Mary Anerley : a Yorkshire Tale Part 59

Without a word the diver plunged, having taken something between his teeth which he would not let the others see. The watery floor of the cavern was as smooth as a mill-pond in July, and he plunged so neatly that he made no splash; nothing but a flicker of reflection on the roof, and a lapping murmur round the sides, gave token that a big man was gone into the deep. For several minutes no one spoke, but every eye was strained upon the gla.s.sy dimness, and every ear intent for the first break of sound.

"T' goop ha' got un," cried old Robin, indignant at this outrage by a stranger to his caves, "G.o.d niver mahd mon to pree intil 's ain warks."

Old Joe and Bob grunted approbation, and Mordacks himself was beginning to believe that some dark whirlpool or coil of tangles had drowned the poor diver, when a very gentle noise, like a dabchick playing beneath a bridge, came from the darkest corner. Nicholas was there, inhaling air, not in greedy gulps and gasps, like a man who has had no practice, but leisurely encouraging his lungs with little doses, as a doctor gives soup to a starved boat crew. Being hailed by loud voices, he answered not, for his nature was by no means talkative; but presently, with very little breach of water, he swam to the middle, and asked for his pipe.

"Have you found the gun?" cried Mordacks, whose loftiest feelings had subsided in a quarter of a minute to the business level. Nicholas made no reply until the fire of his pipe was established, while he stood in the water quite as if he were on land, supporting himself by nothing more than a gentle movement of his feet, while the glow of the touch-paper lit his round face and yellow leather skull-cap. "In coorse I has," he said at last, blowing a roll of smoke along the gleaming surface; "over to yon little cornder."

"And you can put your hand upon it in a moment?" The reply was a nod and another roll of smoke. "Admirable! Now, then, Joe, and Bob the son of Joe, do what I told you, while Master c.o.c.kscroft and our nimble young friend get the links all ready."

The torches were fixed on the rocky shelf, as they had been upon the fatal night; but they were not lit until Joe and his son, sent forth in the smaller boat to watch, came back with news that the Preventive gig was round the point, and approaching swiftly, with a lady in the stern, whose dress was black.

"Right!" cried Mr. Mordacks, with a brisk voice ringing under the ponderous brows of rock. "Men, I have brought you to receive a lesson.

You shall see what comes of murder. Light the torches. Nicholas, go under, with the exception of your nose, or whatever it is you breathe with. When I lift my hand, go down; and do as I have ordered you."

The cavern was lit with the flare of fire, and the dark still water heaved with it, when the coast-guard boat came gliding in. The crew, in white jerseys, looked like ghosts flitting into some magic scene. Only the officer, darkly clad, and standing up with the tiller-lines in hand, and the figure of a woman sitting in the stern, relieved their spectral whiteness.

"Commander Hardlock, and men of the coastguard," shouted Mr. Mordacks, when the wash of ripples and the drip of oars and the creak of wood gave silence, "the black crime committed upon this spot shall no longer go unpunished. The ocean itself has yielded its dark secret to the perseverance of mankind, and the humble but not unskillful efforts which it has been my privilege to conduct. A good man was slain here, in cold blood slain--a man of remarkable capacity and zeal, gallantry, discipline, and every n.o.ble quality, and the father of a very large family. The villain who slew him would have slain six other harmless men by perjury if an enlightened English jury had been fools enough to believe him. Now I will show you what to believe. I am not eloquent, I am not a man of words; my motto is strict business. And business with me is a power, not a name. I lift my hand; you wait for half a minute; and then, from the depths of this abyss, arises the gun used in the murder."

The men understood about half of this, being honest fellows in the main, and desiring time to put heads together about the meaning; but one there was who knew too well that his treacherous sin had found him out. He strove to look like the rest, but felt that his eyes obeyed heart more than brain; and then the widow, who had watched him closely through her black veil, lifted it, and fixed her eyes on his. Deadly terror seized him, and he wished that he had shot himself.

"Stand up, men," the commander shouted, "until we see the end of this.

The crime has been laid upon our force. We scorn the charge of such treachery. Stand up, men, and face, like innocent men, whatever can be shown against you."

The men stood up, and the light of the torches fell upon their faces.

All were pale with fear and wonder, but one was white as death itself.

Calling up his dogged courage, and that bitterness of malice which had made him do the deed, and never yet repent of it, he stood as firmly as the rest, but differed from them in three things. His face wore a smile; he watched one place only; and his breath made a noise, while theirs was held.

Then, from the water, without a word, or sign of any hand that moved it, a long gun rose before John Cadman, and the b.u.t.t was offered to his hand. He stood with his arms at his sides, and could not lift them to do anything. Neither could he speak, nor make defense, but stood like an image that is fastened by the feet.

