The Death Ship: A Strange Story, Vol. 3 (of 3)

I brought a haggard face with me to the breakfast table, and Imogene surveyed me with an eye full of inquiry and anxiety. My thoughts, acting with my wakefulness, had told, and I fancied that even Vanderdecken suffered his gaze to rest upon me as though he marked a change. Van Vogelaar's manner satisfied me that he had acted in his sleep or under some spell that stupefied the understanding whilst it gave the spirit full play, for he discovered nothing of that wonder and terror which had been visible in him when I entered the cabin after his former attempt to destroy me, which certainly had not been the case had he quitted my bedside in the belief that I was dead of my wounds.

Vanderdecken talked of the fair wind; a sort of satisfaction illuminated his sombre austerity; though his dignity was prodigious and his commanding manner full of an haughty and forbidding sternness, he was nevertheless politer to me than he had ever yet been, going to the length of talking about the food on the table, the excellent quality of the African Guinea fowl and bustard, recommending me to taste of a dish of marmalade, and relating a story of a privateer having left behind him, in a ship he had clapt aboard of, a number of boxes which seemed to be full of marmalade, but which in reality were loaded with virgin silver. But it was the fair wind that produced this civility, though after last night's business 'twas welcome enough let the cause be what it would.

No sooner had Imogene and I a chance of speaking alone than she asked me what was the matter. I told her how Van Vogelaar had entered my cabin and stabbed at my bed. She turned white; her beautiful eyes grew large and bright with terror; she clasped her hands and for some moments could not speak. Her agitation diminished, however, when she understood that Van Vogelaar walked in his sleep, though she was still very white when she cried: "If you had been sleeping when he entered you would now be dead!"

I answered: "What he does in his sleep he may do awake. This action is like the whispers of a dreamer, babbling out his conscience. It is in his soul to kill me, and long thinking upon it has moved him to the deed in his sleep."

"Oh, Geoffrey, did I not beg you to secure your door?"

"Ay—that shall be looked to in future, I warrant you. But why should this man, of all the others, especially thirst for my life? How have I wronged him?"

She replied by pointing out that the crew of my ship had fired upon him; also that in the days of his natural life he was no doubt a villain at heart and that all the features of his devilish nature attended him through his doom; that being more jealous, rapacious and avaricious than the others, he might regard my presence as a menace to his share of the treasure, and hunger after my destruction; so that, come what might, I should never be able to report the wealth that lay in the ship's hold.

There was no doubt my darling was right, impossible as I found it to reconcile these earthly and human passions and motives with his supernatural being; and particularly the indifference he exhibited on the previous evening when the Frenchman came running us aboard, with his concern for his share in the gold, jewels and plate below. But I had long abandoned all speculation concerning what I must term the intellectual aspect of these miserable creatures. You will suppose that we found a fruitful text in this mate's somnambulistic attack upon me, and that we talked at great length about our chances of escape and the necessity Van Vogelaar's malignant hate put me under of inventing some method to deliver ourselves by, be the risks of it what they might. Yet it was but talk.

Indeed, never did prisoners' outlook appear more hopeless. Compared to this floating jail, compassed about by the mighty sea, the walls of a citadel were as paper, the bars of a dungeon's window as packthread. But the most bitter and invincible barrier of all was Captain Vanderdecken's resolution to carry Imogene with him in this ship to Amsterdam.

CHAPTER V.
A TEMPEST BURSTS UPON US.

I did not, as I had told Imogene, need a second hint to secure my life by night, however it might fall out with me in the day. By looking about I met with a piece of ratline stuff which I hid in my cabin, and when the night came I secured one end to the hook of the door, passing the other end through the staple and then making it fast to my wrist; so that, the door being shut, no one could enter without tweaking or straining my arm with such violence as was sure to awake me.

Meanwhile the fair wind hung very steady, blowing about south, a pleasant breeze that yielded a pure blue sky and small puff-shaped clouds exceedingly white; the sea was also of a very lovely sapphire, twinkling and sparkling in the north like a sheet of silver cloth set a-trembling. The Braave stole along softly, with but little seething and hissing noises about her now that her yards lay braced well in. I would think whilst I watched her flowing sheets, the long bosoms of her canvas swelling forwards with the slack bolt-ropes arched like a bow, and the mizzen rounding from its lateen yard, backed by the skeleton remains of the great poop lantern, that she needed but the bravery of fresh paint, a new ancient, pennons and streamers, bright pettararoes or swivels, glass for the lanterns and gilt for her galleries and beak, to render her as picturesque and romantic a vessel as ever sailed in that mighty procession, in whose van streamed the triumphant insignia of the great Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese Admirals.

'Twas impossible to doubt that every man in the ship believed that he was going home this time. There was an air of alacrity in them that had never before been noticeable. They would look eagerly seawards over the bows, gazing thus for long minutes at a time. Whenever the log was hove I'd mark one or more inquire the speed of the men who had held the reel or dragged in the line, as they went forward. They smoked incessantly, with an air of dull and heavy satisfaction in their faces.

I observed a lifting, so to speak, of the stupor off Vanderdecken. His trances—I mean those sudden fits of death-like insensibility which I can only liken to cataleptic attacks—were few, whence I concluded that his spirit, or whatever might be the nature of the essence that owned his great and majestical frame for a tabernacle—had gathered an increase of vitality from the invigorated hope and brisk desires which the fair wind had raised. In Van Vogelaar I witnessed no change. Possibly the dark shadows of my fears being on him held him gloomy and malignant to my sight. Likewise, I was careful to keep a wide space between us, save at meals, and never to have my back upon him, for to be sure, if I was to be murdered by the rogue, it should not be for the want of a bright look-out on my part.

This state of things continued for three days. A powerful current runs to the westward in these seas, and adding its impulse to our progress, I calculated that in those seventy-two hours we made not less than an hundred and thirty-three leagues. As time passed my wonder increased, for though I knew not our position, and never durst ask Vanderdecken what situation his dead-reckoning assigned us, I could not conceive—recollecting the place in which the Saracen was when we sighted the Death Ship—that we had been blown, during the time I had been on board, into a very remote sea; and hence 'twas reasonable that I should think it wanted but a few days sailing after this pattern to carry us round the Cape. Therefore I say my wonder grew, for whilst it was impious to suppose that the Devil could contrive that this ship should outwit the Sentence, yet our steady progress caused me to waver in my faith in the stern assurance of the vessel's doom.

I would say to Imogene: "The breeze holds; see how steady is the look of the southern sky! Is it possible that this wind will carry her round?"

To which she would answer: "No, the change will come. Oh, Geoffrey, it will come, though no more than the ship's length lay between her and the limit which you believe the Curse has marked out for her upon this sea."

