The Project Gutenberg eBook of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson Volume XX, by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Mr. Sheepshanks harked back. “I am a married man, and—d’ye see?—Mrs. Sheepshanks, as you might say, has no sympathy with ballooning. She was a Guthrie of Dumfries.”

“To me, sir, on the contrary, aërostatics have long been an alluring study. I might even, Mr. ——, I might even, I say, term it the passion of my life.” His mild eyes shone behind their glasses. “I remember Vincent Lunardi, sir. I was present in Heriot’s Gardens when he made an ascension there in October ’85. He came down at Cupar. The Society of Gentlemen Golfers at Cupar presented him with an address; and at Edinburgh he was admitted Knight Companion of the Beggar’s Benison, a social company, or (as I may say) crew, since defunct. A thin-faced man, sir. He wore a peculiar bonnet, if I may use the expression, very much cocked up behind. The shape became fashionable. He once pawned his watch with me, sir; that being my profession. I regret to say he redeemed it subsequently: otherwise I might have the pleasure of showing it to you. O yes, the theory of ballooning has long been a passion with me. But in deference to Mrs. Sheepshanks I have abstained from the actual practice—until to-day. To tell you the truth, my wife believes me to be brushing off the cobwebs in the Kyles of Bute.”

“Are there any cobwebs in the Kyles of Bute?” asked Dalmahoy, in a tone unnaturally calm.

“A figure of speech, sir—as one might say, holiday-keeping there. I paid Mr. Byfield five pounds in advance. I have his receipt. And the stipulation was that I should be concealed in the car and make the ascension with him alone.”

He made haste to disclaim. “Not at all: decidedly not in the least. But the chances were for less agreeable associates.” I bowed. “And a bargain’s a bargain,” he wound up.

“So it is,” said I. “Byfield, hand Mr. Sheepshanks back his five pounds.”

“O, come now!” the aëronaut objected. “And who may you be, to be ordering a man about?”

“Not the smallest. For all I care, you are Robert Burns, or Napoleon Buonaparte, or anything, from the Mother of the Gracchi to Balaam’s Ass. But I knew you first as Mr. Ducie; and you may take it that I’m Mr. Don’t-see.” He reached up a hand towards the valve-string.

“Scarcely that, seeing that we have struck a northerly current, and are travelling at the rate of thirty miles an hour, perhaps. That’s Broad Law to the south of us, as I make it out.”

“Because it sticks in my head that some one in the crowd called you by a name that wasn’t Ducie; and by a title, for that matter, which didn’t sound like ‘Viscount.’ I took it at the time for a constable’s trick; but I begin to have my strong doubts.”

The fellow was dangerous. I stooped nonchalantly on pretence of picking up a plaid; for the air had turned bitterly cold of a sudden.

We leaned together over the breastwork of the car. “If I mistake not,” I said, speaking low, “the name was Champdivers.”

“The gentleman who raised that foolish but infernally risky cry was my own cousin, the Viscount de Saint-Yves. I give you my word of honour to that.” Observing that this staggered him, I added, mighty slily, “I suppose it doesn’t occur to you now that the whole affair was a game, for a friendly wager?”

“No,” he answered brutally, “it doesn’t. And what’s more, it won’t go down.”

“In that respect,” said I, with a sudden change of key, “it resembles your balloon. But I admire the obstinacy of your suspicions; since, as a matter of fact, I am Champdivers.”

“Man alive, you don’t expect me to demonstrate it up here, by the simple apparatus of ballooning?”

“There is no talk of ‘up here,’” said he, and reached for the valve-string.

“Say ‘down there,’ then. Down there it is no business of the accused to prove his innocence. By what I have heard of the law, English or Scotch, the boot is on the other leg. But I’ll tell you what I can prove. I can prove, sir, that I have been a deal in your company of late; that I supped with you and Mr. Dalmahoy no longer ago than Wednesday. You may put it that we three are here together again by accident; that you never suspected me; that my invasion of your machine was a complete surprise to you, and, so far as you were concerned, wholly fortuitous. But ask yourself what any intelligent jury is likely to make of that cock-and-bull story.” Mr. Byfield was visibly shaken. “Add to this,” I proceeded, “that you have to explain Sheepshanks; to confess that you gulled the public by advertising a lonely ascension, and haranguing a befooled multitude to the same intent, when, all the time, you had a companion concealed in the car. ‘A public character!’ you call yourself! My word, sir! there’ll be no mistake about it, this time.”

“Now just you listen to me, Mr. Byfield. Pull that string, and a sadly discredited aëronaut descends upon the least charitable of worlds. Why, sir, in any case your game in Edinburgh is up. The public is dog-tired of you and your ascensions, as any observant child in to-day’s crowd could have told you. The truth was there staring you in the face; and next time even your purblind vanity must recognise it. Consider; I offered you two hundred guineas for the convenience of your balloon. I now double that offer on condition that I become its owner during this trip, and that you manipulate it as I wish. Here are the notes; and out of the total you will refund five pounds to Mr. Sheepshanks.”

Byfield’s complexion had grown streaky as his balloon; and with colours not so very dissimilar. I had stabbed upon his vital self-conceit, and the man was really hurt.

“By all means.” I knew he was beaten. But only the poorness of my case excused me, and I had no affection for the weapons used. I turned with relief to the others. Dalmahoy was seated on the floor of the car, and helping Mr. Sheepshanks to unpack a carpet bag.

“This will be whisky,” the little pawnbroker announced: “three bottles. My wife said, ‘Surely, Elshander, ye’ll find whisky where ye’re gaun.’ ‘No doubt I will,’ said I, ’but I’m not very confident of its quality; and it’s a far step.’ My itinerary, Mr. Dalmahoy, was planned from Greenock to the Kyles of Bute and back, and thence coastwise to Saltcoats and the land of Burns. I told her, if she had anything to communicate, to address her letter to the care of the postmaster, Ayr—ha, ha!” He broke off and gazed reproachfully into Dalmahoy’s impassive face. “Ayr—air,” he explained: “a little play upon words.”

