"It would be barbarous, useless murder," I cried, "to hang, or stab or drown me, but kindness, nay, lovingness, to set me ashore with a week's provisions and a fowling-piece, to give me a night to be torn to pieces in by wild beasts, or a week to be enslaved by the Homadods, or a month to perish of hunger! The villains! Is this to be their usage of me?"
"Geoffrey, if they put you on shore I will follow. The future that is good enough for you is good enough for me. And, indeed, I would rather die a hard death on shore than be left to miserably live with men capable of cruelly destroying you."
I reflected a little, and said, "Their resolution keeps me safe for the present, at all events. If I am to be marooned they will let me alone meanwhile. Therefore I consider that their determination greatly improves our chances.... No! there is nothing in their intention to scare me. I like their meaning so well that our prayer to God must be that Vanderdecken may not change his mind."
She was at a loss to understand me until I pointed out that, as I gathered from her report, they would not send me ashore until just before they were about to sail, so that I should have plenty of time to look about me and consider the surest method of escaping, whilst the ship was being careened and the leak repaired and the vessel in other ways doctored.
"And, dearest," said I, "it has come to this with you, too: that sooner than remain with these fierce and dreadful people you will take your chance of that African coast you so greatly feared."
"I will share your fortune, Geoffrey, be it life or death—let come what will," said she, nestling close and looking up at me out of the phantom faintness of her face with her large eyes in whose liquid darkness the moon was reflected in two stars.
"My precious one! I could not leave thee! If the terrors of the shore—the fears of the savage, the wild beast, the poisonous serpent—triumphed over your desire of escape, I would remain with you, Imogene, if they would let me. 'Twould be a hard fate for us both, dearest, to wear out our lives in this ship. But we cannot be parted—not of our own will, at least, however God may deal with us, or the knife or yard-arm halter of these villains. Wherever you are I must be——"
"Yes!" she cried, passionately.
"It may not indeed come to our delivering ourselves by using the coast. Another scheme is in my head, though of it I will say nothing, since too much of fortune must enter it to fit it for cold deliberation. But it may end in our escaping to the land and lurking there in hiding till the ship sails. And it makes my heart feel bold, Imogene, to hear you say that sooner than languish and miserably end your days in this accursed fabric you will dare with me the natural perils of that shore."
And I say this: that had I been sure our life would prove the forfeit of attempting to escape by the coast, I would have welcomed death for her and myself sooner than live to think of her locked up in this detested ship, passing the long horrid days in the society of unearthly men condemned of Heaven, and stealthily weeping away her heart at the thought of our severance.
But for Imogene having overheard his conversation with Van Vogelaar, I should never have been able to guess that there was any change in Vanderdecken's resolution respecting me; I mean any change in his intention to carry me to Europe in his ship. There was the same uniformity in the variety of his moods; he was sullen, haughty, morose, often insanely fierce, sometimes talkative, then falling into trances, in all such exhibitions as heretofore. In Van Vogelaar, however, there was a slight alteration. At moments I caught him peering at me with a look in his eyes that might have answered very well as a dark malicious merriment of soul of which the countenance was capable of expressing the villainous qualities only, I mean, not the mirth also. Sometimes he would make as though to converse; but this I cut short, repelling him very fearlessly now that I understood his and his captain's plans, and that I had nothing to fear this side the execution of it.
On my side, I was extremely wary, walking cautiously in all I said and did, and never venturing a remark to Imogene, even when we had reason to believe we were absolutely alone, without sinking my voice after a careful probing glance around as if I expected to see an human ear standing out on any beam or bulkhead my sight went to.
I busied myself in certain preparations in which I got Imogene to help me. Since, in any case, our escape to the land would have to be profoundly secret, 'twas necessary we should get ready a small stock of food to carry away with us, and I told Imogene to make some bags out of the stoutest stuff she could come at to store it in, and to privately convey to me such provisions as I indicated, which she, as well as I, was to secrete when alone, during Prins' absence, when the table was prepared.
I said: "You have needles and thread?" for she had told me that some of the apparel Vanderdecken lent or gave her she had been obliged to alter. "We shall require three or four bags. Linen will do for the material."
"There is plenty of linen," said she. "I will make the bags. But what is your project, Geoffrey? Tell me your full scheme—I may be able to put something to it."
"I have two schemes," I answered: "but I will speak only of the one that concerns the shore. Vanderdecken is sure to bring up close to the land; I have little doubt of being able to swim the distance, and shall make a small frame of wood to sit about your waist on which you will float when I lower you into the water, and then I shall softly let myself down and tow you to the land by swimming."
I thought to see her countenance change, but she regarded me fearlessly, indeed with an emotion as of triumph colouring her face.
"How am I to enter the water?" she asked.
"I will lower you from the quarter-gallery outside your cabin," I replied, "the height is not great. The blackness under the counter will hide you, and I shall contrive to float us both away very quietly."
She said, gazing at me fondly and smiling: "Everything is feasible so far, Geoffrey. But now imagine us arrived on shore."
"I must carry you as far as your strength will suffer," I replied. "Of course, Vanderdecken will send in pursuit of us, but there should be no lack of dense vegetation full of hiding places. Yet in this as in all other things, my dearest, we must rely upon God's help. That given there is nothing to fear; denied—then it would be better for me if I threw myself overboard at once."
"Geoffrey," she said, "I do not question you, dear heart, for dread of what we may encounter, but merely that by letting your plans lie in my mind my girlish spirit may grow used to them and unswervingly help you when the time comes."
"Brave little woman!" I cried, "do not believe I could misjudge you. You would ask me what is to follow when this vessel quits the coast and leaves us alone there? How can I answer? We must attempt what others have successfully achieved, and struggle onwards to some settlement. I know—I know, my darling, that the outlook is black and affrighting. But consider what our choice signifies; the fate that awaits us if you remain and I am marooned; or the chances—meagre indeed, but chances, nevertheless—which offer if we escape to the land. And we shall be together, dearest!"
