My Danish Sweetheart Volume II Part 18

'Perfectly well,' answered the Captain, 'or how should I and Mr. Jones get along, think you?'

'Well,' exclaimed Abraham: 'I han't had much to say to 'em as yet. One chap's been talking a good deal this evening, and I allow he's got a grievance, as most sailors has. There's some sort o' difficulty: I allow it lies in the eating; but a man wants practice to follow noicely what them there sort o' coloured covies has to say.'

'Well,' exclaimed the Captain, with another bland wave of the hand in dismissal of the subject, 'we understand each other, at all events, my lad.'

He went to the locker from which he had extracted the biscuits, produced a bottle of rum, and filled a winegla.s.s.

'Neat or with water?' said he, smiling.

'I've pretty nigh had enough water for to-day, sir,' answered Abraham, grinning too, and looking very well pleased at this act of attention.

'Here's to you, sir, I'm sure, and wishing you a prosperous woyage. Mr.

Tregarthen, your health, sir, and yourn, miss, and may ye both soon get home and find everything comfortable and roight.' He drained the gla.s.s with a smack of his lips. 'As pretty a little drop o' rum as I've had this many a day,' said he.

'You can tell Jacob to lay aft presently,' said the Captain, 'when the steward is at liberty, and he will give him such another dose. That will do.'

Abraham knuckled his forehead, pausing to say to me in a hoa.r.s.e whisper, which must have been perfectly audible to the Captain. 'A noice gemman, and no mistake.'

'I am going below,' said the Captain when he was gone, 'to see after your accommodation. Will you sit here,' addressing Helga, 'or will you go on deck for a few turns? I fear you will find the air chilly.'

'I will go on deck with you, Hugh,' answered Helga.

The Captain ran his eye over her.

'You are without luggage,' said he, 'and, alas! wanting in almost everything; but if you will allow me----' he broke off and went to his cabin, and before we could have found time to exchange a whisper, returned with a very handsome, almost new, fur coat.

'Now, Miss Nielsen,' said he, 'you will allow me to wrap you in this.'

'Indeed my jacket will keep me warm,' she answered, with that same look of shrinking in her face I have before described.

'Nay, but wear it, Helga,' said I, anxious to meet the man, at all events, halfway in his kindness. 'It is a delightful coat--the very thing for the keen wind that is blowing on deck!'

Had I offered to put it on for her she would at once have consented, but I could observe the recoil in her from the garment stretched in the Captain's hands, with his pale fat face smiling betwixt his long whiskers over the top of it. On a sudden, however, she turned and suffered him to put the coat on her, which he did with great ostentation of anxiety and a vast deal of smiling, and, as I could not help perceiving, with a deal more of lingering over the act than there was the least occasion for.

'Wonderfully becoming, indeed!' he exclaimed; 'and now to see that your cabin is comfortable.'

He pa.s.sed through the door, and we mounted the companion steps.

The night was so dark that there was very little of the vessel to be seen. Her dim s.p.a.ces of canvas made a mere pale whistling shadow of her as they floated, waving and bowing, in dim heaps through the obscurity.

There was a frequent glancing of white water to windward and a dampness as of spray in the wind, but the little barque tossed with dry decks over the brisk Atlantic heave, crushing the water off either bow into a dull light of seething, against which, when she stooped her head, the round of the forecastle showed like a segment of the shadow in a partial eclipse of the moon. The haze of the cabin-lamp lay about the skylight, and the figure of the mate appeared in and vanished past it with monotonous regularity as he paced the short p.o.o.p. There was a haze of light, too, about the binnacle-stand, with a sort of elusive stealing into it of the outline of the man at the helm. Forward the vessel lay in blackness. It was blowing what sailors call a top-gallant breeze, with, perhaps, more weight in it even than that; but the squabness of this _Light of the World_ promised great stiffness, and, though the wind had drawn some point or so forward while we were at table, the barque rose as stiff to it as though she had been under reefed topsails.

'Will you take my arm, Helga?' said I.

'Let me first turn up the sleeves of this coat,' said she.

I helped her to do this; she then put her hand under my arm, and we started to walk the lee-side of the deck as briskly as the swing of the planks would suffer. Scarcely were we in motion when the mate came down to us from the weather-side.

