"Get the boat over," cried Vanderdecken, turning to Van Vogelaar, "and go and inspect the wreck. Look to the man first: Heer Fenton declares him dead; and particularly observe if there be aught that hath life in it aboard."
On this, Van Vogelaar went forward, calling about him. In a few minutes a white-faced seaman, with yellow beard trembling to the wind, and his eyes looking like a rat's with the white lashes and pink retinas, leisurely climbed aloft with a line in his hand, and swinging himself on to the main-yard, slided out upon the horses to the extremity, or yard-arm as it is termed, which he bestrode as a jockey a steed; and then hauled up the line, to the end of which was hitched a tackle. This tackle he made fast to the yard-arm, and by it, with the help of steadying-ropes or guys, some of the crew on deck hoisted the little boat out of the bigger one and lowered it away into the water alongside.
I watched this business with a sailor's interest, wondering that so great a ship as this—great, that is, for the age to which she belonged—should carry no more than two boats, stowed one in the other after the fashion of the north-country coastmen. Nor was I less impressed by the aged appearance of the boat when she was afloat. She had the look of a slug with her horns, only that those continuations of her gunnel rail projected abaft as well as from the bows. And when Van Vogelaar and three of the crew entered her, then, what with the faded red of her inner skin, the wide, red blades of the short oars, the soulless movements of the seamen, the hue of their faces, the feverish unnatural shining of their eyes like sunshine showing through a cairngorm stone, their dried and corded hands, which wrapped the handles of their oars like rugged parchment—the little but marvellous picture acted as by the waving of a magic wand, forcing time back by a century and a half and driving shudders through the frame of a beholder with a sight whose actuality made it a hundredfold more startling and fearful than had it been a vision as unsubstantial as the Death Ship herself is mistakenly supposed to be.
The wreck being within hailing distance, the boat was soon alongside her. The heavy rolling of the hull, and the sharp rise and fall of the boat, would have made any human sailor mightily wary in his boarding of the vessel, but if ever there was an endevilled wretch among the Phantom's horrible crew, Van Vogelaar was he. The fiend in him stayed at nothing. The instant the boat had closed the wreck the fellow leaped, and he was on deck and walking towards the figure at the wheel, whilst the other—that is to say, two of them—were waiting for the hull to swing down for them to follow.
The mate went up to the figure, and seemed to address him; then, receiving no reply, he felt his face, touched his hands, and pulled to get that amazing grip relaxed, but to no purpose. The others now joining him, they all stared into the figure's face; one lifting an eyelid and peering into the eye, another putting his ear to the figure's mouth. Van Vogelaar then came to the side, and shouted in his harsh and rusty voice that it was a dead man. Vanderdecken imperiously waved his hand, and cried, "Fall to exploring her!" and motioned significantly to the sky, as if he would have the mate misgive the weather, though there was no change in the aspect of the pearly wreaths and glistening beds of vapour, and the draught was still a gentle breeze.
"Dead!" I whispered to Imogene; "yet I feared it!"
"Will he have been English, think you, Geoffrey?" she said.
"Yes!" cried I, feeling a heat rising to my cheeks, "name me a foreigner that would so gloriously have confessed his nation! English?—ay, a thousand times over! For what does that posture indicate, that stern holding to his place, that dutiful grip of his iron hands? What but those qualities which give the British sailor the dominion of the deep, and which rank him foremost among the noblest spirits the world has ever seen? He has died at his post—one of thousands who have as heroically perished."
I noticed Vanderdecken looking at the body. There was deep thought in his imperious, menacing expression, with a shadow of misery that his fierce and glittering eyes did but appear to coarsen and harshen the gloom of, and I wondered to myself if ever moments came when perception of his condition was permitted to him, for it truly appeared as though there were a hint of some such thing in him now whilst he gazed at the convulsive figure at the wheel, as if—Jesus have mercy upon him!—the sight of the dead filled his own deadly flesh with poignant and enraging yearnings, the meanings of which his unholy vitality was unable to interpret.
When Van Vogelaar had spent about half-an-hour on the wreck, he and the others dropped over the side into the boat and made for us. We had scarce shifted our position, for the courses being hauled up and the topgallant-sails lowered, there was too little sail abroad for the weak wind then blowing to give us drift, and the swell that drove us towards the wreck would also drive the wreck from us. The mate came over the side, and stepping up to the captain, said, "She is an English ship, freighted with English manufacture; I make out bales of blanket, clothing and stores, which I imagine to have been designed for troops.
"What water is in her?"
"Seven and a quarter feet by her own rod."
"Her pump?"
"She hath two—both shattered and useless."
"Does she continue to fill?"
"I believe not, sir; I would not swear to it; she rolls briskly, but," said he, sending his evil glance at the wreck, "it does not appear that she is sunk deeper since we first made her out."
"Yonder figure at the wheel is dead you say?"
"As truly dead a Briton as ever fell to a Dutchman's broadside." I exchanged a swift look with Imogene. "His eyes are glassy; his fingers clasp the spokes like hooks of steel. He must have died on a sudden—perhaps from lightning—from disease of some inward organ—or from fear." And there was the malice of the devil in the sneer that curled his ugly mouth as he spoke, taking me in with a roll of his sinister eyes.
I watched him coldly. Remonstrance or temper would have been as idle with this man and his mates as pity to that unrecking heart of oak out there.
"What is to be come at?" demanded Vanderdecken, with passionate abruptness.
The other answered quickly, holding up one forefinger after another in a computative tallying way whilst he spoke, "The half-deck is free of water, and there I find flour, vinegar, treacle, tierces of beef, some barrels of pork, and five cases of this—which hath the smell of tobacco, and is no doubt that plant." And he pulled out of his pocket a stick of tobacco, such as is taken in cases to sea to be sold to the crews.
Vanderdecken smelt it. "'Tis undeniably tobacco," said he, "but how used?" His eye met mine; I took the hint, and said: "To be chewed, it is bitten; to be smoked, it has to be flaked with a knife—thus, mynheer." And I imitated the action of cutting it.