Then I would agree with her. But afterwards, coming on deck in the afternoon, or next morning, and finding the Death Ship pushing along, her head pointing north-west, her sails full, the wake sliding away astern in a satin smoothness, wonder and doubt would again possess me, and twenty odd fancies occur, such as, "Suppose the Sentence has been remitted! Suppose it be the Will of Heaven this ship should return to Amsterdam, that a final expiation of Vanderdecken's wrong-doing might be accomplished in his and his miserable crew's beholding with their own eyes the extinction of those houses they had yearned for, and the tombs—if aught of memorial in that way remain—of those hearts whose beating they hoped to feel upon their own?"

Such thoughts would set me talking to Imogene.

"Conceive of this ship's arrival in the Texel! What consternation, what astonishment would she arouse! What mighty crowds would flock to view her!" And in the hurry and ardency of my imagination, I would go on figuring the looks and behaviour of the people as our ghastly crew stepped ashore, asking one and another after their wives and children, those Alidas, Geertruidas, Titias, Emelies, Cornelias, Johannas, Fedoras, Engelinas, and Christinas, and those Antonys, Hendricks, Jans, Tjaarts, Lodewyks, Abrahams, Willems, Peters, and Fredericks, whose very memory, let alone their dust, was as utterly gone as the ashes in any pipe forward there when the fire had been tapped out of the bowl overboard.

During the night of the third day the wind held steadily. I left the deck a little before midnight, having passed some hours of the darkness in the company of my love, and our sails were then full with the prosperous wind, the ship passing along over the quiet sea in a great shadow, the stars very piercing, and the light of their colours sharp and lovely; but on coming from my cabin next morning, I found the breeze gone; the ship was rolling upon a swell coming with some power from the westwards; and the dead cloths of the canvas striking a small thunder into the motionless air as they beat against the masts with the weary, monotonous swaying of those spars.

The change had come! The swell was full of foreboding; it was as my heart had foreseen, spite of the wonder and inventions of my imagination; but nevertheless, the perception of that polished sea heaving into the dimness of the distant sky, the sight of the deadness of the calm that had slued the Death Ship till her sprit-topsail veiled and disclosed the oozing sun as she bowed with her beak pointing into the east, brought a disappointment that sickened me to the soul.

"Great God," I cried within myself, "is this experience to end only with my death!" and I entered the cabin in so melancholy a mood that I could scarce hold up my head for the heaviness in my eyes and brain.

Imogene was alone. I kissed her hand and fondled it. She instantly observed my depression, and said, gently, "I feared this calm would dishearten you. But it was inevitable, dear. It was impossible a change of some kind should be delayed."

"Yes, but it breaks me down to think of another long, soul-starving, stormy drive into the south-east, another terrible spell of Vanderdecken's savage manners—of Van Vogelaar's murderous attempts, and of the hopelessness afterwards. Oh, my love! the hopelessness afterwards!—when the weather breaks and the wind blows fair again. Will it never end?"

She cast her eyes down with a swift motion of her finger to her lips. I turned, as Vanderdecken approached. The darkness of his inward rage lay heavy upon the folds of his brow; 'tis no exaggeration to apply to his appearance the strong words of Beaumont:

He came without speaking to his chair, turning his fiery eyes from Imogene to me without saluting us. A moment after Van Vogelaar arrived.

We took our places, but none spoke. One side-long look the mate darted at me under his parchment-coloured lids, and malice and hate were strong in it. I could see that Imogene was awed and terrified by the captain's manner. You dreaded to hear him speak. His stillness was that of a slowly ripening tempest and his sultry, forbidding, darkening bearing seemed to thicken the very atmosphere about him till you drew your breath with labour. He drank a silver cupfull of wine, but ate nothing.

The mate on the other hand plied his knife and fork with a surly heartiness. For my part, I felt as though a mouthful must choke me; yet I made out to eat that these men should not think I was afraid. I believe Imogene would have gone to her cabin but for her anxiety to support and encourage me, so to say, by her presence.

"What horrible curse do we carry in this ship," presently exclaimed Vanderdecken, speaking with a hoarse muttering that had no note of the familiar melodious richness, "that all winds which might blow us westwards die before the meridian of Agulhas is reached? What is there in these masts to poison the breeze? Do we spread sails woven in the Devil's loom? Have we a Jonah among us?"

"Skipper!" cried Van Vogelaar, "Is it Herr Fenton, think you? Measure the luck he carries by what hath happened since he has been in this ship. Six days of storm!" He held up his fingers with a furious gesture. "Twice, in a few hours, have our lives, our treasure, our ship been imperilled! Note, now, this westerly swell, this stagnant atmosphere, and a dimness in the west that will have grown into storm and wind ere the afternoon watch be ended."

"He speaks to my prejudice," I exclaimed, addressing Vanderdecken; "let him be candid. His tongue is injurious to the Hollander's love of honour. Mynheer, consider: He talks of the six days of storm—that weather had been brewed before my ship sighted yours. Of the English man-of-war and the French pirate; why not of the wreck that yielded you a bountiful store of needful things? He knows—as you do, Herr Vanderdecken, that Englishmen—least of all English mariners—are not among those who practise sorcery. This change is the concern of that Being who has yet to judge this man. If he charges me with the control of the elements, then, by the Majesty of Heaven, he basely lies even in his rash and impious effort to do me, a weak and erring mortal, honour!"

With which I turned upon the villain and stared at him with eyes fuller of more potent fury flashed into them by the rage of my healthy, earthly manhood than could possibly possess him out of that dusty sepulchre of his body which lived by the Curse alone. He shrunk away from me, looking at his skipper.

"Captain Vanderdecken," broke in the sweet voice of Imogene, "you will not let Herr Van Vogelaar's intemperate accusations influence your love of justice. Herr Fenton is not accountable for this calm; 'tis monstrous to suppose it. Charge me sooner with witchcraft; I have been longer in this ship than he; in that time you have met many adverse winds; and if his being an Englishman is his wrong, hold me also answerable for the failure of your hopes, since I am English too!"

He looked at her, then at me, then back to her, and methought her beauty coloured the stormy cloud of his expression with a light of its own, not softening it, but robbing it somewhat of its terror. He moved his lips, talking to himself, folded his arms and leaned back, staring straight up at the deck.

I fancied by saying more yet I could mend my case, and would not meet Imogene's eye for fear of being checked.

"Captain Vanderdecken, I am here as a shipwrecked man—dependent upon your generosity as a fellow-being, of which you have given me so abundant an illustration that my heart sinks when I consider that I am too poor to make you any return saving in thanks. Had I tenfold the powers your mate imputes to me, could I work you evil? Give me the control of the wind, and such a gale would follow this ship that you should be speedily counting the date of your arrival at Amsterdam in hours. Is it reasonable that I should seek to delay this voyage? I, who have but these clothes in which I stand—who am divorced from my home—who am helpless and defenceless among the enemies of my country—among men from whom I should have nothing to hope if they had not long given the world to know that their generosity as foes is alone equalled by their heroism as mariners!"

