Wide Courses Part 13

"She's used to having a little loose water on her deck--let her have it again," he said, and at this time we had everything on her, and if I have not made any talk of it before, I'll say it now--the _Bess_ could sail.

We were now heading about a point off the edge of the outer line of heavy breakers, and as the _Bess_ had the least free-board of any ship of her size sailing the trades, she was soon carrying on her deck her full allowance of loose water. Amidships, when she lay quietly to anchor, a long-armed man could lean over her rail and all but touch his fingers in the sea. Now, with the wind beam, over her lee rail amidships the heavy seas mounted. On the high quarter-deck we had only to hang onto the weather-rail, but the men stationed amidships had to watch sharp to keep from being swept overboard.

She was long and lean. It was her depth, and not her beam, which had held the _Bess_ from capsizing in many a blow. Ten years Captain Blaise had had her, and in those ten years, whether in sport or need, he had not spared her. She was long and lean, and as loose forward as an old market basket.

Loose and lean and low, she was wiggling like a black snake through the white-topped seas. We had men in our foretop looking for the guard-ship, and because they knew almost exactly where to look for her, we saw her in time and swung the _Bess_ inside her, yet closer to the breakers. Her big bulk piled toward us, her great sails reached up in clouds--shadows of clouds. Past our bow, past our waist, past our quarter. We could pick the painted ports and the protruding black muzzles of her port battery as she pa.s.sed, a huge shapeless shadow racing one way, and we going the other way like some long, sinuous, black devil of a creature streaking through a white-bedded darkness.

We were by before they were alive to it. A voice, another voice, a hundred voices, and then we saw her green sidelight swing in a great arc; but long before then we were away on the other tack, and so when her broadside belched (and there was metal sufficient to blow us out of water), we were half a mile away and leaping like a black hound to the westward.

A score of rockets followed the broadside. Captain Blaise glanced astern, then ahead, aloft, and from there to the swinging hull beneath him. He started to hum a tune, but broke it off, to recite:

"O the woe of wily Ha.s.san When they break the tragic news!"

And from that he turned to Miss Cunningham with a joyous, "And what d'y'

think of it all?"

She looked her answer, with her head held high and breathing deeply.

"And the _Dancing Bess_, isn't she a little jewel of a ship? Something to love? Aye, she is. And you had no fear?"

"Fear!" Her laughter rang out. "When father went below, he said, 'Fear nothing. If Captain Blaise gets caught, there's no help for it--it's fate.'"

And I knew he was satisfied. She had seen him on the quarter of his own ship and he playing the game at which, the _Bess_ under his _feet_, no living man could beat him; and in playing it he had brought her father and herself to freedom. It was for such moments he lived.

The night was fading. We could now see things close by. He took her hand and patted it. "Go below, child, and sleep in peace. You're headed for home. Look at her slipping through the white-topped seas, and when she lays down to her work--there's nothing ever saw the African coast can overhaul us. No, nothing that ever leaped the belted trades can hold her now, not the _Bess_--while her gear's sound and she's all the wind she craves for."

"I believe you, Captain." She looked over the roaring side. Long and loose and lean, she was lengthening out like a quarter-horse, and he was singing, but with a puzzling savageness of tone:

"Roll, you hunted slaver Roll your battened hatches down--"

"Good-night, Captain." She turned to me. She was pale, but 'twas the pallor of enduring bravery. There was no paling of her dark eyes. Even darker were they now. "Good-night--" She hesitated. "Good-night, Guy."

"Good-night, Miss Shiela," and I handed her down the companion-way. At the foot of the stairs she looked up and whispered, "You must take care of that wound, Guy." And I answered, "No fear," and then her face seemed to melt away in a mist under the cabin lamp.

Astern of us the dawn leaped up. It had been black night; in a moment, almost, it was light again. I remembered what Captain Blaise had said of a sunset in Jamaica; but here it was the other way about--a purple, round-rimmed dish, and from a segment of it the blood-red salad of a sun upleaping. And pictured clouds rolling up above the blood-red. And against the splashes of the sun the tall palm-trees. And in the new light the signal flambeaux paling. And the white spray of the bar tossing high, and across the spray the white-belted squadron tacking and filling futilely.

I grew cold and wondered what was wrong. I dimly saw Captain Blaise come running to me. "Guy! Guy!" he called. I remember also myself saying, "Nothing wrong with me, sir--and no harm if there is. It's sunrise on the Slave Coast and the _Dancing Bess_ she's homeward bound!"

V

The blue-belted Trades! Day and day, week and week, the little curly, white-headed seas, the unspecked blue sky, and the ceaseless caress of the pursuing wind. No yard nor sail, never a bowline, sheet, or halyard to be handled, and the _Bess_ bounding ever ahead. Beauty, peace, and a leaping log--could the sea bring greater joy?

Captain Blaise had located the bullet--the second shot it must have been--which had lodged under my right shoulder and cut it out. We were nearing home, and the fever was now gone from me, but I was not yet able to take my part on deck. "Perhaps to-morrow," she had said. And to-morrow was come, and I lay there thinking, and at times trying to write.

She had left me alone for a while. Her father had called her to hear another of the Captain's stories. Through the cabin skylight I could see her, or at least the curve of her chin, and her tanned throat and one shoulder pressing inward under the skylight shutters. Her face was turned toward Captain Blaise, whose head and shoulders, he pacing and turning on the quarter, came regularly within range. But she was not forgetting me; every few minutes she thrust her head beneath the raised skylight hatches and looked down to see that I wanted for nothing, and always she smiled.