Some of the crew had collected on the quarter-deck to hear the mate's report, and seeing the tobacco in the captain's hand and observing my gestures, one of them cried out that if it was like the tobacco the Englishman had shown them how to use 'twas rare smoking! Whether Vanderdecken had heard of my visit to the forecastle I do not know: he seemed not to hear the sailor's exclamation, saying to me, "Yes, mynheer, I see the convenience of such tablets; they hold much and are easily flaked." And then, sweeping the sea and skies with his eyes, he cried: "Get the other boat over: take a working party in her and leave them aboard to break out the cargo. The smaller boat will tow her to and fro. Arents, you will have charge of the working party—you, Van Vogelaar, will bring off the goods and superintend the transhipments. Away, now! There is stuff enough there to fill the hollowest cheek with fat and to sweeten the howl of a gale into melody. Away, then!"
There was excitement in his words, but none in his rich and thunderous voice, nor in his manner; and though there seemed a sort of bustle in the way the men went to work to hoist out the large boat, it was the very ghost of hurry, as unlike the hearty leaping of sailors, fired with expectation, as are the twitchings of electrified muscles, to the motions of hale limbs controlled by healthy intellect.
Yet, to a mariner, what could surpass the interest of such a scene? As I leaned against the bulwark with Imogene, watching the little boat towing the big one over the swell, with now a lifting that put the leaning, toiling figures of the rowers clear against the delicate, vaporous film over the sky at the horizon—the red blades of the oars glistening like rubies as they flashed out of the water, and the white heads of the little surges which wrinkled the liquid folds melting all about the boats into creaming silver, radiant with salt rainbows and prismatic glories—and now a sinking that plunged them out of sight in a hollow, I said to my dear one, "Here is a sight I would not have missed for a quintal of the silver below. I am actually witnessing the manner in which this doomed vessel feeds and clothes herself, and how her crew replenish their stores and provide against decay and diminution. What man would credit this thing? Who would believe that the Curse which pronounced this ship imperishable should also hold her upon the verge of what is natural, sentencing her to a hideous immortality, and at the same time compelling the crew to labour as if her and their life was the same as that of other crews, in other ships."
"If they knew their doom they would not toil," she answered; "they would seek death by famine or thirst, or end their horrible lot by sinking the ship and drowning with her."
"How far away from the dread reality is the world's imagination of this ship, and the situation of her people!" cried I. "She has been pictured as rising out of the waves, as sailing among the clouds, as being perpetually attended by heavy black storms, and thunder claps and blasts of lightning! Here is the reality—as sheer a piece of prose at first sight as any salvage job, but holding in the very heart of its simplicity so mighty, so complicate, so unparalleled a wonder, that even when I speak to you about it, Imogene, and suffer my mind to dwell upon it, my mind grows numb with a dread that reason has quitted her throne and left me fit only for a madhouse!
"You tremble!" she whispered, softly; "nay, you think too closely of what you are passing through. Let your knowledge that this experience is real rob it of its terror. Are we not surrounded with wonders which too much thought will make affrighting? That glorious sun; what feeds his flaming disk? Why should the moon shine like crystal when her soil perchance is like that of our own world, which also gleams as silver does though it is mere dust and mould and unreflecting ashes? Think of the miracles we are to ourselves and to one another!"
She pressed my hand and pleaded, reproved and smiled upon me with her eyes. Was she some angelic spirit that had lighted by chance on this Death Ship, and held it company for very pity of the misery and hopelessness of the sailor's doom? But there was a human passion and tenderness in her face that would have been weakness in a glorified spirit. Oh, indeed, she was flesh and blood as I was, with warm lips for kissing, and breasts of cream as a pillow for love, and golden hair too aromatic for phantasy.
Above an hour passed before the big boat, deeply laden, was towed by the little one from the wreck. Of what a proportion of her freight was composed I could not tell, much of it being in parcels and casks. They had made sure of the tobacco by bringing away, at once, all that they could find. I observed a number of hams stitched up in canvas, and some sacks of potatoes, two bags of which were lost by the bottoms bursting whilst they were being hoisted, on which Van Vogelaar broke into several terrible oaths in Dutch, though 'twas like a dramatic rehearsal of a ranting and bullying scene, for Vanderdecken took no notice and the men went on hoisting and lowering away in the old phlegmatic mechanic fashion as though they were deaf. There were likewise other kinds of provisions of which I need not tease you with the particulars. I believe that all the loading of the boat—in this her first trip, I mean—consisted of articles of food; for some of the parcels which puzzled me proved to contain cheeses and the others might therefore as well represent stores of a like kind.
"Is it their custom to bring away the provisions first," I asked Imogene.
"As a rule," she answered, "they take whatever comes to hand, that is, if the articles be such as may be of use. What they chiefly secure as soon as possible is tobacco and spirits; then provisions and clothing; and then any treasure they may come across, and afterwards any portion of the cargo they may fancy that is light to handle, such as silks, pottery, and so forth."
"But they cannot take very much," said I, "or a few meetings of this kind would sink their ship for them with overloading."
"There are many of us," she replied, "and the provisions they bring away do not last very long. The pottery they use and it is soon broken. Silk and such materials as they bring are light; and then, my dear, they do not meet wrecks every day, nor of the wrecks they meet may you count one in five that yields enough to sink this ship by a foot."
"I am heartily sorry," said I, "that they should find so much to eat aboard yonder hulk. With so goodly a store of provisions, Vanderdecken will not require to run into the land to shoot; and until this ship brings up I see no chance for ourselves."
She sighed and looked sadly into the water, insomuch that she suggested an emotion of hopelessness; but in an instant she flashed out of her expression of melancholy weariness into a smile and gave me the deep perfections of her violet eyes to look into, as if she knew their power over me and shaped their shining influence for my comfort and courage.