I kissed her brow, and her love leapt in her to my impassioned greeting; beautiful as she was, yet did she appear transfigured by the rich hue in her cheeks, her smile, the sparkle of her chaste and maidenly joy in the dark heaven of her eyes. Call me not cruel for thus deliberately preparing to bring her face to face with the horrors of the African coast—with those barbarous features which her heart had long ago recoiled from the mere thought of. She was my sweetheart—my affianced—my life's blood. Oh! how dear to me for her beauty, her sweetness, her passion for me, the miracle of our meeting, her loneliness under the sun and stars of the mighty Southern Ocean, amid shapes more spectral than ghosts, more horrible with their survival of human vices than had they been dead bodies quickened into life without soul or brain.
How could I leave her? How could I endure the idea of my being forced ashore—alone—and of her sailing away forever from me in this grisly company? I had considered all these things; how if we gained the beach she would have to walk, as far as her limbs suffered, in drenched clothes and her delicate flesh chilled to the bone; how in our hiding-place the dews of a deadly climate would fall upon her by night, with creeping abominations of reptile and vermin swarming in the tangle where she lay—enough! I say that all perils which experience or imagination could crowd into such a deliverance as that I had in my mind and was steadfastly working out had been present to me from the beginning—but to what purpose? Only to make me feel with the power of every instinct, with the impulse and strength of all-influencing and heated passions, that my fortune must be hers and that we could not part!
A sailor will wonder perhaps to hear me speak of three or four bags of provisions, and wonder also that I should not see that if there was the least movement in the water when I lowered Imogene with these bags about her into it, the provisions would be spoiled by the wet. But 'tis proper to say here that this proposal to float her in a frame and tow her ashore by swimming was but an alternative scheme which, at all hazards, I would go through with, if the other and less perilous venture should prove impracticable, and in case this should be so, I said nothing to her about it, that by her growing accustomed to the dismal and dangerous project she would not tremble and shrink if it came, as I feared it might, to our having to escape ashore. Three small bags secured about my darling's shoulders, well out of the water, were less likely to be wetted than one big one that must needs hang low, trice it as I might; and anyway the three would be as good as one, let the manner of our escape be what it would.
She made me these bags, and I hid them in my cabin, along with some biscuit which had been taken from the wreck, a few pieces of salted meat cooked, a small jar of flour, a little silver cup for drinking, and other compact and portable things, such as the flat banana cakes the cook sent to the cabin, a bottle of marmalade of the size of a small pickle jar, and the like. These things she and I took from the table by degrees, and they were not missed. I would have given a finger for a musket and powder and balls; but if there was an arms-chest on board neither she nor I knew where to find it. And suppose it had been possible to me to have secreted a musket—what they used, I believe, for shooting game and cattle were match-locks with barrels about three and a half feet long, and the bore of the bigness of a horse-pistol, and cartridges in small hollow canes, each holding a charge of powder—ammunition was not to be had without asking.
She stitched me four bags, but three I found when loaded would be as heavy a load as it was prudent to put upon her; because when I came to look about me for wood for a frame for her to float in I could only meet with five small pieces, and even the purloining of these was attended with prodigious anxiety and trouble, as you will judge when I say that to get them I had to watch till I was unobserved and then kick a piece, as if by accident, under a gun, or to any corner where it might lie until I could carry it below under cover of the night.
All these things I hid under the bed-place in my cabin, where I had very little fear of their being found; for the good reason that, to my knowledge, no one ever entered the berth.
Meanwhile, the wind held bravely, with—on the third day—but a few hours of stagnant atmosphere and a flat and brilliant sea, followed by a shift into the westward of south that worked into a hearty wind, before which the Death Ship drove under all cloths, the clear water gushing from her scuppers to the clanking and spouting of her pump. Bearing in mind our situation after the tempest, as given me by Vanderdecken, and narrowly, if furtively, observing the courses we made, I kept a dead reckoning of our progress—for by this time I could measure the vessel's pace with my eye as correctly as ever the log could give it—and when the fifth day arrived I knew that at eight o'clock that morning either we were some twelve leagues distant from the African coast or that Vanderdecken was amazingly wrong in his calculations.
My excitement bade fair to master me. It needed a power of will such as I could never have supposed I possessed to subdue my demeanour to that posture of calmness which the captain and his mates were used to see in me. Happily, Imogene was at hand to control any exhibition of impatience or anxiety.
"Let them suspect nothing in your manner," she would say. "Van Vogelaar watches you closely; the least alteration in you might set him conjecturing. Who knows what fancies his base and malignant mind is capable of? His heart is bent on your destruction, and though he hopes that must follow your being left alone on the coast, yet a change in your ordinary manner might fill his cruel soul with fear that you had some plan to escape with your life, in which case I fear, Geoffrey, he would torment and enrage Vanderdecken into slaying you either here or on shore."
Well, as I have said, at eight o'clock that morning I reckoned we were some twelve leagues distant from the coast. The breeze had slackened somewhat, but it still blew a fresh air, and the water being quiet and such small swell as there was, together with the billows, chasing us, our speed was a fair five and a half knots. Yet there was no sign to advertise us of the adjacency of land. A few Cape hens flew along with us on our starboard beam, but this kind of sea-fowl had accompanied the ship when we were as far south as ever we were driven since I had been in her, and they could not be supposed to signify more than that we were "off" the South African headland—which term may stand for the measure of a vast extent of sea. The ocean was of as deep and glorious a blue as ever I had beheld it in the middle of the Atlantic. My suspense grew into torment; anxiety became anguish, the harsher and fiercer for the obligation of restraint. There was no dependence to be placed on Vanderdecken's reckoning. For several days he had been hove-to, and his log would certainly neither tell him his drift nor how the currents served him. My only hope then was in the supernatural guiding of the ship. I might believe, at least, that the instincts of the sea-bird would come to one whose dreadful and ghostly existence lay in an aimless furrowing of the mighty waters, and that he would know how to steer when the occasion arose, as does the ocean-fowl whose bed is the surge as its pinion is its pillow, but whose nest must be sought in rocky solitudes, leagues and leagues below that sea-line in whose narrow circle you find the creature flying.
I dared not seem to appear to stare earnestly ahead; the part I had to play was that of extreme indifference; yet, swift as were the looks I directed over either bow, my eyes would reel with the searching, passionate vehemence of my stare, and the blue horizon wave to my sight as though it swam upon a swooning view.
