Hard Cash Part 34

"Quite a pa.s.sage of arms," said Edward.

"Yes," said Mrs. Dodd, "and of bludgeons and things, rather than the polished rapier. What expressions to fall from two highly educated gentlemen! Slope--Potato-trap--Sawbones--Catlap--_je n'en finirais pas._"

She then let them know that she meditated a "dictionary of jargon;" in hopes that its bulk might strike terror into honest citizens, and excite an anti-jargon league to save the English language, now on the verge of dissolution.

Sampson was pleased with this threat. "Now, that is odd," said he.

"Why, I am compilin' a vocabulary myself. I call 't th' a.s.s-a.s.s-ins'

d.i.c.kshinary; showing how, by the use of mealy-mouthed and d'exotic phrases, knaves can lead fools by th' ear a vilent dith. F'r instance; if one was to say to John Bull, 'Now I'll cut a great gash in your arm and let your blood run till ye drop down senseless,' he'd take fright and say, 'Call another time!' So the profissional a.s.s-a.s.s-in words it thus: 'I'll bleed you from a large orifice till the occurrence of syncope.' All right sis John: he's bled from a lar j'orifice and dies three days after of th' a.s.sa.s.sin's knife hid in a sheath o' goose grease. But I'll bloe the gaff with my dictionary."

"Meantime _there_ is another contribution to mine," said Mrs. Dodd.

And they agreed in the gaiety of their hearts to compare their rival Lexicons.

CHAPTER XIII

THE subsiding sea was now a liquid Paradise: its great pellucid braes and hillocks shone with the sparkle and the hues of all the jewels in an emperor's crown. Imagine--after three days of inky sea, and pitchy sky, and Death's deep jaws snapping and barely missing--ten thousand great slopes of emerald, aquamarine, amethyst and topaz, liquid, alive, and dancing jocundly beneath a gorgeous sun: and you will have a faint idea of what met the eyes and hearts of the rescued looking out of that battered, jagged ship, upon ocean smiling back to smiling Heaven.

Yet one man felt no buoyancy, nor gush of joy. He leaned against a fragment of the broken bulwark, confused between the sweetness of life preserved and the bitterness of treasure lost--his wife's and children's treasured treasure; benumbed at heart, and almost weary of the existence he had battled for so stoutly. He looked so moody, and answered so grimly and unlike himself, that they all held aloof from him; heavy heart among so many joyful ones, he was in true solitude; the body in a crowd, the soul alone. And he was sore as well as heavy; for of all the lubberly acts he had ever known, the way he had lost his dear ones'

fortune seemed to him the worst.

A voice sounded in his ear: "Poor thing! she has s foundered."

It was Fullalove scanning the horizon with his famous gla.s.s.

"Foundered? Who?" said Dodd; though he did not care much who sank, who swam. Then he remembered the vessel, whose flashing guns had shed a human ray on the unearthly horror of the black hurricane. He looked all round.

Blank.

Ay, she had perished with all hands. The sea had swallowed her, and spared him--ungrateful.

This turned his mind sharply. Suppose the _Agra_ had gone down, the money would be lost as now, and his life into the bargain--a life dearer to all at home than millions of gold: he prayed inwardly to Heaven for grat.i.tude and goodness to feel its mercy. This softened him a little; and his heart swelled so, he wished he was a woman to cry over his children's loss for an hour, and then shake all off and go through his duty somehow; for now he was paralysed, and all seemed ended. Next, nautical superst.i.tion fastened on him. That pocket-book of his was Jonah: it had to go or else the ship; the moment it did go, the storm had broken as by magic.

Now Superst.i.tion is generally stronger than rational Religion, whether they lie apart or together in one mind; and this superst.i.tious notion did something toward steeling the poor man. "Come," said he to himself "my loss has saved all these poor souls on board this ship. So be it!

Heaven's will be done! I must bustle, or else go mad."

He turned to and worked like a horse: and with his own hands helped the men to rig parallel ropes--a subst.i.tute for bulwarks--till the perspiration ran down him.

Bayliss now reported the well nearly dry, and Dodd was about to bear up and make sail again, when one of the ship-boys, a little fellow with a bright eye and a chin like a monkey's, came up to him and said--

"Please, captain!" Then glared with awe at what he had done, and broke down.

"Well, my little man?" said Dodd gently.

Thus encouraged, the boy gave a great gulp, and burst in in a brogue, "Och your arnr, sure there's no rudder on her at all barrin the tiller."

"What d'ye mean?"