'Beg pardon,' said he. 'Won't you and the lady walk to wind'ard?'

'Oh, we shall be in your way!' I answered. 'It is a cold wind.'

'It is, sir.'

'But it promises a fair night,' said I.

'I hope so,' he exclaimed. 'Dirty weather don't agree with dirty skins.'

He turned on his heel and resumed his post on the weather-side of the deck.

'Dirty skins mean Malays in that chief mate's nautical dictionary,' said I.

'Hugh, how thankful I shall be when we are transferred to another ship!'

'Ay, indeed! but surely this is better than the lugger?'

'No! I would rather be in the lugger.'

'How now?' cried I. 'We are very well treated here. Surely the Captain has been all hospitality. No warm-hearted host ash.o.r.e could do more.

Why, here is he now at this moment superintending the arrangement of our cabins below to ensure our comfort!'

'I do not like him at _all_!' said she, in a tone which her slightly Danish accent rendered emphatic.

'I do not like his treatment of the men,' said I; 'but he is kind to us.'

'There is an unwholesome mind in his flabby face!' she exclaimed.

I could not forbear a laugh at this strong language in the little creature.

'And then his religion!' she continued. 'Does a truly pious nature talk as he does? I can understand professional religionists intruding their calling upon strangers; but I have always found sincerity in matters of opinion modest and reserved--I mean among what you call laymen. What right has this man to force upon those poor fellows forward the food that they are forbidden by their faith to eat?'

'Yes,' said I; 'that is a vile side of the man's nature, I must own; vile to you and me and to the poor Malays, I mean. But, surely, there must be sincerity too, or why should he bother himself?'

'It may be meanness,' said she: 'he wants to save his beef; meanness and that love of tyrannizing which is oftener to be found among the captains of your nation, Hugh, than mine!'

'Your nation!' said I, laughing. 'I claim you for Great Britain by virtue of your English speech. No pure Dane could talk your mother's tongue as you do. Spite of what you say, though, I believe the man sincere. Would he, situated as he is--two white men to eleven yellow-skins (for we and the boatmen must count ourselves out of it)--would he, I say, dare venture to arouse the pa.s.sions--the religious pa.s.sions--of a set of men who hail from the most treacherous community of people in the world, if he were not governed by some dream of converting them?--a fancy that were you to transplant it ash.o.r.e, would be reckoned n.o.ble and of a Scriptural and martyr-like greatness.'

'That may be,' she answered; 'but he is going very wickedly to work, nevertheless, and it will not be his fault if those coloured sailors do not dangerously mutiny long before he shall have persuaded the most timid and doubting of them that pork is good to eat.'

'Yes,' said I gravely; for she spoke with a sort of impa.s.sioned seriousness that must have influenced me, even if I had not been of her mind. 'I, for one, should certainly fear the worst if he persists--and I don't doubt he _will_ persist, if Abraham and the other boatman agree to remain with him; for then it will be four to eleven--desperate odds, indeed, though as an Englishman he is bound to underrate the formidableness of anything coloured. However,' said I, with a glance into the darkness over the side, 'do not doubt that we shall be transhipped long before any trouble happens. I shall endeavour to have a talk with Abraham before he decides. What he and Jacob then do, they will do with their eyes open.'

As I spoke these words, the Captain came up the ladder and approached us.

'Ha! Miss Nielsen,' he cried, 'were not you wise to put on that warm coat? All is ready below; but still let me hope that you will change your mind and occupy Mr. Jones's berth.'

'Thank you; for the short time we shall remain in this ship the cabin you have been good enough to prepare will be all I require,' she answered.

He peered through the skylight to see the hour.

'Five minutes to eight,' he exclaimed. 'Mr. Jones!' The man crossed the deck. 'I have arranged,' said the Captain, 'with the Deal boatman Abraham Wise to take charge of the barque during the middle watch. It is an experiment, and I shall require to be up and down during those hours to make sure of him. Not that I distrust his capacities. Oh dear no!

From the vicious slipping of cables, merely for sordid purposes of hovelling, to the n.o.ble art of navigating a ship in a hurricane amid the shoals of the Straits of Dover, your Deal boatman is the most expert of men. But,' continued he, 'since I shall have to be up and down, as I have said, during the middle watch, I will ask you to keep charge of the deck till midnight.'