Sir John Constantine Part 24

"_Something_ has scared 'em, sure 'nough. But if 'tis from us they be in any such hurry to get away, why did they take in a reef before putting the helm over? No, no, master: they know the weather hereabouts, and we don't. We've been reckonin' this for a thunderstorm--a short blow and soon over. They know better, seemin'

to me. Else why don't they tack alongside and finish us?"

"I believe you are right," said my father, after a long look to windward.

"And I'm sure of it," insisted Billy. "What's more, if we can't right the ballast a bit and get steerage way on her afore the sea works up, she'll go down under us inside the next two hours.

There's the pumps, too: for if she don't take in water like a basket I was never born in Wendron parish an' taught blastin'. Why, master, you must ha' blown the very oak.u.m out of her seams!"

My father frowned thoughtfully. "That's true," said he; "I have been congratulating myself too soon. Billy, in the absence of Captain Pomery I appoint you skipper. You have an ugly job to face, but do your best."

"Skipper, be I? Then right you are!" answered Billy, with a cheerful smile. "An' the first order is for you and Master Prosper here to tumble below an' heft ballast for your lives. Be the two specimens safe?"

"Eh?" It took my father a second, maybe, to fit this description to Messrs. Badc.o.c.k and Fett. "Ah, to be sure! Yes, I left them safe and unhurt."

"What's no good never comes to harm," said Billy. "Send 'em on deck, then, and I'll put 'em on to the pumps."

We left Billy face to face with a job which indeed looked to be past hope. The wheel had gone, and with it the binnacle; and where these had stood, from the stump of the broken mizzen-mast right aft to the taffrail, there yawned a mighty hole fringed with splintered deck-planking. The explosion had gutted after-hold, after-cabin, sail-locker, and laid all bare even to the stern-post. 'Twas a marvel the stern itself had not been blown out: but as a set-off against this mercy--and the most grievous of all, though as yet we had not discovered it--we had lost our rudder-head, and the rudder itself hung by a single pintle.

"Nevertheless," maintained my father, as we toiled together upon the ballast, "I took the only course, and in like circ.u.mstances I would venture it again. The captain very properly thought first of his ship: but I preferred to think that we were in a hurry."

"How did you contrive it?" I asked, pausing to ease my back, and listening for a moment to the sound of hatchets on deck.

(They were cutting away the tangle of the mizzen rigging.)

"Very simply," said he. "There must have been a dozen hammering on the after-hatch, and I guessed they would have another dozen looking on and offering advice: so I sent Halliday to fetch a keg of powder, and poured about half of it on the top stair of the companion.

The rest Halliday took and heaped on a sea-chest raised on a couple of tables close under the deck. We ran up our trains on a couple of planks laid aslant, and touched off at a signal. There were two explosions, but we timed them so prettily that I believe they went off in one."

"They did," said I.

"My wits must have been pretty clear, then--at the moment.

Afterwards (I don't mind confessing to you) I lay for some minutes where the explosion flung me. In my hurry I had overdone the dose."

We had been shovelling for an hour and more. Already the ship began to labour heavily, and my father climbed to the deck to observe the alteration in her trim. He dropped back and picked up his shovel again in a chastened silence. In fact, deputy-captain Priske (who had just accomplished the ticklish task of securing the rudder and lashing a couple of ropes to its broken head for steering-gear) had ordered him back to work, using language not unmixed with objurgation.

For all our efforts the _Gauntlet_ still canted heavily to leeward, and as the gale grew to its height the little canvas necessary to heave-to came near to drowning us. Towards midnight our plight grew so desperate that Billy, consulting no one, determined to risk all-- the unknown dangers of the coast, his complete ignorance of navigation, the risk of presenting her crazy stern timbers to the following seas--and run for it. At once we were called up from the hold and set to relieve the half-dead workers at the pumps.

All that night we ran blindly, and all next day. The gale had southerned, and we no longer feared a lee-sh.o.r.e: but for forty-eight hours we lived with the present knowledge that the next stern wave might engulf us as its predecessor had just missed to do. The waves, too, in this inland sea, were not the great rollers--the great kindly giants--of our Atlantic gales, but shorter and more vicious in impact: and, under Heaven, our only hope against them hung by the two ropes of Billy's jury steering-gear.

They served us n.o.bly. Towards sunset of the second day, although to eye and ear the gale had not sensibly abated, and the sea ran by us as tall as ever, we knew that the worst was over. We could not have explained our a.s.surance. It was a feeling--no more--but one which any man will recognize who has outlived a like time of peril on the sea. We did not hope again, for we were past the effort to hope.

Numb, drenched, our very skins bleached like a washerwoman's hands, our eyes caked with brine, our limbs so broken with weariness of the eternal pumping that when our shift was done, where we fell there we lay, and had to be kicked aside--we had scarcely the spirit to choose between life and death. Yet all the while we had been fighting for life like madmen.