When the boat was discharged of her freight, the men's dinner was passed over the side for the fellows to eat in snatches, working the while to save time. The wind remained weak and quiet, but it was inevitable that the hamper we showed aloft should give us a drift beyond the send of the swell; and to remedy this Vanderdecken clewed up his topsails and took in all his canvas, leaving his ship to tumble under bare poles, and by this means he rendered the drift of the vessel down upon the wreck extremely sluggish and scarcely perceptible.
All day long the big boat was towed to and fro, making many journeys and regularly putting off from the wreck very deep with freight. Vanderdecken ate his dinner on deck. You would have found it hard to reconcile any theory of common human passions such as cupidity, rapacity and the like, with his bloodless face and grave-yard aspect; and yet it was impossible to mistake the stirring of the true Dutch instincts of the patient but resolved greed in the air he carried whilst he waited for the return of the boat, in his frequent levelling of the telescope at the wreck as one who doubted his people and kept a sharp eye on them, in the eagerness his posture indicated as he hung over the rail watching the stuff as it was handed up or swayed by yard-arm tackles over the side, and the fierce peremptoriness of the questions he put to Van Vogelaar as to what he had there, how much more remained, and so on, though nothing that the mate answered, satisfactory as must have been the account he gave, softened the captain's habitual savageness or in any degree humanised him. Of the majesty of his deportment I have spoken; likewise of the thrilling richness of his voice, the piercing fire of his fine eyes and of his mien and bearing, so haughtily stately in all respects as to make one think of him, after a Pagan fashion, as of some god fallen from his high estate; but for all that he was a Dutchman at heart, dead-alive as he was; as true to his Holland extraction in 1796 as he had been an hundred and fifty years earlier, when he was trading to Batavia and nimbly getting money, and saving it, too, with as sure a hand as was ever swung in Amsterdam.
The threads and lines and beds of vapour extending all over the sky served to reverberate the glory of the sunset, as the crags and peaks of mountains fling onwards the echoes of the thunder-clap. In the east it was all jasper and sapphire, reds and greens, and a lovely clear blue slowly burning to a carnelian in the zenith, where the effulgence lay in a pool of deep red with a haze of light like fine rain floating down upon it half white, half of silver; then followed a jacinthine hue, a lustrous red most daintily delicate, with streaks of clear green like the beryl, till the eye came to the west, where the sun, vastly enlarged by refraction, hung in enormous bulk of golden fiery magnificence amid half-curtained pavilions of living splendour, where 'twas like looking at some newly-wrought fairy world robed in the shinings of the Heaven of Christ to see the lakes and lagoons of amber purple and yellow, the seas of molten gold, the starry flamings in the chrysolite brows of vapour, and the sky fading out north and south in lights and tints as fair as the reflections in the wet pearly interior of a sea-shell gaping on a beach towards the setting sun. The small swell traversing the great red light that was upon the sea put lines of flowing glory under the tapestries of that sunset, and the appearance was that of an eager shouldering of the effulgence into the grey of the south quarter, as though old Neptune sought to honourably distribute the glory all around, and render the western sea-board ambient.
Then it was, while the lower limb of the luminary yet sipped from the horizon the gold of his own showering, that the picture of the wreck, and the Death Ship heaving pale and stripped of her canvas, became the wonder that my memory must for ever find it. How steadfastly the dead seaman at the wheel kept watch! The quieted sea now scarce stirred the rudder, and the occasional light movements of the figure seemed like starts in him, motions of surprise at the Dutchmen's antlike pertinaciousness in their stripping of the hull.
And they? In that mani-coloured western blaze they partook more of the character of corpses, in those faces of theirs, which stared our way or glimmered for a breath or two over the bulwarks, than ever I had found visible in them by moonlight or lamplight or the chilling dimness of a stormy dawn. The sun vanished and the pale grey of evening stole like a curtain drawn by spirit-hands out of the eastern sea and over the waning glories of the skies, with a star or two glittering in its skirts; and the wind from the north blew with a sudden weight and a long moaning, making the sea whence it came ashen with gushings of foam which ran into a colour of thin blood on passing the confines of the western reflection. Vanderdecken, seizing his trumpet, sent a loud command through it to the wreck; but the twilight was a mere windy glimmering under the stars, which shone very brightly among the high small clouds by the time the boats had shoved clear of the hull and were heading for us, and the night had come down dark, spite of the stars and the silver paring of moon, ere the last fragment of the freight of rope, sail, and raffle from the wreck had been passed over the side from the big boat.
It grew into a wild scene then: the light of the lantern-candles dimly throwing out the bleached faces and dark figures of the seamen as they hoisted the boats and stowed them one inside the other, the ship rolling on the swell that had again risen very suddenly as though some mighty hand were striving to press it down and so forcing the fluid surface into larger volumes, the heads of the seas frothing spectrally as they coursed arching and splashing out of the further darkness, the eastering slip of moon sliding like a sheering scythe among the networks of the shrouds and gear, and nothing to be heard but the angry sobbing of waters beating themselves into hissing foam against the ship's side, and the multitudinous crying, as of a distant but piercing chorussing of many women and boys, of the freshening wind flying damp through the rigging.
It had been a busy day, it was still a busy time; but never throughout the hours, if I save the occasional cursing of the mate, the captain's few questions, his command trumpetted to the wreck, my talk with Imogene, had human voice been heard. It was not so noticeable a thing, this silence of the ghostly crew, in the broad blaze of sunshine and amid an exhibition of labour that was like sound to the eye, as now, in the darkness, with the wind freshening, sail to be made and much to be done—much of the kind that forces merchant seamen into singing out and bawling as they drag and pull and jump aloft. The wreck was a mere lump of blackness tumbling out to windward upon the dusky frothing welter, and I thought of the dead sentinel at the helm. What in the name of the saints was there in that figure to put into the sea the enormous solitude I found in the vast surface glimmering to where it melted in shadow against the low stars? What was there in that poor corpse to fling a bleakness into the night wind, to draw an echo as chilling as a madman's cry out of the gusty moaning aloft, to sadden the very star-beams into dull and spectral twinklings? The canvas shook as the silent sailors sheeted it home and voicelessly mastheaded the yards. At three bells in the first watch the Death Ship had been wore to bring her starboard tacks aboard, and under all the canvas she had she was leaning before a small gale with her head to the southward and westward, her sides and decks alive with the twistings of the mystic fires which darkness kindled in her ancient timbers, and her round weather-bow driving the rude black surge back into boiling whiteness.