“Skye would have been better,” suggested Dalmahoy, without moving an eyelid.

“Skye? Dear me—capital, capital! Only, you see,” he urged, “she wouldn’t expect me to be in Skye.”

A minute later he drew me aside. “Excellent company your friend is, sir: most gentlemanly manners; but at times, if I may so say, not very gleg.”

My hands by this time were numb with cold. We had been ascending steadily, and Byfield’s English thermometer stood at thirteen degrees. I borrowed from the heap a thicker overcoat, in the pocket of which I was lucky enough to find a pair of furred gloves; and leaned over for another look below, still with a corner of my eye for the aëronaut, who stood biting his nails, as far from me as the car allowed.

The sea-fog had vanished, and the south of Scotland lay spread beneath us from sea to sea, like a map in monotint. Nay, yonder was England, with the Solway cleaving the coast—a broad, bright spearhead, slightly bent at the tip—and the fells of Cumberland beyond, mere hummocks on the horizon; all else flat as a board or as the bottom of a saucer. White threads of high-road connected town to town: the intervening hills had fallen down, and the towns, as if in fright, had shrunk into themselves, contracting their suburbs as a snail his horns. The old poet was right who said that the Olympians had a delicate view. The lace-makers of Valenciennes might have had the tracing of those towns and high-roads; those knots of guipure and ligatures of finest réseau-work. And when I considered that what I looked down on—this, with its arteries and nodules of public traffic—was a nation; that each silent nodule held some thousands of men, each man moderately ready to die in defence of his shopboard and hen-roost; it came into my mind that my Emperor’s emblem was the bee, and this Britain the spider’s web, sure enough.

“Mr. Ducie, I have considered your offer, and accept it. It’s a curst position——”

“Don’t, sir! I beg that you don’t. Your words just now made me suffer a good deal: the more, that I perceive a part of them to be true. An aëronaut, sir, has ambition—how can he help it? The public, the newspapers, feed it for a while; they fête, and flatter, and applaud him. But in its heart the public ranks him with the mountebank, and reserves the right to drop him when tired of his tricks. Is it wonderful that he forgets this sometimes? For in his own thoughts he is not a mountebank—no, by God, he is not!”

“Mr. Byfield, my words were brutal. I beg you will allow me to take them back.”

“I am not so sure. A balloon, as you hint and I begin to discover, may alter the perspective of man’s ambitions. Here are the notes; and on the top of them I give you my word that you are not abetting a criminal. How long should the Lunardi be able to maintain itself in the air?”

“I have never tried it; but I calculate on twenty hours—say twenty-four at a pinch.”

“We will test it. The current, I see, is still north-east, or from that to north-by-east. And our height?”

Dalmahoy heard, and whooped. “Hi! you fellows, come to lunch! Sandwiches, shortbread, and cleanest Glenlivet—Elshander’s Feast:

Sheepshanks provided the whisky. Rise, Elshander: observe that you have no worlds left to conquer, and, having shed the perfunctory tear, pass the corkscrew. Come along, Ducie: come, my Dædalian boy; if you are not hungry, I am, and so is—Sheepshanks—what the dickens do you mean by consorting with a singular verb? Verbum cum nominativo—I should say, so are sheepshanks.”

Byfield produced from one of the lockers a pork pie and a bottle of sherry (the viaticum in choice and assortment almost explained the man) and we sat down to the repast. Dalmahoy’s tongue ran like a brook. He addressed Mr. Sheepshanks with light-hearted impartiality as Philip’s royal son, as the Man of Ross, as the divine Clarinda. He elected him Professor of Marital Diplomacy to the University of Cramond. He passed the bottle and called on him for a toast, a song—“Oblige me, Sheepshanks, by making the welkin ring.” Mr. Sheepshanks beamed, and gave us a sentiment instead. The little man was enjoying himself amazingly. “Fund of spirits your friend has, to be sure, sir—quite a fund.”

Either my own spirits were running low or the bitter cold had congealed them. I was conscious of my thin ball-suit, and moreover of a masterful desire of sleep. I felt no inclination for food, but drained half a tumblerful of the Sheepshanks whisky, and crawled beneath the pile of plaids. Byfield considerately helped to arrange them. He may or may not have caught some accent of uncertainty in my thanks: at any rate he thought fit to add the assurance, “You may trust me, Mr. Ducie.” I saw that I could, and began almost to like the fellow.

In this posture I dozed through the afternoon. In dreams I heard Dalmahoy and Sheepshanks lifting their voices in amœbæan song, and became languidly aware that they were growing uproarious. I heard Byfield expostulating, apparently in vain: for I awoke next to find that Sheepshanks had stumbled over me while illustrating, with an empty bottle, the motions of tossing the caber. “Old Hieland sports,” explained Dalmahoy, wiping tears of vain laughter: “his mother’s uncle was out in the ‘Forty-Five. Sorry to wake you, Ducie: balow, my babe!” It did not occur to me to smoke danger in this tomfoolery. I turned over and dozed again.

It seemed but a minute later that a buzzing in my ears awoke me, with a stab of pain as though my temples were being split with a wedge. On the instant I heard my name cried aloud, and sat up, to find myself blinking in a broad flood of moonlight over against the agitated face of Dalmahoy.

Dalmahoy pointed. The aëronaut lay at my feet, collapsed like some monstrous marionette, with legs and arms a-splay. Across his legs, with head propped against a locker, reclined Sheepshanks, and gazed upwards with an approving smile. “Awkward business,” explained Dalmahoy, between gasps. “Sheepshanks ’nmanageable; can’t carry his liquor like a gentleman: thought it funny ’pitch out ballast. Byfield lost his temper: worst thing in the world. One thing I pride myself, ’menable to reason. No holding Sheepshanks: Byfield got him down; too late; faint both of us. Sheepshanks wants ring for ’shistance: pulls string: breaks. When string breaks Lunardi won’t fall—tha’s the devil of it.”

