The Pilot and his Wife Part 17

Elizabeth followed him, feeling very uncomfortable, and after standing for a moment in indecision, went over to him, and sitting down on his knee, put her arm round his neck, saying--

"You are not angry with me, are you? I didn't think you would mind, or I wouldn't have done it."

"Oh! it's quite immaterial to me, of course, who you send your love to."

"She was my best friend when I was--in Arendal," Elizabeth said, avoiding the mention of Beck's name again.

"I don't doubt you are on the best possible terms with all these people," Salve said, impatiently, and making a movement as if he would get up from his seat.

It was Elizabeth who rose first.

"Salve!" she exclaimed, and was about to add more, when he pulled her down to him again, and said in a gentle tone of remorse--

"Forgive me, Elizabeth. I didn't mean what I said. But I do so hate hearing you talk of these people."

Elizabeth burst into tears, protesting against his want of confidence in her; and Salve, now thoroughly distressed at the result of his want of self-control, overwhelmed her with tenderness in his endeavours to appease her. He succeeded after a while, and the evening was pa.s.sed in such sunshine as only succeeds to storm.

After a quarrel of the kind, however, there must be always something left behind, and though Salve was doubly affectionate for many days, afterwards he grew more and more silent, and presently even irritable and moody, and would not go to church on any of the succeeding Sundays while he remained at home.

CHAPTER XXII.

Elizabeth carried out her intention of accompanying him to Amsterdam, where she paid a visit of several days to the Garvloits, and the pleasure of the trip was only alloyed for her by the change which had come over Salve's manner, and to which she had now to try and accustom herself as one does to a less brilliant light after having seen the sun.

They were on their way home again, sailing before a light breeze, and under a soft blue sky, out of the busy, shallow Zuyder Zee. Elizabeth was sitting on deck with little Gjert, blooming as a rose, and asking animated questions of the pilot, whom they had been compelled to take on board, about the various flat sandy islands and towns which came in sight from time to time, Salve occasionally stopping in his walk to listen.

By Tersch.e.l.ling the channel from the Zuyder Zee to the North Sea is marked out like a narrow strait with black and red buoys; and even in that calm weather there were foaming breakers the whole way close to the ship on either side. "What must it be like," Elizabeth asked, in a sort of terror, "in a storm, when the whole sea was driving in?"

"That is a sight it's better not to see," replied the pilot.

"But you have to be out, storm or not, pilot?"

"It is my way of getting a living," he answered, shortly.

Salve stood and listened, as the conversation took this turn.

"We have pilots in Norway, too," she said, "who don't mind a wet jacket either. It is a fine life!"

The Dutchman merely observed, coldly, in reply--

"In two successive years--it is three years ago now--they lost out here off Amland a total of fifty pilots."

"Still, it is a fine life!" she said; and Salve resumed his walk.

A couple of evenings after, the Apollo was pitching out on the Doggerbank in the moonlight, with a reef in her topsails. Elizabeth had not yet gone below, and was sitting with her child warmly wrapped up on her lap, while Salve paced the deck and looked at her from time to time.

A little farther off, near the main-hatch, Nils Buvaagen (whom Salve had met again at Nottero, and persuaded to take service with him) and a couple of the crew who were off duty were engaged in story-telling, the others lounging about near them to listen. Elizabeth, too, was listening.

They had crossed that day a long stretch of dead water, and the carpenter had several mysterious incidents, of which he declared he had been an eyewitness, to recount on the head of it. Meeting dead water like that out in the open sea generally meant that something was going to happen.

Nils Buvaagen, like all fjord peasants, had a strong leaning towards every kind of superst.i.tion; and in his many voyages across the North Sea, he had had more than one experience of the kind in question. He had sat quite silent so far.

"H'm!" he remarked now, thoughtfully taking a pull at his pipe. "I dare be sworn there's many a one out here on the Dogger. Where we are now, I tell you, is as it might be an old burial-ground."

With that he retired into himself, and began to pull away vigorously at his pipe, as if he had unintentionally said more than he exactly liked.

But being pressed to go on, he was obliged to satisfy the curiosity he had excited, and resumed accordingly in a hushed tone, after cautiously looking round first.

"Do you know," he asked, mysteriously, "how all the old fish come by their deaths?"

None of his audience were able to give an answer to this unexpected question.

"You don't?" he continued; "nor no one else neither. But all the same, such myriads die every day that, if all was right, the whole surface of the sea would be covered with their white bellies--we should be sailing all day long through dead fish. It is a 'mystery,' the same as it is what becomes of all the old ships in the world." Coming from him, that word "mystery" had something very weird and uncanny about it.

"Yes, the Dogger can be ugly enough, and may be so perhaps before we are clear of it," he concluded, and leant back against the spar behind him to look up at the clouds. Some scud was driving at the moment across the full moon.

"But about the old fish and the old vessels, Nils?" said the carpenter, recalling him to the subject.

"Yes, it is here, to the Dogger Bank, that they resort for the most part, and to one or two other places perhaps in the world besides. That is the reason that there is always a sort of corpse sand in the water here, and so many noises and things that one can't explain."

There was a general start as he said this, and they looked at one another in silence; for it seemed as if the vessel had suddenly stopped with a shock in the middle of her course, and the spray from a heavy sea came pouring down over the deck.

"She heard it," said the carpenter, involuntarily; "she is an old craft, and doesn't like going over the churchyard."

Elizabeth thought that last proposition sounded so uncomfortable that she got up and went below to bed.

The sea ran high in the night, and the vessel kept pitching with dull thuds as if they were in very shoal water, which, however, the lead showed not to be the case. In the morning the chain-cable of the anchor was found tossed by the force of the sand-laden seas right over the deck, and arranged there with a certain regularity. To many of the crew it seemed clear that other than natural causes must have been at work; there were evidently "dead hands" upon the bank, and this was a warning.

Nils shook his head and said nothing.

All the morning they were enveloped in a thick sea fog that surrounded them like a wall; but towards noon the sun began to appear like a sickly gleam above them, and by dinner-time they were sailing under a clear sky, and in a fresh green breezy sea, with sails on every side.

It was an exhilarating sight, and reminded Elizabeth of the days of her childhood. She called Salve over to share her enjoyment of it.

Of all the vessels in sight, the handsomest, without comparison, was the North Star, a Norwegian corvette, well known along the coast of Norway, and which had often aroused Elizabeth's enthusiasm in earlier days. She was crossing their course, and standing under full sail for the Channel.

Elizabeth recognised her at once, and exclaimed decisively--

"That is the North Star--isn't she a magnificent ship, Salve! See, they are taking in the topsails; they look like a flock of birds up there on the yard among those beautiful big sails. Did you ever see anything so grand as her shape? and how majestically she ploughs through the sea!

When she has all her canvas spread like that, I could fancy Tordenskjold himself on board of her in full chase."

Salve looked straight before him and didn't answer. He knew, what Elizabeth had not the faintest suspicion of, that Lieutenant Beck was on board the North Star, as third in command for that year's cruise in the Mediterranean, whither she was now bound; and a host of unpleasant a.s.sociations were raised by Elizabeth's innocent admiration of her.

"It was the North Star," she continued, "that beat through the straits of Gibraltar against the current when none of the others could." The North Star had long ago taken the place of the Naiad as her heroine ship, and she related the performance with a certain pride.

"How would you like to be in command of a ship like that, Salve?" she asked, determined to wake him up and get an answer.

"It would be a very different thing from having such an old tub as the Apollo under one--there's no disputing that," he replied bitterly; and quitted her side abruptly, as if to give orders to the crew.