to a man whose duties lie amongst
crockery and bills of fare, and whose leisure is often devoted to dark
and mysterious altercations with the cook; the second steward was
noticeable for nothing but a large strawberry-mark on his left cheek;
but Wilfrid’s man was worth a stare. I had no recollection of him, and
consequently he must have been taken into my cousin’s service since I
was last at the Abbey, as we used to call it. He had the appearance of
a man who had been bred to the business of a mute, a lanthorn-jawed,
yellow, hollow-eyed person whose age might have been five-and-twenty or
five-and-forty; hair as black as coal, glossy as grease, brushed flat
to the tenacity of sticking-plaster, and fitting his egg-shaped skull
like a wig. He was dressed in black, his trousers a little short and
somewhat tight at the ankles, where they revealed a pair of white socks
bulging with a hint of gout over the sides of a pair of pumps. He stood
behind the chair that Wilfrid would take with his hands reverentially
clasped upon his waistcoat, his whole posture indicative of humility
and resignation. Nothing could be more in harmony with the melancholy
nature of our expedition than this fellow’s countenance.

Miss Jennings arrived and took her place; she was followed by my
cousin, who walked to the table with the gait of a person following
a coffin. This sort of thing, thought I, must be suffered for a day
or two, but afterwards, if the air is not to be cleared by a rousing
laugh, it won’t be for lack of any effort on my part to tune up my
pipes.

CHAPTER IV.

IN THE SOLENT.

The dinner was exquisitely cooked, and as perfectly ordered a repast
as the most fastidious could devise or desire; but very little was
said, mainly, I suspect, because our thoughts were filled with the one
subject we could not refer to whilst the attendants hung about us. What
fell was the merest commonplace, but I noticed that whilst Wilfrid ate
little he offered no objection to the frequent replenishing of his
glass with champagne by the melancholy chap who stood behind him.

By-and-by we found ourselves alone.

‘That is very honest port; you need not be afraid of it, Charles,’ said
my cousin. ‘Do you understand gunnery?’

‘I believe I could load a piece and point it,’ said I, smiling, ‘but
beyond _that_----’

‘Have you seen the gun on the forecastle?’

‘Just the outline of a cannon,’ I answered, ‘under a smother of
tarpaulin. What is called a Long Tom, I think.’

‘You will have guessed the object of my mounting it?’ said he, with a
frown darkening his face to one of those angry moods which would sweep
athwart his mind like the deep but flitting shadows of squall clouds
over a gloomy sky sullen with the complexion of storm.

‘Yes; Miss Jennings explained,’ I answered, glancing at her and meeting
her eye, in which I seemed to find the faintest hint of rebuke, as
though she feared I might be laughing in my sleeve. ‘What’s the
calibre, Wilfrid?’

‘Eighteen pounds,’ he answered.

‘An eighteen-pounder, eh! That should bring the “Shark’s” spars about
their ears, though. Let me think: the range of an eighteen-pounder will
be, at an elevation of five degrees, a little over a mile.’

‘If,’ cried my cousin--lifting his hand as though to smite the table,
then bringing his clenched fist softly down, manifestly checked in some
hot impetuous impulse by the sense of the presence of the girl, who
regarded him with a face as serious as though she were listening to
a favourite preacher--‘if,’ he repeated, sobering his voice with the
drooping of his arm, ‘we succeed in overhauling the “Shark,” and they
refuse to heave her to, my purpose is to wreck her aloft, and _then_,
should they show fight, to continue firing at her until I sink her.’

There was a vicious expression in his eyes as he said this, to which
the peculiar indescribable trembling or quivering of the lids imparted
a singular air of cunning.

‘Is the “Shark” armed, do you know?’ said I.

‘She carries a couple of small brass pieces, I believe, for purposes of
signalling. Pop-guns,’ said he, contemptuously. ‘But I fancy she has
an armoury of her own. Lord Winterton was constantly cruising north on
shooting excursions, and it is quite likely that he let the weapons
which belong to him with the yacht.’

‘If Colonel Hope-Kennedy’s programme,’ said I, ‘includes a ramble
amongst the South Sea Islands, you may reckon upon his having equipped
himself with small arms and powder enough, if only with an eye to
man-eating rogues. But to revert to your Long Tom, Wilfrid. It should
not be hard to sink a yacht with such a piece; but you are not for
_murdering_ your wife, my dear fellow?’

‘No, no,’ said he slowly, and speaking to me, though he kept his eyes
fixed upon his sister-in-law, ‘have no fear of that. It is I that am
the murdered man.’ He pressed his hand to his heart. ‘Rather put it
thus: that when they find their vessel hulled and sinking they will get
their boats over and be very willing to be picked up by us.’

‘But your round shot may knock their boats into staves,’ said I, ‘and
what then?’

‘Our own boats will be at hand to rescue them,’ said he, now looking at
me full with an expression of relish of the argument.

‘But, my dear Wilfrid,’ said I, ‘don’t you know that when a craft
founders she has a trick of drowning most of the people aboard her,
and amongst the few survivors, d’ye see, who contrived to support
themselves by whatever lay floating might _not_ be Lady Monson!’

He took a deep breath, and said, so slowly that he seemed to articulate
with difficulty, ‘Be it so. I have made up my mind. If we overhaul the
“Shark” and she declines to heave to, I shall fire into her. The blood
of whatever follows will be upon their heads. This has been forced upon
me; it is none of my seeking. I do not mean that Colonel Hope-Kennedy
shall possess my wife, and I will take her from him alive if possible;
but rest assured I am not to be hindered from separating them though
her death should be the consequence.’