“With my tol-de-rol,” Mr. Sheepshanks murmured. “Pretty—very pretty.”

I cast a look aloft. The Lunardi was transformed: every inch of it frosted as with silver. All the ropes and cords ran with silver too, or liquid mercury. And in the midst of this sparkling cage, a little below the hoop, and five feet at least above reach, dangled the broken valve-string.

“Well,” I said, “you have made a handsome mess of it! Pass me the broken end, and be good enough not to lose your head.”

“I wish I could,” he groaned, pressing it between his palms. “My dear sir, I’m not frightened, if that is your meaning.”

I was, and horribly. But the thing had to be done. The reader will perhaps forgive me for touching shyly on the next two or three minutes, which still recur on the smallest provocation and play bogey with my dreams. To balance on the edge of night, quaking, gripping a frozen rope; to climb, and feel the pit of one’s stomach slipping like a bucket in a fathomless well—I suppose the intolerable pains in my head spurred me to the attempt—these and the urgent shortness of my breathing—much as toothache will drive a man up to the dentist’s chair. I knotted the broken ends of the valve-string and slid back into the car: then tugged the valve open, while with my disengaged arm I wiped the sweat from my forehead. It froze upon the coat-cuff.

In a minute or so the drumming in my ears grew less violent. Dalmahoy bent over the aëronaut, who was bleeding at the nose and now began to breathe stertorously. Sheepshanks had fallen into placid slumber. I kept the valve open until we descended into a stratum of fog—from which, no doubt, the Lunardi had lately risen: the moisture collected here would account for its congelated coat of silver. By and by, still without rising, we were quit of the fog, and the moon swept the hollow beneath us, rescuing solitary scraps and sheets of water and letting them slip again like imprehensible ghosts. Small fiery eyes opened and shut on us; cressets of flame on factory chimneys, more and more frequent. I studied the compass. Our course lay south-by-west. But our whereabouts? Dalmahoy, being appealed to, suggested Glasgow: and thenceforward I let him alone. Byfield snored on.

I pulled out my watch, which I had forgotten to wind; and found it run down. The hands stood at twenty minutes past four. Daylight, then, could not be far off. Eighteen hours—say twenty: and Byfield had guessed our rate at one time to be thirty miles an hour. Five hundred miles——

A line of silver ahead: a ribbon drawn taut across the night, clean-edged, broadening—the sea! In a minute or two I caught the murmur of the coast. “Five hundred miles,” I began to reckon again, and a holy calm dawned on me as the Lunardi swept high over the fringing surf, and its voice faded back with the glimmer of a whitewashed fishing-haven.

“O, have it as you please!” I retorted. It was not worth arguing with the man.

I told him that my watch had run down. His had done the same. Dalmahoy did not carry one. We searched the still prostrate Sheepshanks: his had stopped at ten minutes to four. Byfield replaced it and underlined his disgust with a kick.

“A nice lot!” he ejaculated. “I owe you my thanks, Mr. Ducie, all the same. It was touch and go with us, and my head’s none the better for it.”

“But I say,” expostulated Dalmahoy. “France! This is getting past a joke.”

Byfield stood, holding by a rope, and studied the darkness ahead. Beside him I hugged my convictions—hour after hour, it seemed; and still the dawn did not come.

“I see a coast line to the south of us. This will be the Bristol Channel: and the balloon is sinking. Pitch out some ballast if these idiots have left any.”

I found a couple of sand bags and emptied them overboard. The coast, as a matter of fact, was close at hand. But the Lunardi rose in time to clear the cliff barrier by some hundreds of feet. A wild sea ran on it: of its surf, as of a grey and agonising face, we caught one glimpse as we hurled high and clear over the roar: and, a minute later, to our infinite dismay, were actually skimming the surface of a black hillside. “Hold on!” screamed Byfield, and I had barely time to tighten my grip when crash! the car struck the turf and pitched us together in a heap on the floor. Bump! the next blow shook us like peas in a bladder. I drew my legs up and waited for the third.

None came. The car gyrated madly and swung slowly back to equilibrium. We picked ourselves up, tossed rugs, coats, instruments, promiscuously overboard, and mounted again. The chine of the tall hill, our stumbling-block, fell back and was lost, and we swept forward into formless shadow.

It was, for aught we could see. Not a light showed anywhere; and to make things worse the moon had abandoned us. For one good hour we swept through chaos to the tuneless lamentations of Sheepshanks, who declared that his collar-bone was broken.

Then Dalmahoy flung a hand upwards. Night lay like a sack around and below us: but right aloft, at the zenith, day was trembling. Slowly established, it spread and descended upon us until it touched a distant verge of hills, and there, cut by the rim of the rising sun, flowed suddenly with streams of crimson.

“Over with the grapnel!” Byfield sprang to the valve-string and pulled; and the featureless earth rushed up towards us.

The sunlight through which we were falling had not touched it yet. It leaped on us, drenched in shadow, like some incalculable beast from its covert: a land shaggy with woods and coppices. Between the woods a desolate river glimmered. A colony of herons rose from the tree-tops beneath us and flew squawking for the farther shore.

“This won’t do,” said Byfield, and shut the escape. “We must win clear of these woods. Hullo!” Ahead of us the river widened abruptly into a shining estuary, populous with anchored shipping. Tall hills flanked it, and in the curve of the westernmost hill a grey town rose from the waterside: its terraces climbing, tier upon tier, like seats in an amphitheatre; its chimneys lifting their smoke over against the dawn. The tiers curved away southward to a round castle and a spit of rock, off which a brig under white canvas stood out for the line of the open sea.