Heading out to sea afresh! Once again pointing the ship's beak for the solitude of the ocean, and starting as it might be on a new struggle that was to end in storm and defeat, in the heavy belabouring of the groaning structure by giant surges, and in a sickening helpless drift of God alone knew how many leagues, ere the sky brightened into blueness once more!
Never had I so strongly felt the horror and misery of the fate which Vanderdecken's hellish impiety had brought down upon his ship and her company of mariners as now, when I saw the yards braced up on the starboard tack, and the vessel laid with her head to the south and west. The fresh wind seemed to shriek the word "Forever!" in her rigging, and the echo was drowned in the wild sobbing sounds that rose out of each long, yearning wash of the sea along her dimly shining bends.
How was I to escape? How deliver Imogene?
I was a sailor, and whilst the ocean found me business, whilst it defined the periods of its detentions of me, I loved it! The freedom of it was dear to my heart; it was my home; it was a glass in which was mirrored the image of the Creator I worshipped. But the prospect of continuously sailing upon it in the Death Ship, of fighting its subtle winds and furious storms to no purpose, converted it into a melancholy waste—a liquid plain of desolation—a mere Hell of waters upon whose sandy floor Hope, with tempest-torn wings, would speedily lie drowned, whilst its surface should grow maddening with the reflected icy sparkling of that Starry Crux, which shone but as a symbol of despair when the eye sought it from these accursed decks and beheld the quick light of its jewels trembling over the yard-arms of the Death Ship.
Shortly after midnight the wind freshened, and it came on to blow with some weight. I had been in my cabin an hour, lying there broad awake, being rendered extraordinarily uneasy by my thoughts. The sea had grown hollow, and the ship plunged quickly and sharply with a heavy thunderous noise of spurned and foaming waters all about her. It was sheer misery lying intensely wakeful in that desolate cabin, that would have been as pitchy black as any ancient castle dungeon but for the glimmering lights, which were so much more terrible than the profoundest shade of blackness could be, that had there been any hole in the ship where the phosphor did not glow, I would cheerfully have carried my bed to it, ay, even if it had been in the bottom of the fore-peak or in the thickest of the midnight of the hold. The rats squeaked, the bulkheads and ceilings seemed alive with crawling glow-worms, groans as of dying, cries as of wounded men sounded out of the interior in which lay stowed the pepper, mace, spices and other Indian commodities of a freight that was hard upon an hundred and fifty years old!
I suspected from the motions of the ship and the hollow, muffled roarings outside, that a gale of wind was brewing, and I resolved to go on deck and take a look at the weather since I could not sleep, for if the wind was north west it would give us such a further drift to the eastwards as would set the African coast at a fearful distance for our round-bowed sea-wagon to come at. On the other hand, the gale might have veered to a quarter favourable to heading for Cape Agulhas. Should this happen, how would the Curse operate? Would the ship be permitted to near the Cape before being blown back? But I suspected the operation of no fixed laws in this doom. To suffer the Death Ship to draw close, to fill the minds of the crew with triumphant assurance of their weathering the Cape of Storms, would be a mere hideous tantalising of them that could surely form no part of the sentence which obliterated from their minds the recollection of past failures. For, let the readers of my narrative bear this steadfastly in view: that if Vanderdecken and his men knew of a surety that they were never to pass the cape into the South Atlantic Ocean, then, as beings capable of thinking and acting, they would long ago have desisted from the attempt and sought rest—if they could not procure death for themselves—haply in that same island of Java from which they had sailed.
I crawled into my clothes by feeling for them, and groped my way on to the poop. The sky was black with low-flying cloud, from the speeding rims of which a star would now and again glance, like the flash of a filibuster's fusil from the dark shrubbery of a mountain slope. But there was so much roaring spume and froth all about the ship, that a dim radiance as of twilight hung in the air, and I could see to as high as the topmast heads.
I stepped at once to the binnacle without noticing who had the watch and found the ship's head south-east by south. I could not suppose the ancient magnet showed the quarters accurately, but, allowing for a westerly variation of thirty degrees, the indication came near enough to satisfy me that the wind was as it had been ever since the night I first entered this ship—right in our teeth for the passage of the Cape, and that though we might be sluggishly washing through it close-hauled, we were also driving away broadside on, making a clean beam course for the heart of the mighty Southern Ocean.
This vexed and harassed me to the soul, and occasioned in me so lively a sympathy with the rage that adverse gales had kindled in Vanderdecken, that had he contented himself with merely damning the weather instead of flying in the face of the Most High and behaving like some foul fiend, I should have deeply pitied him and considered his case the hardest ever heard of. The main-yard was lowered and a row of men were silently knotting the reef-points. The topgallant-sails had been handed, reefs tied in the topsails, and the vessel looked prepared for foul weather.
But though the wind blew smartly, with weight in its gusts and plenty of piping and screaming and whistling of it aloft, there was no marked storminess of aspect in the heavens, sombre and sullen as was the shadow that ringed the sea-line, and fiercely as flew the black clouds out of it in the north west; and with this appearance I essayed to console myself as I stood near the mizzen-shrouds gazing about me.
Seeing a figure standing near the larboard-shrouds, I stepped over and found it to be Van Vogelaar. My direct approach made some sort of accost a formal necessity, but I little loved to speak with this man, whom I considered as wicked a rascal as ever went to sea.
"These nor'-westers are evil winds, mynheer," said I, "and in this sea they appear to have the vitality of easterly gales in England. What is the weather to be like? For my part, I think we shall find a quieter atmosphere before dawn."