Shortly after twelve o'clock, I was standing alone on the forward end of the poop, when I observed a clear shade of blue haze upon the horizon directly ahead. I watched it a little while, believing it no more than a darkening in the dye of the sky that way; but on bringing my eyes to it a second time, I found a fixity in the atmospheric outlining of the shadow that was not to be mistaken for anything but the blue faintness and delicate dim heads of a distant hilly coast. I turned, with a leap of heart that was a mingling of rapture and dread, to win Imogene by my manner to view the land, too; but she stood with Vanderdecken near the tiller, with her back upon me, apparently watching the motions of a bird that steadily flew along with us, some three cables' length on our larboard quarter, flying no faster than we sailed, yet going through the air as straight as a belated homeward-bound rook. One of the men forward saw the azure shadow, and seemed to call the attention of two or three others to it in that voiceless, mechanical way, which furnished a ghostlier and grislier character to the bearing and movements of the crew than ever they could have taken from the paleness of their faces, and the glittering, unreal vitality of their eyes only; and they went towards the beak to look, dropping whatever jobs they might have been upon, with complete disregard of discipline.
Broad as the day was, abounding as the scene with the familiar and humanising glory of the blessed golden sunshine and the snow-topped peaks of shallow liquid sapphire ridges, yet the figures of those men, showing under the swelling and lifting foot of the foresail, peering under the sharp of their hands against their foreheads, silent in postures of phlegmatic observation, gave the whole picture of the ship a wild and dismal colour and appearance, and the black melancholy, the cold unholiness of it, stole biting as polar frost-smoke to the senses through the genial splendour of the noon-tide. Yet, like those men, did I stand looking with my hand against my brow, for there was a wonderful and almost blinding magnificence of light upon the shivering waters under the sun that was now floated north, but the resplendent haze did not dim the substantial line that was growing with a deepening hue into the atmosphere, and already methought I could discern the curve and sweep of inland airy altitudes with the dainty silver of clouds streaking them.
"Land, Herr Fenton!" cried a voice in my ear.
I started. Van Vogelaar stood close beside me, pointing with a pale leathern forefinger, his harsh and rugged face smileless, though his eyes grinned with malice as they lay fastened upon mine.
"I see it, mynheer," I replied, coldly.
"It should rejoice your English soul," he exclaimed. "Your countrymen will not count you as a mariner of theirs if you love not the land! See! Remote and faint though it be, how substantial even in its blue thinness doth it show! No sea-sickness there, Herr Fenton! No hollow seas yawning black as vaults!"
Had this man been of the earth I needed but to catch him by the scroff and breech and bring his spine to my knee to kill him. And he looked so much as if I could have served him so that it was hard to regard him without pity. I said, quietly, "Will that be the land the captain desires to make?"
"Ay," he answered, snarlingly, "the Dutch are sailors."
I thought to myself, yes, when they have the Devil for a sea-cunny they will hit their port.
"You will be glad to step ashore if but for half-an-hour?" said he, looking at me.
"That is a matter that concerns your master," I answered, turning from him. A low ha! ha! broke from him, muffled as the sound of a saw worked under deck, as musical too, and as mirthless. Yet Imogene's quick ear caught it, and she turned swiftly to look. And methought it had penetrated further yet, for upon the heels of it, there rose up, as an echo, from the cabin, that harsh and rusty cry, "Wy zyn al Verdomd!"
I could not at that time know what part of the South African coast was this we had made, but I have since learnt that it lies a few miles to the eastward of the meridian of twenty-two degrees, and about an hundred and sixty miles from Cape Agulhas. When it first came into sight, as I have said, it was but a faint, long-drawn shade in the light blue of the sky over the horizon, with such a fairy tincture of flanking eminence beyond that the whole was as delicately tender as the visionary shore of a dream.
But before the dinner-hour had come round we had stolen nearly two leagues closer to it, and the coast lay plain enough and very brave with colours, the green of several dyes, the mountain sky-lines of an exquisite clearness of cutting in the radiant atmosphere and against the hard azure brilliance of the heavens, and the tracts of white sand low down as lustrous as the foam of a dissolving surge.
Soon after the land had hove into view, Imogene joined me. She had kept her feelings under whilst near Vanderdecken. Now, by my side, she stood with twenty emotions working in her, her nostrils quivering, her lips pale, the colour coming and going in her cheeks, the bright light that a passing hope flashed into her eyes dying out to the tearful shadowing of some bitter fear.
I said to her, very softly, and keeping my face as expressionless as my inward agitation would permit—for Vanderdecken and his mates conferred together near us, sometimes stopping close, sometimes pacing—"If this pace holds our anchor should be down by dusk."
"What will they do?" she asked.
"I have been asking that question of myself," I replied. "Were they human—of this earth—I could foretell their movements. No sooner were they come to an anchor than they would turn to and get the guns and cargo over to one side, that by listing the ship they might bring the leak out of water and save themselves this starving job of pumping. But we have to base conjecture upon men who are neither dead nor alive, who are Dutchmen besides, I mean of a dull and apathetic habit, and they may wait for daylight and so obtain rest, of which they should get as much as they want with the reliefs they are able to send to the pump."
"What should best fit your project, Geoffrey?"
"Oh," said I, under my breath, "if we are to escape we shall need a deserted deck and a sleeping ship."
"If this should come about to-night will you make the venture?"
"I cannot tell. Put it thus: if they shift the cargo after coming to an anchor with the idea of raising the leak clear, the work may occupy them all night. So all night long the ship will be alive and busy, and there will be no chance for me."
"But the ship will also be alive if they continue to ply the pump, which must be done if she is not to sink."
"Yes," said I, "so I may have to wait till to-morrow night."
She cried, with a quick blanching of her face that cruelly proved her stock of strength but slender, "If they careen the ship to-night they will be able to repair the leak in the morning, and be ready to sail before the evening."
"I do not fear that."
"Yet it might happen, Geoffrey! They will put you on shore before sailing——" She stopped, bringing her hands together with a passionate clasp.