We swept across the roadstead towards the town, trailing our grapnel as it were a hooked fish, a bare hundred feet above the water. Faces stared up at us from the ships’ decks. The crew of one lowered a boat to pursue; we were half a mile away before it touched the water. Should we clear the town? At Byfield’s orders we stripped off our overcoats and stood ready to lighten ship; but seeing that the deflected wind in the estuary was carrying us towards the suburbs and the harbour’s mouth, he changed his mind.

“It is devil or deep sea,” he announced. “We will try the grapnel. Look to it, Ducie, while I take the valve!” He pressed a clasp-knife into my hand. “Cut, if I give the word.”

We descended a few feet. We were skimming the ridge. The grapnel touched, and, in the time it takes you to wink, had ploughed through a kitchen garden, uprooting a regiment of currant bushes; had leaped clear and was caught in the eaves of a wooden outhouse, fetching us up with a dislocating shock. I heard a rending noise, and picked myself up in time to see the building collapse like a house of cards, and a pair of demented pigs emerge from the ruins and plunge across the garden-beds. And with that I was pitched off my feet again as the hook caught in an iron chevaux-de-frise, and held fast.

“Hold tight!” shouted Byfield, as the car lurched and struggled, careering desperately. “Don’t cut, man! What the devil!”

Our rope had tautened over the coping of a high stone wall; and the straining Lunardi—a very large and handsome blossom, bending on a very thin stalk—overhung a gravelled yard; and lo! from the centre of it stared up at us, rigid with amazement, the faces of a squad of British red-coats!

I believe that the first glimpse of that abhorred uniform brought my knife down upon the rope. In two seconds I had slashed through the strands, and the flaccid machine lifted and bore us from their ken. But I see their faces yet, as in basso relievo: round-eyed, open-mouthed; honest country faces, and boyish, every one: an awkward squad of recruits at drill, fronting a red-headed sergeant; the sergeant, with cane held horizontally across and behind his thighs, his face upturned with the rest, and “Irishman” on every feature of it. And so the vision fleeted, and Byfield’s language claimed attention. The man took the whole vocabulary of British profanity at a rush, and swore himself to a standstill. As he paused for second wind I struck in:

“Mr. Byfield, you open the wrong valve. We drift, as you say, towards—nay, over the open sea. As master of this balloon, I suggest that we descend within reasonable distance of the brig yonder; which, as I make out, is backing her sails; which, again, can only mean that she observes us and is preparing to lower a boat.”

He saw the sense of this, and turned to business, though with a snarl. As a gull from the cliff, the Lunardi slanted downwards, and passing the brig by less than a cable’s length to leeward, soused into the sea.

I say “soused“: for I confess that the shock belied the promise of our easy descent. The Lunardi floated: but it also drove before the wind. And as it dragged the car after it like a tilted pail, the four drenched and blinded aëronauts struggled through the spray and gripped the hoop, the netting—nay, dug their nails into the oiled silk. In its new element the machine became inspired with a sudden infernal malice. It sank like a pillow if we tried to climb it: it rolled us over in the brine; it allowed us no moment for a backward glance. I spied a small cutter-rigged craft tacking towards us, a mile and more to leeward, and wondered if the captain of the brig had left our rescue to it. He had not. I heard a shout behind us; a rattle of oars as the bowmen shipped them; and a hand gripped my collar. So one by one we were plucked—uncommon specimens!—from the deep; rescued from what Mr. Sheepshanks a minute later, as he sat on a thwart and wiped his spectacles, justly termed “a predicament, sir, as disconcerting as any my experience supplies.”

CHAPTER XXXIV

CAPTAIN COLENSO

Had it been my affair, I believe I should have obeyed a ridiculous impulse and begged them to keep it for their trouble; so weary was I of the machine. Byfield, however, directed them to slit a seam of the oiled silk and cut away the car, which was by this time wholly submerged and not to be lifted. At once the Lunardi collapsed and became manageable; and having roped it to a ring-bolt astern, the crew fell to their oars.

My teeth were chattering. These operations of salvage had taken time, and it took us a further unconscionable time to cover the distance between us and the brig as she lay hove-to, her maintopsail aback and her headsails drawing.

I whipped round. The voice—yes, and the face—were the voice and face of the seaman who sat and steered us: the voice English, of a sort; the face of no pattern that I recognised for English. The fellows were as like as two peas: as like as the two drovers Sim and Candlish had been: you might put them both at forty; grizzled men, pursed about the eyes with seafaring. And now that I came to look, the three rowers forward, though mere lads, repeated their elders’ features and build; the gaunt frame, the long, serious face, the swarthy complexion and meditative eye—in short, Don Quixote of la Mancha at various stages of growth. Men and lads, I remarked, wore silver earrings.

I was speculating on this likeness when we shipped oars and fell alongside the brig’s ladder. At the head of it my hand was taken, and I was helped on deck with ceremony by a tall man in loose blue jacket and duck trousers: an old man, bent and frail; by his air of dignity, the master of the vessel, and by his features as clearly the patriarch of the family. He lifted his cap and addressed us with a fine but (as I now recall it) somewhat tired courtesy.

“I am pleased to have been of service. The pilot-cutter yonder could hardly have fetched you in less than twenty minutes. I have signalled her alongside, and she will convey you back to Falmouth; none the worse, I hope, for your wetting.”

“A convenience,” said I, “of which my friends will gladly avail themselves. For my part, I do not propose to return.”

He paused, weighing my words; obviously puzzled, but politely anxious to understand. His eyes were grey and honest, even childishly honest, but dulled about the rim of the iris and a trifle vacant, as though the world with its train of affairs had passed beyond his active concern. I keep my own eyes about me when I travel, and have surprised just such a look, before now, behind the spectacles of very old men who sit by the roadside and break stones for a living.

“Why,” said I, “if I may guess, this is one of the famous Falmouth packets?”

“As to that, sir, you are right, and yet wrong. She was a packet, and (if I may say it) a famous one.” His gaze travelled aloft, and descending rested on mine with a sort of gentle resignation. “But the old pennon is down, as you see. At present she sails on a private adventure, and under private commission.”

