A Marriage at Sea Part 15

"Hoist away!" was shouted, and up I went, and I shall not readily forget the sensation. My brains seemed to sink into my boots as I mounted. I was hoisted needlessly high, almost to the yard-arm itself, I fancy, through some blunder on the part of the men who manned the "whip." For some breathless moments I dangled between heaven and ocean, seeing nothing but grey sky and heaving waters. But the torture was brief. I felt the chair sinking, saw the open gangway sweep past me, and presently I was out of the chair at Grace's side, stared at by some eighty or a hundred emigrants, all 'tweendecks pa.s.sengers, who had left the bulwarks to congregate on the main deck.

"Well, thank Heaven, here we are, anyway!" was my first exclamation to Grace.

"It was a thousand times worse than the _Spitfire_ whilst it lasted,"

she answered.

"You behaved magnificently," said I.

"Will you step this way?" exclaimed a voice overhead.

On looking up I found that we were addressed by a short, somewhat thick-set man, who stood at the rail that protected the forward extremity of the p.o.o.p deck. This was the person who had talked to us through the speaking-trumpet, and I at once guessed him to be the captain. There were about a dozen first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers gazing at us from either side of him, two or three of whom were ladies. I took Grace by the hand, and conducted her up a short flight of steps, and approached the captain, raising my hat as I did so, and receiving from him a sea-flourish of the tall hat he wore. He was b.u.t.toned up in a cloth coat, and his cheeks rested in a pair of high, sharp-pointed collars, starched to an iron hardness, so that his body and head moved as one piece. His short legs arched outwards, and his feet were encased in long boots, the toes of which were of the shape of a shovel.

He wore the familiar tall hat of the streets; it looked to be brushed the wrong way, was bronze at the rims, and on the whole showed as a hat that had made several voyages. Yet, if there was but little of the sailor in his costume, his face suggested itself to me as a very good example of the nautical life. His nose was scarcely more than a pimple of a reddish tincture, and his small, moist, grey eyes lying deep in their sockets seemed, as they gazed at you, to be boring their way through the apertures which Nature had provided for the admission of light. A short piece of white whisker decorated either cheek, and his hair that was cropped close as a soldier's was also white.

"Is that your yacht, young gentleman?" said he, bringing his eyes from Grace to me, at whom he had to stare up as at his masthead, so considerably did I tower over the little man.

"Yes," said I, "she is the _Spitfire_--belongs to Southampton. I am very much obliged to you for receiving this lady and me."

"Not at all," said he, looking hard at Grace; "your wife, sir?"

"No," said I, greatly embarra.s.sed by the question, and by the gaze of the ten or dozen pa.s.sengers who hung near, eyeing us intently and whispering, yet, for the most part, with no lack of sympathy and good nature in their countenances. I saw Grace quickly bite upon her under-lip, but without colouring or any other sign of confusion than a slight turn of her head as though she viewed the yacht.

"But what have you done with the rest of your people, young gentleman?"

inquired the captain.

"My name is Barclay--Mr. Herbert Barclay: the name of the young lady to whom I am engaged to be married," said I, significantly sending a look along the faces of the listeners, "is Miss Grace Bella.s.sys, whose aunt, Lady Amelia Roscoe, you may probably have heard of."

This, I thought, was introduction enough. My business was to a.s.sert our dignity first of all, and then as I was addressing a number of persons who were either English or Colonial, or both, the p.r.o.nunciation of her ladyship's name was, I considered, a very early and essential duty.

"With regard to my crew--" I continued, and I told the captain they had made up their minds to carry the vessel home.

"Miss Bella.s.sys looks very tired," exclaimed a middle-aged lady with grey hair, speaking with a gentle, concerned smile, engaging with its air of sympathetic apology, "if she will allow me to conduct her to my cabin--"

"By all means, Mrs. Barstow," cried the captain. "If she has been knocking about in that bit of a craft there through the gale that's been blowing, all I can say, ladies and gentlemen, she'll have seen more tumbling and weather in forty-eight hours than you'll have any idea of though I was to keep you at sea for ten years in this ship."

Mrs. Barstow, with a motherly manner, approached Grace, who bowed and thanked her, and together they walked to the companion hatch and disappeared.