"Hand me that," cried the officer, sharply; but instead of obeying, the man stared malignantly, and then plunged over the gun into the depth.

Not so, however, did he cheat the hangman; Nicholas caught him (as a water-dog catches a worn-out glove), and gave him to any one that would have him. "Strap him tight," the captain cried; and the men found relief in doing it. At the next jail-delivery he was tried, and the jury did their duty. His execution restored good-will, and revived that faith in justice which subsists upon so little food.

CHAPTER LVI

IN THE THICK OF IT

One of the greatest days in all the history of England, having no sense of its future fame, and being upon a hostile coast, was shining rather dismally. And one of England's greatest men, the greatest of all her sons in battle--though few of them have been small at that--was out of his usual mood, and full of calm presentiment and gloomy joy. He knew that he would see the sun no more; yet his fear was not of that, but only of losing the light of duty. As long as the sun endures, he shall never see duty done more brilliantly.

The wind was dropping, to give the storm of human fury leisure; and while a sullen swell was rolling, canvas flapped and timbers creaked.

Like a team of mallards in double column, plunging and lifting buoyant b.r.e.a.s.t.s to right and left alternately, the British fleet bore down upon the swan-like crescent of the foe. These were doing their best to fly, but failing of that luck, put helm alee, and shivered in the wind, and made fine speeches, proving that they must win the day.

"For this I have lived, and for this it would be worth my while to die, having no one left, I dare say now, in all the world to care for me."

Thus spake the junior lieutenant of that British ship, the Victory--a young man after the heart of Nelson, and gazing now on Nelson's face.

No smarter sailor could be found in all that n.o.ble fleet than this Lieutenant Blyth, who once had been the captain of all smugglers. He had fought his way up by skill, and spirit, and patience, and good temper, and the precious gift of self-reliance, failing of which all merit fails. He had always thought well of himself, but never destroyed the good of it by saying so; and whoever praised him had to do it again, to outspeak his modesty. But without good fortune all these merits would never have been successes. One of Robin's truest merits was that he generally earned good luck.

However, his spirits were not in their usual flow of jocundity just now, and his lively face was dashed with care. Not through fear of lead, or steel, or wooden splinter, or a knock upon the head, or any other human mode of encouraging humanity. He hoped to keep out of the way of these, as even the greatest heroes do; for how could the world get on if all its bravest men went foremost? His mind meant clearly, and with trust in proper Providence, to remain in its present bodily surroundings, with which it had no fault to find. Grief, however--so far as a man having faith in his luck admits that point--certainly was making some little hole into a heart of corky fibre. For Robin Lyth had heard last night, when a schooner joined the fleet with letters, that Mary Anerley at last was going to marry Harry Tanfield. He told himself over and over again that if it were so, the fault was his own, because he had not taken proper care about the safe dispatch of letters. Changing from ship to ship and from sea to sea for the last two years or more, he had found but few opportunities of writing, and even of those he had not made the utmost. To Mary herself he had never once written, knowing well that her father forbade it, while his letters to Flamborough had been few, and some of those few had miscarried. For the French had a very clever knack just now of catching the English dispatch-boats, in most of which they found accounts of their own thrashings, as a listener catches bad news of himself. But none of these led them to improve their conduct.

Flamborough (having felt certain that Robin could never exist without free trade, and missing many little courtesies that flowed from his liberal administration), was only too ready to lament his death, without insisting on particulars. Even as a man who has foretold a very destructive gale of wind tempers with the pride of truth the sorrow which he ought to feel for his domestic chimney-pots (as soon as he finds them upon his lawn), so Little Denmark, while bewailing, accepted the loss as a compliment to its own renowned sagacity.

But Robin knew not until last night that he was made dead at Flamborough, through the wreck of a ship which he had quitted a month before she was cast away. And now at last he only heard that news by means of his shipmate, Jack Anerley. Jack was a thorough-going sailor now, easy, and childish, and full of the present, leaving the past to cure and the future to care for itself as might be. He had promised Mr.

Mordacks and Robin c.o.c.kscroft to find out Robin Lyth, and tell him all about the conviction of John Cadman; and knowing his name in the navy and that of his ship, he had done so after in-and-out chase. But there for the time he had rested from his labors, and left "Davy Jones" to send back word about it; which that Pelagian Davy fails to do, unless the message is enshrined in a bottle, for which he seems to cherish true naval regard.

In this state of things the two brothers-in-law--as they fully intended to be by-and-by--were going into this tremendous battle: Jack as a petty officer, and Robin as a junior lieutenant of Lord Nelson's ship. Already had Jack Anerley begun to feel for Robin--or Lieutenant Blyth, as he now was called--that liking of admiration which his clear free manner, and quickness of resource, and agreeable smile in the teeth of peril, had won for him before he had the legal right to fight much. And Robin--as he shall still be called while the memory of Flamborough endures--regarded Jack Anerley with fatherly affection, and hoped to put strength into his character.