He was some time in answering, feigning to watch the men reefing the mainsail, though by the light of the white water I could catch the gleam of his eyes fixed upon me askant.
"What brings you on deck at this hour?" said he, in his rasping, surly voice.
I answered, quietly, that feeling wakeful and hearing the wind, I rose to view the weather for myself.
"A sailor is supposed to rest the better for the rocking of seas and the crying of wind," said he, with a mocking, contemptuous tone in his accents. "That saying is intended no doubt for the Dutch seamen; the English mariner nobly shines as a sailor in his own records, but you will admit, sir, that he is never so happy as when he is ashore."
"Sir," I replied, suppressing my rising temper with a very heavy effort, "I fear you must have suffered somewhat at the hands of the English sailor that you should never let slip a chance to discharge your venom at him. I am English, and a sailor, too, and I should be pleased to witness some better illustrations of Dutch courage than the insults you offer to a man who stands defenceless among you, and must be beholden, therefore, wholly to your courtesy."
He said, in a sneering, scornful voice, "Our courtesy! A member of a dastardly crew that would have assassinated me and my men with their small arms, hath a great claim upon our courtesy!"
"I was aft, and ignorant of the intentions of the men when that thing was done," said I, resolved not to be betrayed into heat, let the struggle to keep calm cost what it would.
To this he made no reply, then after a pause, said in a mumbling voice as if he would, and yet would not have me hear him, "I brought a curse into the ship when I handed you over the side; the devil craved for ye, and I should have let you sink into his maws. By the holy sepulchre, there are many in Amsterdam who would have me keel-hauled did they know this hand had saved the life of an Englishman!" And he tossed up his right hand with a vehement gesture of rage.
I was a stoutly-built fellow, full of living and healthy muscle, and I do solemnly affirm that it would not have cost me one instant of quicker breathing to have tossed this brutal and insulting anatomy over the rail. But it was not only that I feared any exhibition of temper in me might end in my murder; I felt that in the person of this ugly and malignant mate I should be dealing with a sentence that forbade his destruction, that must preserve him from injury, and that rendered him as superior to human vengeance as if his body had been lifeless. And what were his insults but a kind of posthumous scorn, as idle and contemptible as that inscription upon a dead Dutchman's grave in Rotterdam, in which the poor Holland corpse after eighty years of decay goes on telling the world that in his opinion Britons are poor creatures?
I held my peace, and Van Vogelaar went to the break of the poop, whence he could better see what the men were doing upon the main-yard. The enmity of this man made me feel very unhappy. I was never sure what mischief he meditated, and the sense of my helplessness, the idleness of any resolution I might form in the face of the supernatural life that encompassed me, made the flying midnight seem inexpressibly dreary and dismal, and the white foam of the sea carrying the eye to the ebony cloud-girdle that belted the horizon, suggested distances so prodigious that the heart sank to the sight of them, as to thoughts of eternity.
I was running my gaze slowly over the weather sea-board, whence came the endless procession of ridged billows like incalculable hosts of black-mailed warriors, with white plumes flying and steam from the nostrils of their steeds boiling and pouring before them, and phosphoric lights upon them like the shining points of couched spears, when methought a dim pallid shadow, standing just under a star that was floating a moment betwixt two flying shores of cloud, was a ship; and the better to see, I sprang on to the rail about abreast of the helmsman, for my support catching hold of some stout rope that ran transversely aft out of the darkness amidships. What gear it was I never stopped to consider, but gripping it with my left hand swayed to it erect upon the rail, whilst with my right I sheltered my eyes against the smarting rain of spray, and stared at what I guessed to be a sail. I have said that the creaming and foaming of the waters flung from the vessel's sides and bows made a light in the air, and the sphere of my sight included a space of the poop-deck to right and left of me, albeit my gaze was fastened upon the distant shadow.
All on a sudden the end of the rope I grasped was thrown off the pin to which it was belayed and I fell overboard. 'Twas instantaneous! And so marvellously swift is thought that I recollect even during that lightning-like plunge thinking how icy-cold the sea would be, and how deep my dive from the great height of the poop-rail. But instead of striking the water, the weight of me swung my body into the mizzen-channels by the rope my left hand desperately gripped. I fell almost softly against a shroud coming down to a great dead-eye there and dropped in a sitting posture in the channel itself which to be sure was a wide platform to windward and therefore lifted very clear of the sea, spite of the ship's weather rolls. My heart beat quickly, but I was safe: yet a moment after I had liked to have perished, indeed, for the rope I mechanically grasped was all at once torn from my fingers with so savage a drag from some hand on deck that nothing but the pitting of my knee against a dead-eye preserved me from being tweaked into the hissing caldron beneath. I could see the rope plain enough as it was tautened, through the pallid atmosphere and against the winking of the stars sliding from one wing of vapour to another, and perceived that it was the main-brace, the lowering of the yard or reefing the sail having brought it within reach of my arm. Then, with this, there grew in me a consciousness of my having noticed a figure glide by me whilst I stood on the rail; and, putting these things together, I guessed that Van Vogelaar, having observed my posture, had sneaked aft to where the main-brace—that was formed of a pendant and whip—was made fast and had let go of it, never doubting that, as I leaned against it, so, by his whipping the end off the pin it would let me fall overboard!
I was terribly enraged by this cowardly attempt upon my life and was for climbing inboard at once and manhandling him, ghost or no ghost; then changed my mind and stayed a bit in the channel considering what I should do. Thin veins of fire crawled upon this aged platform as upon all other parts of the ship; but the shrouds coming very thick with leather chafing-gear to the dead-eyes made such a jumble of black shapes, that I was very sure Van Vogelaar could not see me if he should take it into his head to peer down over the rail.