"I do not fear that," said I again. "Much will depend on where the leak is. If it be low down they may not be able to come at it without discharging cargo, which, seeing that they have but those two boats yonder to work with, and that they will have to make tents ashore and protect themselves against the natives—if any there here be—should keep them on the move for a long month. No, dearest, I do not fear that they will get away by to-morrow night—not if they were ten times as numerous and as nimble; nor is it probable that Vanderdecken would suffer me to be marooned till the ship is ready to start. My one anxiety is just now the weather. There is tranquility in that dark blue sky over us; the wind weakens as we approach the land, and there is promise of a calm night. May God help me to achieve my purpose before another twelve hours have rolled by."
She looked at me with eagerness and alarm. "To-night!" she cried. "If this ship lies here for days, as you imagine, how, when we are ashore, dare we hope to escape the strenuous search Vanderdecken is certain to make for us?" I smiled; she continued, with a feverish whisper: "Consider, dearest! If we are captured—he will have your life! God knows into what barbarities his rage may drive him!"
"Dearest," said I, gently, "let us first get out of the ship."
And here we broke off, for our whispering had lasted long enough. Soon after this we went below to dinner. At the start we none of us spoke, our behaviour and perhaps our appearance answering very exactly to the poet's description of a party in a parlour who sat—
Outside, the sun shone gloriously, and the blue air had the purity of polished glass; but only a small portion of light found admission through the small windows in the cabin front, and we ate and gazed upon one another in a sullen atmosphere as gloomy as the expression on Vanderdecken's face. At this moment I see him plain, as on that day; his beard falling to his waist, his head slightly bowed, and his glance travelling in a gaze that would often stop and become fixed, his skin bleak and high and drawn with pallor. He was attired in a sort of blouse of dark-green cloth, confined about his waist by a yellow belt fastened by a small metal clasp, that would have given him a romantic and buccaneering look but for the austere majesty and fateful character of his appearance, which inevitably neutralised every suggestion that did not accord with the solemn, horrible mystery of his being.
We sat for some time, as I have said, as silent as the dead; but on reflecting that there was nothing, in reason, I could say likely to procure me a harder fate than that already designed by these men, I determined to ask a question or two, and said: "Has your carpenter ascertained in what part of the ship the leak is, mynheer?"
He turned his eyes round upon me slowly. He was indeed stately in all he did. I never beheld him glance quickly nor start, and the only time in which his dignity fell, torn in rags from him, was that night when he acted over the scene of the Curse in his sleep.
He answered, "Yes."
"Is it far down?" said Imogene.
"The ship will need heeling to four strakes," he replied.
I dropped my knife on to the deck for the excuse to pick it up that I might hide the delight in my face. A list of four strakes would prove but a very small matter to bring about, and my fears that the vessel would linger for days, perhaps for a month, on this coast vanished.
"I hope," said I, "it may not prove worse than a started butt-end."
"It is that, and no more," said he.
"How much more would you have, Herr Fenton?" exclaimed Van Vogelaar, in his ugliest manner. "Dost suppose our pump can deliver half the great South Sea with every stroke?"
"It should take us four days of easy working," said I, "to careen, repair, and start afresh snugly stowed."
"You are in a hurry to get home, sir, no doubt?" exclaimed Van Vogelaar.
"Sir," said I, "I am addressing the captain."
"Skipper!" cried the man; "Herr Fenton is in a hurry to get home! We should put him in the way of making a speedy passage."
"I expect to return in this ship," said I, speaking with my eyes on Vanderdecken. "I am well satisfied. Nothing stauncher floats. Consider, mynheer, how nobly she has acted in the gales we have encountered. It would please me to entreat you to use such poor skill as I have as a mariner in helping your men; but your courtesy is magnanimous—of the form that is to be met in highest perfection in the Hollander of lineage—and I will not risk my own civility by further requests."
He motioned with his hand, contenting himself with whatever answer the gesture signified. I perceived there was no further information to be obtained from him—from Van Vogelaar nothing but sneers and insults—and so held my peace. Yet I had learnt something.
When, after dining, I went on deck, the land looked as near again as it had when I went below. This was owing to the amazing transparency and purity of the atmosphere, insomuch that every twenty fathoms the ship measured was like adding a fresh lens to a perspective glass. Yet it was not until four o'clock that the coast lay so clear as to render every detail of it a visible thing, and then the sight was helped by the sun being on the larboard side and showering his glory aslant, which, mingling with the golden splendour rising out of his wake in the sea, put an extraordinary shining into the atmosphere, but without the lustrous haze that had been rising when he was right over the land and kindling the water under our bows. 'Twas a picture of a bay with a shelving beach thickly green with bushes and trees, in and out of which there winded lengths and lines of exceeding white sand that trembled to the sunshine with the shivering metallic sheen of frosted silver. The sea went blue as the sky to the shore and tumbled into foam, in some places leaping up in creamy dartings, in others making a small crystal smoke with its boiling, elsewhere lapping tenderly and expiring in ripples. The azure heights beyond, which had seemed to closely flank the coast when first beheld, drew inland with our approach, marking their remoteness by the retention of their lovely atmospheric delicacy of colour, and their height by the lengths of vapour that clung to their mighty slopes at various altitudes, like fragments of great silken veils or cloths of pale gold which had been rent whilst blowing along. The seaboard went in a rugged line east and west by the compass, sometimes coming very low down, sometimes soaring into great forelands, plentifully covered with wild growths, as you saw by the several dyes of green that coated it, and in one place—about a league from the bay—a pale blue smoke rising up denoted a bush-fire, and, as it was easy to suppose, the presence of natives.
The sky was catching a tinge of brassy hardness from the westering sun, and the complexion of it where the mountain heights were somehow made you think of measureless miles of hot and cloudy sand glowing yellowly up into that feverish reflection. The weak swell that lifted us rolled in wind-wrinkled folds into the bay, which yawned unsheltered to the south. I knew from experience that it needs no great wind on this coast to raise a monstrous sea, and it was with unspeakable eagerness and anxiety that I directed my eyes from the land to the sky overhead and on our quarters. But the promise of tranquility seemed to deepen with the drawing down of the sun. It was sheer sapphire in the south, melting eastwards into violet, and the sea that way was like an English lake, and to the left of the sun there floated a few purple clouds, which I watched some time with attention but could not tell that they moved, though a breeze was still about us, humming pleasantly aloft, keeping our old sails rounded, and sending the aged structure gliding at four knots an hour as quietly through it as a seagull paddling in the level water of an harbour.
