My Danish Sweetheart Volume III Part 15

We went to the skylight to spread it.

'Now,' said I, 'where is this Mossel Bay that you were speaking about?'

I pored upon the chart in a posture of eager interest. He immediately pointed to the place with a forefinger as delicately shaped as a woman's.

'Ha!' said I. 'Yes; that is to the eastward of Agulhas. See,' I continued, pointing to one of those marginal ill.u.s.trations I have referred to, 'here is a picture of the bay. It is a long walk to Cape Town!' I continued, looking round at Nakier.

'Oh no; plenty coach, plenty horse, plenty ox,' he responded, showing his teeth and speaking without the least hesitation--a quality of a.s.surance that made me hopeful, for it was everything indeed that he should believe us credulous enough to suppose that Mossel Bay was the destination he had in his mind.

'Here is the picture, Helga!' said I. 'D'ye see it, Abraham? A fine open roadstead, not to be easily missed by you and Miss Nielsen. There are a couple of excellent s.e.xtants and a good chronometer below, and all necessary instruments for a safe navigation.'

'Oy, a first-cla.s.s bay, and no mistake!' exclaimed Abraham.

Bending his squint upon the chart in a musing way, he scored along the line of coast with his square-cut thumb, as though calculating courses and distances. Miserable as I felt, I could have burst into a laugh at the face he put on.

'Oi've long had a notion,' said he, still squinting at the chart, 'of wisiting these 'ere foreign parts. Oi've heered tell of Cape Town as a proper city, plenty o' grapes a-knocking about and sherry vines and the likes of them drinks to be had for the asting, everything A1 and up to the knocker. But see here, Nakier,' said he, in a wonderfully familiar and friendly, shipmate-like sort of way. 'Oi'm a pore man, and so is my mate Jacob. Tell ye what Oi'm a-thinking of: ain't there no chance of our taking up a few pound for this here run?'

His apparent earnestness must have deceived a subtler eye than ever Nakier could have brought to bear on him. I uttered a word or two, as though I would remonstrate.

'You and me, Misser Vise, will speak on dat by-um-bye. We allee want money, and we get it,' responded Nakier, nodding significantly.

I partly turned away, as though there was nothing in this conversation to interest me.

'Ye don't know what hovelling is, Nakier, Oi suppose,' said Abraham.

'This here wessel is what we should call a blooming good job down our way----'

I interrupted him, fearful lest he should overdo his part: 'You might go forward and get some breakfast now, Abraham. You can relieve me here when you have finished the meal. Is there anything more you wish to know that this chart can tell us about, Nakier?'

'No, sah. Now you sabbee where Mossel Bay is, it is allee right.'

Abraham was descending the p.o.o.p ladder. Under pretence of giving him the chart to replace in the mate's berth, I whispered, 'Mind you tell Jacob everything,' and then walked aft with Helga, leaving Nakier to go forward.

Throughout that morning the weather continued wonderfully brilliant and quiet. The heavens were a sweep of blue from line to line, and the sun as hot as we might have thought to find it ten degrees farther south.

But shortly after ten o'clock the weak wind, that had been barely giving the _Light of the World_ steerage way, entirely failed; the atmosphere grew stagnant with the dry, parched hollowness that one sometimes notices before a storm, as though Nature sucked in her cheeks before expelling her breath through her feverish lips. I put my head into the skylight to look at the barometer, not knowing but that there might be dirty weather at the heels of this pa.s.sing spell of sultry silence; but the mercury stood high, and the lens-like sharpness of the line of the horizon along with the high fine-weather blue was as ample a confirmation of its promise as one could hope to find. By eleven o'clock the calm was broken by a delicate rippling of wind out of the north-east--the first fanning of the north-east trade-wind I took it to be. The yards were trimmed to the change by Abraham, who followed on with some orders about the foretopmast-studdingsail. I was on deck at the time, and hearing this, rose hastily and thrust past him, saying betwixt my teeth, so vexed was I by his want of foresight:

'Keep all fast with your studdingsail gear, you fool! Are we three Englishmen a line-of-battle ship's company? Think before you bawl out!'

He saw his blunder, and, after a leisurely well-acted view of the sea, as though the weather had raised a debate in his mind, he called out to the three or four fellows who were clambering aloft to rig the boom out on the foreyard:

'Never mind about that there stun'-sail! Ye can lay down, moy lads!' and he bawled to me (who had returned aft), by way, no doubt, of excusing himself to Nakier, who was on the forecastle, and who appeared to be keeping a keen look-out upon the ship on his own account, 'There's no use, Oi think, Mr. Tregarthen, aworriting about stun'-sails ontil this here breeze hardens. It'll only be keeping the men agoing for no good.'

'Unless we are speedy,' I whispered to Helga, as we stood within earshot of the helmsman, 'that man Abraham will ruin us. Think of the fellow piling canvas at such a time! What a curse is consequentiality when out of season! Here is a poor, miserable Deal boatman with the privilege of ordering a few black men about, and he doesn't know how to make enough of his rights.'

From time to time I would gaze mechanically round the sea in search of a ship, but with no notion of finding encouragement in the gleam of a sail or in the shadowing of a steamer's smoke. My hope lay in a very different direction. But custom is strangely strong on shipboard, and I continued to look, though I was without the wish to see.

Shortly before noon I fetched the two s.e.xtants, one of which I gave to Abraham and the other to Helga. The boatman seemed hardly to know what to do with the instrument; it was a new, very handsome s.e.xtant, sparkling with bra.s.s and details of telescope, coloured gla.s.s, and the like, and bore as little resemblance to the aged, time-eaten quadrant that had gone down with the _Early Morn_ as to the cross-staff of the ancient mariner. I marked him putting it to his eye, and then fumbling with it, and, noticing several fellows forward, Nakier among them, attentively watching us, I called to him softly:

'Keep it at your eye, man! Let them believe that you thoroughly understand it!'