He had slowly turned his eyes upon me when I began to speak, and now made a haughty gesture with his hand as if bidding me hold my peace. And perhaps my conscience felt the rebuke, though he merely designed to let me know that I had said enough; for, between ourselves, I had as little opinion of Dutch generosity as I had of Dutch valour, and should have despised myself for this flattering had I been talking to human beings.

Happily nothing more came of the tempest that lay muzzled in the captain's breast. Whether my standing up for myself, my heated manner towards his mate, gave a new turn to his mood, he did not speak again of the change of weather, and as speedily as ceremony would permit, I got up, made my bow, and went on deck.

The appearance in the west was sullen enough, though merely with a faintness there that was unrelieved by any edging or shouldering outline of cloud. A few patches of vapour lay streaked along the sky, otherwise the heavens hovered in an unstained hollow, but of a faded, watery blue, unwholesome and with a sort of blindness of fog in it; and up in the north-east hung the sun, shorn of his rays, a squeezed yet uncompacted mass of dazzle, like as I have seen him show when setting in a belt of vapour that has not entirely hid him, and casting a wake as dim as burning oil. The swell had grown in weight even while we had been breaking our fast. There being not the faintest draught of air to steady the vessel—no, not so much as to put the most delicate curl of shadow upon the heads of the muddy-blue, grease-smooth, liquid roundings which came with a sulky brimming to the channels. She rolled with stupid heaviness, her sails rattling like a discharge from great ordnance, and a sort of song-like cries twanging out from the sharp fierce strains put upon the shrouds and backstays, and many noises in her hold. You would have thought that her huge round-tops and heavy furniture of spar and rigging would have given some regularity to her pendulous swaying: but the contrary was the case, her action being so jerky, abrupt, and unforegatherable by the legs, that walking was impossible.

I passed the morning partly on deck, partly in the cabin, nearly all the while in Imogene's society, Vanderdecken's passionate mood being too vehement to suffer him to notice either me or my dearest. Indeed, I sought the cabin chiefly to remove myself from his sight, for as the weather darkened round his wrath mounted with it—visible in his tempestuous stridings, and above all, in the flaming and cursing eyes he would again and again level at the heavens; and I sometimes felt that nothing less than my life might be the forfeit of my even provoking his regard and constraining his attention to me in his present satanic posture of mind.

When the dinner hour came, he fiercely ordered Prins to bring him some drink on deck: he could not eat. All the morning he had been directing his gaze into the south and north and east for any blurr of the polished folds that should exhibit movement in the air in those quarters; and from the undulating sea-line, which he searched in vain, his eyes seemed to reel with the very sickness of wrath into the west where, as I knew, the Curse was busy.

Imogene and I were as mute as images at table. We had agreed not to utter a syllable whilst the mate was present, and some time before he had finished his meal, we left the cabin for the quarter-deck, where we sat hidden from Vanderdecken, who marched about the poop near the tiller, with a tread whose echo rang through the solid deck, and with a mien that made me ready to witness him at any minute repeat, waking and sensible, the horrid blasphemous part he had performed in his sleep.

The faintness in the west deepened into thickness. The atmosphere grew hot, and the fanning of the canvas that had before filled the decks with chilling draughts became a refreshment. By two o'clock in the afternoon the heads and shoulders of ponderous storm-clouds had shaped themselves above the dingy blueish obscurity in the west; they jutted up with a ghastly sheen of sickly bronze upon their peaks and brows and made a very frightful appearance. You would have thought there was a great motionless fold of heat suspended, viewless, in the middle of the heavens, and that it was magnetically drawing up volumes of black fumes from some pestilential land lying hidden behind the sea. The strange light, rusty with the ominous storm-tinge, made the sea appear round and hard, cheating the eye with the illusive complexion, till the eastern sea-line looked thirty leagues distant, and not closer westwards either, spite of its fading out in a jumble of ugly shadow that way. The sky still had a dirty sort of blue where the sun went out behind it, and I tell you 'twas scaring to find him sunk out of sight in a kind of ether whose hue, deceptive as it was, caused it to look clear enough for him to float in. It was in its way a sheer drowning of the luminary, like the foundering of a flaming fabric in the sea.

The gloom stole gradually into darkness as though some giant hand was warily drawing a sable curtain over our mastheads. Never did I watch the growth of a storm with such awe as now filled me. To my alarmed sight, the gathering seemed like an embodiment of the Curse in dreadful, swelling, livid vapours, whose dull hectic, whose sallow bronze glaring out of the murkiness, showed like the overflowing of the blue and scarlet and sunlight fires pent up in those teeming surcharged bosoms. My plain sense assured me that the tempest could not hold for this Death Ship the menace that would render its aspect terrifying to the mariner on board an earthly craft; yet it was impossible for my instincts as a seaman to accommodate themselves to the supernatural conditions which begirt me, and I found myself trembling for the safety of the ship when I discovered that the tempest was suffered to grow without an order being given to the men to shorten sail and prepare for it.

I left Imogene and stepped furtively along the quarter-deck to command the poop, and saw Vanderdecken standing aft, surveying the storm with his arms folded, his chin depressed, and his face staring out ashenly against the gloom. I watched him for some minutes, but never once did he stir. Arents and Van Vogelaar were on the other side of the deck, leaning over the rail, gazing at God knows what, but never speaking as I could be sure in the silence that rested upon the ship. The men hung about in groups forward; mere cunningly devised shapes of human beings without the faintest stir of restlessness among them. Many of them smoked, and the pale wreaths went from their paler lips into the air straight as staffs.

"Imogene, look at that sky!" I whispered, "did mortal ever behold the like of it?"

'Twas two o'clock; a tempest-coloured twilight, in which the sails to the flattened swell swayed like visionary wings grown languid with long flight, and feebly hovering and almost noiselessly beating over the ship; out of the gloom over the side came now and again the yearning moan of water, foamlessly laving the bends and run of the vessel; in each death-like pause you heard the silence tingling in the air with the low phantasmal muttering of a weltering sea, a sound as of an imagination of unreal breakers upon a faery shore.

With hands clasped upon my arm, my darling looked as I pointed. In the extreme west the shade of the heavens was a sort of dismal slate, and there was an incessant winking of lightning all about it, like a mad dancing of stars of piercing brilliance; this enlarged into dense masses of dark vapour streaked as sand is ribbed by the action of surf; then zenith-wards was a space of faint green sky, very dim as though beheld through smoke, and past this lay a floating body of thin vapour thickening over our mastheads into an amazing appearance of clouds like to the bush that shags the New Holland slopes, merging eastwards into a vast array of clouds twisted into the aspect of whirlpools, and in their brooding motionlessness resembling vortices suddenly arrested when most madly gyrating. But this description, though imitated to the life, conveys not the least idea of the horrid appearance of that sky, for there is nothing in words to express the effect upon the mind of the contrast of the several shades of colour all combinating to fill the sea with a malignant hue, and the keen throbbing of the lightning low down, the washing sweep of the sick and ghastly ocean into the western dusk, the stooping soot of the vaporous maelstroms overhead, only waiting, as it seemed, for some storm-signal to start off every one of them into a very madness of revolution, boiling out into wet and crimsoned tempests.