But for the tedious clanging of the pump and the fountain-sounds of its discharge, the stillness on board would have been as deep as the hush upon the land. Still, lovely as was that afternoon, I very well remember wishing it had been a month earlier or later than this. We were in the stormy time of the year in these parts, though it was summer at home, and a violent change might quickly come. If it came, Vanderdecken would have to put to sea, leak or no leak, for it was not to be supposed that mere hemp could partake of the Curse; and the cables which I saw some of the crew getting up out of the hold and bending to the anchors at the bows were assuredly not going to hold this lump of a craft, high out of water and as thick as a tower aloft, for twenty solid minutes in a seaway and in the eye of a stout wind.
Therefore it was, when I was alone with Imogene, the coast being then about a league distant and the sun low, that I said to her: "Dearest, I have made up my mind to make a desperate effort to get away with you to-night."
"I am ready," she answered, instantly; "you need but tell me what to do."
"We must make use of this noble weather," I continued; "it is a fickle season, a change may come in half-a-dozen hours and force Vanderdecken to sea with his pump going. Imogene, it must not find us aboard."
"No."
"There will be no moon till eleven; we must be away before she rises, for she will glow brightly in that sky."
"Dearest, I am ready," she repeated. "But, Geoffrey, risk nothing on the mere chance that the weather will change. You might imperil your life by haste—and to-morrow night may be as reposeful as this that approaches, and with a later moon too!"
"Yes, but do not bid me risk nothing!" I exclaimed. "We must risk everything—our chances aboard and our chances out of the ship—or you are as good as chained to this vessel for life."
She smiled her acquiescence. I looked at her with passionate inquiry, but never did a braver and more resolved heart gaze at a lover from a maiden's eyes. I found the fearlessness of her devotion the more admirable for the dread she had expressed concerning the perils of the coast, and for her speaking thus to me with the land close to and all its wildness and melancholy visible to her, together with the distant smoke, towards which I had seen her glance again and again, and whose meaning she perfectly understood.
The ship swam slowly forwards. The coast dried the wind out of the atmosphere, but so much the better, for there was enough to carry us in, and then it could not die too soon to serve my turn. All was ready with the anchors forward, and the men hung about in pallid gangs waiting for orders to take sail off the ship. The vitality of the wondrous craft seemed to lie in the pump and its automatic plyers, so deep was the silence among the crew and so still their postures; but now and again the heavy courses would swing into the masts to the soft bowing of the fabric and raise a feeble thunder-note like to the sound of bowls rolling over hollow ground. The red light in the west lay upon the head of the shaggy line of coast, and the far-off mountains that had been blue went up in a dim purple to the sky; the crimson haze seemed to float over the rugged brink and roll down the slope to the shore, so that the scene was bathed in a most exquisite delicate light—all features touched with red; a bronze as of English autumn upon the green; the white sand gleaming rosily, and great spaces of reddish rubble-like ground glowing dark as blood. But the loneliness! I figured myself ashore there—the ship gone—Imogene gone! I stood in fancy upon the beach looking out on this bare sea; an aged, perhaps worthless firelock by my side, a few cartridges, a week's store of provisions! The moan of the surf was in my ear; every creaking and rustling of the wind in the near bushes startled me. To right and left rolled the coast for endless leagues, and the vast plain of sea, whose multitudinous crying found echoes in a thousand caverns, east and west, and in the reverberating heart of giant cliffs, whose walls were best measured in parallels and meridians, went down into the heavens where the uttermost ends of the earth were.
Yet, hideous as was the prospect of that shore when I thought of myself marooned upon it, its horrors shrunk into mere perils, such as courage, patience and resolution might overcome, when my imagination put my darling by my side, and with her hand in mine, I looked round me upon the vast scene of solitude. In her weakness I found my strength; in her devotion my armour. Great God! How precious to man is Thy gift of woman's love! But for Imogene where would have been my purpose and determination? I have but to recall the condition of my spirits when I looked at the shore and thought of myself as alone there to know.
The sun had been sunk an hour, the twilight had melted into darkness, and the sky was full of stars, when the Death Ship floated in a breathless manner to abreast of the eastern bluff or foreland of the bay, and with an air as faint as the sigh of a spirit expiring upon the black drapery of her higher canvas, she slided the blotting head of coast on to her quarter, and came to a dead stand within half-a-mile of the beach.
I heard Vanderdecken tell Arents to drop the lead over the side. This was done. The captain exclaimed: "What trend hath she?"
"None, sir. The line is up and down like an iron bar."
"Clew up the topsails and topgallant-sails. Up with the courses. See all ready to let go the anchors, Van Vogelaar."
These orders were re-echoed. In a moment the decks were alive with dusky shapes of moving men; one after another the sails dissolved against the stars like clouds, amid the hoarse rumbling of blocks, the whistling of running ropes, the rattle of descending yards.
"Are you all ready forward?" cried Vanderdecken, his rich voice going in notes of deep-throated music up into the gloom.
"All ready!" answered Van Vogelaar from the forecastle.
"Then let go the anchor!"
The heavy splash of a great weight of iron was followed by a hot seething sound of cable torn through the hawse-pipe; the water boiled to the launching blow from the bow and spread out in a surface of dim green fire.
I watched to see if the vessel would swing: but there was no air, neither was there tide or current to slue her, and she hung in a shadow like that of a thunder-cloud over her own anchor, her mastheads very softly beating time to the slow lift and fall of the light swell.
"Keep all fast with the larboard anchor!" exclaimed Vanderdecken. "Overhaul the cable to the fifty fathom scope. Aloft men and stow the canvas. Carpenter!"
A hoarse voice answered, "Sir?"
"Sound the well and let me know what water there is."