"Don't murder me, your arnr, and I'll tell ye. It's meself looked over the starrn just now; and I seen there was no rudder at all at all.

Mille diaoul, sis I; ye old b.i.t.c.h, I'll tell his arur what y'are after, slipping your rudder like my granny's list shoe, I will."

Dodd ran to the helm and looked down; the brat was right: the blows which had so endangered the ship, had broken the rudder, and the sea had washed away more than half of it. The sight and the reflection made him faintish for a moment. Death pa.s.sing so very close to a man sickens him _afterwards,_ unless he has the luck to be brainless.

"What is your name, urchin?"

"Ned Murphy, sir."

"Very well, Murphy, then you are a fine little fellow, and have wiped all our eyes in the ship: run and send the carpenter aft."

"Ay, ay, sir."

The carpenter came. Like most artisans, he was clever in a groove: take him out of that, and lo! a mule, a pig, an owl. He was not only unable to invent, but so stiffly disinclined: a makeshift rudder was clean out of his way; and, as his whole struggle was to get away from every suggestion Dodd made back to groove aforesaid, the thing looked hopeless. Then Fullalove, who had stood by grinning, offered to make a bunk.u.m rudder, provided the carpenter and mates were put under his orders. "But" said he, "I must bargain they shall be disrated if they attempt to reason."

"That is no more than fair," said Dodd. The Yankee inventor demanded a spare maincap, and cut away one end of the square piece, so as to make it fit the stem-post: through the circle of the cap he introduced a spare mizen topmast: to this he seized a length of junk, another to that, another to that, and so on: to the outside junk he seized a spare maintop-gallant mast, and this conglomerate being now nearly as broad as a rudder, he planked over all. The sea by this time was calm; he got the machine over the stern, and had the square end of the cap bolted to the stern-post. He had already fixed four spans of nine-inch hawser to the sides of the makeshift, two fastened to tackles, which led into the gunroom ports, and were housed taut--these kept the lower part of the makeshift close to the stern post--and two, to which guys were now fixed and led through the aftermost ports on to the quarter-deck, where luff- tackles were attached to them, by means of which the makeshift was to be worked as a rudder.

Some sail was now got on the ship, and she was found to steer very well.

Dodd tried her on every tack, and at last ordered Sharpe to make all sail and head for the Cape.

This electrified the first mate. The breeze was very faint but southerly, and the Mauritius under their lee. They could make it in a night and there refit, and ship a new rudder. He suggested the danger of sailing sixteen hundred miles steered by a gimcrack; and implored Dodd to put into port.

Dodd answered with a roughness and a certain wildness never seen in him before: "Danger, sir! There will be no more foul weather this voyage; Jonah is overboard." Sharpe stared an inquiry. "I tell you we shan't lower our topgallants once from this to the Cape: Jonah is overboard:"

and he slapped his forehead in despair; then, stamping impatiently with his foot, told Sharpe his duty was to obey orders, not discuss them.

"Certainly, sir," said Sharpe sullenly, and went out of the cabin with serious thoughts of communicating to the other mates an alarming suspicion about Dodd, that now, for the first time, crossed his mind.

But long habit of discipline prevailed, and he made all sail on the ship, and bore away for the Cape with a heavy heart. The sea was like a mill-pond, but in that he saw only its well-known treachery, to lead them on to this unparalleled act of madness: each sail he hoisted seemed one more agent of Destruction rising at his own suicidal command.

Towards evening it became nearly dead calm. The sea heaved a little, but was waveless, gla.s.sy, and the colour of a rose, incredibly brave and delicate.

The look-out reported pieces of wreck to windward. As the ship was making so little way, Dodd beat up towards them: he feared it was a British ship that had foundered in the storm, and thought it his duty to ascertain and carry the sad news home. In two tacks they got near enough to see with their gla.s.ses that the fragments belonged, not to a stranger, but to the _Agra_ herself. There was one of her waterb.u.t.ts, and a broken mast with some rigging: and as more wreck was descried coming in at a little distance, Dodd kept the ship close to the wind to inspect it: on drifting near, it proved to be several pieces of the bulwark, and a mahogany table out of the cuddy This sort of flotsam was not worth delaying the ship to pick it up; so Dodd made sail again, steering now south-east.

He had sailed about half a mile when the look-out hailed the deck again.

"A man in the water!"

"Whereabouts?"

"A short league on the weather quarter."

"Oh, we can't beat to windward for _him,_" said Sharpe; "he is dead long ago."

"Holds his head very high for a corpse," said the look-out.