My Danish Sweetheart Volume II Part 19

'Very good, sir,' said the mate, who appeared to me to have been on duty ever since the hour of our coming aboard. 'It will keep the round of the watches steady, sir. The port watch comes on duty at eight bells.'

'Excellent!' exclaimed the Captain. 'Thank you, Mr. Jones.'

The mate stalked aft.

'Mr. Tregarthen,' he added, 'I observe that you wear a sou'-wester.'

'It is the headgear I wore when I put off in the lifeboat,' said I, 'and I am waiting to get home to exchange it.'

'No need, no need!' cried he; 'I have an excellent wideawake below--not, indeed, perfectly new, but a very serviceable clinging article for ocean use--which is entirely at your service.'

'You are all kindness!'

'Nay,' he exclaimed in a voice of devotion, 'I believe I know my duty.

Shall we linger here, Miss Nielsen, or would you prefer the shelter of the cabin? At half-past eight Punmeamootty will place some hot water, biscuit, and a little spirit upon the table. I fear I shall be at a loss to divert you.'

'Indeed not!' exclaimed Helga.

The unconscious irony of this response must have disconcerted a less self-complacent man.

'I have a few volumes of an edifying kind, and a draughtboard. My resources for amusing you, I fear, are limited to those things.'

The sweep of the wind was bleaker than either of us had imagined, and, now that the Captain had joined us, the deck possessed no temptation. We followed him into the cabin, where Helga hastily removed the coat as though fearing the Captain would help her. His first act was to produce the wideawake he had spoken of. This was a very great convenience to me; the sou'-wester lay hot and heavy upon my head, and the sense of its extreme unsightliness added not a little to the discomfort it caused me.

He looked at my sea-boots and then at his feet, and, with his head on one side, exclaimed, in his most smiling manner, that he feared his shoes would prove too large for me, but that I was very welcome to the use of a pair of his slippers. These also I gratefully accepted, and withdrew to Mr. Jones's berth to put them on, and the comfort of being thus shod, after days of the weight and unwieldiness of my sea-boots, it would be impossible to express.

'I think we shall be able to make ourselves happy yet,' said the Captain. 'Pray sit, Miss Nielsen. Do you smoke, Mr. Tregarthen?'

'I do, indeed,' I answered, 'whenever I can get the chance.'

He looked at Helga, who said to me: 'Pray smoke here, Hugh, if the Captain does not object. My father seldom had a pipe out of his mouth, and I was constantly in his cabin with him.'

'You are truly obliging,' said the Captain; and going to the locker in which he kept his rum, biscuits, and the like, he took out a cigar-box, and handed me as well-flavoured a Havannah as ever I had smoked in my life. All this kindness and hospitality was, indeed, overwhelming, and I returned some very lively thanks, to which he listened with a smile, afterwards, as his custom was, waving them aside with his hand. He next entered his cabin and returned with some half-dozen books, which he put before Helga. I leaned over her shoulder to look at them, and speedily recognised 'The Whole Duty of Man,' 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' Young's 'Night Thoughts,' a volume by Jeremy Taylor; and the rest were of this sort of literature. Helga opened a volume and seemed to read. When I turned to ask the Captain a question about these books, I found him staring at her profile out of the corner of his eyes, while with his right hand he stroked his whisker meditatively.

'These are all very good books,' said I, 'particularly the "Pilgrim's Progress."'

'Yes,' he answered with a sigh; 'works of that kind during my long periods of loneliness upon the high seas are my only solace, and lonely I am. All ship-captains are more or less alone when engaged in their profession, but I am peculiarly so.'

'I should have thought the Church, Captain, would have suited you better than the sea,' said I.

'Not the Church,' he answered. 'I am a Nonconformist, and Dissent is stamped upon a long pedigree. Pray light up, Mr. Tregarthen.'

He took his seat at the head of the table, put a match to his cigar, the sight of which betwixt his thick lips considerably humanized him in my opinion, and, clasping his pale, gouty-looking hands upon the table, leaned forward, furtively eyeing Helga over the top of his cigar, which forked up out of his mouth like the bowsprit of a ship.

