My Danish Sweetheart Volume II Part 15

'No, you have not mistaken,' said I; 'Miss Nielsen and I have now for some days been fellow-sufferers, and, for acquaintance's sake, she wishes her berth to be near mine!'

This I said soothingly, for I thought the skipper's brow looked a little clouded.

'Be it so,' said he, with a bland flourish of both hands: 'meanwhile, madam, such conveniences as my cabin affords are at your service for immediate use.'

She hesitated, but on meeting my eye seemed immediately to catch what was in my mind, and, smiling prettily, she thanked him, and went at once to his cabin.

'The fact is, sir,' said he nasally, dragging at the wristband of his shirt and looking at his nails, 'man at the best is but a very selfish animal, and cruelly neglectful of the comfort and happiness of women.

Pardon my frankness: your charming companion has been exposed for several days to the horrors of what was really no better than an open boat. What more natural than that she should wish to adjust her hair and take a peep at herself in a looking-gla.s.s? And yet'--here he smiled profoundly--'the suggestion that she should withdraw did not come from _you_.'

'The kindness of your reception of us,' I answered, 'a.s.sured me that you would do everything that is necessary.'

'Quite so,' he answered; 'and now, Mr. Tregarthen, I dare say a brush-up will comfort you too. You will find all that you require in Mr. Jones's cabin.'

I thanked him, and at once entered the berth, hardly knowing as yet whether to be amused or astonished by the singular character of this long-whiskered, blandly smiling, and, as I might fairly believe, religious sea-captain.

There was a little window in the berth that looked on to the quarter-deck. On peering through it I spied Abraham and Jacob with their arms buried to the elbow in their breeches' pockets, leaning, with dogged mien, in the true loafing, lounging, 'longsh.o.r.e posture, against the side of the caboose or galley. The whole ship's company seemed to have gathered about them. I counted nine men. There was a rusty tinge in the atmosphere that gave me a tolerable sight of all those people. It was the first dog-watch, when the men would be free to hang about the decks and smoke and talk. The coloured sailors formed a group, in that dull hectic light, to dwell upon the memory--one with a yellow sou'-wester, another with a soldier's forage-cap on his head, a third in a straw hat, along with divers scarecrow-like costumes of dungaree and coa.r.s.e canvas jumpers--here a jacket resembling an evening-dress coat that had been robbed of its tails, there a pair of flapping skirts, a red wool comforter, half-wellington boots, old shoes, and I know not what besides.

The man that had been pointed out to me as 'boss'--to employ Captain Bunting's term--was addressing the two boatmen as I looked. He was talking in a low voice, and not the slightest growl of his accents reached me. Now and again he would smite his hands and act as though betrayed by temper into a sudden vehement delivery, from which he swiftly recovered himself, so to speak, with an eager look aft at the p.o.o.p-deck, where, I might suppose, the mate stood watching them, or where, at all events, he would certainly be walking, on the look-out.

While he addressed the boatmen, the others stood doggedly looking on, all, apparently, intent upon the countenances of our Deal friends, whose att.i.tude was one of contemptuous inattention.

However, by this time I had refreshed myself with a wash, and now quitted the cabin after a slight look round, in which I took notice of the portrait of a stout lady cut out in black paper and pasted upon a white card, a telescope, a s.e.xtant case, a little battery of pipes in a rack over the bunk.

Helga arrived, holding her sealskin hat in her hand. Her amber-coloured hair--for sometimes I would think it of this hue, at others a pale gold, then a very fine delicate yellow--showed with a little roughness in it, as though she were fresh from the blowing of the wind. But had she been an artist she could not have expressed more choiceness in her fashion of neglect. She had heartened and brightened greatly since our rescue from the raft, and, though there were still many traces of her grief and sufferings in her face, there was likewise the promise that she needed but a very short term of good usage from life to bloom into as sweet, modest, and gentle a maiden as a man's heart could wish to hold to itself.