“Accept me, Captain Colenso, for your passenger: I will not say comrade-in-arms—naval warfare being so far beyond my knowledge, which it would perhaps be more descriptive to call ignorance. But I can pay—” I thrust a hand nervously into my breast-pocket, and blessed Flora for her waterproof bag. “Excuse me, Captain, if I speak with my friend here in private for a moment.”

“Consequently I never make an ascension unaccompanied by a small bottle of Epsom salts, tightly corked.”

“And you threw away the salts and substituted the notes?—that was clever of you, Byfield.”

I lifted my voice. “And Mr. Dalmahoy, I presume, returns to his sorrowing folk?”

The extravagant cheerfully corrected me. “They will not sorrow: but I shall return to them. Of their grudged pension I have eighteenpence in my pocket. But I propose to travel with Sheepshanks, and raise the wind by showing his tricks. He shall toss the caber from Land’s End to Forthside, cheered by the plaudits of the intervening taverns and furthered by their bounty.”

“A progress which we must try to expedite, if only out of regard for Mrs. Sheepshanks.” I turned to Captain Colenso again. “Well, sir, will you accept me for your passenger?”

He hesitated; tottered to the companion, and called down, “Susannah! Susannah! A moment on deck, if you please. One of these gentlemen wishes to ship as passenger.”

A dark-browed woman of middle age thrust her head above the ladder and eyed me. Even so might a ruminating cow gaze over her hedge upon some posting wayfarer.

“My dear lady, I accept that and every condition you may impose. Whatever the discipline of the ship——”

“Why, no. You see, sir, I ought to tell you that this is not an ordinary voyage.”

“But I do dwell on it,” he answered earnestly, a red spot showing on either cheek. “I must tell you, sir, that we are very likely indeed to fall into an enemy’s hands.”

“Yes, I will say we are certain. I cannot in conscience do less.” He sought his daughter’s eyes. She nodded.

“O, damn your conscience!” thought I, my stomach rising in contempt for this noble-looking but extremely faint-hearted privateersman. “Come,” I said, rallying him, “we fall in with a Frenchman, or—let us suppose—an American: that is our object, eh?”

“Then I warrant we give a good account of ourselves. Tut, tut, man—an ex-packet captain!”

I pulled up in sheer wonder at the lunacy of our dispute and the side he was forcing me to take. Here was I haranguing a grey-headed veteran on his own quarter-deck and exhorting him to valour! In a flash I saw myself befooled, tricked into playing the patronising amateur, complacently posturing for the derision of gods and men. And Captain Colenso, who aimed but to be rid of me, was laughing in his sleeve, no doubt. In a minute even Sheepshanks would catch the jest. Now, I do mortally hate to be laughed at: it may be disciplinary for most men, but it turns me obstinate.

Captain Colenso, at any rate, dissembled his mirth to perfection. The look which he shifted from me to Susannah and back was eloquent of senile indecision.

“I cannot explain to you, sir. The consequences—I might mitigate them for you—still you must risk them.” He broke off and appealed to me. “I would rather you did not insist: I would indeed! I must beg of you, sir, not to press it.”

“But I do press it,” I answered, stubborn as a mule. “I tell you that I am ready to accept all risks. But if you want me to return with my friends in the cutter, you must summon your crew to pitch me down the ladder. And there’s the end on’t.”

“Up to now I have that misfortune.” I aimed a bow at Mistress Susannah; but that lady had turned her broad shoulders, and it missed fire. “Which reminds me,” I continued, “to ask for the favour of pen, ink, and paper. I wish to send a letter ashore, to the mail.”

She invited me to follow her; and I descended to the main cabin, a spick-and-span apartment, where we surprised two passably good-looking damsels at their housework, the one polishing a mahogany swing-table, the other a brass door-handle. They picked up their cloths, dropped me a curtsy apiece, and disappeared at a word from Susannah, who bade me be seated at the swing-table and set writing materials before me. The room was lit by a broad stern-window, and lined along two of its sides with mahogany doors leading, as I supposed, to sleeping cabins: the panels—not to speak of the brass handles and finger-plates—shining so that a man might have seen his face in them, to shave by. “But why all these women on board a privateer?” thought I, as I tried a quill on my thumb-nail, and embarked upon my first love-letter.

“Dearest,—This line with my devotion to tell you that the balloon has descended safely, and your Anne finds himself on board....”

“She is called the Lady Nepean; and I am a married woman and the mother of six.”

“... the Lady Nepean packet, outward bound from Falmouth to....”

“Madam,” I answered, on the sudden impulse, “I am an escaped French prisoner.” And with that, having tossed my cap over the mills (as they say), I leaned back in the settee, and we regarded each other.

“——escaped,” I continued, still my eyes on hers, “with a trifle of money, but minus my heart. I write this to the fair daughter of Britain who has it in her keeping. And now what have you to say?”

“Ah, well,” she mused, “the Lord’s ways be past finding out. It may be the easier for you.”

Apparently it was the habit of this ship’s company to speak in enigmas. I caught up my pen again:

“... the coast of Massachusetts, in the United States of America, whence I hope to make my way in good time to France. Though you have news, dearest, I fear none can reach me for a while. Yet, and though you have no more to write than ‘I love you, Anne,’ write it, and commit it to Mr. Robbie, who will forward it to Mr. Romaine, who in turn may find a means to get it smuggled through to Paris, Rue du Fouarre, 16. It should be consigned to the widow Jupille, ‘to be called for by the corporal who praised her vin blanc.’ She will remember; and in truth a man who had the courage to praise it deserves remembrance as singular among the levies of France. Should a youth of the name of Rowley present himself before you, you may trust his fidelity absolutely, his sagacity not at all. And so (since the boat waits to take this) I kiss the name of Flora, and subscribe myself—until I come to claim her, and afterwards to eternity—her prisoner.