After a little all these appearances melted into one great cloud of an indigo tint, ridged with layers of black vapour and blackening into very midnight on the western seaboard where the lightning was shooting. The sea had strangely flattened; the weighty swells which had precoursed the growth of the storm had run away down the eastern waters; it was as though the hot heaviness of the rising and spreading blackness had pressed down the ocean into a smooth plain.

As not an order had yet been given, not a clewline nor a halyard touched, I had made up my mind to presently behold an astonishing exhibition of magic; that is to say, I was to witness a sudden violent blast of storm strike this Death Ship with every sail she carried abroad, and no harm to come to her from it. All at once there was a great stroke of lightning that flashed up the heavy oppressive obscurity, and the whole ship leapt to the eye in a blaze of emerald fire. There fell a few huge drops of rain, covering the decks with circles as big as saucers. A sullen shock of thunder boomed in a single report out of the west, and then it was that the voice of Vanderdecken rang out like a vibratory echo of the deep storm-note that had died away.

"Clew up the topsails and topgallant sails!"

"In sprit-sail and get the yard fore and aft!"

"Some hands this way and stow the mizzen!"

"Lower the main-yard and furl the sail!"

"Stand by to double reef the fore-course!"

These and other orders he delivered one by one, and they were repeated by the two mates and the boatswain.

I cannot believe that any fantastic vision was ever wilder, stranger, more impressive than the picture offered by the Death Ship when her men went to work to snug her down. Their mechanically-moving shapes hauling upon the ropes, running like shadows along the decks, vanishing in the sullen, swarming thickness as they mounted the shrouds, every man as silent as a spectre; the fitful trembling out of the whole vessel to the white and green and violet glimmer of the yet distant lightning; the dark sea dimly glancing into a kind of light, wan and indeterminable as the sheen of stars in polished steel, under the play of those western glitterings; the blackness overhead now settled down to the eastern seaboard, over the horizon of which there yet hovered a streak of dusty green—it was a spectacle to need the hand of Dante or Milton.

It was as black as night. What the men were about, with what dispatch they worked, it was impossible to see. No songs or cries came from them to enable me to guess their movements. If ever Imogene and I exchanged a word it was in a whisper, so heart subduing was the darkness and the horrible element of suspense and uncertainty in it. I had her close to the cabin-front under the poop, ready for the shelter of it at the outburst. Ten minutes went by, and then it seemed to me as if a deeper shade yet had penetrated the darkness. Suddenly, I heard a far-off humming noise, a kind of growling sound, not to be likened to thunder, though you seemed to catch the note of that too in the multitudinous crying. It was as if the denizens of a thousand forests were flying before the roaring of a tornado among the trees, every savage beast raising its own savage cry as it went, the whole uproar so remote as to resemble a mountain's reverberation of the horrible clamour leagues and leagues distant inland.

"What is that?" cried Imogene.

Ere I could speak, the heavens were split in twain by a blast of lightning that looked to fly like a dazzling shaft of flame from the north sheer over our mastheads into the south. It was almost instantly followed by a crash of thunder, ear-splitting as the explosion of the batteries of a dozen first-rates all discharged at one moment. And then fell the rain in a whole body of water, charged with hailstones as big as pigeon's eggs. The fall raised such an uproar on our decks that you looked to see the whole substantial fabric shattered by it. The surface of the sea foamed in fire to that lashing of water and hail. There was now a perpetual blaze of lightning, but the thunder merely deepened the prodigious noise of the rushing wet without, its claps being distinguishable in the dreadful tumult. We had immediately withdrawn to the cabin, and closing the door, stood looking on through the window. The decks were full of water, which, cascading through the ports and all other freeing orifices, added its roaring to the other notes of the tempest. The ship seemed on fire to as high as we could see with the hellish and continual flaming of the lightning.

'Twas of several colours, and in the same breath you saw spars, rigging, bulwark-rails, all blazing out as though lumined with brushes dipped in blue and crimson, and star-white and yellow and dark violet fires.

But no wind as yet; not a breath! That I could tell by the droop of the fore-course hanging by its gear, and faintly fanning dark and wet from its yard. But I knew it could not be far off. Those sounds I had heard as of a thousand affrighted wild beasts were—my ear well knew the noise—the echoings high in the middle air of a prodigious wind bellowing as it swept the ocean into white rage. My heart beat swiftly; all was so fearfully real that I could not grasp the supernatural conditions of the life of this ship and crew, which had otherwise assured me that the Curse that triumphed over the monarch Death must be superior to the wildest hurricane that ever piled the ocean into mountains.

"Hark!" I exclaimed, "it is upon us!" and as I spoke the gale smote us like a bolt from heaven, falling upon us with a long and frightful scream and amid a volley of lightning that made the sky a blinding purple dazzle from sea-line to sea-line. I held with both hands to one side of the frame of the window, and Imogene, half-swooning with terror, lay against me, nothing but my body saving her from being dashed against the side of the cabin. Such was the sharpness of the angle to which the first frenzy of the liberated hurricane heeled the vessel, that for some minutes I veritably believed she was foundering. The ocean boiled in a flat plain of froth, and the ship lay steady upon the enraged whiteness, with the rail of her bulwarks under, and you heard amid the seething and shrill shrieking of the wind, the sound of the water pouring on to her decks over the upper and quarter-deck and forecastle-rails, as the cataract thunders, coiling with a pure head, over the edge of some rocky abrupt. If I had opened the door—if indeed I could have taken action on that violent headlong steep of deck—it would have merely been to drown the cabin and Imogene and myself. There was nothing to be done but attend the issue, and for several minutes, I say, I stood holding on, my dearest clasping me and so supporting herself, scarce knowing whether the vessel was under water or not, unable to speak for the horrible clamour without, the lightning continuously holding the fabric visible through the window in its mani-coloured blaze, and the enduring steadiness of the hull upon the flat foam putting a terror into the situation you would not have remarked in her labouring in a hollow sea.

Presently, to my great joy, I perceived that she was recovering her upright posture. They had succeeded in getting her to pay off, and after a little, giving her tall stem to the gale, she went before it as upright as a church, the water on her decks pouring away overboard, the piercing fury of the wind robbed to the extent of the velocity with which the vessel drove, and no other sound rising up off the sea but the amazing hissing of foam.

"Curse or no Curse," said I, "Vanderdecken knows his business as a sailor, and call me a Dutchman if here has not been a noble stroke of seamanship!"

"Wy zyn al Verdomd!" said the parrot.

CHAPTER VI.
WE SPRING A LEAK.