Miss Jennings clasped her fingers upon her forehead and sat motionless,
looking down. For a little I was both startled and bewildered; one
moment he talked as though his wish was that his wife should not
be harmed, and the next, in some concealed convulsion of wrath, he
betrayed a far blacker resolution than ever I could have imagined
him capable of. Yet in the brief silence that followed I had time to
rid myself of my little fit of consternation by considering, first
of all, that he was now talking just as, according to my notion, he
was acting--insanely; next, that it was a thousand to one against our
falling in with the yacht; and again, supposing we came up with her, it
was not very probable that the crew of the ‘Bride’ could be tempted,
even by heavy bribes, into a measure that might put them in jeopardy of
their necks or their liberty.

It was new dark, and the cabin lamps had been for some time lighted.
The evening looked black against the portholes and the skylight, but
the cheerfulness and beauty of the cabin were greatly heightened by
the sparkling of the oil-flames in the mirrors, the swing-trays, the
glass-like surface of the bulkheads, and so on. Miss Laura’s golden
loveliness--do not laugh at my poor nautical attempts to put this
amber-coloured, violet-eyed woman before you--showed, as one may
well suppose of such a complexion and tints, incomparably perfect,
I thought, in the soft though rich radiance diffused by the burning
sperm. I wondered that she should listen so passively to Wilfrid’s
confession of his intentions should we overhaul the ‘Shark.’ My gaze
went to her as he concluded that little speech I have just set down;
but I witnessed no alteration in as much of her face as was visible,
nor any stir as of one startled or shocked in her posture. Possibly
she did not master all the significance of his words; for how should
a girl realise the full meaning of plumping round shot out of an
eighteen-pounder into a vessel till she was made a sieve of? Or it
might be that she was of my mind in regarding the expedition as a
lunatic undertaking, and in suspecting that a few weeks of this ocean
hunt would sicken Wilfrid of his determination to chase the ‘Shark’
round the world. Or mingled with these fancies, besides, there might be
enough of violent resentment against her sister, of grief, pain, shame,
to enable her to listen with an unmoved countenance to fiercer and
wilder menaces than Wilfrid had as yet delivered himself of.

These thoughts occupied my mind during the short spell of silence that
followed my cousin’s speech. He suddenly rang a little handbell, and
his melancholy servant came sliding up to him out of the after cabin.

‘Tell Captain Finn I wish to see him--that is, if he can leave the
deck.’

The fellow mounted the steps.

‘What is the name of that gloomy-looking man of yours, Wilfrid?’

‘Muffin,’ he answered.

‘Have I not seen somebody wonderfully like him,’ said I, ‘holding on
with drunken gravity to the top of a hearse trotting home from the last
public-house along the road from the graveyard?’

Miss Laura laughed; and there was a girlish freshness and arch
cordiality in her laughter that must have put me into a good humour,
I think, had it been _my_ wife instead of Wilfrid’s that Colonel
Hope-Kennedy was sailing away with.

‘Maybe, Charles, maybe,’ he answered, with a dull smile; ‘he may have
been an undertaker’s man for all I know; though I doubt it, because
I had him from Lord ---- with a five years’ character, every word of
which has proved true. But I knew you would have your joke. The fellow
fits my temper to a hair; he has a hearse-like face, I admit; but then
he is the quietest man in the world--a very ghost; summon him, and if
he shaped himself out of thin air he couldn’t appear at your elbow more
noiselessly. That’s his main recommendation to me. Any kind of noise
now I find distracting; even music--Laura will tell you that I’ll run a
mile to escape the sound of a piano.’

At this moment a pair of pilot breeches showed themselves in the
companion-way, and down came Captain Finn. As he stood, hat in hand,
soberly clothed, with nothing more gimcrack in the way of finery upon
him than a row of brass waistcoat-buttons, I thought he looked a very
proper, sailorly sort of man. There was no lack of intelligence in his
eyes, which protruded, as from a long habit of staring too eagerly to
windward, and trying to see into the inside of gales of wind. He was
remarkable, however, for a face that was out of all proportion too
long, not for the width of his head only, but for his body; whilst his
legs, on the other hand, were as much too short, so that he submitted
himself as a person whose capacity of growth had been experimentally
distributed, insomuch that his legs appeared to have come to a full
stop when he was still a youth, whilst in his face the active principle
of elongation had continued laborious until long after the term when
Nature should have made an end.

‘A glass of wine, captain?’ said Sir Wilfrid.

‘Thank your honour. Need makes the old wife trot, they say, and I feel
a-dry--I feel a-dry.’

‘Put your hat down and sit, Finn. I want you to give my cousin, Mr.
Monson, your views respecting this--this voyage. But first, where are
we?’

‘Why,’ answered the captain, balancing the wine-glass awkwardly betwixt
a thumb and a forefinger that resembled nothing so much as a brace
of stumpy carrots, whilst he directed a nervous look from Wilfrid to
me and on to Miss Laura, as though he would have us observe that he
addressed us generally; ‘there’s Yarmouth lights opening down over
the port bow, and I reckon to be clear of the Solent by about three
bells--half-past nine o’clock.’

‘The navigation hereabouts,’ said I, ‘needs a bright look-out. The
captain may not thank us for calling him below.’

‘Lord love ’ee, Mr. Monson, sir,’ he answered, ‘the mate, Jacob Crimp,
him with the one eye slewed--if so be as you’ve noticed the man,
sir--he’s at the helm, and I’d trust him for any inshore navigation,
from the Good’ens to the Start, blindfolded. Why, he knows his
soundings by the smell of the mud.’

‘How is the weather?’ inquired my cousin.

‘Fine, clear night, sir; the stars plentiful and the moon arising; the
wind’s drawed a bit norradly, and’s briskening at that; yet it keeps a
draught, with nothing noticeable in the shape of weight in it. Well,
your honour, and you, Mr. Monson, sir, and you, my lady, all I’m sure I
can say, is, here’s luck,’ and down went the wine.

‘Captain,’ said Sir Wilfrid, ‘oblige me by giving Mr. Monson your views
of the chase we have started upon.’

Finn put down the wine-glass and dried his lips on a pocket
handkerchief of the size of a small ensign.

