My Danish Sweetheart Volume II Part 13

'Well, and what'll you do now?' cried Captain Bunting.

'Do? Whoy, chuck myself overboard!' shouted Jacob, apparently quickened into his old vitality by the anguish of sudden realization.

Here Abraham slowly looked round, and then turned and lay against the rail, eyeing us lifelessly.

CHAPTER VI.

CAPTAIN JOPPA BUNTING.

There were four or five coloured seamen standing near, looking on.

Though I could not have been sure, I guessed them to be Malays by the somewhat Chinese cast of their features. I had seen such faces once before, discolouring a huddle of white countenances of European seamen looking over the side of a ship, anch.o.r.ed in our bay, at the lifeboat I was in charge of for an hour or two of practice. I also caught the fierce lemon-coloured creature at the wheel following the Captain, as he moved about, with his stealthy dusky eyes; but more than this I had not time to take notice of.

'Abraham,' I exclaimed, approaching him, 'this is a bad business.'

'Ay,' he muttered, drying his lips upon his knuckles. 'There's nothen to do now but to get home again. I laid out fifteen pound for myself on this here job, an it's gone, and gone's, too, the money we was to take up. Oh, Jacob, matey! how came it about? how came it about?' he cried, in a voice of bitter grief that was without the least hint of temper or reproach.

'Ye've heard, Abraham,' answered the other, speaking brokenly. 'Gord He knows how it happened. I'd ha' given ten toimes ower the money we was to airn that this here mucking job had been yourn instead o' mine, that I might feel as sorry for ye, Abey, as ye are for me, mate.'

'Is she clean gone?' cried Captain Bunting, looking over the quarter.

'Yes, clean. Nothing but her boat floating, and a few spars. It is spilt milk, and not to be recovered by tears. You two men will have to go along with us till we can send the four of you home. Mr. Jones, fill on your topsail, if you please. Hi! you Pallunappach.e.l.ly, swab up that wet there, d'ye hear? Now Moona, now Yong Soon Wat, and you, Shayoo Saibo--maintopsail-brace, and bear a hand!'

While the topsail-yard was in the act of swinging I observed that Abraham's countenance suddenly changed. A fit of temper, resembling his outbreak when the Hamburger had pa.s.sed us, darkened his face. He rolled his eyes fiercely, then, plucking off his cap, flung it savagely down upon the deck, and, while he tumbled and sprawled about in a sort of mad dance, he bawled at the top of his voice:

'I says it _can't_ be true! What I says is, it's a dream--a blooming, measly dream! The _Airly Marn_ foundered!' Here he gave his cap a kick that sent it flying the length of the p.o.o.p. 'It's a loie, I says. It was to ha' been seventy-foive pound a man, and there was two gone, whose shares would ha' been ourn. And where's moy fifteen pound vorth o'

goods? Cuss the hour, I says, that ever we fell in with this barque!'

He raved in this fashion for some minutes, the Captain meanwhile eyeing him with his head on one side, as though striving to find out whether he was drunk or mad. He then rushed to the side with an impetuosity that made me fear he meant to spring overboard, and, looking down for a moment, he bellowed forth, shaking his clenched fist at the sea:

'Yes, then she _is_ gone, and 'tain't a dream!'

He fetched his thigh a mighty slap, and, wheeling round, stared at us in the manner of one temporarily bereft of his senses by the apparition of something he finds horrible.

'These Deal boatmen have excitable natures!' said Captain Joppa Bunting, addressing me, fixedly smiling, and pa.s.sing his fingers through a whisker as he spoke.

'I trust you will bear with the poor fellows,' said I: 'it is a heavy loss to the men, and a death-blow to big expectations.'

'Temper is excusable occasionally at sea,' observed the Captain; 'but language I never permit. Yet that unhappy Christian soul ought to be borne with, as you say, seeing that he is a poor ignorant man very sorely tried. Abraham Vise, come here!' he called.

'His name is Wise,' said I.

'Wise, come here!' he shouted.

Abraham approached us with a slow, rolling gait, and a face in which temper was now somewhat clouded by bewilderment.