I never remember the like of such a storm as this in these seas, though I have made the passage of the Cape four times and have met some frightful weather off the great Agulhas Bank. Amazing suddenness and violence in the first bursting of a storm you have reason to expect in the inter-tropical regions eastwards of the African continent, but not down here. Captain George Bonny, of the ship Elizabeth Tudor, is the only person that I am acquainted with who has had experience of so sudden a tempest as I have attempted to describe off this African headland; and who is to say that he had not happened upon the neighbourhood of the Death Ship and unwottingly tasted somewhat of the doom of that vessel, whose passage over the limits of her fate the storm the Elizabeth Tudor encountered was designed to furiously arrest?

Be this as it will. I passed from the cabin into as raging and affrighting a scene as was ever witnessed in any ocean. The sky was made unearthly by the flashes of lightning, whose blinding leaps seemed to bring the blackness down like a wall upon the eyes, and if ever an interval lasted long enough to suffer the light to resume its powers, then you found that blackness horrible with the unspeakable shade it took from the plain of boiling froth that stretched like a world covered with snow to the sea-girdle, fading from startling, staring, glaring whiteness around us into a pallid, ghastly dimness, where it sank and melted into the levin-riven inky folds.

I struggled on to the poop and crawled on my hands and knees to the little deck-house, against the foremost end of which I stationed myself; and here I was protected from the rain and wind. Straight as an arrow over the seething smother the Death Ship was running, and her keel slided smooth as a sledge through the feathery surface. The tempest lay like a red-hot iron sheet upon the waters, making it boil and furiously hiss, but stifling all life of billow, ay, of ripple even, out of it. The men had contrived to shorten sail down to the double-reefed fore-course, and under that strip of curved and lifted canvas—a steel-hard belly, black as a cloud against the white water beyond the bows—the ship was driving, three men at the great tiller, and others attending the tackles attached to it. With every blue or green or yellow flash, you saw the rain sweeping along in crystal lines, complexioned by the electric dartings, now like silver wire, now as if the heavens were shedding blood. 'Twas like a sea of water in the wind, and the shrill harsh singing of it above, and the vehement sobbing of it upon the decks, were sounds of themselves amid the universal shrieking and hissing. There was an incessant explosion of thunder, sometimes right overhead, the echoes answering in volleys, and the rattling sharper than the speaking of great guns in mountain scars and hollows. The dazzling play made a fiery tapestry of the scene, and the flying ship came and went in flames, leaping out of the black tempest, then vanishing like a burning shape, eclipsed and revealed by the speeding of sooty vapours.

Amid these fierce swift shinings I would catch sight of the towering form of Vanderdecken standing at the mizzen-rigging, one hand on a shroud or backstay, sloping his figure against the tempest and his beard blown straight out before him. The others being abaft the little house I could not see. The scene now did indeed astonishingly realise the doubtful traditions which depicture the Flying Dutchman perpetually sailing amid storm. Since I had been on board I had viewed her in many conditions of weather; but though her supernatural qualities and characteristics best appeared when they stole out to the faint, waving silver of the moonshine trembling along the oil-like blackness of a midnight calm, yet she could never be more impressive than when, as she was now, fleeing like a witch driven mad by pursuing demons, whose numbers darkened the heavens, the lightning streaming about her like ordnance in Titanic hands fired to bring her to, all her rigging in a scream as she ran, showing in the spaces of dusk betwixt the flashes a great, black, phantasmal shape upon the floor of ringing and frenzied whiteness which the tempest swept along with her, and which broke not therefore in the lightest curl from her stern, nor yielded a hand's-breadth of wake.

She was flying dead into the east, and every minute her keel passed over as many fathoms of sea as would take her hours of plying to recover. I frequently directed my eyes at Vanderdecken, suspecting his wrath, and prepared for a tragical exhibition, whose furiousness should be in awful correspondence with this insanity of sea and sky, but had the life been struck out of him as he stood there his posture could not have been more fixed and unmoving.

It was, however, impossible for such wind as this to blow many minutes without raising a sea. The increased soaring and falling of the black wing of canvas forward against the boiling that rose in a faintness of spume and lustre of its own into the air denoted the gradual hollowing of the water, and then no sooner had the talons of the storm succeeded in scooping shallow troughs out of the levelness of foaming snow than the surge grew magically. Every liquid side was shouldered by the tempest into hills, and the hills swelled into such mountains as you must come down into these seas to behold the like of. Half-an-hour after the first of the hurricane the ship was plunging and laying along amid a very cauldron of infuriate waters, scarcely visible amid the fleecy fog of spray, heights of the sea reaching to her tops, spouting their prodigious lengths alongside, sometimes tumbling in thunder upon her forward decks, sometimes curling in blown snakings ahead of her. Heavy as had been some of the hours of my first six days of storm, the wildest of that time was but as a feather to the weight of this tempest. The lightning ceased, and but for the evening that was now descending, and that had put the shadow of night into the shade of the storm, the heavens must have shown somewhat pale by the thinning of the electrical vapour; but this scarce perceptible clearance did but leave larger room for the wind, and it was now blowing with extraordinary spite. It would be impossible for the ship to run long before the swollen acclivities, whose foaming heads appeared to brush the black ceiling under which they coursed as they arched in the wake of the vessel's narrow stern, and methought they would have to bring her to speedily if she was not to be pooped and swept and smothered.

Even whilst I thus considered, the tempestuous voice of Vanderdecken swept in a roar along the deck.

"Settle away the fore-yard and secure the sail!"

"Some men aft here to the mizzen and show the foot of it as she rounds!"

'Twas more like the spiriting of canvas than the hands of men going prosaically to work on jeers and clew-garnets when the fore-yard slowly slided down to the bulwark-rails, and the sail was smothered as though frapped by airy fingers forked out of the whirling dusk. Some of the crew with glimmering faces came crawling aft, probing the solid substance of the wind with figures bowing sheer into it, and all in silence the helm was put down amid a sudden mad flogging of liberated cloths aft, and the ship lying along gave her round bow and side to the seas which flashed in storms of water over her as she met them to the pressure of the hard-over rudder.

Once with the sea fair upon the bow, the ancient structure rose as buoyantly as a wooden castle to the heave of the mighty surge, for all her labouring with full decks and the veiling of her by clouds and storms of spray. But had her situation looked to be one of frightful and imminent peril, I must by this time have viewed it with unconcern. The sense of the Curse that held the ship vital was strong in me. Out of the first terrific blast of the hurricane 'twas odds if the newest and stoutest ship could have emerged without damage, supposing she had not been sunk outright; yet did this vessel survive that fearful outfly, aged as she was. Not a yarn of her old ropes broken, nor a spar nor yard, whose rottenness caused them to glow in the dark, sprung or strained; more staunchly than could have been possible to her, even in the hour of her launch, did she breast the great black seas which swept her to their mountain-tops with yelling rigging and masts aslant, to hurl her a breathless moment afterwards into stagnant valleys, echoing the thunder of the gale that touched not their depths.