‘Well,’ he began, with a nervous uneasy twisting about of his legs and
feet, ‘my view’s this: Fidler isn’t likely to take any other road to
the Cape than the one that’s followed by the Indiemen. Now,’ said he,
laying a forefinger in the palm of his big hand, yellow still with
ancient stains of tar, whilst Wilfrid watched him in his near-sighted
way, leaning forward in the posture of one absorbed by what is said,
‘you may take that there road as skirting the Bay o’ Biscay and
striking the latitude of forty at about fifteen degrees east; then a
south by west half west course for the Canaries; the Equator to be cut
at twenty-five degrees west, and a straight course for Trinidad to
follow with a clean brace up to the South-east trades. What d’ye think,
sir?’

‘Oh, ’tis about the road, no doubt,’ said I, for whatever might have
been my thoughts, I had no intention to drop a discouraging syllable
then before Finn in my cousin’s hearing.

‘But,’ said the captain, eyeing me nervously and anxiously, ‘if so be
as we should have the luck to fall into that there “Shark’s” wake, you
know, we shan’t need to trouble ourselves with the course to the Cape
south of the Equator.’

‘Of course not,’ exclaimed Sir Wilfrid.

‘By which I mean to say,’ continued the captain, giving his back hair a
pull as though it were some bell-rope with which he desired to ring up
the invention or imagination that lay drowsy in his brain, ‘that if we
aren’t on to the “Shark” this side the Line it’ll be better for us to
tarn to and make up our mind to crack on all for Table Bay to be there
afore her, without further troubling ourselves about her heaving in
sight, though, of course, the same bright look-out’ll be kept.’

‘Good,’ said Wilfrid with a heavy emphatic nod; ‘that’s not to be
bettered, I think, Charles.’

‘I suppose,’ said I, addressing Finn, ‘that, though your hope will be
to pick up the “Shark” any day after a given period, and though you’ll
follow the scent of her as closely as your conjecture of Fidler’s
navigation will admit, you will still go on sweating--pray pardon this
word in its sea sense, Miss Jennings--your craft as though the one
business of the expedition was to make the swiftest possible passage to
the Cape of Good Hope?’

‘Ay, never sparing a cloth, sir, and she’s something to jockey, Mr.
Monson. You don’t know her yet, sir.’

‘The “Shark”’s a fore-and-aft schooner?’

‘Yes,’ he answered.

‘She carries a square sail, no doubt?’

‘Ay, a big ’un, but good only for running, and we ain’t without that
canvas, too, you must know,’ he added with the twinkle of humour in his
gaze that I had observed in him when Wilfrid had first made him known
to me. ‘Enough of it, Mr. Monson, to hold wind to serve a Dutchman
for a week, not to mention a torps’l and a t’gallants’l fit for a
line-o’-battle ship to ratch under.’

This was vague talk, but it pleased Wilfrid.

‘Square yards are very well,’ said I; ‘but surely they don’t allow a
vessel to look up to it as though her canvas was fore and aft only?
I merely ask for information. My marine experiences were limited to
square rigs.’

‘There’s nothen to prevent the “Bride” from looking up to it as close
as the “Shark,”’ answered Finn. ‘The yards’ll lie fore and aft; what’s
to hinder them? There ain’t no spread, sir, like what you get in ships
with your futtock rigging and backstays and shrouds in the road of
the slings elbowing their way to channels big enough for a ball-room.
Besides,’ he added, ‘suppose it should be a matter of a quarter of a
pint’s difference, we need but stow the square cloths, and then we
ain’t no worse off than the “Shark.”’

‘True,’ said I, thinking more of Miss Jennings than of what Finn was
saying: so perfect a picture of girlish beauty did she happen to be
at that instant as she leaned on her elbow, supporting her chin with
a small white hand, her form in a posture that left one side of her
face in shadow, whilst the other side lay bright, golden, and soft in
the lamplight over the table. She was listening with charming gravity,
and a countenance of sympathy whose tenderness was unimpaired by an
appearance of attention that I could not doubt was just a little
forced, since our sailor talk could not but be Greek to her. Besides,
at intervals, there was a lift of the white lid, a gleam of the violet
eye, which was like assuring one that thought was kept in the direction
of our conversation only by constraint.

I was beginning to feel the want of a cigar, and I had been sitting
long enough now to make me pine for a few turns on deck, but I durst
not be abrupt in the face of my cousin’s devouring stare at his skipper
and the pathetic spectacle of the contending passions in him as he
hearkened, now nodding, now gloomily smiling, now lying back on a
sudden with a frown which he made as if to smooth out by pressing his
hand to his brow.

‘The “Shark,”’ said I, ‘has five days’ start of us. Give her a hundred
miles a day, for the mere sake of argument; she should be, at that,
well in the heart of the Bay.’

‘By Heaven! within arm’s length of us, when you put it so!’ cried
Wilfrid, extending his hand in a wild, darting, irrelevant gesture, and
closing his fingers with a snap as though upon some phantom throat he
had seen and thought to clutch.

‘Five hundred miles,’ exclaimed Finn, apparently giving no heed to the
baronet’s action. ‘Well, sir, as a bit of supposing, there’s no harm
in it. It might be more. _I_ should allow less. There’s been no weight
of wind down Channel. What’s happened then to blow her along? But
there’s no telling. Anyhow,’ said he, picking up his cap and rising,
‘there’s nothing in five hundred miles, no, nor in a thousand, to make
us anxious with such a race-course as lies afore us. ’Tain’t as if we’d
got to catch the craft before she’d made Madeira.’ He paused, looking a
little irresolute, and then said, addressing Wilfrid, ‘I don’t know if
there’s anything more your honour would like to ask of me?’

‘No, not for the moment,’ answered my cousin dully, with the air of a
man languid with a sudden sense of weariness or exhaustion following
some internal fiery perturbation; ‘it is just this, Finn. Mr. Monson
served in the Royal Navy for a few years, and I was anxious that he
should be at once made acquainted with your views, so that he and you
could combine your experiences. You have chased in your time, Charles,
no doubt!’