In a few minutes a lantern flickered like an ignis fatuus and threw out the sombre shapes of men as its gleam passed over the decks which rippled in faint sheets of phosphoric light. He who bore it was the carpenter. When he came to the pump he handed it to a seaman whilst he dropped the sounding-rod down the well. The light was yellow, and the figures of the fellows who were pumping and the stooping form of the carpenter stood out of the gloom like an illuminated painting in a crypt. A foot or two of water gushing from the pump sparkled freely to where the darkness cut it off. Against the glittering lights in the sky you saw the ink-like outlines of men dangling upon the yards, rolling up the canvas. I watched the carpenter pore upon the rod to mark the height to which the wet rose; he then came on to the poop and spoke to Vanderdecken in a voice too low for me to catch what he said.
Imogene had left me ten minutes before, and I stood alone in the deeper shade made in the gloom upon the poop by the mizzen-rigging. The beating of my heart was painful with anxiety. From one moment to another I could not tell what the next order might be, and if ever I seemed to feel a breath of air upon my hot temples, I trembled with the fear that it was the forerunner of a breeze. As it stood, 'twas such a night to escape in that my deepest faith in God's mercy had never durst raise my hopes to the height of its beauty and stillness.
On the opposite side of the poop slowly walked Vanderdecken; in the starlight such of his skin as showed was as white as wax; he sometimes looked aloft at the men there, sometimes around at the ocean, sometimes coming to a stand to mark the gradual swinging of the ship that was now influenced by some early trickling of tide or by the motions of the small heaving in the sea, or by some ghostly whisperings of air overhead.
Ten minutes passed. Though the ship was full of business, not a sound broke from the men, and the hush you felt upon the dark line of shore would have been upon the vessel but for the clanking jerks of the pump-brake and the noise of flowing water.
A figure came up the poop-ladder and softly approached. It was Imogene. I lightly called and she came to my side in the shadow.
"What are they doing?" she asked.
"They are furling the sails; nothing more as yet," I answered.
"Will they endeavour to lift the leak out of water to-night?"
"Dearest, I am waiting to see what they mean to do."
"I will ask Vanderdecken," said she, "he always answers my questions."
I seized her hand. "No! He may suspect I sent you. Let us walk carelessly here and there. Lurking in the shadow might give an air of conspiracy to the prattle of infants to the suspicions of such a mind as his."
We moved towards the taffrail—the helm was lashed and abandoned—and then quietly to and fro, speaking under our breath.
"Geoffrey, we may find no water to drink when we get on shore; have you provided for that?" she said.
I started. I had thought of all things, as I fancied; yet I had overlooked the most essential of our certain needs.
"No, I have not provided for that," I exclaimed. "How now to manage?"
"I thought of it just now in my cabin. There is a pitcher there and the sight of it put it into my head to ask if you had included water in your stock of provisions. It holds about two gallons. It has a narrow neck and may be easily corked. But how can we convey it ashore. My weight and the bags and it would sink a bigger frame than the one that is to float me."
I said: "Is there fresh water in it?"
"It is nearly full. Prins keeps it replenished."
I said: "Are bottles to be had?"
She reflected and answered: "There are jars in which wine is kept, but I do not know where to find them."
'Twas my turn to think. I then cried: "There is a silver flagon in the box under the table; that which Prins took away last week and brought back filled with sherry for Vanderdecken. Can you get it?"
"Yes."
"We may not need it; if so we will leave it. Vanderdecken shall not say that we have plundered him though we must risk a graver charge even than that if there be occasion. Dearest, convey that flagon to your cabin. Fill it with fresh water in readiness. We shall find fresh water sweeter than the richest wine. Also contrive to have the pitcher filled to the brim. Prins will do that and suspect nothing. You will invent a reason, and when it is filled cork it as securely as possible and bind the head with stout rag that what you use as a cork may not fall out."
She said she would go and see about it at once.
"A moment," I whispered. "Is the window of your quarter-gallery open?"
"No; but I will open it."
"Do so; stand at it till you hear me cough. Then grasp a rope that I will let hang against the window and coil it away as you pull it in."
She understood me with the readiness of a sailor's child and a sailor's sweetheart, and left me. The mizzen-yard was lowered; the sail had been stowed some time. Rove through a small block at the end of the yard was a length of thin line termed signal halliards used for the showing of colours. I waited till Vanderdecken came to a stand at the head of the ladder that was, of course, at the forward end of the poop, and then with a mariner's swiftness overhauled the halliards through the block, catching the end as it fell that it might not strike the deck, and threw it over the quarter, coughing distinctly as I did so. I felt her pull it; I paid it out cautiously, narrowly watching Vanderdecken till the whole length was gone, then sauntered forward to where the shadow of the mizzen-rigging blackened the air.
I had not stood there a minute when Vanderdecken cried out, "Van Vogelaar!" The mate answered from the forecastle.
"Let a hand remain on the main-topsail yard to receive a tackle for hoisting out both boats."
I turned my back, putting both my hands to my face in an ecstatic burst of gratitude to the great God of Heaven for this signal mercy. 'Twas what I had been hoping and waiting for, with a heart sickened by doubt and fear. The order was given, and had I been suddenly transported with Imogene into a ship bound for England my soul could not have swelled up with keener exultation!
I will say now that the alternate scheme I had all along had in my mind was escaping by means of one of the boats. But I had held this project back from Imogene; nay, had kept it in hiding almost away from my own consideration for fear that I should be unable to secure a boat. Perhaps, indeed, I had counted upon Vanderdecken practising the custom of his day, which was to get the boats over on coming to an anchor; yet it was but a hope, and not daring to think too heartily in this direction I had talked wholly to Imogene of delivering ourselves by floating and swimming ashore.
But now the boats were to be lifted over the side, and my next proceeding must therefore be to watch an opportunity to enter one of them with Imogene and silently sneak away.
To see what they were about, the men hung several lanterns about the waist and gangways. The canvas had been furled, and the yards lay in thick black strokes against the stars. The coast looked like peaked heights of pitch, and the sea, with a sort of dead gleaming floating in it with the motion of the folds, spread out brimful to the dim flashing of the surf. You could hear nothing for the noise of the pumping, yet it seemed to me but for that, God knows what mysterious whisperings, what faint noise of howling cries, what strange airy creeping of hisses and the seething of swept and disturbed foliage and burrowed bush I might catch the mingled echo of, hovering in a kind of cloud of sound, and coming, some of it, from as far away as the deeper blackness that you saw in the land where the cerulean giants of the afternoon steadied their burdened postures by pressing their brows against the sky. There was a red spot upon that part of the coast over which you would be looking for the crimson forehead of the moon presently. 'Twas a league off, and expressed a big area of incandescence, and was the fire whence the smoke I had noticed arose.