I quitted the deck and returned to Imogene in the cabin. The lighted lamp swung wildly, and though the uproar of the tempest was muffled below, yet the noise of straining was so great that I had to put my lips close to my dear girl's ear to make myself heard. I gave her a description of the sea, acquainted her with the posture in which the ship lay, and told her that the incredible violence of the storm was promise enough that it would not endure; though it was horrible to think of the miles we had been forced to run into the eastwards, and of the leagues off our course the drift of the ship, even in twelve hours, would compel us to measure.

Prins came to inquire if we would eat. We answered "No." That evening was the most dismal I had ever spent in the accursed ship. I held my sweetheart's hand, and speech being, as I have said, as good as impossible, I afflicted myself with a thousand miserable thoughts and dark and ugly fancies. Great heaven! With what loathing did I regard the sickly mask of the ship's side, the gloomy ovals, the ghastly revelry of the lantern's colours flashing to the prodigious swinging of the tempest-tossed fabric! And from time to time the parrot, affrighted by the noises and by the dashing of her cage against the bulkhead, burst suddenly out with her horrid croak of "Wy zyn al Verdomd!"

Neither Vanderdecken nor his mate came below. Nothing could better have illustrated their ignorance of their true state than the anxieties which held them to the deck in the heart of that raging wind. Their solicitude might indeed deserve another name for the impious passions which informed it, yet it had a character sailorly enough to make it intelligible to human sympathy, and 'twas truly soul-subduing to sit in that cabin and hear the uproar of the tormented waters without, the outcry in the rigging, the straining and groaning below, and think of those men—of Vanderdecken, at all events—watching his ship as though Batavia were but six weeks distant and Amsterdam a certain port presently.

At half-past nine Imogene withdrew. I led her to her cabin door, tenderly kissed her, then returning called for a cup of spirits and water and went to my sleeping place. I thought to have stayed a minute on deck to look about me, but the wind came with so much fury of wet in it that, having no mind to turn in with drenched clothes, I hastily raised the hatch and dropped below. I believe I lay awake the greater part of the night. My memory is not clear owing to the confusion my brain was in. It was not only a feeling akin to conviction that my fate was sealed, that my dearest and I were never to be rescued nor suffered to deliver ourselves from this Death Ship, though to be sure such apprehensions, so keen and fierce, might have caused a stouter mind than mine to fall distraught, the movements of the ship were so excessive, being very high, light and broad, and the seas so extraordinarily hollow, that, without disordering me with sickness, they wrought an alarming giddiness in me, and I lay as one in a sort of fit.

In some such condition as this I languished, I believe, through the greater part of the night, but contrived to snatch sleep enough to refresh me, so that when I awoke I felt better, the dizziness gone and with it something of the distress of mind. The action of the ship showed that the gale was considerably abated, but I had no sooner my senses than I took notice of an unusual sound, like a slow and measured beating in the ship, as though some stout fellow with a heavy mallet regularly struck a hollow object in the hold. This excited my curiosity, and I went on deck. The moment my head was through the hatch I saw what produced the noise. The men were pumping. There was but one pump seemingly that would work, and this four seamen were plying, the water gushing freely from the pipe and washing away overboard through the scuppers.

The old engine made so melancholy and uncommon a sound that I might have lain a week in my bed speculating upon it, without even hitting the truth. I took notice that the water came up clear and bright as glass, a sure sign that it was entering freely. A sullen shade still hung in the weather, the sky was of slate, with a small scud flying under it of the hue of sulphur, but the breeze was no more than a fresh gale of which we were making a fair wind, the yards braced very nearly square, and the Braave sulkily swinging through it with a noise of boiling at her bows.

I was not a little excited by this combination of glass-bright gushing and square yards, and after going forward for the comfort and sweetness of a canvas bucketful of salt water foaming like champagne as I lifted it out of the snow-flaked, dark-green surge, I walked on to the poop, where stood Arents alone, and stepped up to the binnacle. The card made a west-north-west course, the wind on the larboard quarter. I ran my eye over the sea, but the olive-complexioned hue worked with a sulky sinuosity naked against the livid shadow, and the deep looked indescribably gloomy and swollen and confused, though the sun had been risen above half-an-hour. Arents was not a man I held in awe, albeit many might have deemed his unearthly pallor more dreadful than most of the others because of the great breadth of fat and hairless face it overlay; yet I was determined not to question him lest he should repulse me. I therefore contented myself with a short salute and lay over the rail watching the swollen bodies of water and wondering what plan Vanderdecken was now upon, until the chimes of the clock in the cabin made me know it was breakfast time.

The captain came to the table with a stern and bitter expression in his countenance. It was possible he had been on deck throughout the greater part of the night, but he exhibited no trace of the fatigue you would expect to see in one that was of this earth. Methought, as I glanced at him, that sleep must be a mockery to these men, who, being deathless, stood in no need of that repose which counterfeiting death, reinvigorates our perishable frame every morning with a quickening as of a resurrection. What has one to whom the grave is denied to do with slumber? Yet if a whiter pallor was possible in Vanderdecken I fancied I witnessed it in him now. His eyes were angry and bright; the skin of his forehead lay in folds upon his heavy brows, and yet there was the stillness of a vitality, numbed or blasted by disappointment or exhausted by passion, in his manner.

Van Vogelaar did not arrive, maybe he was sleeping, with Arents' leave, well into his watch on deck. Imogene had a wan and drooping look. She answered my concerned gaze by saying she had not slept, and she smiled as she spoke, but never more sadly to my knowledge; it seemed but as a light playing over and revealing her melancholy. Lovely she appeared, but too fragile for my peace, and with too much of the sorrowful sweetness of the moon-lily when it hangs down its white beauty and contracts its milky petals into leanness with the waning of the silver orb it takes its name from.

Suddenly she pricked her ears. "What is that sound?" she exclaimed, in English.

"It is the seamen pumping the water out of the ship," I replied.

"Strange!" she said. "Long before dawn I heard it indistinctly and have ever since been listening to it with a languid, drowsy wonder, not imagining its nature. It has been working continuously. Is there water in the ship?"

"I have not dared inquire," I answered, with a side-long look at Vanderdecken, who ate mechanically without heeding us.

"Captain," she said, softly, touching him on the arm with her hand, which glittered with his jewels, "the men have been pumping for some hours—why? Will you tell me?"

He brought his eyes slowly to hers with a blank look that caused her to repeat her question.

Whereupon he answered: "The heavy working of the ship in the small hours has caused her to start a butt or hidden end."

"She is leaking?"

He answered: "Yes, my child."

"Can the leak be stopped?" she asked, encouraged to these questions by my glances.

"No, 'tis below her water-line. But it does not gain. Continuous pumping keeps the water level. We shall have to careen to get at the leak."

"Are we sailing to the coast?" she asked.

"Yes," he answered.

CHAPTER VII.
IMOGENE FEARS FOR ME.