‘Not very often, and then always something that was in sight,’ I
answered with a slight glance at Finn, whose gaze instantly fell whilst
he exclaimed:

‘Well, sir, any suggestion you can make I’ll be mighty thankful to
receive. But it’ll be all plain sailing, I don’t doubt; it’ll be all
plain sailing,’ he repeated, rumbling out the words in a stifled
hurricane note, and, giving us a bow, he went up the steps.

Wilfrid gazed at me vacantly when I proposed a cigar on deck.

‘What do you think of Finn?’ he asked.

‘He seems as honest a man and as practical a seaman as needs be. But he
has had command of this yacht since you bought her?’

He nodded. ‘Well then, of course, you know all about him. He has
clearly been a merchant Jack in his day, and has all necessary
experience, I dare say, to qualify him for this charge. But I say,
Wilfrid, let us go on deck, my dear fellow. Miss Jennings, I am sure,
will not object to the scent of a cigar in the open air.’

‘Nor down here either,’ she exclaimed.

‘I shall remember that,’ said I gratefully. ‘Now, Wilfrid, won’t
you----?’

‘No,’ he interrupted; ‘I am drowsy, and thank Heaven for a sensation
that threatens to become a novelty. If I get no rest to-night it will
be my eighth of sleeplessness, and I must humour myself; yes, I must
humour myself,’ he repeated, talking in a sort of muttering way, and
rising.

I advised him by all means to withdraw if he really felt tired, and
further recommended a boatswain’s caulker of whisky to top off the
champagne and port he had been swallowing.

‘How will you amuse yourself, Laura?’ he exclaimed, turning to her. ‘It
will be dull work for you, I fear.’

‘No, no,’ cried I blithely, ‘why need Miss Jennings be dull? It must be
our business to keep her lively.’

‘I can sit and read here,’ said she, ‘till it is time to go to bed.
What is the hour, Mr. Monson?’

‘Just on the stroke of eight,’ said I.

She made a pretty little grimace, and then burst into one of her
refreshing cordial laughs.

‘A little early for bed, Wilfrid,’ she exclaimed.

He smothered a yawn and responded: ‘I will leave you to Charles. Would
to Heaven I had his spirits! God bless you both--good night.’

He rang for his valet and stalked with hanging arms and drooping head,
in the most melancholy manner picturable, to his cabin. I asked Miss
Jennings to accompany me on deck.

‘There is a moon in the air,’ said I; ‘you may see the haze of it
through this porthole; but I must not forget that it is an autumn
night so let me beg you to wrap yourself up warmly whilst I slip on a
pea-coat.’

I fancied she hung in the wind an instant, as a girl might who could
not promptly see her way to walking the deck of a yacht alone with
a young man on a moonlight or any other night, but she assented so
quickly in reality that I dare say my suspicion was an idle and
groundless bit of sensitiveness. Five minutes later we were on deck
together.

The yacht was floating through the dusk--that was tinctured into
glimmering pearl by the broad face of the silver moon, which had
already climbed several degrees above the black sky-line of the Isle of
Wight--without the least perceptible stir or tremor in her frame. The
wind was well abaft the starboard beam; the great main boom overhung
the port quarter; the white sail rose wan to the moonshine with a large
gaff topsail above it--for those were the days of gaffs--dimming into
a space of airy faintness to the masthead, above the white button of
whose truck you caught the icy gleam of a metal vane as though it was a
piece of meteoric scoring under the dust of the stars that hovered in
the velvet gloom like a sheet of undulating silver glooming out into
hollows in places. Light as the breeze was, and following us besides,
it held the canvas asleep; but that every cloud-like cloth was doing
its work, too, the ear quickly noted in the pleasant fountain-like
sounds of running waters over the side, with a cool seething noise in
the wake and a fairy tinkling of exploding foam-bells. The land to port
loomed black against the moonshine, save where some slope or other
catching the slanting beam showed the faint green of its herbage or
wooded growths in a very phantasm of hue, like some verdant stretch of
land dyeing an attenuated veil of vapour witnessed afar upon the ocean.
Over the port bow I caught sight of a light or two a long way down the
dusky reach, as it seemed, with a brighter gleam to starboard where
the land, catching the moonlight, came in visionary streaks and breaks
to abeam and on past the quarter where it seemed to melt out into some
twinkling beacon--off Calshot Castle, maybe, so far astern it looked.

I spied the sturdy figure of the mate standing beside the wheel, no
longer steering, but manifestly conning the yacht. The skipper was
abreast of the skylight, leaning over the rail with his arm round a
backstay; there were figures moving forward tipping the gloom there
with the scarlet points of glowing bowls of tobacco, but if they
conversed it was in whispers. The stillness was scarce imaginable. It
was heightened yet even to my fancy presently when, growing used to the
light, I spied the phantom figure of what was apparently a large brig
clouded to her royals with pale canvas stemming the Solent, outward
bound, some half a mile distant.

‘There is no dew,’ said I; ‘the moon shines purely, and is full of
promise so far as fine weather goes. Well! here we are fairly started
indeed. It is almost a dream to me, Miss Jennings, d’ye know?’ I
continued, staring about me. ‘Three days ago I had no notice of
anything having gone wrong with my cousin, and therefore little
dreamt, as you will suppose, of what I was to enter upon this blessed
afternoon. Three days ago! And now here am I heading into God knows
what part of this mighty globe of ocean as empty of all theory of
destination as though I were bound in a balloon to the part the poets
call interstellar space. How is it all to end, I wonder?’

She was pacing quietly by my side.

‘You think the pursuit a silly one, Mr. Monson?’

‘Yes, I do, and Wilfrid _knows_ that I do. If he were not----He is my
cousin, Miss Jennings, and a dear friend, and you are his sister-in-law
and dear to him, too, I am sure, and so I dare be candid with you. If
it were not that he--’ (I touched my forehead) ‘would he embark on such
a quest as this?’