After casting about in my mind, the determination I arrived at was to treat my tumble from the rail as an accident, for I very honestly believed this: that if I should complain to Vanderdecken of his mate's murderous intention, I would not only harden the deadly malignity of that ghastly ruffian's hatred of me, insomuch, that it might come to his stabbing me in my sleep, but it might end in putting such fancies into the captain's head as should make him desire my destruction, and arrange with his horrid lieutenant to procure it. Indeed, I had only to think of Amboyna and the brutal character of the Dutch of those times, and remember that Vanderdecken and his men belonged to that age, and would therefore have the savagery which one hundred and fifty years of civilization, arts, and letters have somewhat abated in the Hollanders, to determine me to move with very great wariness in this matter.
But I had been dreadfully near to death, and could not speedily recollect myself. The white heads of the surges leaped, boiled and snapped under the channels, like wolves thirsting for my blood; and the crying of the wind among the shrouds, in whose shadows I sat, and the sounds it made as it coursed through the dark night and split shrilly upon the ropes and spars high up in the dusk, ran echoes into those raving waters below, which made them as much wild beasts to the ear as they looked to the eye.
But little good could come of my sitting and brooding in that mizzen-channel; so, being in no mood to meet the villain, Van Vogelaar, I very cautiously rose, and with the practised hand of a sailor crawled along the lap of the covering-board, holding by the rail but keeping my head out of sight, and reached the main-chains, whence I dropped on to the deck unseen among the tangled thickness of the shrouds, and slided, as stilly as the ghostliest man among that ghastly crew could tread, to my cabin.
Once asleep I slept heavily, and it was twenty minutes past the breakfast hour by the time I was ready to leave the crazy and groaning dungeon that served me for a bedroom.
I entered the cabin, but had scarcely made two steps when there sounded a loud cry in a girl's voice, half of terror, half of joy; a shriek so startling for the passions it expressed that it brought me to a dead stand. It was Imogene. I saw her jump from her seat, make a gesture with her arms as though she would fly to me, then bring both hands violently to her heart with a loud hysterical ha! ha! as if she could only find breath in some such unnatural note of laughter, whilst she stood staring at me with straining eyes that filled her violet beauty with a light like that of madness.
The clock struck the half-hour as she cried, and the echo of her voice and the deep, humming vibration of the bell were followed by the parrot's diabolical croak:
"Wy zyn al Verdomd!"
"God in Heaven!" exclaimed Vanderdecken, in a tone deep with amazement, "I thought that man was drowned!"
It was a picture of consternation that I should not have dreamt to expect in men who had outlived life and in whom you would think of seeking qualities and emotions outside those which were necessary to the execution of their sentence. Vanderdecken, leaning forward at the head of the table upon his great hands, the fingers of which were stretched out, glared at me with a frown of astonishment. Prins—whose attendance upon me in my cabin had long been limited to his placing a bucket of salt-water at my door without entering—Prins, I say, arrested by my entry whilst in the act of filling a cup of wine for the captain, watched me with a yawn of wonder, and stood motionless as though blasted by a stroke of lightning; whilst Van Vogelaar, with his head upon his shoulder, the blade of the knife with which he had been eating forking straight up out of his fist that lay like a paralysed thing upon the table, eyed me with a sunk chin and under a double fold of brow; his level, enchained stare full of fear, and cruelty and passion.
I saw how it was, and giving the captain a bow and my darling a smile, I went to my place at the table and sat down. Van Vogelaar shrunk as I passed him, keeping his eyes upon me as a cat follows the motions of a dog; and when I seated myself he fell away by the length of his arm, dropping his knife and fork and watching me. Imogene, breathing deeply, resumed her seat; nothing but Vanderdecken's amazement hindered him from observing her agitation, which was of a nature he could not possibly have mistaken, if indeed he still possessed the capacity of distinguishing such emotions as love.
She merely said, letting out her words in a tremulous sigh: "O Geoffrey, thank God! thank God!" The food in front of her was untasted; but what grief there had been in her face before was lost in the confusion of feelings which worked in her loveliness with a vitality that made her red and white in the same moment. She repeated under her breath to herself: "Thank God! thank God!"
This, while the others stared.
I turned to Van Vogelaar. "Mynheer," said I, "you regard me with astonishment."
He shrank a little further yet, and, after a pause, said, "Are you man or devil?"
"Captain Vanderdecken," said I, "has your mate lost his reason?"
On this Van Vogelaar cried out: "Captain, by the Holy Trinity, I swear it was as I have reported. This Englishman, after prowling on deck last night in the early hours of the middle watch, suddenly clambered on to the rail, for what purpose I know not, and leaned his weight against the starboard main-brace, the sail then reefing. I looked round—on turning again he was gone! and Nicholas Houltshausen, who was at the helm, swore he saw him rise black upon the white eddies of the wake."
Vanderdecken frowningly questioned me with his eyes. I should have been acting a sillier part than a fool's to have jested with these men, besides, I had long since resolved to be plain.
"Herr Van Vogelaar," said I, "doubtless refers to my having fallen into the weather mizzen-channel last night from the rail, whilst peering at what I believed to be a ship. The main-brace, upon which I had put my hand to steady myself, yielded very suddenly," and here I shot a look at the mate, "but I fell lightly, and after sitting a little to recover my breath, made my way to my cabin."
Van Vogelaar's death-like face darkened. An oath or two rattled in his throat, and returning to his old posture he fell to the meat upon his plate with the ferocity of some starving beast, insomuch that the veins about his forehead stood out like pieces of cord.
The feelings with which Vanderdecken received my explanation I could not gather. He gazed hard at me with fiery eyes, as though, mistrusting me, he sought to burn his sight down to my heart, and then, slowly resuming his knife and fork, went on with his breakfast in his familiar trance-like way, mute as a dead man.
I constantly exchanged glances with Imogene, but held my peace since she remained silent. She struggled to compose her face, but her joy at my presence shone through her mask of reserve, twitching the corners of her mouth into faint smiles, and dancing in her eyes like sunshine on the ripples of a sapphire pool. Her love for me spoke more in this quiet delight than she could have found room for in a thousand words. How sweet and fair she looked! The light of her heart lay with a fair rosiness upon her cheeks, which had been as pale as marble when she had risen with her shriek and laughter to my first coming.