One after the other they swung the boats clear of the rail to the water, and secured the ends of their painters, or the lines by which they were fastened, to a pin, on either quarter, thus leaving both boats floating under the counter. Vanderdecken then gave orders for the second anchor to be let go, the ship having some time since slided imperceptibly back to the fair tension of the cable already down.
I now thought I had been long enough on deck, that further lingering must suggest too much persistency of observation; so I went to the cabin. It was empty. I coughed, and in a minute or two Imogene came from her berth. The lamp swung over the table and the white light that fell through the open bottom of it streamed on my face.
She instantly exclaimed: "You are flushed and look glad! What is it, Geoffrey?"
"We are as good as free!" I cried. She stared at me. Then I explained how Vanderdecken had ordered the boats over as though in sober truth he had as great a mind as I that we should escape; how our deliverance by one of the boats had been my second but concealed scheme; how both boats were under the counter, to our hands almost; and how nothing more remained to be done but wait a chance of entering one of them and dropping hiddenly out of sight.
"Then we need not land!" she cried.
I said, "No." She clasped her hands and looked at me with a rapture that made me see how heavy though secret had lain the horror of escape by the shore upon her.
I said to her: "Slip into your quarter-gallery and look over and tell me which boat lies under it, whether the little or the large one. Also if the rope that holds her is within reach. Also distinguish what furniture of oars and sails are in the boats—if any there be. I dare not go to your cabin lest Vanderdecken should arrive as I come out."
She went, and was gone about five minutes. During this interval I took notice of a sobering down of the movements of the men about the deck, as though they were coming to an end with their various jobs of coiling away and clearing up. But the pump gushed incessantly. I grew extremely eager to know if they meant to handle the cargo and guns, towards careening the vessel, that night. But whether or no, I was determined to leave the Death Ship, and before the moon rose—if possible.
'Twas now a little after seven o'clock. Imogene returned. She glanced about her to make sure I was alone, and seating herself close to me, said: "It is the bigger boat that is under my quarter-gallery."
"Good!" I cried. "She will be the safer for our purpose."
"Where the other boat lies the gloom is so thick 'tis impossible to see what is in her. But I can distinctly perceive the outline of a sail in the big boat."
"There will be a mast as well," said I. "Since the sail is there she will have been lowered fully equipped. And the rope that holds her?"
"It tightens and droops with the lifting of the boat and the heaving of the ship," she replied. "But I think it may be grasped by standing upon the rail of the galley."
This I had expected, for the boat rode to a very short scope of line.
"Now, dearest," said I, "this is my plan: the line you dragged in, when middled and doubled, will serve me to lower you down with. When in the boat, you must throw the line off you, so that I may use it to send down the pitcher of water and the bags of provisions. I will then come down by it myself. Retire as early as you may under pretence of being weary, then clothe yourself in your warmest attire and select such apparel as fits most closely, for flowing drapery cannot but prove troublesome. Leave your cabin door unlatched, but seemingly shut, that I may enter by pushing only. Meanwhile, stay here. I shall return in a few minutes."
I walked to my cabin below. The gang of pumpers clove to the brake like a little company of spectres clothed as seamen, and their manner of toiling suggested a horrid mockery of the labour of earthly beings. I shot a swift glance along the deck ere descending the hatch, but, saving the men who pumped, could see no more than a shadow or two moving in the distance forward. I took the bags of provisions from under the bed; the smallest of the three fitted my hat, which I put on my head; the other two I crammed into my coat pockets, which were extremely capacious. A goodly portion of the bag in the larboard pocket stood up, and the head of the other was very visible; but I covered them by keeping my arms up and down; and so conveyed them to the cabin, which I surveyed through the door before entering.
Imogene instantly took them to her berth, and then returned. She had scarce resumed her seat when Vanderdecken entered. He came to the table and looked on a moment, and said: "Imogene, where is Prins?"
"I have not seen him," she answered.
He stepped to the door and called, and then came to his chair and seated himself, not offering to speak till Prins arrived.
"Get the supper," said he. "Mix a bowl of brandy punch. My limbs ache. I have stood too long."
Encouraged to address him by his breaking the silence, I said, "Mynheer Vanderdecken, may I ask if it is your intention to careen to-night?"
He looked at me sullenly and with a frown, and said: "Why do you inquire?"
"That I may crave a favour, sir. My cabin is close to the pump; the clattering of that engine is extremely disturbing, and therefore I would ask your permission to use this bench for a bed to-night if you do not intend to careen to the leak, and so render further pumping unnecessary."
He considered awhile, eyeing me sternly; but it was not conceivable that he should find any other than the surface-meaning in this request.
He answered: "I do not intend to careen; the weather hath every promise of continued fairness; the men shall have their night's rest; they will work the more briskly for it to-morrow. As the pump must be kept going, your request is reasonable. You can use this cabin, and Prins shall give you one of my cloaks to soften your couch."
I made him a low grateful bow, secretly accepting his civility, however, as does a man condemned to death the attentions of a gaoler or the tenderness of the hangman.
Prins prepared the table for supper, and then set a bowl of steaming punch before the captain. Shortly afterwards arrived Van Vogelaar and Arents. Our party was now complete, and we fell to. I said: "Gentlemen, you will forgive the curiosity of an English mariner who is unused to the discipline of the Batavian ships. How, Mynheer Vanderdecken, are the watches among you arranged when in harbour, as in a sense we may take ourselves now to be?"
Imogene observing my drift came to my help and said in Dutch: "The practice is as with our countrymen, Herr Fenton."
"Then the commandant stands the watch till midnight, and the mates together till sunrise," said I, speaking inaccurately that I might draw them into speech.
"No," exclaimed Arents. "With us the commander keeps no watch. The mates take the deck as at sea, I till midnight, Van Vogelaar till four, then I again."