Anne.”

I had, in fact, a second reason for abbreviating this letter and sealing it in a hurry. The movements of the brig, though slight, were perceptible, and in the close air of the main cabin my head already began to swim. I hastened on deck in time to shake hands with my companions and confide the letter to Byfield with instructions for posting it. “And if your share in our adventure should come into public question,” said I, “you must apply to a Major Chevenix, now quartered in Edinburgh Castle, who has a fair inkling of the facts, and as a man of honour will not decline to assist you. You have Dalmahoy, too, to back your assertion that you knew me only as Mr. Ducie.” Upon Dalmahoy I pressed a note for his and Mr. Sheepshanks’s travelling expenses. “My dear fellow,” he protested, “I couldn’t dream ... if you are sure it won’t inconvenience ... merely as a loan ... and deuced handsome of you, I will say.” He kept the cutter waiting while he drew an I.O.U., in which I figured as Bursar and Almoner (honoris causà) to the Senatus Academicus of Cramond-on-Almond. Mr. Sheepshanks meanwhile shook hands with me impressively. “It has been a memorable experience, sir. I shall have much to tell my wife on my return.”

It occurred to me as probable that the lady would have even more to say to him. He stepped into the cutter, and, as they pushed off, was hilariously bonneted by Mr. Dalmahoy, by way of parting salute. “Starboard after-braces!” Captain Colenso called to his crew. The yards were trimmed and the Lady Nepean slowly gathered way, while I stood by the bulwarks gazing after my friends and attempting to persuade myself that the fresh air was doing me good.

Captain Colenso perceived my queasiness, and advised me to seek my berth and lie down; and on my replying with haggard defiance, took my arm gently, as if I had been a wilful child, and led me below. I passed beyond one of the mahogany doors leading from the main cabin; and in that seclusion I ask you to leave me face to face with the next forty-eight hours. It was a dreadful time.

Nor at the end of it did gaiety wait on a partially recovered appetite. The ladies of the ship nursed me, and tickled my palate with the lightest of sea diet. The men strowed seats for me on deck, and touched their caps with respectful sympathy. One and all were indefatigably kind, but taciturn to a degree beyond belief. A fog of mystery hung and deepened about them and the Lady Nepean, and I crept about the deck in a continuous evil dream, entangling myself in impossible theories. To begin with, there were eight women on board: a number not to be reconciled with serious privateering; all daughters or sons’ wives or granddaughters of Captain Colenso. Of the men—twenty-three in all—those who were not called Colenso were called Pengelly; and most of them convicted landsmen by their bilious countenances and unhandy movements; men fresh from the plough-tail by their gait, yet with no ruddy impress of field-work and the open air.

Twice every day, and thrice on Sundays, this extraordinary company gathered bare-headed to the poop for a religious service which it would be colourless to call frantic. It began decorously enough with a quavering exposition of some portion of Holy Writ by Captain Colenso. But by and by (and especially at the evening office) his listeners kindled and opened on him with a skirmishing fire of “Amens.” Then, worked by degrees to an ecstasy, they broke into cries of thanksgiving and mutual encouragement; they jostled for the rostrum (a long nine-pounder swivel); and then speaker after speaker declaimed his soul’s experiences until his voice cracked, while the others sobbed, exhorted, even leapt in the air. “Stronger, brother!” “’Tis working, ’tis working!” “O deliverance!” “O streams of redemption!” For ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour maybe, the ship was a Babel, a Bedlam. And then the tumult would die down as suddenly as it had arisen, and dismissed by the old man, the crew, with faces once more inscrutable, but twitching with spent emotion, scattered to their usual tasks.

Five minutes after these singular outbreaks it was difficult to believe in them. Captain Colenso paced the quarter-deck once more with his customary shuffle, his hands beneath his coat-tails, his eyes conning the ship with their usual air of mild abstraction. Now and again he paused to instruct one of his incapables in the trimming of a brace, or to correct the tie of a knot. He never scolded; seldom lifted his voice. By his manner of speech, and the ease of his authority, he and his family might have belonged to separate ranks of life. Yet I seemed to detect method in their obedience. The veriest fumbler went about his work with a concentrated gravity of bearing, as if he fulfilled a remoter purpose, and understood it while he tied his knots into “grannies,” and generally mismanaged the job in hand.

Towards the middle of our second week out, we fell in with a storm—a rotatory affair, and soon over by reason that we struck the outer fringe of it; but to a landsman sufficiently daunting while it lasted. Late in the afternoon I thrust my head up for a look around. We were weltering along in horrible forty-foot seas, over which our bulwarks tilted at times until from the companion hatchway I stared plumb into the grey sliding chasms, and felt like a fly on the wall. The Lady Nepean hurled her old timbers along under close-reefed maintopsail, and a rag of a foresail only. The captain had housed topgallant masts and lashed his guns inboard; yet she rolled so that you would not have trusted a cat on her storm-washed decks. They were desolate but for the captain and helmsman on the poop; the helmsman, a mere lad—the one, in fact, who had pulled the bow-oar to our rescue—lashed and gripping the spokes pluckily, but with a white face which told that, though his eyes were strained on the binnacle, his mind ran on the infernal seas astern. Over him, in sea-boots and oilskins, towered Captain Colenso—rejuvenated, transfigured; his body swaying easily to every lurch and plunge of the brig, his face entirely composed and cheerful, his salt-rimmed eyes contracted a little, but alert and even boyishly bright. An heroical figure of a man!

My heart warmed to Captain Colenso; and next morning, as we bowled forward with a temperate breeze on our quarter, I took occasion to compliment him on the Lady Nepean’s behaviour.

“Ay,” said he abstractedly; “the old girl made pretty good weather of it.”

He faced me with sudden earnestness. “Mr. Ducie, I have served the Lord all my days, and He will not sink the ship that carries my honour.” Giving me no time to puzzle over this, he changed his tone. “You’ll scarce believe it, but in her young days she had a very fair turn of speed.”

