Under the Waves: Diving in Deep Waters Part 20

By this time the fleet of boats was distinctly visible, making straight for the island. Edgar now ordered the sails to be set, and bade Dwarro take the helm. The pilot obeyed with the air of a Stoic. It was clear that his mind was made up. This had the effect of calling up a look of settled resolution on Edgar's face.

In a few minutes the sails filled, and then, to the surprise not only of Dwarro but all on board, Edgar ordered the pilot to steer straight for the line of advancing boats.

Two of these had changed their course on first observing the divers'

boat, but when they saw it steering straight down, as if to meet or join them, they resumed their course for the island. Presently the breeze increased, and the pilot boat leaped over the waves as if it had received new life.

"It's a bowld thing to try," muttered Rooney Machowl, "but I'm afeard, sir--"

He was silenced by a peremptory "Hush" from Edgar. "Get down so as to be out of sight," he continued, "all of you except the Chinamen.--You two come and sit by Dwarro."

As he spoke, Edgar himself sat down on an oar, so as to be able to see over the gunwale without himself being seen. To those in the fleet it would thus appear that their vessel was a pilot boat returning from seaward with its skipper and two Chinamen. Whatever Dwarro's intentions had been, he was evidently somewhat disconcerted, and glanced more than once uneasily at the calm youth who sat pistol in hand at his side directing him how to steer.

Although there was a considerable fleet of the piratical boats, they were spread out so that a s.p.a.ce of several hundred yards intervened between each. Edgar steered for the centre of the widest gap, and his bold venture was favoured by a sudden increase of wind, which caused the waves to gurgle from the bow.

Just as they pa.s.sed between two of the boats they were hailed by one of them. Edgar kept his eyes fixed on Dwarro, who became slightly pale.

The click of the pistol at the moment caused the pilot to start.

"You may inform and we may be caught," said Edgar, sternly; "but whatever happens you shall die if you disobey. Speak not, but wave your hand in reply."

Dwarro obeyed. Those who had hailed him apparently thought the distance too great for speech; they waved their hands in return, and the boat pa.s.sed on. A few minutes more and our divers were safely beyond the chance of capture, making for the mainland under a steady breeze.

Note 1. The pump used by Denayrouze of Paris, besides being very simple in its parts and action, possesses an air-reservoir which renders a cessation of the pump-action for a few minutes of no importance.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

MISS PRITTY'S "WORST FEARS" ARE MORE THAN REALISED.

Turn we now to Miss Pritty--and a pretty sight she is when we turn to her! In her normal condition Miss Pritty is the pink of propriety and neatness. At the present moment she lies with her mouth open, and her eyes shut, hair dishevelled, garments disordered, slippers off, and stockings not properly on. Need we say that the sea is at the bottom of it? One of the most modest, gentle, una.s.suming, amiable of women has been brought to the condition of calmly and deliberately a.s.serting that she "doesn't care!"--doesn't care for appearances; doesn't care for character; doesn't care for past reminiscences or future prospects; doesn't care, in short, for anything--life and death included. It is a sad state of mind and body--happily a transient!

"Stewardess."

"Yes, Miss?"

"I shall die."

"Oh no, Miss, don't say so. You'll be quite well in a short time," (the stewardess has a pleasant motherly way of encouraging the faint-hearted). "Don't give way to it, Miss. You've no idea what a happyt.i.te you'll 'ave in a few days. You'll be soon able to eat hoceans of soup and 'eaps of fat pork, and--"

She stops abruptly, for Miss Pritty has gone into sudden convulsions, in the midst of which she begs the stewardess, quite fiercely, to "Go away."

Let us draw a veil over the scene.

Miss Pritty has been brought to this pa.s.s by Mr Charles Hazlit, whose daughter, Aileen, has been taken ill in China. Being a man of unbounded wealth, and understanding that Miss Pritty is a sympathetic friend of his daughter and an admirable nurse, he has written home to that lady requesting her, in rather peremptory terms, to "come out to them." Miss Pritty, resenting the tone of the request as much as it was in her nature to resent anything, went off instanter, in a gush of tender love and sympathy, and took pa.s.sage in the first ship that presented itself as being bound for the China seas. She did not know much about ships.

Her maritime ideas were vague. If a washing-tub had been advertised just then as being A1 at Lloyds' and about to put forth for that region of the earth with every possible convenience on board for the delight of human beings, she would have taken a berth in it at once.

We do not intend to inflict Miss Pritty's voyage on our reader. Suffice it to say that she survived it, reached China in robust health, and found her sick friend,--who had recovered,--in a somewhat similar condition.

After an embrace such as women alone can bestow on each other, Miss Pritty, holding her friend's hand, sat down to talk. After an hour of interjectional, exclamatory, disconnected, irrelevant, and largely idiotical converse--sustained chiefly by herself--Miss Pritty said:--

"And oh! The pirates!"

She said this with an expression of such awful solemnity that Aileen could not forbear smiling as she asked--

"Did you see any?"