His conversation chiefly concerned himself, his past career, his antecedents, and so forth. He talked as one who wishes to stand well with his hearers. He spoke of a Lady Duckett as a connection of his on his mother's side, and I observed that he paused on p.r.o.nouncing the name. He told us that his mother had come from a very ancient family that had been for centuries established in c.u.mberland, but he was reticent on the subject of his father. He talked much of his daughter's loneliness at home, and said he grieved that she was without a companion--someone who would be equally dear to them both; and as he said this he lay back in his chair in a very amplitude of waistcoat, with his eyes fixed on the upper deck and his whole posture suggestive of pensive thought.

Well, thought I, this, to be sure, is a very strange sort of sea-captain. I had met various skippers in my day, but none like this man. Even a trifling expletive would have been refreshing in his mouth.

From time to time Helga glanced at him, but with an air of aversion that was not to be concealed from me, however self-complacency might blind him to it. She suddenly exclaimed, with almost startling inconsequentiality:

'You will be greatly obliging us, Captain Bunting, by giving orders to Mr. Jones or to Abraham to keep a look-out for ships sailing north during the night. We can never tell what pa.s.sing vessel might not be willing to receive Mr. Tregarthen and me.'

'What! In the darkness of night?' he exclaimed. 'How should we signal?

How would you have me convey my desire to communicate?'

'By a blue light, or by burning a portfire,' said Helga shortly.

'Ah, I see you are a thorough sailor--you are not to be instructed,' he cried, jocosely wagging his whiskers at her. 'Think of a young lady being acquainted with the secret of night communications at sea! I fear--I fear we shall have to wait for the daylight. But what,' he exclaimed unctuously, 'is the reason of this exceeding desire to return home?'

'Oh, Captain,' said I, 'home is home.'

'And Mr. Tregarthen wishes to return to his mother,' said Helga.

'But, my dear young lady, _your_ home is not in England, is it?' he asked.

She coloured, faltered, and then answered: 'My home is in Denmark.'

'You have lost your poor dear father,' said he, 'and I think I understood you to say, Mr. Tregarthen, that Miss Nielsen's poor dear mother fell asleep some years since.'

This was a guess on his part. I had no recollection whatever of having told him anything of the sort.

'I am an orphan,' exclaimed Helga, with a little hint of tears in her eyes, 'and--and, Captain Bunting, Mr. Tregarthen and I want to return home.'

'Captain Bunting will see to that, Helga,' said I, conceiving her somewhat too importunate in this direction.

She answered me with a singularly wistful, anxious look.

The conversation came to a pause through the entrance of Punmeamootty.

He arrived with a tray and hot water, which he placed upon the table together with some gla.s.ses. The Captain produced wine and a bottle of rum. Helga would take nothing, though no one could have been more hospitably pressing than Captain Bunting. For my part, I was glad to fill my gla.s.s, as much for the sake of the tonic of the spirit as for the desire to appear entirely sociable with this strange skipper.

'You can go forward,' he exclaimed to the Malay; and the fellow went gliding on serpentine legs, as it veritably seemed to me, out through the door.

No further reference was made to the subject of our leaving the barque.

The Captain was giving us his experiences of the Deal boatmen, and relating an instance of heroic roguery on the part of the crew of a galley-punt, when a noise of thick, throaty, African-like yowling was heard sounding from somewhere forward, accompanied by one or two calls from the mate overhead.

'I expect Mr. Jones is taking in the foretop-gallant sail,' said the Captain. 'Can it be necessary? I will return shortly.' And, giving Helga a convulsive bow, he pulled his wideawake to his ears and went on deck.

'You look at me, Hugh,' said Helga, fixing her artless, sweet, and modest eyes upon me, 'when I speak to Captain Bunting as though I do wrong.'

I answered gently, 'No. But is it not a little ungracious, Helga, to keep on expressing your anxiety to get away, in the face of all this hospitable treatment and kindly anxiety to make us comfortable and happy while we remain?'

She looked somewhat abashed. 'I wish he was not so kind,' she said.

'What is your misgiving?' said I, inclining towards her to catch a better view of her face.

'I fear he will not make haste to tranship us,' she answered.

'But why should he want to keep us?'

She glanced at me with an instant's surprise emphasized by a brief parting of her lips that was yet not a smile. She made no answer, however.