The Captain, motioning us to our places, took his seat at the head of the table with a large air of hospitality in his manner of drawing out his whiskers and inflating his waistcoat. The vessel creaked and groaned noisily as she pitched and rolled, so slanting the table that, but for the rough, well-used fiddles, every article upon it would have speedily tumbled on to the deck. The lamp burned brightly, and almost eclipsed the rusty complexion of daylight that lay upon the gla.s.s of the little skylight directly over our heads.

Punmeamootty waited nimbly upon us, though my immediate impression was that his alacrity was not a little animated by fear and dislike. As the Captain sat smilingly recommending the ham that he was carving--dwelling much upon it, and talking of the pig as an animal on the whole more serviceable to man than the cow--I caught the coloured steward watching him as he stood some little distance away upon the skipper's left, with his dusky shining eyes in the corner of their sockets. It reminded me of the look I had observed the fierce-looking fellow at the wheel fasten upon the Captain. It was as though the fellow cursed him with his dusky gaze. Yet there was nothing forbidding in his face, despite his ugliness. His skin was of the colour of the yolk of an egg, and he had a coa.r.s.e heavy nose, which made me suspect a Dutch hand in the man's creation. His hair was coal black, long, and lank, after the Chinese pattern. It would have been hard to guess his age from such a mask of a face as he carried; but the few bristles on his upper lip suggested youth, and I dare say I was right in thinking him about two-and-twenty.

The Captain talked freely; sometimes he omitted his nasal tw.a.n.g; but his conversation was threaded with pious reflections, and I took notice of a tendency in the man to sermonize, as though little in the most familiar talk could occur out of which a salutary moral was not to be squeezed.

He seemed to be very well pleased to have us on board, not perhaps so much because our company was a break as because it provided him with an opportunity to philosophize, and to air his sentiments. I shall not be thought very grateful for thus speaking of a man who had rescued us from a trying and distressful situation, and who was entertaining us kindly, and, I may say, bountifully; but my desire is to give you the truth--to describe exactly as best I can what I saw and suffered in this strange pa.s.sage of my life, and the portrait I am attempting of Captain Joppa Bunting is as the eyes of my head, and of my mind too, beheld him.

As I looked at him sitting at the table, of a veal-like complexion in that light, blandly gesticulating with his fat hands, expressing himself with a nasal gravity that was at times diverting with the smile that accompanied it, it seemed difficult to believe that he was a merchant captain, the master of as commonplace an old ocean waggon as ever crushed a sea with a round bow. I asked him how long he had followed the life, and he astonished me by answering that he was now forty-four, and that he had been apprenticed to the sea at the age of twelve.

'You will have seen a very great deal in that time, Captain,' said I.

'I believe there is no wonder of the Lord visible upon the face of the deep which I have not viewed,' he responded. 'There is no part of the world which I have not visited. I have coasted the Antarctic zone of ice in a whaler, and I have been becalmed for seventeen weeks right off, with thirty miles of motion only in those seventeen weeks, upon the parallel of one degree north.'

On this I observed that Helga eyed him with interest, yet I seemed to be sensible, too, of an expression of recoil in her face, if I may thus express what I do not know how better to define.

'You have worn wonderfully well,' said I.

'I have taken care of myself,' he answered, smiling.

'Is this your ship, sir?'

'I have a large interest in her,' he replied. 'I am very well content to follow the sea. The sense of being watched over is comforting, and often exhilarating; but I wish,' he exclaimed, with a solemn wagging of his head, 'that the obligation to make money in this life was less, much less, than it is.'

'It is the only life in which we shall require money,' said Helga.

'True, madam,' said he, with an apparently careless but puzzling glance at her; 'but let me tell you that the obligation of money-making soils the soul. I am not surprised that the G.o.dliest of the good men of old took up their abode in caves, were satisfied with roots for dinner, and were as happy in a sheep's-skin as a dandy in a costume by Poole. I defy a man to practise virtue and make money too. Punmeamootty, put some wine into the lady's gla.s.s!'

Helga declined. The Malay was moving swiftly to execute the order, but stopped dead on her saying no, and with insensible and mouse-like movements regained his former post, where he stood watching the Captain as before.