By this time the boat had been hoisted, and the ship was full of the animation and business of her sailors piling canvas upon her. The sudden stagnation that had fallen was now threaded by a weak draught of air out of the east where the brightness of the new weather had first shown. The compacted pall of cloud was fast breaking up, settling into large bodies of vapour, with s.p.a.ces of dim blue sky between and in the south there stood a shaft of golden sunshine that flashed up a s.p.a.ce of water at its base in splendour, though past it the sulky heaps of cloud loomed the darker for that magical and beautiful lance of radiance.

Miles away in the south-west a white sail hovered, but nothing else broke the sea-line.

I took all this in at a glance: also the figure of my poor, mutilated yacht heaving forlorn and naked upon the swell that still rolled heavily, as though after the savage vexing of its heart during the past hours, old ocean could not quickly draw its breath placidly. The little vessel looked but a toy from the height of the p.o.o.p of the iron ship. As I surveyed her, I marvelled to think that she had successfully encountered the weather of the past two days and nights.

I could see one of the men--d.i.c.k Files--steadily labouring at the pump whilst the others were busy with the tackle and gear that supported the mast. But even as I watched, the _Carthusian_ had got way upon her, and was dwarfing yet the poor brave little _Spitfire_ as she slided round to the government of her helm, her yards squaring, her canvas spreading, and her crew chorussing all about her decks as she went.

The captain asked me many questions, most of which I answered mechanically, for my thoughts were fixed upon the little yacht, and my heart was with the poor fellows who had resolved to carry her home--but with _them_ only! not with _her_. No! as I watched her rolling, and the fellow pumping, not for worlds would I have gone aboard of her again with Grace, though Caudel should have yelled out that the leak was stopped, and though a fair, bright breezy day, with promise of its quiet lasting for a week, should have opened round about us.

The captain wanted to know when I had sailed, from what port I had started, where I was bound to, and the like. I kept my face with difficulty when I gave him my attention at last. It was not only his own mirth-provoking, nautical countenance; the saloon pa.s.sengers could not take their eyes off me, and they bobbed and leaned forward in an eager, hearkening way to catch every syllable of my replies. Nor was this all, for below on the quarter-deck and along the waist stood the scores of steerage pa.s.sengers, all straining their eyes at me. The curiosity and excitement were ridiculous. But fame is a thing very cheaply earned in these days.

The captain inquired a little too curiously sometimes. So Miss Bella.s.sys was engaged to to be married to me, hey? Was she alone with me? No relative, no maid, n.o.body of her own s.e.x in attendance? To these questions the ladies listened with an odd expression on their faces. I particularly noticed one of them: she had sausage-shaped curls, lips so thin that when they were closed they formed a fine line as though produced by a single sweep of a camel's hair-brush under her nose; the pupil of one eye was considerably larger than that of the other, which gave her a very staring, knowing look on one side of her face; but there was nothing in my responses to appease hers, or the captain's, or the others' thirst for information. In fact, ever since I had resolved to quit the _Spitfire_ for the _Carthusian_, I had made up my mind to keep secret the business that had brought Grace and me into this plight. The captain and the rest of them might think as they chose; Grace was not to be much hurt by their conjectures or opinions; there could be nothing to wholly occupy our thoughts whilst aboard the _Carthusian_, but the obligation of leaving her as speedily as might be, of reaching Penzance, and then getting married.

"There can be no doubt, I hope, Captain Parsons," said I, for the second mate had given me the skipper's name, "of our promptly falling in with something homeward bound that will land Miss Bella.s.sys and me?

What the craft may prove can signify nothing--a smack would serve our purpose."

"I'll signal when I have a chance," he answered, looking round the sea and then up aloft, "but it's astonishing, ladies and gentlemen," he continued, addressing the pa.s.sengers, "how lonesome the ocean is, even where you look for plenty of shipping."

"Not in this age of steam, I think," observed a tall, thin man mildly.

"In this age of steam, sir," responded the captain. "You may not credit it, but on three occasions I have measured the two Atlantics from abreast of Ushant to abreast of the Cape of Good Hope without sighting a single ship, steam or sail."

"You amaze me," said the mild, thin man.

"How far are we from Penzance, captain?" I inquired.

"Why," he answered, "all a hundred and fifty miles."

"If that be so then," I cried, "our drift must have been that of a balloon."