‘Yes,’ she replied, with just enough of heat or temper, or whatever you
like to call it, in her voice to render her utterance distinct with
unconscious emphasis; ‘he adored his wife. Can a man tear his love into
pieces in a day, as though it were no more than a tedious old letter?
He thinks he hates her; he does so in a sense, no doubt; but in a
sense, too, he still worships her. Mad! that is what you mean.’

I was beginning to protest.

‘Yes, it _is_ what you mean, and you are right and wrong. If he does
not pursue her, if he does not recover her, she is lost for ever. She
is lost now, you will tell me. Ay,’ she cried with a little stamp,
‘lost so far as her husband’s heart goes, so far as her honour is
concerned; but not so utterly lost as she will later be if she is not
rescued from that--that man, who must be so served, Mr. Monson, as to
render it impossible for him ever again to trouble the peace of another
home, to break the heart of a noble-minded creature and rob a little
infant of its mother. Hate him! Oh, girl as I am, I declare before my
Maker I would shoot him with my own hand!’

There was nothing in the least degree theatrical in her way of
speaking. The words came in a hurry to her lips from her indignant
heart, and I heard the sincerity of them so clearly in the mere
utterance, I did not doubt for an instant that, put a pistol in her
hand and set up the figure of the Colonel in front of her, she would
have sought for his heart, if he had one, with the barrel of the weapon
without so much as a sigh at having to kill him. I felt abashed; her
sincerity and resentment were overwhelming; her strength of feeling,
too, won a peculiar accentuation from the character of airy delicacy,
of tender fragility, the moonlight gave to her fair and golden beauty.
It was like listening to a volume of sounds poured forth by a singing
bird, and wondering that such far-reaching melody should be produced by
so small a creature.

‘I fear,’ said I, ‘you don’t think me very sincere in my sympathy with
Wilfrid----’

‘Oh, yes, Mr. Monson,’ she interrupted; ‘do not suppose such a thing.
It is not to be imagined that you should take this cruel and miserable
affair to heart as he does, or feel it as I do, who am her sister.’

‘The truth is,’ said I, ‘it is impossible for a bachelor not to take
a cynical view of troubles of this sort. A man was charged with the
murder of his sweetheart. The judge said to him, “Had the woman been
your wife, your guilt would not have been so great, because you would
have no other means of getting rid of her save by killing her; but
the unhappy creature whose throat you cut you could have sent adrift
without trouble.” What I mean to say is, Miss Jennings, that a husband
does not merit half the pity that is felt for him if his wife elopes.
He is easily quit of a woman who is his wife only by name. I am for
pitying _her_. The inevitable sequel--the disgrace, desertion, and
the rest of it--is as punctual as the indication of the hands of a
clock.... But see how nimbly the “Bride” floats through all this
darkness and quietude. We shall be passing that vessel shortly, and yet
for canvas she might really be one of the pyramids of Egypt towing down
Channel.’

We went to the rail to look, I, for one, glad enough to change the
subject, for it was nothing less than profanity to be arguing with so
sweet a little woman as this--in the pure white shining of the moon,
too, and with something of an ocean freshness of atmosphere all about
us--on such a gangrenous subject as the elopement of Lady Monson with
Colonel Hope-Kennedy. Out of all my sea-going experiences I could not
pick a fairer picture than was made by the brig we were passing, clad
as she was in moonlight, and rising in steam-coloured spaces to mere
films of royals motionless under the stars. She was a man-of-war; the
white of her broad band, that was broken by black ports, gleamed like
the ivory of pianoforte keys; her canvas was exquisitely out and set,
and trimmed as naval men know how--one yardarm looking backwards a
little over another, the rounded silent cloths, faint in the radiance
with a gleam as of alabaster showing through a delicate haze, and high
aloft the tremor of a pennant like the expiring trail of a shooting
star. All was as hushed as death upon her; her high bulwarks concealed
her decks; nothing was to be seen stirring along the whole length of
the shapely, beautiful, visionary fabric that, as we left her slowly
veering away upon our quarter, looked to lose the substance of her
form, as though through the gradual absorption of the light her own
white canvas made by the clearer and icy radiance of the soaring moon.

‘To think now,’ said I, ‘of the thunder of adamantine lips concealed
within the silence of that heap of swimming faintness! How amazing the
change from the exquisite repose she suggests to the fierce crimson
blaze and headlong detonations of a broadside flashing up the dark
land and dying out miles away in a sullen roar. But, d’ye know, Miss
Jennings, I shall grow poetical if I do not light another cigar. Women
should encourage men to smoke. Nothing keeps them quieter.’

We exchanged a few words with Captain Finn, who, together with the
mate, was keeping a bright look-out, and then resumed our walk, and
in a quiet chat that was ended only by a small bell on the forecastle
announcing the hour of ten by four chimes, Miss Laura gave me the story
of my cousin’s introduction to her family, described the marriage,
talked to me about Melbourne and her home there, with more to the same
purpose, all very interesting to me, though it would make the merest
parish gossip in print. Her mother was dead; her father was a hearty
man of sixty who had emigrated years before in dire poverty, ‘as you
will suppose,’ said she, ‘when I tell you that he was the son of a
dissenting minister who had a family of twelve children, and who died
without leaving money enough to pay for his funeral.’ Mr. Jennings had
made a fortune by squatting, but he had lost a considerable sum within
the past few years by stupid speculation, and as Miss Laura said this
I could see, by hearing her (to use a Paddyism), the pout of lip; for,
bright as the moonlight was, the silver of it blended with the golden
tint of her hair without defining any feature of her clearly saving
her eyes, in which the beam of the planet would sparkle like a diamond
whenever she raised them to my face. She told me her father was very
proud that his daughter should become a lady of title, and yet he
opposed the marriage, too. In short, he saw that Wilfrid’s mind was
not as sound as it should be, though he never could point to any act
or speech to justify his misgivings. But this was intelligible enough;
for, to speak of my cousin as I remembered him in earlier times, the
notion you got that he was not straight-headed, as I have before said,
was from his face, and the suspicion lay but dully in one, so rational
was his behaviour, so polished and often intellectual his talk; till on
a sudden it was sharpened into conviction on your hearing that there
was insanity in his mother’s family.