However, one necessary step toward that is to keep the character surviving; and in the world's pell-mell now beginning, the uproar alone was enough to kill some, and the smoke sufficient to choke the rest.

Many a British sailor who, by the mercy of Providence, survived that day, never could hear a word concerning any other battle (even though a son of his own delivered it down a trumpet), so furious was the concussion of the air, the din of roaring metal, and the clash of cannon-b.a.l.l.s which met in the air, and split up into founts of iron.

No less than seven French and Spanish ships agreed with one accord to fall upon and destroy Lord Nelson's ship. And if they had only adopted a rational mode of doing it, and shot straight, they could hardly have helped succeeding. Even as it was, they succeeded far too well; for they managed to make England rue the tidings of her greatest victory.

In the storm and whirl and flame of battle, when shot flew as close as the teeth of a hay-rake, and fire blazed into furious eyes, and then with a blow was quenched forever, and raging men flew into pieces--some of which killed their dearest friends--who was he that could do more than attend to his own business? Nelson had known that it would be so, and had twice enjoined it in his orders; and when he was carried down to die, his dying mind was still on this. Robin Lyth was close to him when he fell, and helped to bear him to his plank of death, and came back with orders not to speak, but work.

Then ensued that crowning effort of misplaced audacity--the attempt to board and carry by storm the ship that still was Nelson's. The captain of the Redoubtable saw through an alley of light, between walls of smoke, that the quarter-deck of the Victory had plenty of corpses, but scarcely a life upon it. Also he felt (from the comfort to his feet, and the increasing firmness of his spinal column) that the heavy British guns upon the lower decks had ceased to throb and thunder into his own poor ship. With a bound of high spirits he leaped to a pleasing conclusion, and shouted, "Forward, my brave sons; we will take the vessel of war of that Nielson!"

This, however, proved to be beyond his power, partly through the inborn absurdity of the thing, and partly, no doubt, through the quick perception and former vocation of Robin Lyth. What would England have said if her greatest hero had breathed his last in French arms, and a captive to the Frenchman? Could Nelson himself have departed thus to a world in which he never could have put the matter straight? The wrong would have been redressed very smartly here, but perhaps outside his knowledge. Even to dream of it awakes a shudder; yet outrages almost as great have triumphed, and nothing is quite beyond the irony of fate.

But if free trade can not be shown as yet to have won for our country any other blessing, it has earned the last atom of our patience and fort.i.tude by its indirect benevolence at this great time. Without free trade--in its sweeter and more innocent maidenhood of smuggling--there never could have been on board that English ship the Victory, a man, unless he were a runagate, with a mind of such laxity as to understand French. But Robin Lyth caught the French captain's words, and with two bounds, and a holloa, called up Britons from below. By this time a swarm of brave Frenchmen was gathered in the mizzen-chains and gangways of their ship, waiting for a lift of the sea to launch them into the English outworks. And scarcely a dozen Englishmen were alive within hail to encounter them. Not even an officer, till Robin Lyth returned, was there to take command of them. The foremost and readiest there was Jack Anerley, with a boarder's pike, and a brace of ship pistols, and his fine ruddy face screwed up as firm as his father's, before a big sale of wheat "Come on, you froggies; we are ready for you," he shouted, as if he had a hundred men in ambush.

They, for their part, failed to enter into the niceties of his language--which difficulty somehow used never to be felt among cla.s.sic warriors--yet from his manner and position they made out that he offered let and hinderance. To remove him from their course, they began to load guns, or to look about for loaded ones, postponing their advance until he should cease to interfere, so clear at that time was the Gallic perception of an English sailor's fort.i.tude. Seeing this to be so, Jack (whose mind was not well balanced) threw a powder-case amongst them, and exhibited a dance. But this was cut short by a hand-grenade, and, before he had time to recover from that, the deck within a yard of his head flew open, and a stunning crash went by.

Poor Jack Anerley lay quite senseless, while ten or twelve men (who were rushing up, to repel the enemy) fell and died in a hurricane of splinters. A heavy round shot, fired up from the enemy's main-deck, had shattered all before it; and Jack might thank the grenade that he lay on his back while the havoc swept over. Still, his peril was hot, for a volley of musketry whistled and rang around him; and at least a hundred and fifty men were watching their time to leap down on him.