“Her business surely demands it still,” said I. Only an arrant landsman could have reconciled the lumbering old craft with any idea of privateering; but this was only my theory, and I clung to it.

“You rely on your guns, then?” I had observed the care lavished on these. They were of brass, and shone like the door-plates in the main cabin.

“Why, as to that,” he answered evasively, “I’ve had to before now. The last voyage I commanded her—it was just after the war broke out with America—we fell in with a schooner off the Banks; we were outward bound for Halifax. She carried twelve nine-pounder carronades and two long nines, beside a big fellow on a traverse; and we had the guns you see—eight nine-pounders and one chaser of the same calibre—post-office guns, we call them. But we beat her off after two hours of it.”

He rose abruptly (we had seated ourselves on a couple of hen-coops under the break of the poop). “You will excuse me. I have an order to give”; and he hurried up the steps to the quarter-deck.

It must have been ten days after this that he stopped me in one of my eternal listless promenades and invited me to sit beside him again.

“I wish to take your opinion, Mr. Ducie. You have not, I believe, found salvation? You are not one of us, as I may say?”

“I and mine, sir, are unworthy followers of the Word, as preached by John Wesley.”

“But you are a gentleman.” I bowed. “And on a point of honour—do you think, sir, that as a servant of the King one should obey his earthly master even to doing what conscience forbids?”

“But on a point of honour, sir? Suppose that you had pledged your private word, in a just, nay, a generous bargain, and were commanded to break it. Is there anything could override that?”

I thought of my poor old French colonel and his broken parole; and was silent. “Can you not tell me the circumstances?” I suggested at length.

He had been watching me eagerly. But he shook his head now, sighed, and drew a small Bible from his pocket. “I am not a gentleman, sir. I laid it before the Lord: but,” he continued naïvely, “I wanted to learn how a gentleman would look at it.” He searched for a text, turning the pages with long, nervous fingers; but desisted with another sigh, and, a moment later, was summoned away to solve some difficulty with the ship’s reckoning.

My respect for the captain had been steadily growing. He was so amiable, too, so untiringly courteous; he bore his sorrow—whatever the cause might be—with so gentle a resignation; that I caught myself pitying even while I cursed him and his crew for their inhuman reticence.

But my respect vanished pretty quickly next day. We were seated at dinner in the main cabin—the captain at the head of the table, and, as usual, crumbling his biscuit in a sort of waking trance—when Mr. Reuben Colenso, his eldest son and acting mate, put his solemn face in at the door with news of a sail about four miles distant on the lee bow. I followed the captain on deck. The stranger, a schooner, had been lying-to when first descried in the hazy weather; but was standing now to intercept us. At two miles’ distance—it being then about two o’clock—I saw that she hoisted British colours.

“But that flag was never sewn in England,” Captain Colenso observed, studying her through his glass. His cheeks, usually of that pallid ivory colour proper to old age, were flushed with a faint carmine, and I observed a suppressed excitement in all his crew. For my part, I expected no better than to play target in the coming engagement: but it surprised me that he served out no cutlasses, ordered up no powder from the hold, and, in short, took no single step to clear the Lady Nepean for action or put his men in fighting trim. The most of them were gathered about the fore-hatch, to the total neglect of their guns, which they had been cleaning assiduously all the morning. On we stood without shifting our course by a point, and were almost within range when the schooner ran up the stars-and-stripes and plumped a round shot ahead of us by way of hint.

I stared at Captain Colenso. Could he mean to surrender without one blow? He had exchanged his glass for a speaking trumpet, and waited, fumbling with it, his face twitching painfully. A cold, dishonouring suspicion gripped me. The man was here to betray his flag. I glanced aloft: the British ensign flew at the peak. And as I turned my head, I felt rather than saw the flash, heard the shattering din as the puzzled American luffed up and let fly across our bows with a raking broadside. Doubtless she, too, took note of our defiant ensign, and leaped at the nearest guess that we meant to run her aboard.

Now, whether my glance awoke Captain Colenso, or this was left to the all but simultaneous voice of the guns, I know not. But as their smoke rolled between us I saw him drop his trumpet and run with a crazed face to the taffrail, where the halliards led. The traitor had forgotten to haul down his flag!

It was too late. While he fumbled with the halliards, a storm of musketry burst and swept the quarter-deck. He flung up both hands, spun round upon his heel, and pitched backwards at the helmsman’s feet, and the loosened ensign dropped slowly and fell across him, as if to cover his shame.

Instantly the firing ceased. I stood there between compassion and disgust, willing yet loathing to touch the pitiful corpse, when a woman—Susannah—ran screaming by me and fell on her knees beside it. I saw a trickle of blood ooze beneath the scarlet folds of the flag. It crawled along the plank, hesitated at a seam, and grew there to an oddly shaped pool. I watched it. In shape I thought it remarkably like the map of Ireland. And I became aware that some one was speaking to me, and looked up to find a lean and lantern-jawed American come aboard and standing at my shoulder.

“Are you anywise hard of hearing, stranger? Or must I repeat to you that this licks cockfighting?”

“The Lady Nepean, too! Is that the Cap’n yonder? I thought as much. Dead, hey? Well, he’d better stay dead; though I’d have enjoyed the inside o’ five minutes’ talk, just to find out what he did it for.”

“Why, brought the Lady Nepean into these waters, and Commodore Rodgers no further away than Rhode Island, by all accounts. He must have had a nerve. And what post might you be holding on this all-fired packet? Darn me, but you have females enough on board!” For indeed there were three poor creatures kneeling now and crooning over the dead captain. The men had surrendered—they had no arms to fling down—and were collected in the waist, under guard of a cordon of Yankees. One lay senseless on deck, and two or three were bleeding from splinter wounds; for the enemy, her freeboard being lower by a foot or two than the wall sides of the Lady Nepean, had done little execution on deck, whatever the wounds in our hull might be.