‘What had Lady Monson to say to your father’s misgivings?’ I inquired.

‘She accepted him, and insisted upon marrying him. He was wonderfully
fond of her, Mr. Monson.’

‘And she?’

I saw her give her head a little shake, but she made no reply. Perhaps
she considered that this trip we had started on sufficiently answered
the question. She said, after a brief pause, ‘I myself thought my
father a great deal too critical in his estimate of Sir Wilfrid. No
one talked more delightfully than your cousin. He was a favourite with
everybody whom he met at Melbourne. He was fresh from his travels,
and was full of entertaining stories and shrewd observations; and
then, again, he had much to say about European capitals, of English
university life, of English Society--you will not need me to tell you
that we Colonials have little weaknesses in regard to lords and ladies
and to the doings of high life, from which people in England are quite
exempt, and for the having which I fear we are slightly sneered at and
a good deal wondered at.’

I caught the sparkle of her lifted eye.

‘And pray, Miss Jennings,’ said I, ‘what would your papa think if he
were to know that you had embarked on what, I must still take the
liberty of calling, a very queer voyage?’

‘Oh,’ she cried quickly and almost hysterically, ‘don’t ask me what he
would think of what I am doing! What will be his thoughts when he gets
the news of what Henrietta has done?’

She turned her head away from me, and kept it averted long enough to
make me suspect that there was a tear in her eye. It was then that a
sailor forward struck the forecastle bell four times.

‘Ten o’clock!’ she exclaimed, knowing as an ocean traveller how to
interpret sea time. ‘Good-night, Mr. Monson.’

I handed her down the companion-steps, and went to my own cabin, and
was presently in my bunk. But it was after seven bells, half-past
eleven, before I fell asleep.

The breeze had freshened--had drawn apparently more yet to the
northward; and the yacht, having hauled it a bit now that we were out
of the Solent, was leaning over a trifle with a sputtering and frisky
snapping of froth along her bends and a quiet moaning sounding down
into her heart out of the hollows of her canvas, whilst an occasional
creak, breaking from one knew not what part of the structure, hinted
at a taut drag of tacks and sheets, though there was no motion in the
water, over whose surface our keel slided as steadily as a sleigh over
a snow-covered plain.

It was one thing on top of another, I suppose; the fancies put into me
by the oddness of this adventure; the memory of the long gun forward;
Wilfrid’s tragic intentions, the darker to my mind because it was so
easy for me to see how grief, wrath, a sense of dishonour, bitter
injury, with impulses not imaginable by me which every recurrence to
the motherless little baby at home would visit him with, had quickened
in him of late the deadly seminal principle that circulated in his
blood. Then again, there was Miss Laura’s beauty, if beauty be the
proper term to express a combination of physical charms which a brief
felicitous sentence like a single line from some old poet would better
convey than fifty pages of description; her conversation; her sympathy
with the motive of this trip; her apparent heedlessness as to the time
to be occupied by it; her indifference as to the magnitude of the
programme that Wilfrid’s resolution to recover his wife might end in
framing, if Table Bay should prove but a starting-point--I say it was
one thing on top of another; and all reflections and considerations
being rendered acute by the spirit of life one now felt in the yacht,
and that awakened the most dormant or puzzled faculty to the perception
that it was all grim, downright earnest, small wonder that I should
have lain awake until half-past eleven. Indeed that I should have
snatched a wink of sleep that first blessed night is a mystery only
to be partially resolved by reflecting that I was young, heedless,
‘unencumbered’ as they say, a lover of adventure, and in no sense
dissatisfied by the company I found myself among.

CHAPTER V.

LONG TOM.

When I awoke the morning was streaming a windy light through the
port-hole over my bunk. I lay a few minutes watching my coat and other
suspended garments swinging against the bulkhead, and listening to the
creaking and groanings of partitions and strong fastenings, and to a
muffled humming sound that was like the distant continuous roll of a
drum mixed with a faint seething that sent one’s fancy to the shingle
of the English shore, and to the panting respiration of the recoiling
breaker upon it; and then I guessed that there was a fresh breeze
blowing.

I tumbled out of bed and stood awhile, partly with the notion of
making sure of my sea-legs, and partly to discover if I was likely to
be sea-sick. Finding myself happily sound in all ways, I drew on some
clothing and looked out. Wilfrid’s melancholy man sat at the cabin
table, leaning his head upon his elbow, with his fingers penetrating
the black plaister of hair over his brow, so that he presented a very
dejected and disordered appearance. I called to him; he looked in my
direction with a wandering eye, struggled to get up, put his hand upon
his stomach with an odd smile and sat again. I entered the cabin to see
what ailed the fellow.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ said I. ‘Sick?’

He turned his hollow yellow face upon me, and I saw that he was in
liquor.

‘It’s here, sir,’ he exclaimed, pointing with an inebriated forefinger
to the lower button of his waistcoat; ‘it’s a feelin’, sir, as if I was
a globe, sir, with gold and silver fishes a-swimming round and round,
and poking of their noses against me to get out.’

He spoke respectfully, but thickly, with sundry little feints at
rising, as though very sensible that he should not be sitting whilst I
stood.

‘Try a dose of brandy,’ said I, satirically.

‘Do you think it will help me, sir?’ he inquired, pulling his fingers
out of his hair and clasping his hands upon his waistcoat, whilst his
lips went twisting into an intoxicated grin on one side of his nose, as
it looked. ‘I will try it, Mr. Monson, sir. There’s a something here as
wants settling, sir. I never was partial to the hocean, sir.’