I was propped up in an easy chair. Up to two days back I had been on a cot. Mr. Cunningham had improved so rapidly that for more than a week now he had been allowed on deck, and there he was now, as I said, listening with his daughter to the tales of Captain Blaise. His laughter and her breaths of suspense, I could hear the one and feel the other.

I took up my pad of paper and resumed my writing. And reviewing my writing, I had to smile at myself, even as I used to smile at Captain Blaise when he would submit his couplets or quatrains for my judgment.

He might marshal off-hand a stanza or two of his vagabond thoughts, but here was I carefully composing with pencil and paper, and had been for a week now.

I had never been ill before, never for five minutes. And this illness had driven me to a strange introspection. There had been time to think.

I smiled at Captain Blaise's amateurish rhymings on the veranda of the manor-house. I had condemned him in my own mind for this death or that death of his irregular career; on that last night on the veranda I had even allowed him to read my thoughts of such matters. And now I could not recollect of his having ever killed or maimed except in defence of his life or property; and yet that night in Momba I had shot, caring not whether I killed or no. Self-defence? At the instant of shooting I had thought, had almost spoken it aloud: "There! There's for a channel to let the starlight into your unclean brain." Self-defence? Tish! The Governor's son desired, possibly loved in his way, a girl that I had known no longer than I knew him, and there it was--I loved her, too!

Captain Blaise himself had probably never killed on less provocation; and meditating on his emotional side, on his many provocations, his life-long environment, I had to concede that the Captain Blaise I condemned was a less guilty man than I.

This, as I was beginning to see, was but an argument with myself for a final dismissal of my old life. Surely I should be ashamed to admit that in such fashion was my brain trying to fool my soul; but so it was.

Remorse? I should have been worn with remorse, I know; but I was not. I tried to grieve for my hasty judgment of Captain Blaise: and I did. But for the Governor's son, not a qualm. I, too, like Captain Blaise, had become the creature of hereditary instincts and overpowering emotion.

Never in all my life before had I thought that any sin or shortcoming of mine was ever to be anybody's business but my own. My salvation lay in the future, which, now that my conscience was awakened, I would have only myself to censure if it did not become what I wished.

But these serious thoughts were of previous days. This morning I was to have some little composition ready for her when she came down. I turned to my paper and pencil and began to write. But thoughts, such thoughts as I conceived would please her, came slowly. My new conscience or it may have been the voices of the quarter-deck,--her father's questions, Captain Blaise's m.u.f.fled answers, her exclamations of delight and wonder,--all these diverted me. In despair I tried to catch, as I usually could, what Captain Blaise was saying, but to-day he spoke in so low a tone that I could not quite.

Ubbo came down for a chart, a particular chart which Captain Blaise has always kept apart from the others. I pointed out to him where he would find it. And my eye followed his figure up the cabin steps. In a sailor's costume Ubbo was proud but perspiring, though devotion shone out in every drop of perspiration.

[Ill.u.s.tration: After a long look I saw that he did not resume his narrative. By that I knew that the stranger was troubling him]

Through the skylight I saw Captain Blaise take the chart from Ubbo, unroll and scan it. "I was right. Yes, here's the spot." He was addressing Shiela. "In red ink, see, and here's about where we are now--not ten miles from here, north by east."

Shiela was bending over the chart when "Sail-ho!" rang out from the lookout in the foretop. He had a grand voice, that man on watch.

With one hand Captain Blaise held the chart so Shiela still could read it; with the other he reached through the skylight opening for his long gla.s.s. After a long look I saw that he did not resume his narrative. By that I knew that the stranger was troubling him.

Shiela came below to see me. The traces of tears were in her eyes.

"It's a large ship to the northward," she said. "From something Captain Blaise whispered to father it may be a man-o'-war, though I hope not.

But what have you done since I've been gone? You mustn't feel put out when I have to go on deck. It's an ungrateful girl, you know, who is not courteous to her host, especially when that host is Captain Blaise.

Think what father and I owe him! And what a wonderfully interesting man he is! And what adventures he has had!"

"But what made you cry?"

"Captain Blaise was telling of a happening on this very spot almost. It was a ship from Cadiz for Savannah. She had taken fire. He picked up among others three people lashed to some pieces of wreckage--a man, a woman, and their baby. She was dead and he dying. He did die later aboard his ship, the predecessor of the _Bess_. The baby lived. Do you recall the story?"

"No, he never told me that one. And the baby?"

"The father had practically supported the baby in the water for four days--the baby was less than a year old--and the mother had nursed him till she died. For two days, the man said, with nothing to eat herself.

She and he, they had practically killed themselves for the baby boy. She was a Spanish woman--a lady. The father died aboard Captain Blaise's ship. He was an American who had married abroad without consulting his father, and the old gentleman made such a fuss about it that the young man had stayed away--intended to remain away and renounce his heritage; but at last the father had sent for him, and he was then on his way home. But you should have heard Captain Blaise tell it. He made us feel that mother's love for her baby, that mother who was dead before he picked her up, and made us feel, too, what a man the father was. What an actor he is! I tried not to cry, but I did. But let me see--what have you there?"

I showed her some things. She picked up the nearest and read it aloud:

"I was walking down the glen-- O my heart!--on a summer's day.

He pa.s.sed me by, my gentleman-- Would I had never seen the day!

"True love can neither hate nor scorn, And ne'er will true love pa.s.s away.

And his hair was silk as ta.s.selled corn, My heart alack--that summer's day!

"Oh, he wore plumes in his broad hat And jewelled buckles on his shoon, And O, the sparkle in his eye!

And yet his love could die so soon!"

"H-m. Suggests satin breeches and hair-powder, men who could navigate a ball-room floor more safely than the Trades, doesn't it? Wherever did you get such notions?"