“Seccombe, sir, is my name. Alpheus Q. Seccombe, of the Manhattan schooner.”

“Well, then, Captain Seccombe, I am a passenger on board this ship, and know neither her business here nor why she has behaved in a fashion that makes me blush for her flag—which, by the way, I have every reason to abominate.”

“O, come now! You’re trying it on. It’s a yard-arm matter, and I don’t blame you, to be sure. Cap’n sank the mails?”

“I trust not. I am the Viscount Anne de Kéroual de Saint-Yves, escaped from a British war-prison.”

“Lucky for you if you prove it. We’ll get to the bottom of this.” He faced about and called, “Who’s the first officer of this brig?”

Reuben Colenso was allowed to step forward. Blood from a scalp-wound had run and caked on his right cheek, but he stepped squarely enough.

“Bring him below,” Captain Seccombe commanded. “And you, Mr. What’s-your-name, lead the way. It’s one or the other of us will get the hang of this affair.”

He seated himself at the head of the table in the main cabin, and spat ceremoniously on the floor.

The prisoner, standing between his two guards, gripped his stocking cap nervously. “Will you please to tell me, sir, if my father is killed?”

“Seth, my lad, I want room.” One of the guards, a strapping youngster, stepped and flung open a pane of the stern window. Captain Seccombe spat out of it with nonchalant dexterity before answering—

“Now, see here, Mister First Officer Colenso junior; it’s a shortish trip between this and the yard-arm, and it may save you some su-perfluous lying if I tell you that in August, last year, the Lady Nepean packet, Captain Colenso, outward bound for Halifax, met the Hitchcock privateer off the Great Bank of Newfoundland, and beat her off after two hours’ fighting. You were on board of her?”

“Very good. The next day, being still off the Banks, she fell in with Commodore Rodgers, of the United States frigate President, and surrendered to him right away.”

“You did, my man. Notwithstanding which, that lion-hearted hero treated you with the forbearance of a true-born son of freedom.” Captain Seccombe’s voice took an oratorical roll. “He saw that you were bleeding from your fray. He fed you at his hospitable board; he would not suffer you to be de-nuded of the least trifle. Nay, what did he promise?—but to send your father and his crew and passengers back to England in their own ship, on their swearing, upon their sacred honour, that she should return to Boston harbour with an equal number of American prisoners from England. Your father swore to that upon the Old and New Testaments, severally and conjointly; and the Lady Nepean sailed home for all the world like a lamb from the wolf’s jaws, with a single American officer inside of her. And how did your dog-damned Government respect this noble confidence? In a way, sir, that would have brought a blush to the cheek of a low-down attorney’s clerk. They re-pudiated. Under shelter of a notification that no exchange of prisoners on the high seas would count as valid, this perjured tyrant and his myrmidons went back on their captain’s oath, and kept the brig; and the American officer came home empty-handed. Your father was told to resume his duties, immortal souls being cheap in a country where they press seamen’s bodies. And now, Mister First Officer Colenso, perhaps you’ll explain how he had the impudence to come within two hundred miles of a coast where his name smelt worse than vermin.”

“Back to Boston, sir. You see, Cap’n, father wasn’t a rich man, but he had saved a trifle. He didn’t go back to the service, though told that he might. It preyed on his mind. We was all very fond of father; being all one family, as you might say, though some of us had wives and families, and some were over to Redruth, to the mines.”

“But this is the point, Cap’n. He was coming back, you see. The Lady Nepean wasn’t fit for much after the handling she’d had. She was going for twelve hundred pounds: the Post Office didn’t look for more. We got her for eleven hundred, with the guns, and the repairs may have cost a hundred and fifty; but you’ll find the account-books in the cupboard there. Father had a matter of five hundred laid by, and a little over.”

Captain Seccombe removed his legs from the cabin-table, tilted his chair forward and half rose in his seat.

“That’s what I’m telling you, sir; though father’d have put it much clearer. You see, he laid it before the Lord; and then he laid it before all of us. It preyed on his mind. My sister Susannah stood up and she said, ‘I reckon I’m the most respectably married of all of you, having a farm of my own; but we can sell up, and all the world’s a home to them that fears the Lord. We can’t stock up with American prisoners, but we can go ourselves instead; and judging by the prisoners I’ve a-seen brought in, Commodore Rodgers’ll be glad to take us. What he does to us is the Lord’s affair.’ That’s what she said, sir. Of course, we kept it quiet: we put it about that the Lady Nepean was for Canada, and the whole family going out for emigrants. This here gentleman we picked up outside Falmouth; perhaps he’ve told you.”

Captain Seccombe stared at me, and I at Captain Seccombe. Reuben Colenso stood wringing his cap.

At length the American found breath enough to whistle. “I’ll have to put back to Boston about this, though it’s money out of pocket. This here’s a matter for Commodore Bainbridge. Take a seat, Mr. Colenso.”

“I was going to ask,” said the prisoner simply, “if, before you put me in irons, I might go on deck and look at father. It’ll be only a moment, sir.”

“Yes, sir, you may. And if you can get the ladies to excuse me, I will follow in a few minutes. I wish to pay him my respects. It’s my opinion,” he added pensively, as the prisoner left the cabin—“it’s my opinion that the man’s story is genu-wine.”

He repeated the word, five minutes later, as we stood on the quarter-deck beside the body. “A genu-wine man, sir, unless I am mistaken.”

Well, the question is one for casuists. In my travels I have learnt this, that men are greater than governments; wiser sometimes, honester always. Heaven deliver me from any such problem as killed this old packet-captain! Between loyalty to his king and loyalty to his conscience he had to choose, and it is likely enough that he erred. But I believe that he fought it out, and found on his country’s side a limit of shame to which he could not stoop. A man so placed, perhaps, may even betray his country to her honour. In this hope at least the flag which he had hauled down covered his body still as we committed it to the sea, its service or disservice done.