He was proceeding, but just then the second steward came below, on
which I quitted the melancholy man, ordered a cold salt-water bath and
a hot cup of coffee, and was presently on deck. It was a windy-looking
morning, the sky high, grey, compacted; with here and there a dark curl
of scud in chase of some bald lump of sulphur-coloured cloud blowing
away to leeward like the first ball of powder smoke from a cannon’s
mouth ere the wind has had time to shred it. The water was green,
a true Channel sea with the foam of the curled ridges dazzling out
in times to the touch of a wet, pale beam of sunshine dropping in a
lance of light in some breathless moment through one of the dim blue
lines that here and there veined the dulness aloft. There was no land
to be seen; the haze of the sea-line ran the water into the sky, and
the green of the horizon went blending into the soft greyness of the
heavens till it looked all one with a difference of colour only.

The yacht was bowling through it at a noble pace; the wind sat as it
should for such a craft as the ‘Bride’; the sea had quartered her and
swept in hillocks of foam along her lustrous bends, sending an impulse
to her floating rushes with every pale boiling of it to her frame, and
the sputter and creaming all about her bows, and the swirl of the snow
over the lee rail, and the milk-white race of wake rising and falling
fan-shaped astern prismatic with the glint of chips and bubbles and
feathers of spume swept out of the giddiness by the rush of the wind,
might have made you think yourself aboard a ship of a thousand tons.
Upon my word it was as though the ‘Bride’ had got the scent and knew
that the ‘Shark’ was not far distant. Finn was not sparing her. He
was to windward, close beside the wheel, as I emerged, and I knew he
watched me whilst I stood a moment in the hatch looking from the huge
thunderous hollow of the mainsail to the yawn of the big square-sail
they had clapped upon her with the whole square topsail atop of _it_,
topgallant sail stowed, but the jibs yearning from their sheets taut as
fiddle-strings, as though they would bodily uproot the timber and iron
to which they were belayed.

Something of the exhilaration of a real chase came into one with the
glad roaring aloft and the saw-like spitting at the cutwater, and
the sullen crash of the arching billow repulsed by the cleaving bow;
and it was the instinct in me, I suppose, due to my early training
and recollection of the long pursuit of more than one polacre and
nimble-heeled schooner flush to the hatches with a living ebony cargo
that made me send a look sheer over the bows in search of some shining
quarry there.

There were three or four coasters in a huddle on the weather beam,
their outlines sharp, but their substance of a dingy black against
the yellowish glare of light over the water that way as though the
East were finding reflection in it; and to leeward, a mile off, a
full-rigged sailing ship on a bowline bound up Channel, and plunging
her round bows with clumsy viciousness into the green hollows with a
frequent lift of white water to above the cathead, where it blew in a
storm of crystals into the head canvas.

‘Good morning, captain.’

‘Good morning, sir,’ answered Finn, knuckling his forehead in the
old-fashioned style. ‘Nice little breeze of wind, sir.’

‘Ay, one could pray for nothing better,’ said I, crossing over to him.
‘You’ve got a fine craft here certainly, captain; no stint of beam, and
bulwarks stout and tall enough to serve the purpose of a pirate. And
how finely she rounds forward to the eyes! Hillo! getting ready with
your gun so soon?’

‘No, sir, only a cleaning of him,’ he answered with a grin.

They had removed the tarpaulin, and there stood the long piece, with a
couple of seamen hard at work furbishing it up.

‘D’ye think,’ said I, making a step or two towards the rail to bring us
out of earshot of the fellow who was standing at the wheel, ‘that Sir
Wilfrid really means to let fly at the “Shark” should we overhaul her,
if she refuses to heave to?’

‘I don’t doubt it, sir.’

‘But how about your crew? Will they be willing, think you, to fire
into a vessel that’s a yacht like their own ship, that hails from the
same port, and whose people may number amongst them acquaintances--old
shipmates of your own men?’

‘They’ll obey orders, sir,’ said he quietly, with an air of caution in
his long face.

‘Suppose it should come to our having to board the “Shark,” captain,
and she shows fight--are you going to get your men to hazard their
lives in the face of the pacific articles they, I presume, have signed?’

‘It’ll never come to a fight, Mr. Monson,’ he responded, ‘though I
don’t say it may not come to our having to fire at the vessel to stop
her; for you see if the Colonel commands Fidler to keep all fast and
take no notice of us there’ll be nothen for him but to obey: whilst
stop her _we_ must, do ye see, sir? But as to fighting----’ he shook
his head. ‘No, sir; when the time’s come for boarding they’ll be
willing to let us walk quietly over the side, no matter how much they
may consider their feelings injured by our shooting at ’em. In short
it’s like this; ne’er a man aboard the “Shark” but knows what the
Colonel and her Ladyship’s gone and done; a good many, I dessay, are
husbands themselves, not to speak of their being Englishmen, and ye may
take it that ne’er a hand of ’em from Fidler down is going to resist
Sir Wilfrid’s stepping on board to demand his own.’

‘You may be right,’ said I; ‘’tis hard to say, though. Do our crew know
the errand we are on?’

‘Bound to it, sir. In fact, the shipping of that there gun wouldn’t
allow the job to remain a secret. But the “Shark” was away first, and
if all Southampton had got talking of our intention it couldn’t have
signified, so far as consarns I mean their guessing at it aboard the
“Shark.”’

‘You must have pushed your equipment forward with wonderful expedition?’

‘Yes, sir; we worked day and night. Of course we was all ready for sea,
but there would be many things a-wanting for what might turn out a six
or seven thousand mile run with ne’er a stoppage along the whole road
of it.’

My eye was just then taken by something that glittered upon the
mainmast within reach of a man’s uplifted arm. I peered, imagining
it to be a little plate with an inscription upon it commemorating
something that Wilfrid might have deemed worthy of a memorial. I caught
Finn grinning.