'Abraham,' said the Captain, looking from him to Jacob, who leaned, wet through, against the rail with a dogged face and his eyes rooted upon the deck, 'you have met with one of those severe reverses which happen entirely for the good of the sufferer, however he may object to take that view. Depend upon it, my man, that the loss of your lugger is for some wise purpose.'

Abraham looked at him with an eye whose gaze delivered the word _d.a.m.n_ as articulately as ever his lips could have uttered the oath.

'You two men were going in that small open boat to Australia,' continued the Captain, with a paternal air and a nasal voice, and smiling always.

'Do you suppose you would ever have reached that distant coast?'

'Sartainly I dew, sir,' cried Abraham hoa.r.s.ely, with a vehement nod.

'I say _no_, then!' thundered the Captain. '_Two_ of you! Why, I've fallen in with smaller luggers than yours cruising in the Channel with eight of a crew.'

'Ay!' shouted Abraham. 'And vy? Only ask yourself the question! 'Cause they carry men to ship as pilots. But tew can handle a lugger.'

'I say no!' thundered the Captain again. 'What? All the way from the Chops to Sydney Bay. Who's your navigator?'

'Oy am,' answered Abraham.

The Captain curved his odd, double-lipped mouth into a sneer, that yet somehow did not disguise or alter his habitual or congenital smile, while he ran his eye over the boatman's figure.

'You!' he cried, pausing and bursting into a loud laugh; then, resuming his nasal intonation, he continued. 'Mark you this now. The loss of your lugger alongside my barque is a miracle wrought by a bountiful Heaven to extend your existence, which you were deliberately attempting to cut short by a dreadful act of folly, so dreadful that had you perished by a like behaviour ash.o.r.e you would have been buried with a stake through your middle.'

He turned up his eyes till little more than the whites of them were visible. Grieved as I was for poor Abraham, I scarcely saved myself from bursting out laughing, so ludicrous were the shifting emotions which worked in his face, and so absurd Jacob's fixed stare of astonishment and wrath.

'Now, men,' continued the Captain, 'you can go forward. What's _your_ name?'

'Jacob Minnikin, sir,' answered the boatman, speaking thickly and with difficulty.

'Get you to the galley, Jacob Minnikin,' said the Captain, 'and dry your clothes. The chief mate will show you where to find a couple of spare bunks in the forecastle. Go and warm yourselves and get something to eat. You'll be willing to work, I hope, in return for my keeping you until I can send you home?'

Abraham sullenly mumbled, 'Yes, sir.'

'All right. We may not be long together; but while I have you I shall be thankful for you. We are a black crew, and the sight of a couple of white faces forward will do me good. Off you go, now!'

Without another word the two men trudged off the p.o.o.p; but I could hear them muttering to each other as they went down the ladder.

Some time before this sail had been trimmed, and the barque was once again clumsily breaking the seas, making a deal of noisy sputtering at her cut.w.a.ter to the stoop of her apple-shaped bows, and rolling and plunging as though she were contending with the surge of Agulhas or the Horn. I sent my sight around the ocean, but there was nothing to be seen. The atmosphere had slightly thickened, and it was blowing fresh, but the wind was on the quarter, and the mate had found nothing in the weather to hinder him from showing the mainsail to it again with the port clew up. But the Captain's talk prevented me from making further observations at that time.

'Those two men,' said he, 'have very good, honest, substantial, Scriptural names. Abraham and Jacob,' he smacked his lips. 'I like 'em.

I consider myself fortunate in the name of Joppa,' he continued, looking from me to Helga. 'I _might_ have been called Robert.'

You would have thought that the smile which accompanied this speech was designed to point it as a joke, but a moment's observation a.s.sured me that it was a fixed expression.

'I have observed,' he went on, 'that the lower orders are very dull and tardy in arriving at an appreciation of the misfortunes which befall them. Those two men, sir, are not in the least degree grateful for the loss of their lugger, by which, as I told them, their lives have been undoubtedly preserved.'

'They are poor men,' said Helga, 'and do not know how to be grateful for the loss of perhaps very nearly all that they have in the world.'

He looked at her smilingly, with a glance down her figure, and exclaimed, 'I am quite sure that when your poor dear father's barque sank _you_ did not resent the decree of Heaven.'

Helga held her peace.