Presently Van Vogelaar left the cabin, going out scowling and talking to himself, but not offering so much as to glance at me. There was a piece of hung meat on the table, of what animal I did not know; it proved indifferent good eating. This and some cakes made of flour, with a goblet of sherry and water, formed my breakfast. I ate slowly, knowing that Vanderdecken would not smoke whilst I breakfasted, and wishing to tire him away that Imogene and I might have the cabin to ourselves. But my stratagem was to no purpose. He started suddenly from his waking dream—if, indeed, it was to be credited that any sort of intellectual faculty stirred in him when he lapsed into these cataleptic stillnesses—and bade Prins go and get cut up some of the tobacco they had removed from the wreck, and then erecting his figure and stroking down his beard, he looked from me to Imogene and back to me again, and said, "The weather promises to mend; but this wind must come from a witch's mouth—and a witch of deep and steady lungs. I hope you may not have brought us ill-luck, sir?"
"I hope not," said I, shortly.
"There are malign stars in the heavens," he continued, in a voice that trembled richly upon the air, like the waving echoes of some deep-throated melodious bell, "and there are men born under them. North of the Baltic, on Muskovite territory, is a nation of wretches who can bewitch the winds and sail their ships through contrary gales. They are not far removed from Britain," said he, significantly.
"They are as close to Holland, mynheer," said I.
"Oh, captain!" cried Imogene, "you do not wish to say that Mr. Fenton has had a hand in the fixing of this wind?"
He leaned his forehead upon his elbow, and stretching forth his other hand, drummed lightly on the table with his long, lean, leprous-coloured fingers as he spoke. "Why, Mynheer Fenton, Miss Dudley must allow that a curious luck attends you. How many of a crew went to your ship?"
"Forty, sir."
"Mark your star! Of forty men you alone fall overboard! But fortune goes with you and you are rescued by Van Vogelaar. Observe again! Of forty men you alone are delivered into a ship whose nation is at war with yours! Yet fortune still attends you and you are hospitably received, yea, even made welcome, and clothed, and fed and housed."
I bowed.
"More yet! Last night you fell from the bulwark-rail. What sorcery is it that sways you into the mizzen-channel and presently, unseen, to your bed? Nicholas Houltshausen is noted among us for his shrewd sight. Did not he swear he saw you rise black after your plunge among the froth of the ship's wake? What was it that he beheld? Can the soul shed its body as the butterfly its skin and yet appear clothed, substantial, real as flesh and blood?"
"I exactly explained that accident," said I. "If there be sorcery in my having the luck to tumble into a ship's mizzen-chains instead of the water, then am I a witch fit for a broomstick and a grinning moon!"
"Captain Vanderdecken does but amuse himself with you, Mr. Fenton," said Imogene. "It is true, mynheer," she continued, putting on an inimitable air of sweet dignity, which was vastly reassuring to me as proving that she had recovered her old easiness of mind and was now playing a part, "that we believed you had fallen overboard last night, and this being our conclusion you may judge how greatly your entrance just now amazed us. For me, I was so frightened that I shrieked out, as you doubtless heard. Truly I thought you, the dead, arisen. Captain Vanderdecken cannot recover his surprise, and would have himself to believe that you are a sorcerer. You, who are so young, and an English sailor!" She laughed out, and a truer ring she could not have put into her forced merriment had she been a Pritchard, or a Clive, or a Cibber. "Indeed," she added, "to be a necromancer, you need a beard as long and as grey as the captain's."
There was no temper in the look Vanderdecken cast upon her, nay, it almost deserved the name of mildness in him whose eyes were forever fiery with hot thought and passions of undivinable character. But not the phantom of a smile showed in his face in response to her laughter.
"Madam," said I, putting on a distant air in conformity with the hint of her own manner, "I am no sorcerer. For your sake I would I were, for then my first business would be to veer this wind south, and keep it there till it had thundered our ship with foaming stem into the smooth waters of the Zuyder-Zee."
This seemed to weigh with Vanderdecken. He reflected a little and then said, with something of lofty urbanity in his mode of addressing me, "Had you that power, mynheer, I do not know that I should object to your presence were you Beelzebub himself."
Imogene's smile betrayed the delight she felt in her gradual, happy, nimble drawing of this fierce man's thoughts away from his astonishing suspicions of me as a wizard.
"Have you ever heard, Mr. Fenton," said she, "of that nation to the north of the Baltic of whom Captain Vanderdecken has spoken?"
"Oh! yes, madam," I replied; "they are well known as Russian Finns, and are undoubtedly wizards, and will sell such winds to ships as captains require. I knew a master of a vessel who, being off the coast of Finland, grew impatient for a wind to carry him to a certain distant port. He applied to an old wizard, who said he would sell him a gale that should enable him to fetch the Promontory of Rouxella, but no further, for his breeze ceased to obey him when that point was reached. The captain agreed, holding that a wind to Rouxella was better than light airs and baffling calms off the Finland coast, and paid the wizard ten kronen—about six and thirty shillings of English money—and a pound of tobacco; on which the conjurer tied a woollen rag to the fore-mast, the rag being about half a yard long and a nail broad. It had three knots, and the wizard told him to loose the first knot when he got his anchor, which he did, and forthwith it blew a fresh favourable gale."
"That is so?" demanded Vanderdecken, doubtingly, and folding his arms over his beard.
"I knew the captain, mynheer," I answered; "his name was Jenkyns, and his ship was a brig called the True Love."
"Did the first knot give him all the wind he wanted?" asked he.
"No, sir. It gave them a brisk west south-west gale that carried them thirty leagues beyond the maelstrom in the Norwegian sea; then shifted, on which Captain Jenkyns untied the second knot, which brought the wind back to its own quarter. It failed them again, but when the third knot was untied there arose so furious a tempest that all hands went to prayers, begging for mercy for choosing to deal with an infernal artist instead of trusting to Providence."