Everything now looked as bad as could be, with the drifting of the smoke, and the flare of fire, and the pelting of bullets, and of grapnel from coehorns, and the screams of Frenchmen exulting vastly, with scarcely any Englishmen to stop them. It seemed as if they were to do as they pleased, level the bulwarks of English rights, and cover themselves with more glory than ever. But while they yet waited to give one more scream, a very different sound arose. Powder, and metal, and crash of timber, and even French and Spanish throats at their very highest pressure, were of no avail against the onward vigor and power of an English cheer. This cheer had a very fine effect. Out of their own mouths the foreigners at once were convicted of inferior stuff, and their two twelve-pounders crammed with grapnel, which ought to have scattered mortality, banged upward, as harmless as a pod discharging seed.

In no account of this great conflict is any precision observed concerning the pell-mell and fisticuff parts of it. The worst of it is that on such occasions almost everybody who was there enlarges his own share of it; and although reflection ought to curb this inclination, it seems to do quite the contrary. This may be the reason why n.o.body as yet (except Mary Anerley and Flamborough folk) seems even to have tried to a.s.sign fair importance to Robin Lyth's share in this glorious encounter.

It is now too late to strive against the tide of fortuitous clamor, whose deposit is called history. Enough that this Englishman came up, with fifty more behind him, and carried all before him, as he was bound to do.

CHAPTER LVII

MARY LYTH

Conquests, triumphs, and slaughterous glory are not very nice till they have ceased to drip. After that extinction of the war upon the waves, the nation which had won the fight went into general mourning. Sorrow, as deep as a maiden's is at the death of her lover, spread over the land; and people who had married their romance away, and fathered off their enthusiasm, abandoned themselves to even deeper anguish at the insecurity of property. So deeply had England's faith been anch.o.r.ed into the tenacity of Nelson. The fall of the funds when the victory was announced outspoke a thousand monuments.

From sires and grandsires Englishmen have learned the mood into which their country fell. To have fought under Nelson in his last fight was a pa.s.sword to the right hands of men, and into the hearts of women. Even a man who had never been known to change his mind began to condemn other people for being obstinate. Farmer Anerley went to church in his Fencible accoutrements, with a sash of heavy c.r.a.pe, upon the first day of the Christian year. To prove the largeness of his mind, he harnessed the white-nosed horse, and drove his family away from his own parish, to St. Oswald's Church at Flamborough, where Dr. Upround was to preach upon the death of Nelson. This sermon was of the n.o.blest order, eloquent, spirited, theological, and yet so thoroughly practical, that seven Flamborough boys set off on Monday to destroy French ships of war. Mary did her very utmost not to cry--for she wanted so particularly to watch her father--but nature and the doctor were too many for her. And when he came to speak of the distinguished part played (under Providence) by a gallant son of Flamborough, who, after enduring with manly silence evil report and unprecious balms, stood forward in the breach, like Phineas, and, with the sword of Gideon, defied Philistia to enter the British ark; and when he went on to say that but for Flamborough's prowess on that day, and the valor of the adjoining parish (which had also supplied a hero), England might be mourning her foremost [Greek word], her very greatest fighter in the van, without the consolation of burying him, and embalming him in a nation's tears--for the French might have fired the magazine--and when he proceeded to ask who it was that (under the guiding of a gracious hand) had shattered the devices of the enemy, up stood Robin c.o.c.kscroft, with a score of equally ancient captains, and remembering where they were, touched their forelocks, and answered--"Robin Lyth, sir!"

Then Mary permitted the pride of her heart, which had long been painful with the tight control, to escape in a sob, which her mother had foreseen; and pulling out the stopper from her smelling-bottle, Mistress Anerley looked at her husband as if he were Bonaparte himself.

He, though aware that it was inconsistent of her, felt (as he said afterward) as if he had been a Frenchman; and looked for his hat, and fumbled about for the b.u.t.ton of the pew, to get out of it. But luckily the clerk, with great presence of mind, awoke, and believing the sermon to be over, from the number of men who were standing up, p.r.o.nounced "Amen" decisively.

During the whole of the homeward drive Farmer Anerley's countenance was full of thought; but he knew that it was watched, and he did not choose to let people get in front of him with his own brains. Therefore he let his wife and daughter look at him, to their hearts' content, while he looked at the ledges, and the mud, and the ears of his horse, and the weather; and he only made two observations of moment, one of which was "gee!" and the other was "whoa!"

With females jolting up and down, upon no springs--except those of jerksome curiosity--conduct of this character was rude in the extreme.

But knowing what he was, they glanced at one another, not meaning in any sort of way to blame him, but only that he would be better by-and-by, and perhaps try to make amends handsomely. And this, beyond any denial, he did as soon as he had dined, and smoked his pipe on the b.u.t.t of the tree by the rick-yard. n.o.body knew where he kept his money, or at least his good wife always said so, when any one made bold to ask her. And even now he was right down careful to go to his pot without anybody watching; so that when he came into the Sunday parlor there was not one of them who could say, even at a guess, where he last had been.