"Will those poor creatures ever be able to reach the English coast in that broken boat?" exclaimed one of the ladies, indicating the _Spitfire_ that now lay dwarfed right over the stern of the ship.

"If they are longsh.o.r.emen--and yet I don't know," exclaimed the captain with a short laugh, "a boatman will easily handle a craft of that sort when a blue-water sailor would be all abroad." He put his hand into the skylight and lifted a telescope off its brackets, and applied it to his eye. "Still pumping," said he, talking whilst he gazed through the gla.s.s, "and they're stretching a sail along--bending it no doubt.

There's plenty of mast there for cloths enough to blow them home. The pump keeps the water under--that's certain. To my mind she looks more buoyant than she was. Ladies and gentlemen, she'll do--she'll do. If I thought not--" he viewed her for a little while in silence. "Oh, yes, ladies and gentlemen, she'll do," he repeated, and then replacing the gla.s.s, exclaimed to me, "Have you lunched, Mr. Barclay?"

"No, captain, I have not, neither can I say I have breakfasted."

"Oh, confound it, man, you should have said so before. Step this way, sir, step this way," and he led me to the companion hatch that conducted to the saloon, pausing on the road, however, to beckon with a square forefinger to a sober, Scotch-faced personage in a monkey jacket and loose pilot trousers--the chief mate as I afterwards learnt--to whom in a wheezy undertone he addressed some instructions, which, as I gathered from one or two syllables I overheard, referred to the speaking of inward-bound ships, and to our trans-shipment.

The saloon was a fine, long, handsome interior, but I preserve no more of it than a general impression of mirrors, rich panels, a short row of lamps formed of some l.u.s.trous metal, an elaborate stove aft, a piano secured to the richly-decorated shaft of the mizzenmast; a long table with fixed revolving chairs on either hand, flanked to port and starboard by a row of cabins or berths. After our experience aboard the _Spitfire_, I was scarcely sensible of the motions of the deck of this big ship, albeit she was rolling and curtseying as she floated, clothed to her royal yards, over the sulky undulations of the water.

But I was able to gather from certain sounds which penetrated through the closed doors of the berths that some of the pa.s.sengers were not yet quite well. There was n.o.body in the saloon save one little man with a quant.i.ty of hair down his back after the manner of poets and professors. He was seated near the main-deck entrance with a countenance of a ghastly hue. His eyes were riveted to the deck, and when the captain cheerily called to him to know how he did, he answered without moving his figure or shifting his gaze, "Ach! Gott! don't shpeak to me."

At this moment a door close beside which I was standing opened and Grace came out, followed by the kind lady, Mrs. Barstow. She had removed her hat and jacket, and was sweet and fresh with the application of such toilet conveniences as her sympathetic acquaintance could provide her with. Captain Parsons stared at her and then whipped off his tall hat.

"This is better than the _Spitfire_, Grace," said I.

"Oh, yes, Herbert," she answered, sending a glance of her fine dark eyes over the saloon; "but Mrs. Barstow tells me that the ship is going to New Zealand."

"So she is, so she is," cried Captain Parsons, bursting into a laugh, "and if you like, Mr. Barclay and you shall accompany us."

She looked at him with a frightened girlish air.

"Oh, no, Miss Bella.s.sys," said Mrs. Barstow. "Captain Parsons is a great humorist. I have made two voyages with him, and he keeps me laughing from port to port. He will see that you get safely home, and I wish that we could count upon arriving at Otaga as speedily as you will reach England."

Just then a man in a camlet jacket entered the saloon--cuddy, I believe, is the proper word for it. He was the head steward, and Captain Parsons immediately called to him.

"Jenkins, here. This lady and gentleman have not breakfasted; they have been shipwrecked, and wish to lunch. You understand? And draw the cork of a quart bottle of champagne. There is no better sea-physic, Miss Bella.s.sys. I've known what it is to be five days in an open boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and I believe if even Mrs. Barstow had been my wife, I should not have scrupled to make away with her for a quart bottle of champagne."

CHAPTER IX

WE ARE MUCH OBSERVED

Our lunch consisted of cold fowl and ham and champagne; good enough meat and drink, one should say, for the sea, and almost good enough, one might add, for a pair of love-sick fugitives.