"That is as it should be," said I, smiling into Arents' large, fat, white face.
"And it is very proper," said Van Vogelaar, in his coarse sarcastic voice, "that English sailors should apply to the Dutch for correct ideas on true marine discipline."
"Gentlemen," said I, suavely, "I have learnt much since I have been with you."
The mate darted one of his ugliest looks at me. And it was made infernal by the twist of leering triumph in his heavy lips, though he could not suppose I exactly understood what it meant.
We fell silent. Vanderdecken served out the punch with a small silver goblet. I drank but a mouthful or two, dreading the fumes. The others quaffed great draughts, making nothing of the potency of the liquor, nor of the steaming heat of it. Had they been as I was or Imogene—human and real—I should have rejoiced in their intemperance; but 'twas impossible to suppose that the fumes of spirits could affect the brains of men immortal in misery.
When they had done eating they called for pipes, and Vanderdecken told Prins to bring him such and such a cloak, naming and describing it. The fashion of it was about eighty years old; 'twas of very dark velvet, with a silver chain at the throat and silk under-sleeves. He motioned to Prins to put it down, giving me to know by the same gesture that it was at my service. I thanked him with a slight inclination of the head, grateful that he did not speak, as I knew not what effect the news of my desire to sleep in the cabin might have upon the malignant mate's suspicious mind.
Imogene observed a strict silence. Sometimes I caught her looking at Vanderdecken, sometimes round upon the cabin. At such moments there came a softened light of wistfulness into her eyes; nay, rather let me call it pensiveness, for there was nothing of yearning in it—merely the emotion that would attend the thought that, under God, this was the last night she would ever pass in the Death Ship; the last hours she would ever spend in the company of Vanderdecken. The old fabric had for nearly five years been her ocean home—the only refuge in the wide world for her. 'Twas associated with the desolation of her orphaned state—with the anguish of her loneliness in the open boat. Her very being had merged into the ancient timbers—to the spirit of her life a voice and an expression had been given by each hollow straining sound, by the roar of wind in the rigging, by the musical stirrings of air in the quiet night, by the sob of gently-passing waters, by the thunder of the storm-created surge. And he at whom she gazed—cruel, fierce, scowling, imperious as he was—lifting God-defying eyes to the heavens, his giant frame volcanic with the desperate perturbations of a soul of fire—yet had that man ever been gentle to her—he had tended her with something of a father's love; he had held her to his breast as an ocean-stray for whom, Heaven help him! he believed that there was an asylum, that there was affection, that there was motherly and sisterly sympathy in his distant home at Amsterdam. She could not have been the Imogene of my adoration, the fresh, true-hearted virginal being of this Death Ship, mingling something of the mystery of the doomed structure and something of the mighty deep, with the pure, chaste, exquisite vitality of a living and a loving woman, had not her violet eyes saddened to the thought of parting for ever from her floating home and from that stately, bearded figure whose affection for her was even fuller of pathos than his dream of those whom he deemed yet slumbered at night in far-off Amsterdam.
But no sentiment of this kind coloured my view of him. To me, that was to be put ashore by his command and left miserably to perish there, he was a cruel and a murderous rascal; of which qualities in him I had so keen a sense that I never for a moment questioned that if my scheme miscarried and he found out what I intended, he would have me swung at the yard-arm right away out of hand, though it should be pitch dark and they should have to hang me by lantern-light.
Presently Arents put down his pipe and went on deck. Van Vogelaar, leaning on his elbow midway across the table, muttered with the long shank of his pipe between his teeth to Vanderdecken about the routine and rotation of the pumping-gangs. The captain let fall a few instructions touching the morning's work. Imogene rose.
"I am like you, Captain Vanderdecken—weary," she said, smiling, whilst her pale face fully warranted her assurance. "I shall go to bed."
"'Tis early," said he, sending a look at the clock; "you seem dispirited, my dear. It will not be this brief halt here, I trust? We shall be under weigh again in a couple of days, homeward-bound—one great ocean already traversed. Think of that!" She put her fingers to her mouth simulating a yawn. "But if you are weary," he continued, "go to rest, my dear."
She smiled at him again, curtsied to me, and with a half-bow to Van Vogelaar went to her cabin.
Vanderdecken, dipping the silver goblet into the punch-bowl, bade me extend my cup. I thanked him, said my head ached, and that with his leave I would take the air above for a spell. On gaining the poop I walked right aft and looked over the taffrail. The boats there rose and fell in two lumps of blackness under the quarters. They strained very quietly at the lines which held them, and this enabled me to observe, by noting the trend of the land, that such surface-motion as the water had was westerly. I was fretted to observe the sea unusually phosphorescent. Every time the rise and fall of the ship's stern flipped at one or the other of the boat's lines the sudden drag raised a little foam about her, and the bubbling flashed like the reflection of sheet lightning in a mirror. This, I say, vexed me; for the dip of an oar must occasion a fire as signalling in its way as a flare or a lantern, though the boat itself should be buried in the darkness.
I came away from the taffrail after a very brief look over. Arents at the head of the poop-ladder stood apparently gazing at the men pumping on the main-deck, but I knew the motionless postures into which he and the others fell too well to guess that any speculation would be found in his eyes could they be peered into. The bush fire burnt like a great red spark on the black outline to starboard. Out of the western ocean the stars looked to be floating as though they were a smoke of silver sparkles, meeting in a mass of diamond-light over our swaying mastheads, with scatterings of brilliant dust among them, suggesting the wakes of winged star-ships; but past the starboard yard-arms all this quick, glorious scintillation of planet and meteor, of fixed stars and the Magellanic clouds, with the beautiful Cross sweetly dominant, went wan and dying into mere faintness. This however I did not particularly heed, though the habits of a sailor would cause me to fasten my eye upon the appearance; but presently looking for the crimson scar of bush-fire, I found it was gone with many of the stars which had been glittering above and against it.
A few minutes put an end to conjecture; 'twas a true South African fog coming along, white as gunpowder smoke, and eating out the prospect with long feelers and winding limbs till the whole body was fluffing thick and soft as feathers about the ship, eclipsing everything save a golden spike or two of the lighted lantern that hung against the main-mast for the comfort or convenience of the pumpers.