‘D’ye see what it is, sir?’ said he.

I looked again, and shook my head. He walked to the mast, and I
followed him, and now I saw that it was a handsome five-guinea piece,
obviously of an old date--but it was too high to distinguish the
impress clearly--secured by a couple of little staples which gripped
without piercing or wounding it.

‘That piece of money,’ said Finn, ‘is for the first man that sights the
“Shark.”’

‘Ha!’ I exclaimed, ‘an old whaling practice. My cousin has not viewed
the world for nothing!’

It was but a trifling thing, yet in its way it was almost as hard a bit
of underscoring of my cousin’s resolution as the long grinning piece
they were cleaning forward, or the stand of arms against the bulkhead
below.

‘What’s the pace, captain?’

‘A full ten, sir, by the last heave of the log.’

I fell a-whistling--for it was grand sailing, surely--with a lift of my
eye to the topgallant sail that lay stowed in a snow-white streak with
a proper man-of-war’s bunt amidships on the slender black yard.

‘Well, sir,’ said Finn, taking it upon himself to interpret my
glance, ‘I know the “Bride,” and I’m likewise acquainted with a good
many vessels which ain’t the least bit in the world like her, and my
notion’s this, that a craft’ll do no more than she _can_ do. I’ve hove
the log to reefed canvas, and I’ve hove it in the same wind to whole
sails and found a loss. No use of burying what you want to keep afloat.
I might set that there little top-gallant sail without enjoying a hinch
of way more out of it. Then what ’ud be the good of straining the
spars?’

‘But you’ll be setting stun’ sails, I suppose, when a right chance for
running them aloft occurs?’

‘Ay, sir. There’s the boom irons all ready. But my notion is, in a
vessel of this sort, that it’s best to keep your stun’ sail booms out
of sight till your anchors are stowed. Once out of soundings, and then
let a man cut what capers he likes.’

As he said this, up rose my cousin’s long body through the companion
hatch. He stood a little looking about him in his short-sighted way,
but with an expression of satisfaction upon his face that gave a new
character to it. I saw him rub his hands whilst he grinned to the swift
salt rush of the wind. He caught sight of me, and instantly approached.

‘This will do! this will do, Charles!’ he cried, grasping my hand.
‘Don’t spare her, captain. These are slants to be made the most of. By
Heaven, but it makes a new man of me to see such a sight as _that_!’
pointing to the white torrent that was roaring past to leeward.

He stared with a sort of pathetic eagerness at the vessels which we
were passing as though they had their anchors down, afterwards shading
his eyes for another long yearning look over either bow.

‘It is fine, though! it is fine, though!’ he muttered with the spirit
of an unreasonable exhilaration working strong in every feature. ‘What
is it, captain? Twelve?’ Finn gave him the figure. ‘And what would be
the “Shark’s” pace supposing her yonder?’

‘Not all ours, Sir Wilfrid, not all ours,’ responded Finn, ‘though
it is a fine sailing breeze, your honour. A craft would have to be a
sawed-off-square consarn not to wash handsomely along this morning,
sir.’

‘How have you slept, Wilfrid?’ said I.

‘Well,’ he answered. ‘But I say, Charles, what do you think?’ said
he with a sudden boyish air that startled me with its suggestion of
stupidity in him. ‘Muffin is drunk.’

‘Drunk!’ cried I; ‘but who the deuce is Muffin?’ forgetting the name.

‘Why, my man,’ he answered; ‘my valet. It’s very odd. I thought at
first it was sea-sickness. He’s been crying. The tears, I give you my
word, streamed down his cheeks. He begs to be set ashore, and swears
that if he should choke with one of the fish that are swimming about
in him, his mother and two sisters would have to go to the Union. Do
you think he’s mad?’

‘Drunk, and sea-sick, too,’ said I. ‘Has he not been away with you on a
yachting trip before?’

‘No. This is a handsome vessel, don’t you think, Charles?’ he
exclaimed, breaking from the subject as though it had never been in his
mind, and following on his question with a curious fluttering smile and
that trembling of the lids I have before described; though his gaze
steadied miraculously as they rested upon the gun the fellows were at
work upon, and a shadow came into his face which was as good as telling
me that I need not respond to his inquiry, as his thoughts were already
elsewhere.

‘Let’s go and have a look at my cannon,’ said he with the same odd
boyish manner he had discovered a minute or two earlier.

We walked forward; the decks had been some time before washed down
and were sand dry, white as a tree newly stripped of its bark, with
a glitter all about them of the crystals of salt. The rigging was
everywhere neatly coiled down; whatever was of brass shone as though
it reflected a sunbeam; no detail but must have satisfied the most
exacting nautical eye with an indication of frigate-like neatness,
cleanliness, finish, and fore and aft discipline. The ‘Bride,’ after
the manner of many yachts of those days, carried a galley on deck abaft
her foremast. I peeped in as I passed and took notice of a snug little
interior, brilliant with polished cooking vessels, and as clean and
sweet as a dairy. A few of the sailors were standing about it waiting
(as I took it) for the cook to furnish the messes with their breakfast.
They had the air of a rough resolute set of men, with something of
the inspiration of the yachting business, perhaps, in their manner
of saluting Sir Wilfrid and myself, but with little of the aspect
of the seafarer of the pleasure-vessel of _these_ times. They were
bushy-whiskered hard-a-weather fellows for the most part, with one odd
face amongst them as yellow and wrinkled as the skin of a decayed lemon.

I asked Wilfrid carelessly if any of his crew had sailed with him
before. He answered that a few of them had; but that the others had
declined to start on a voyage to the end of which Finn was unable to
furnish a date, so that the captain had made up the complement in
a hurry out of the best hands he could find cruising about ashore.
So this, thought I, accounts for the absence of that uniformity of
apparel one looks for amongst the crews of yachts; yet all the sailors
I had taken notice of were dressed warmly in very good clean nautical
clothes, though I protest it made one think of the old picaroon and