"Gracious! No," exclaimed Miss Pritty, with a look of horror, "but we _heard_ of them. Only think of that! If I have one horror on earth which transcends all other horrors in horribleness, that horror is-- pirates. I once had the misfortune to read of them when quite a girl-- they were called Buccaneers, I think, in the book--and I have never got over it. Well, one day when we were sailing past the straits of Malacca,--I think it was,--our captain said they were swarming in these regions, and that he had actually seen them--more than that, had slain them with his own--oh! It is too horrible to think of. And our captain was _such_ a dear good man too. Not fierce one bit, and _so_ kind to everybody on board, especially the ladies! I really _cannot_ understand it. There are such dreadfully strange mixtures of character in this world. _No_, he did not say he had slain them, but he used nautical expressions which amount to the same thing, I believe; he said he had spiflicated lots of 'em and sent no end of 'em to somebody's locker. It may be wrong in me even to quote such expressions, dear Aileen, but I cannot explain myself properly if I don't. It is fearful to know there are so many of them, `swarming,' as our captain said."

"The worst of it is that many of the boatmen and small traders on the coast," said Aileen, "are also pirates, or little better."

"Dreadful!" exclaimed her friend. "Why, oh _why_ do people go to sea at all?"

"To transport merchandise, I suppose," said Aileen. "We should be rather badly off without tea, and silk, and spices, and such things-- shouldn't we?"

"Tea and silk! Aileen. I would be content to wear cotton and drink coffee or cocoa--which latter I hate--if we only got rid of pirates."

"Even cotton, coffee, and cocoa are imported, I fear," suggested Aileen.

"Then I'd wear wool and drink water--anything for peace. Oh _how_ I wish," said Miss Pritty, with as much solemn enthusiasm as if she were the first who had wished it, "that I were the Queen of England--_then_ I'd let the world see something."

"What would you do, dear?" asked Aileen.

"Do! Well, I'll tell you. Being the head of the greatest nation of the earth--except, of course, the Americans, who a.s.sert their supremacy so constantly that they _must_ be right--being the head, I say, of the greatest earthly nation, with that exception, I would order out all my gun-ships and turret-boats, and build new ones, and send them all round to the eastern seas, attack the pirates in their strongholds, and--and-- blow them all out o' the water, or send the whole concern to the bottom!

You needn't laugh, Aileen. Of course I do not use my own language. I quote from our captain. Really you have no idea what strong, and to me quite new expressions that dear man used. So powerful too, but _never_ naughty. No, never. I often felt as if I ought to have been shocked by them, but on consideration I never was, for it was more the manner than the matter that seemed shocking. He was so gentle and kind, too, with it all. I shall _never_ forget how he gave me his arm the first day I was able to come on deck, after being reduced to a mere shadow by sea-sickness, and how tenderly he led me up and down, preventing me, as he expressed it, from lurching into the lee-scuppers, or going slap through the quarter-rails into the sea."

After a little more desultory converse, Aileen asked her friend if she were prepared to hear some bad news.

Miss Pritty declared that she was, and evinced the truth of her declaration by looking prematurely horrified.

Aileen, although by no means demonstrative, could not refrain from laying her head on her friend's shoulder as she said, "Well then, dear Laura, we are beggars! Dear papa has failed in business, and we have not a penny in the world!"

Miss Pritty was not nearly so horrified as she had antic.i.p.ated being.

Poor thing, she was so frequently in the condition of being without a penny that she had become accustomed to it. Her face, however, expressed deep sympathy, and her words corresponded therewith.

"How did it happen?" she asked, at the close of a torrent of condolence.

"Indeed I don't know," replied Aileen, looking up with a smile as she brushed away the two tears which the mention of their distress had forced into her eyes. "Papa says it was owing to the mismanagement of a head clerk and the dishonesty of a foreign agent, but whatever the cause, the fact is that we are ruined. Of course that means, I suppose, that we shall have no more than enough to procure the bare necessaries of life, and shall now, alas! Know experimentally what it is to be poor."

Miss Pritty, when in possession of "enough to procure the bare necessaries of life," had been wont to consider herself rich, but her powers of sympathy were great. She scorned petty details, and poured herself out on her _poor_ friend as a true comforter--counselled resignation as a matter of course, but suggested such a series of bright impossibilities for the future as caused Aileen to laugh, despite her grief.

In the midst of one of these bursts of hilarity Mr Hazlit entered the room. The sound seemed to grate on his feelings, for he frowned as he walked, in an absent mood, up to a gla.s.s case full of gaudy birds, and turned his back to it under the impression, apparently, that it was a fire.

"Aileen," he said, jingling some loose coin in his pocket with one hand, while with the other he twisted the links of a ma.s.sive gold chain, "your mirth is ill-timed. I am sorry, Miss Pritty, to have to announce to you, so soon after your arrival, that I am a beggar."

As he spoke he drew himself up to his full height, and looked, on the whole, like an over-fed, highly ornamented, and well-to-do beggar.