'Yes,' said I, 'this world would be a pleasant one if we could manage without money.'

'For myself,' said he, casting his eyes over the table, 'I could do very well with a crust of bread and a gla.s.s of water; but I have a daughter, Judith Ruby, and I have to work for her.'

This brought a little expression of sympathy into Helga's face.

'Is she your only daughter, Captain Bunting?' she asked.

'My only daughter,' he answered, with a momentary softening of his voice. 'I wish I had her here!' said he. 'You would find her, Miss Nielsen, a good, kind, religious girl. She is lonely in her home when I am away. I am a widower. My dear wife fell asleep six years ago.'

He sighed, but he was smiling too as he did so.

The windows of the skylight had now turned into gleaming ebony against the darkness of the evening outside, and reflected the white table-cloth and the sparkling gla.s.s and our figures as though it were a black polished mirror over our heads. I had taken notice of a sharper inclination in the heel of the barque when she rolled to leeward, and, though I was no sailor, yet my ears, accustomed to the noises of the coast, had caught a keener edge in the hum of the wind outside, a more fretful hiss in the stroke of every sea smiting the bends. An order was delivered from the deck above us and shortly afterwards, a singular sound of howling arose, accompanied with the slatting and flapping of canvas.

'Mr. Jones is taking the mainsail off her,' said the Captain, 'but the gla.s.s is very steady. We shall have a fine night,' he added, smiling at Helga.

'Is that strange wailing noise made by the crew?' she asked.

'It is, madam. The Malays are scarcely to be called nightingales. They are pulling at the ropes, and they sing as they pull. It is a habit among sailors--but you do not require me to tell you that.'

'I believe there is very little in seamanship, Captain Bunting,' said I, 'that even you, with your long experience, could teach Miss Nielsen.'

She looked somewhat wistfully at me, as though she would discourage any references to her.

'Indeed!' he exclaimed. 'I should like to hear your nautical accomplishments.'

'It was my humour to a.s.sist my father when at sea,' she said, with her eyes fixed on the table.

'Now, what can you do?' said he, watching her. 'Pray tell me? A knowledge of the sea among your s.e.x is so rare that a sailor could never value it too greatly in a lady.'

'Let me answer for Miss Nielsen, Captain,' I exclaimed carelessly, with a glance at the Malay steward, whose gaze, like the Captain's, was also directed at Helga. 'She can put a ship about, she can steer, she can loose a jib, and run aloft as nimbly as the smartest sailor; she can stand a watch and work a ship in it, and she can take sights and give you a vessel's place on the chart--within a mile shall I say, Helga?'

He looked at me on my p.r.o.nouncing the word 'Helga.' I do not know that I had before called the girl thus familiarly in his presence.

'You are joking, Mr. Tregarthen!' said he.

A little smile of appeal to me parted Helga's lips.

'No, no,' said I, 'I am not joking. It is all true. She is the most heroical of girls, besides. We owe our preservation to her courage and knowledge. Helga, may G.o.d bless you, and grant us a safe and speedy return to a home where, if the dear heart in it is still beating, we shall meet with a sweet welcome, be sure.'

'But you must not be in a hurry to return home,' exclaimed the Captain, turning his smiling countenance to Helga; 'you must give me time to tempt you to remain on board _The Light of the World_. Your qualifications as a sailor should make you an excellent mate, and you will tell me how much a month you will take to serve in that capacity?'

I observed the same look of recoil in her face that I had before seen in it. A woman's instincts, thought I, are often amazingly keen in the interpretation of men's minds. Or is she merely nervous and sensitive with a gentle, pretty modesty and bashfulness which render direct allusions to her after this pattern distressing? For my part, I could find no more than what the French call badinage in the Captain's speech, with nothing to render it significant outside the bare meaning of the words in his looks or manner.

She did not answer him, and by way of changing the subject, being also weary of sitting at that table, for we had finished the meal some time, though the Malay continued to look on, as though waiting for the order to clear away, I pulled out my watch.