On hearing that we were sailing to the coast my delight was so keen that I came near to suffocating myself by the sudden checking of the shout of joy that rose to my throat like an hysteric throttling thickness in the windpipe. To be sure, had anyone asked what there was in the news to fill me with this transport I should not have been able to offer a sufficient reason, for it was not as though Vanderdecken meant to steer for a port. I was sensible that he would head for some desolate bay upon a hot shore of sand, backed by great mountains, and leagues distant from any settlement, whether Dutch or British. Yet so great had been the depression excited by the tempest and the barrenness of our chances, that the mere circumstance of a change having come about, the mere happening of a departure from our rueful business of beating to the windward, raised my spirits to a very great height; nor must it be forgotten that though I conjectured in darkness, I had for a long time felt persuaded that if ever we were to remove ourselves from the Death Ship, the only opportunity that could offer would attend our dropping anchor off the African Coast.

I will not say that Vanderdecken did not observe the change in my countenance when he made his answer to Imogene. But whatever might have been his reflections they were concealed by his frowning brow and the dark and stormy shadow of passion upon his face. He ceased to speak when she ceased to question, and went on deck without calling for his usual pipe of tobacco, which was a very remarkable illustration in him of his wrath and concern.

"Dearest," said I, going to Imogene's side, "it has been a dark and cheerless night with you I fear. Would to God it were this day in my power to give redness to the roses that now lie white in your cheeks. Yet this is great news that Vanderdecken has given us."

She smiled in a questioning way.

"Why," said I, answering her, "'tis very certain that we shall never escape from this Death Ship whilst she sails the seas. But though I could not here say for the life of me what the land may do for us, I feel that the coming to an anchor close to it may give us a chance, and it will go hard indeed if a sailor's cunning, sharpened by despair, does not contrive some remedy for this horrible enthralment."

She mused a little and said, "Geoffrey, I have made up my mind to this: if you can carry me away with you I will go—whatever resolution you may form will be mine, as shall be your fortune. But, dearest," says she, smiling to my grasp of her hand, "I am also determined that your liberty shall not depend upon my escape; if you are able to get away alone, but not with me, then I stay."

"Ah!" said I, shaking my head, "your gaze cannot have sunk very deep into me or you would not talk thus."

She put her finger upon my lip. "Geoffrey, consider this. You are a man, you are young, the world is before you, liberty is your precious jewel—nay, you have a home and a mother to return to. I am an orphan—lonely in this great world of water as any sea-bird that solitarily follows our ship. I sometimes feel that there is a cold hand on my heart and that my time is not long. If it is to be my destiny to remain in this vessel, I am too certain of a short residence to fear it."

She stopped suddenly and wept.

We were alone, and I took her in my arms. I saw how it was with her, how the fear of the tempest, how sleeplessness, had wrought in her delicate health and depressed her powers, and I comforted and cherished her as my heart's love best knew how; yet her foreboding concerning her time in this world struck a chill into my blood, for it just then found solemn accentuation in her unusual pallor, her languid eyelids, the sadness of her smile, her low voice and tears.

However, I borrowed comfort from the reflection that the health of the heartiest maiden might well fail in such an existence as this girl passed, spite of the wine-like invigoration of the salt winds; that she had survived hard upon five years of experiences so wild and amazing that a few weeks had tended not a little to pale my own face and even rob me of something of my manhood; that it was inevitable she should break down from time to time, but that her sweetness would soon bloom and be coloured into a loveliness of health when this Death Ship had become a thing of the past, and when I had safely lodged her as my bride in my mother's pretty home, with flower-gardens and fields to wander in, upon floors unrocked by billows, in rooms irradiated at night by fires never more mystical than the soft flame of oil or the silver of star and moonshine.

The weather brightened as the day advanced. By noon the sky had broken into lagoons of blue, with fine large clouds that rained here and there upon the horizon and filled the air down there with broken shafts of rainbow, like to windgalls, only that the colours were very sharp and even glorious. There was now plenty of sunshine to give life and splendour to the ocean, whose dye of azure looked the purer and more sparkling for its cleansing by the great wind and rain and fire-bolts of the past night. The swell of the sea was from the southward, no longer a turbulent movement, but a regular respiratory action, with weight and volume yet that made you think of the deep as a sentient thing, with something of the violence of its hellish conflict yet lurking in its rhythmic breathing.

About this hour a number of whales showed their black, wet backs at the distance of a mile. The sunshine turned their spoutings into very beautiful fountains, which fell in showers of diamonds and rubies and emeralds; and their great shapes and solemn movements, with now and again the dive of one with a breathless lingering of tail that showed like a gigantic fan of ebony, or the rise of another, floating its sparkling blackness above the violet fold of a brimming swell, as though a little island had been hove to the surface by some deep-sea convulsion, afforded Imogene and me some twenty minutes of very agreeable diversion. The wind was a trifle to the southward of west, a brisk breeze, and the ship swarmed and swirled and rolled along at a speed of some five or six marine miles in the hour, every cloth abroad and already dried into its usual dingy staring tones. But the pump was worked without intermission. The clanging of the brake upon its pin, the gushing of the bright water flowing to the scuppers and flooding the deck thereabouts with every roll, the hissing of the slender cascades over the side, grew into sounds as familiar as the creaking of the bulkheads, or the cries of the rudder upon its ancient rusty pintles.

Those pumping gangs made a strange, mysterious sight. They toiled, but their labour was not that of living seamen who change their posture again and again, who let go an instant with one hand to smear the sweat from their brows or to bite an end of tobacco, who break into choruses as they ply their arms or growl out curses upon this hardest of marine tasks, or raise a cheerful call of encouragement one to another. There was the same soullessness in this as in all else they did. No dew was distilled from their death-like faces. Once at the pump they never shifted their attitudes. A seaman of seventy, and perhaps older yet, would work side by side with one of twenty years, and at the end of the hour's labour—for each gang was relieved every hour—the aged sailor would exhibit no more fatigue than the younger one. Their aspects came out startlingly as they stood close together, their countenances bearing expressions as undeterminable as the faint smile or the dim frown of horror or the slumberous placidity on the features of the dead; and never was the sense of the wild conjecture of the Saracen's mad captain so borne into me as when I viewed one group after another coming to this pumping business, and contrasted their faces and perceived how every man—young, middle-aged and old—showed in dreadful vitality the appearance he would have offered at the hour of his death, no matter his years, had the Curse not stood between him and the grave.

That afternoon, happening to be alone on the poop—I mean, without Imogene—for when she was absent I was more alone, though the whole of that ship's grisly company had gathered around me, than ever I could have been if marooned on some mid-ocean rock—and listening a little to the monotonous beat of the pump-gear, a thought came into my head and I stepped over to Vanderdecken, who leaned upon the weather-rail, his chin upon his hand.

"Mynheer," said I, "I ask your pardon for breaking in upon you. The labour of pumping is severe—I know it from several stern experiences." He lifted his head and slowly looked round to me. "This ship," I continued, "has rescued me from death and proved an asylum to me. 'Tis but right I should share in the general toil. Suffer me then, mynheer, to take my turn at the pump with the others."