Towards the close of the day, too, Roger Wearne had made shift to crawl on deck and bear a hand. Captain Pomery lay in the huddle of the forecastle, no man tending him: and old Worthyvale awaited burial, stretched in the hold upon the ballast.

At whiles, as my fingers cramped themselves around the handle of the pump, it seemed as though we had been fighting this fight, tholing this misery, gripping the verge of this precipice for years upon years, and this nightmare sat heaviest upon me when the third morning broke and I turned in the sudden blessed sunshine--but we blessed it not--and saw what age the struggle had written on my father's face.

I pa.s.sed a hand over my eyes, and at that moment Mr. Fett, who had been s.n.a.t.c.hing an hour's sleep below--and no man better deserved it-- thrust his head up through the broken hatchway, carolling--

"To all you ladies now at land We men at sea indite, But first would have you understand How hard it is to write: Our paper, pen, and ink and we Roll up and down our ships at sea, With a fa-_la_-LA!"

"Catch him!" cried my father, sharply; but he meant not Mr. Fett.

His eyes were on Billy Priske, who, perched on the temporary platform, where almost without relief he had sat and steered us, shouting his orders without sign of fatigue, sank forward with the rudder ropes dragging through, his hands, and dropped into the hold.

For me, I cast myself down on deck with face upturned to the sun, and slept.

I woke to find my father seated close to me, cross-legged, examining a s.e.xtant.

"The plague of it is," he grumbled, "that even supposing myself to have mastered this diabolical instrument, we have ne'er a compa.s.s on board."

Glancing aft I saw that Mike Halliday had taken Billy's place at the helm. At my elbow lay Nat, still sleeping. Mr. Badc.o.c.k had crawled to the bulwarks, and leaned there in uncontrollable sea-sickness.

Until the gale was done I believe he had not felt a qualm. Now, on the top of his nausea, he had to endure the raillery of Mr. Fett, whose active fancy had already invented a grotesque and wholly untruthful accusation against his friend--namely, that when a.s.sailed by the Moors, and in the act of being kicked below, he had dropped on his knees and offered to turn Mohammedan.

That evening we committed old Worthyvale's body to the sea, and my father, having taken his first observation at noon, carefully entered the lat.i.tude and longitude in his pocket-book. On consulting the chart we found the alleged bearings somewhere south of Asia-Minor--to be exact, off the coast of Pamphylia. My father therefore added the word "approximately" to his entry, and waited for Captain Pomery to recover.

Though the sea went down even more quickly than it had arisen, the pumps kept us fairly busy. All that night, under a clear and starry sky, we steered for the north-east with the wind brisk upon our starboard quarter.

"I have no chart, No compa.s.s but a heart,"

quoted I in mischief to Nat. But Nat, having pa.s.sed through a real gale, had saved not sufficient fondness for his verse to blush, for it. We should have been mournful for old Worthyvale, but that night we knew only that it was good, being young, to have escaped death.

Under the stars we made bad jokes on Mr. Badc.o.c.k's sea-sickness, and sang in chorus to Mr. Fett's solos--

"With a fa-la, fa-la, fa-la-la!

To all you ladies now at land . . ."

Next morning Captain Pomery (whose hurt was a pretty severe concussion of the skull, the explosion having flung him into the panelling of the ship's cabin, and against the knee of a beam) returned to duty, and professed himself able, with help, to take a reckoning. He relieved us of another anxiety by producing a pocket-compa.s.s from his fob.

My father held the s.e.xtant for him, while Nat, under instructions, worked out the sum. With a compa.s.s, upon a chart spread on the deck, I p.r.i.c.ked out the bearings--with a result that astonished all as I leapt up and stared across the bows.

"Why, lad, by the look of you we should be running ash.o.r.e!"

exclaimed my father.

"And so we should be at this moment," said I, "were not the reckoning out."

Captain Pomery reached out for the paper. "The reckoning is right enough," said he, after studying it awhile.

"Then on what land, in Heaven's name, are we running?" my father demanded testily.

"Why, on Corsica," I answered, pointing with my compa.s.s's foot as he bent over the chart. "On Corsica. Where else?"

It wanted between three and four hours of sunset when we made the landfall and a.s.sured ourselves that what appeared so like a low cloud on the east-north-eastern horizon was indeed the wished-for island.

We fell to discussing our best way to approach it; my father at first maintaining that the coast would be watched by Genoese vessels, and therefore we should do wisely to take down sail and wait for darkness.

Against this, Captain Pomery maintained--

1. That we were carrying a fair wind, and the Lord knew how long that would hold.

2. That the moon would rise in less than three hours after dark, and thenceforth we should run almost the same risk of detection as by daylight.

3. That in any case we could pa.s.s for what we really were, an English trader in ballast, barely escaped from shipwreck, dismasted, with broken steerage, making for the nearest port.