'Roight ye are,' he answered, putting the instrument to his face; 'but who the blazes is agoing to bring the sun into the middle o' such a muddle o' hornamentation as this here?'

The attention of the men, however, was in reality fixed upon Helga. She stood at the rail within full view of them, and there was, indeed, novelty enough in the sight to account for their staring, apart from the hope they had of her as the one that was to navigate their ship to the coast on which, as I took it, they meant to wreck her. Her well-fitting dress of dark serge showed no signs of wear as yet. No posture that she might have artfully adopted could so happily express the charms of her figure as this, when she turned her face sunwards, with the shining s.e.xtant raised to her eye. The delicate pale gold of her short hair was the right sort of tint to fascinate the dusky gaze that was fastened upon her. In her conversations with me she had made little or nothing of her knowledge of navigation, but it was easy to see in an instant's glance that she was a practised hand in the art of coaxing the sun's limb to the sip of the sea-line.

I spied Nakier forward watching her with an air of breathless interest.

He and the rest of them might have doubted her capacity, knowing of it only from such off-hand talk as Punmeamootty had been able to collect and repeat from the cabin table. But now she was justifying their expectations, and by this time the whole of the crew--ten of them, with Jacob in the waist and a Malay at the wheel--were staring as one man; the cook from the door of his galley, Nakier on the forecastle swinging off from a rope, the rest of them in groups here and there.

'It is eight bells,' cried Helga in her clear voice, accentuated, as it always was, with a faint harshness of Scandinavian articulation.

'Height bells!' roared Abraham, though it might have been midnight to him, so far as the indications of _his_ s.e.xtant went.

'Eight bell!' piped the melodious voice of Nakier, like a belated echo of Helga's cry; and the chimes floated along the quiet decks.

I told Abraham to go below to the mate's cabin, and bring materials of ink, paper, log-book, and so forth, to enable Helga to work out the sights; also the chronometer and the Nautical Almanack. This was a part of our plot; otherwise, as you may suppose, the chronometer was not a thing to be carried here and there, least of all by such hands as Abraham's. The men were now pa.s.sing in and out of the galley, conveying their dinner of smoking beef and ship's 'duff' into the forecastle. They talked eagerly, and with a gratulatory tone. That Helga had been able to find out what o'clock it was by the s.e.xtant, was the fullest warranty of her sufficiency as a navigator the poor wretches' ignorant souls could have demanded.

Nakier remained on the forecastle, watching us. I summoned him with the motion of my forefinger, and he came rapidly gliding to the p.o.o.p.

'I wish you to remain here,' said I, 'while Miss Nielsen calculates the barque's position, that you may be able to tell the rest of the men they are in friendly hands, and that we look for the same friendly behaviour from you all.'

He answered with a motion of his hand, that was as expressive as a Frenchman's gesture.

'It would have been more convenient for the lady,' I continued, 'to have made her calculations in the Captain's cabin, but----' I looked him full in the face. He did not seem to understand. 'That berth is not fit for her to enter.'

'Ha!' he exclaimed, 'dat shall be put right. I have forgot.'

'By-and-bye. No hurry now. Tell Punmeamootty to bring us our dinner here. Miss Nielsen does not care to use the cuddy. She is a young lady--impressionable--you understand me, Nakier? When all is made straight the feeling will pa.s.s with her. But for the present----'

I broke off as Abraham arrived, bringing with him the articles I had despatched him to procure.

'Whose trick at the wheel is it?' I asked the boatman carelessly. 'It is noon, and that man yonder has been at the helm since ten.'

'It'll be Jacob's, sir. Oi allow he's waiting to finish his dinner.'

'No, no,' said I, 'that's not true ship's discipline. Fair must be fair aboard us,' and with some demonstration of warmth in my manner, I went to the p.o.o.p rail and bawled for Jacob to come aft. The man promptly made his appearance, and the moment he had gripped the spokes of the wheel the ginger-coloured fellow who had been steering fled along the decks for his dinner, fleet as a hare with hunger. Abraham, with pencil and paper in hand, leaned upon the companion-cover while he pretended to be lost in calculating. Nakier and I stood looking on at Helga, who was seated on one side the skylight, the lid of which, being closed and lying flat, provided her with a table on which stood the chronometer, the volumes, the charts, and the other appliances she needed. She knew exactly what to do, and worked out her problems with a busy face and the blue of her eyes sweetened into violet by the shadow of her lashes.

Deeply worried, miserably anxious as I was, on the eve of a project the failure of which was bound to signify an inhuman butchery of the three of us by the dark-skinned creatures we designed to betray, I could still find heart for admiration of the wonderful heroism of this girl. She was actively to share in our enterprise, and if failure followed, her doom might be even more fearful than ours; yet had her face been of marble carved into an incomparable counterfeit of a girl's countenance intent on a bit of arithmetic and nothing more, its pa.s.sionlessness, its marvellous freedom from all expression of agitation, could not have been completer.

When she had completed her reckoning, she opened the chart which bore Captain Bunting's 'p.r.i.c.kings,' as it is termed, and with rules and pencil continued the line to the situation of the ship at noon.

'That is where we are at this moment,' she exclaimed, pointing to the chart.

Nakier, with looks of astonishment and delight, peered.

'What d'ye make it, miss?' called Abraham.

She gave him the lat.i.tude--what it was has wholly escaped me.

'Roight,' he shouted, tearing up his bit of paper.

'Take these things below, Abraham,' said I, 'and then get your dinner.