He eyed me a little with his wonderful fiery gaze, and answered: "It is not necessary. Our company is numerous, there are hands enough. Besides, sir, there is no urgency, the water doth not gain if it do not decrease."

I bowed, and was leaving him, but he added: "I fear you have but an imperfect knowledge of the character of the Dutch. Yet you tell me you have often visited Rotterdam."

"It is true, mynheer, but only as a sailor liberated o' nights and forced therefore to form his judgment on such company as the ale-house supplies."

"That seems so," said he, "otherwise you would suspect from such treatment as we have shown you that we regard you as a guest, and it is not customary among us to use our guests as labourers."

I bowed again, contenting myself with merely thinking how, as a guest, I went in fear of my life—to say no more. I thought, however, I would use his seeming willingness to converse with me, and said in as deferential a manner as I could command, "Sir, the mere circumstance of my being your guest should properly teach me to believe that a time must come when I shall have wearied your courtesy by imposing too great a burden of my company upon it."

I paused, hoping he would make haste to assure me to the contrary; but he did not speak, merely eyeing me steadfastly.

"You will therefore judge, mynheer," I continued, "that I am actuated by no idle motive of curiosity in asking you whether your present design is to steer the ship to a port?"

"To what port?" he exclaimed.

I told him I did not know.

"Nor I," said he. "What settlement is there on this seaboard? You do not suppose that, with yonder pump going day and night, I should be willing to head for any other point of the coast than the nearest bay in which to careen and get at the leak?"

"Will that bay, mynheer," said I, still speaking with the utmost modesty and deference, "be far distant?"

He answered: "It lies a few miles south of the parallel of thirty-four degrees. To reach it we shall have to sail an hundred and eighty leagues."

"Five hundred and forty miles!" I exclaimed, with an involuntary dejected glance aloft and at the passing water. "At this rate of progress, sir, the passage will occupy about five days."

Our gaze met as I said this and I observed a sudden fire in his eyes.

"Does the execution of any project you have in your mind depend upon the time we will take in reaching the coast?" said he, with suspicion sounding fiercely in the rich deep notes of his utterance.

I felt the blood in my face as I answered: "Mynheer, I have no project. Methought, if you sailed to a port, you would rid yourself of my company. I have been long in your ship; every day increases my sense of trespass——" which said, I broke off, being really dismayed by the passionate fixity of his regard. Such a searching for the heart in one's face was unbearable. My imagination, perhaps my conscience, imparted a wizard-like power to his burning eyes, and I felt that if I lingered, I should be constrained into a revelation of my intention to escape with Imogene, as certain birds are fascinated into motionlessness and charmed to their devourment by the gaze of serpents. With the abruptness of alarm I bowed and left him. As I walked I could feel that his searching, scorching gaze followed me.

However, it was something to have found out our whereabouts, to have gathered his intention, and to be able to calculate the time of our arrival off the coast. On this I plumed myself, making pretty sure that if my questions had caused him to suspect some project in my mind, his memory would loose its hold of the thing after a few hours. But I was mistaken, as you shall now see.

Whilst we were seated at the last meal, and with us in that Death Ship formed of soup or wine for drink, and such victuals as remained from dinner, I observed a peculiar air of distress and anxiety in Imogene's face. I do not know that she made the least effort to disguise it. A sharp gleam of resentment would sparkle in the soft violet depths of her eyes as she now and then turned them on Van Vogelaar or Vanderdecken, and then as they came to me they would soften into an exquisite wistfulness that was very near to a look of grievous pain.

On the captain filling his pipe I went on deck and stood out of sight of the cabin on the poop-front, wondering what Imogene's manner signified. Presently she joined me.

The sun was gone down; the stars shone singly or in clouds of bright dust over our northward-pointing bowsprit, and the air was soft and faint with the delicate light of the moon that was drawing out of her first quarter, and that could now rain her pearls with power into the dark waters under her.

"What is amiss, dearest?" said I, taking her hand in mine, and moved in a way I could not give expression to by the pallor of her face, her eyes showing large and dark, the paleness of lip and hair and throat—her whole countenance, yes and her figure too; stealing out of their realness into an elfin-like unsubstantiality to the wan complexion of the moon.

She answered: "Did not I tell you I was sorry you had questioned Vanderdecken? He is full of suspicion, and there is always Van Vogelaar at hand to exasperate his captain's temper and fancies by the poison of his own reptile-nature."

"Has Vanderdecken spoken to you of my questions?"

"No," she replied. "What has happened is this:—Half-an-hour before supper I was in my cabin. The air was close, and I put the door on the hook and was near it combing my hair. Vanderdecken came into the cabin and spoke to Prins. Soon afterwards Van Vogelaar entered, and told the captain that he had been among the crew and informed them that he hoped to make the coast in four or five days, and that on their arrival at Amsterdam they would receive additional pay for their labour at the pump. They talked a little, but I should not have heeded them had not I suddenly caught the sound of your name. On this I left off combing my hair and crept close to the door. Vanderdecken said: 'I believe he hath some scheme. He shrunk from my gaze and the colour mounted to his cheeks. He quitted me with the air of one whose conscience is like an exposed nerve.'"

"Heaven defend us!" I exclaimed, "your true Dutchman is very fit to be a hangman. Yet this unholy creature did certainly look at me to some purpose. 'Twas time I walked off!"

She continued: "Van Vogelaar answered, 'I would not trust that man further away from me than my hand could seize him. Skipper, I ask your pardon, but was it wise, think you, to exhibit samples of the treasure below to this Englishman? There is a noble fortune for him in those chests could he but come at them. What sort of egg is that which, beyond question, his mind is sitting upon, and that will be presently hatched? He is eager to learn your intentions. He manifests this eagerness in defiance of the contempt and anger with which you have again and again crushed down his curiosity into the silence of terror. Suppose he hath some plot to secure the stranding of this ship; or that he intends her a mischief that shall force us to beach and perhaps abandon her? He is a sailor and an Englishman; we are Hollanders! Skipper, the like of that man needs no help from sorcery to contrive our ruin.' Vanderdecken answered, 'He must be got rid of,' in a voice that showed how Van Vogelaar's talk worked in him. I did not need to look, Geoffrey, to know what sort of expression his face wore. They were silent awhile. Vanderdecken then said: 'Twould be mere barbarous, useless murder to take his life; there is no evidence against him. But we have a right to protect ourselves since he hath been mad and ungenerous enough to raise our suspicions——' Van Vogelaar interrupted: ''Tis more than suspicion—'tis conviction with me, skipper——' 'This occurs to me as a remedy,' said Vanderdecken: 'he must be set ashore before we sail; but he shall not be left to starve. A musket and ammunition will provide him with food, and he shall have a week's provisions. He is young, and with stout legs, and cannot miss his way to our Settlement if he hold steadfastly to the coast.' The mate said, 'Ay, that will be dismissing him lovingly.' They then went to the other end of the cabin and talked, but I could not hear them."