It was not easy to make out the thoughts in Vanderdecken's mind, not less because of the half of his countenance being densely clothed with hair, than because of the white, iron rigidity of as much of his face as was visible; yet I could not doubt that he believed in those Finnish wizards from a sudden yearning in his manner, followed by a flashing glance of impatience at the cabin entrance, that was for all the world as though he had cried out "Would to God there was a purchasable wind hereabouts!" But the reader must consider that this man belonged to an age when wise men soberly credited greater wonders than Icelandish and Finnish wind-brokers.
By this I had made an end of breakfast, and Prins arriving with a jar full of the tobacco, flaked and fit for smoking, the captain filled his pipe, first pushing the jar to me, and then fell into one of his silences, from which he would emerge at wide intervals to say something that was as good as a warrant he was thinking no longer of the sorcery of my fall and appearance. When he had emptied his bowl, he went to his cabin. Imogene instantly arose and came to my side.
"Oh, my dearest!" she whispered, with a sudden darkening of her eyes by the shadow of tears, "I did believe, indeed, you were lost to me for ever! My senses seemed to leave me when Vanderdecken accounted for your absence."
"Dear heart! My precious one!" I answered, fondling her little hand, which lay cold with her emotion in mine; "I am still with thee, and hope with us may remain fearless. But it was a narrow escape. Van Vogelaar came red-handed to this table. For hours he has had my blood upon his devilish soul. No wonder the villain quailed when I entered this cabin."
"What did he do?" she cried.
"I believed I saw a ship," I answered; "I jumped on to the rail to make sure, and leaned against the brace that governs the main-yard. He slipped aft and let go the rope, meaning that I should fall overboard, but my grip was a sailor's, and I swung with the rope into the mizzen-chains."
"The wretch! He told Vanderdecken that you had climbed on to the bulwarks and fallen. I could kill him!" She clenched her white fingers till the jewels on them flashed to the trembling of the tension, and a delicate crimson surged into her face. "I could kill him!" she repeated.
"Hush, sweet one! It is our business to escape, and we need an exquisite judgment. I, too, could kill the treacherous ruffian, only that he is deathless. You, brave heart, will advise me that we are not to know of this thing. No, let it be an accident of my own doing. We are in a shipful of devils, and must act as if we believed them angels."
Her face slowly paled, her fingers opened, and the angry shining faded out of her eyes leaving the soft, violet pensive light there.
"Yes, you are right; we must not know the truth of this thing," said she, musingly, after a little. "But be on your guard, Geoffrey; keep well away from that rogue. His Spanish treachery is made formidable by his Dutch cunning. How swiftly he acted last night! His thoughts must have been intent for some time or even the demon in him would not have been equal to such readiness. See to your cabin door at night—O Geoffrey, he might steal in upon you."
I smiled. "He has spoken once; I shall not require a second hint."
"O that I had a man's arm, Geoffrey, that I might be your sentinel whilst you slept!"
"Precious one! You shall sentinel me yet! Patience, meanwhile! It is this ship that makes home so distant. Once clear of this groaning vault and we shall be smelling the sweetbriar and the violet."
Vanderdecken came out of his cabin and went on deck. He walked with impetuosity and passed without regarding us. Through the open door leading to the quarter-deck I saw him stand a minute with his face upturned and then toss his hand with a gesture of baffled rage.
"He is cursing the wind," said Imogene. "How often has he done so since I have been in this ship! And when will a last day come to him, when there shall be no wind to curse, when death shall have paralysed his tongue and silenced his heart? How fiercely it now throbs! Surely there is more stormy passion in one day of its beating than in twenty years of a human pulse! O, my dear, that you had the northern wizard's power of evoking prosperous gales!"
"I should be glad of that power," said I, "for better reasons than to help this man to fight against his Sentence. Can you guess what I would do? I would straightway blow this old ship ashore. Dread the Afric coast as you will, dear one, it will be our only chance."
"I dread it for its savages—the thought of captivity beyond the mountains is horrible! I have heard my father tell of the wreck of an East Indiaman named the Grosvenor, in which were ladies of distinction, who were seized by the natives and carried far inland and made wives of. That is not more than twenty years ago. O, Geoffrey, sooner than that—I would be content to die in this ship—to go on sailing about in her till my hair was as white as the foam about our keel!" and as she said this she grasped a handful of her golden hair and held it to me, unconscious in the earnestness of her fears of the child-like simplicity of her action. I put my lips to the tress, that flowed from her head through the snow of her hand and thence down like a stream of sunny light or the raining of the jet of a golden fountain, and told her not to fear, that I loved the natives as little as she, and would contrive to give them a wide berth; and then I changed the subject by wondering what the consequences would be if last night's business and Vanderdecken's talk this morning put it into the minds of the crew that I was as much a wizard as any Finn and could control the breezes if I chose.
She shook her head. "Better that they should regard you as what you really are—an English sailor. Suppose they persuaded themselves that you could raise and sell winds, they might determine to test you, and imprison, even torture you in the belief you were stubborn and would not do their bidding; or, if they came to consider you a wizard, they might think your presence in the ship unlucky, and, being half-savages, with demons for souls, as I believe, and with instincts belonging to a time when the world was brutal and human life held in no account—there is no imagining how they would serve you."
"Oh, Imogene!" cried I, "you are my good angel——"
"A true sweetheart must ever be that to the boy she loves," she whispered, looking down and softly blushing.
"You are my true sweetheart, Imogene! And how faithfully you are able to guide me through the marvellous experience we are both passing through, I know by the words you have just uttered," and I went on to tell her how Van Vogelaar had under his breath talked as if to himself of my being a curse in the ship.
As I said this, Prins came to the cabin door, and stood looking in. Perceiving him, Imogene rose and saying quietly, "He has perhaps been sent to report if we are together; go you on deck, dearest; I will join you, presently," went to her berth.