I had expected that the unaccountable appearance which had excited my attention so strongly would have vanished with the closing of my eyes; but it did not, for when I looked at it again, the working and shifting of the folds of the cloth still continued, and even more distinctly than before.
“Very extraordinary all this,” I murmured to myself.
“Pray, Mr Cringle, be sociable man,” said the captain; “what the deuce do you see, that you stare over my shoulder in that way? Were I a woman, now, I should tremble to look behind me, while you were glaring aft in that wild, moonstruck sort of fashion.”
“By all that is astonishing,” I exclaimed, in great agitation, “if the folds of the cape have not arranged themselves into the very likeness of his dying face!—Why it is his face, and no fanciful grouping of my heated brain. Look there, sir—look there—I know it can’t be—but there he lies—the very features and upper part of the body, lith and limb, as when he disappeared beneath the water when he was shot dead.”
I felt the boiling blood, that had been rushing through my system like streams of molten lead, suddenly freeze and coagulate about my heart, impeding my respiration to such a degree that I thought I should have been suffocated. I had the feeling as if my soul was going to take wing. It was not fear, nor could I say I was in pain, but it was so utterly unlike anything I had ever experienced before, and so indescribable that I thought to myself—”this may be death.”
“Why, what a changeable rose you are, Master Cringle,” said Captain Transom, good-naturedly; “your face was like the north-west moon in a fog but a minute ago, and now it is as pale as a lily—blue-white, I declare. Why, my man, you must be ill, and seriously too.”
His voice dissipated the hideous chimera—the folds fell, and relapsed into their own shape, and the cloak was once more a cloak, and nothing more. I drew a long breath. “Ah, it is gone at last, thank God!”—and then, aware of the strange effect my unaccountable incoherence must have had on the skipper, I thought to brazen it out by trying the free-and-easy line, which was neither more nor less than arrant impertinence in our relative positions. “Why, I have been heated a little, and amusing myself with sundry vain imaginings, but allow me to take wine with you, captain,” filling a tumbler with vin-de-grave to the brim as I spoke. “Success to you, sir—here’s to your speedy promotion—may you soon get a crack frigate; as for me, I intend to be Archbishop of Canterbury, or maid of honour to the Queen of Sheba, or something in the heathen mythology.”
I drank off the wine, although I had the greatest difficulty in steadying my trembling hand, and carrying it to my lips; but notwithstanding my increasing giddiness, and the buzzing in my ears, and swimming of mine eyes, I noticed the captain’s face of amazement as he exclaimed—
“The boy is either mad or drunk, by Jupiter!”
I could not stand his searching and angry look, and in turning my eye, it again fell on the cloak, which now seemed to be stretched out at greater length, and to be altogether more voluminous than it was before. I was forcibly struck with this, for I was certain no one had touched it.
“By heavens! it heaves,” I exclaimed, much moved—”how is this? I never thought to have believed such things—it stirs again—it takes the figure of a man—as if it were a pall covering his body. Pray, Captain Transom, what trick is this?—Is there anything below that cloak there?”
“What cloak do you mean?”
“Why, that blue one lying on the locker there. Is there any cat or dog in the cabin?” and I started on my legs. “Captain Transom,” I continued, with great vehemence, “for the love of God tell me what is there below that cloak.”
He looked surprised beyond all measure.
“Why, Mr Cringle, I cannot for the soul of me comprehend you; indeed I cannot; but, Mafame, indulge him. See if there be anything below my cloak.”
The servant walked to the locker, and lifted up the cape of it, and was in the act of taking it from the locker, when I impetuously desired the man to leave it alone.
“I can’t look on him again,” said I; while the faintishness increased, so that I could hardly speak. “Don’t move the covering from his face, for God’s sake— don’t remove it,” and I lay back in my chair, screening my eyes from the lamp with my hands, and shuddering with an icy chill from head to foot.
The captain, who had hitherto maintained the well-bred, patronising, although somewhat distant, air of a superior officer to an inferior who was his guest, addressed me now in an altered tone, and with a brotherly kindness.
“Mr Cringle, I have some knowledge of you, and I know many of your friends; so I must take the liberty of an old acquaintance with you. This day’s work has been a severe one and your share in it, especially after your past fatigues, has been very trying, and as I will report it, I hope it may clap a good spoke in your wheel; but you are overheated, and have been over-excited; fatigue has broken you down, and I must really request you will take something warm, and turn in.—Here, Mafame, get the carpenter’s mate to secure that cleat on the weather side there, and sling my spare cot for Mr Cringle.—You will be cooler here than in the gunroom.”
I heard his words without comprehending their meaning. I sat and stared at him, quite conscious, all the time, of the extreme impropriety, not to say indecency, of my conduct; but there was a spell on me; I tried to speak, but could not; and, believing that I was either possessed by some dumb devil, or struck with palsy, I rose up, bowed to Captain Transom, and straightway hied me on deck.
I could hear him say to his servant, as I was going up the ladder, “Look after that young gentleman, Mafame, and send Isaac to the doctor, and bid him come here now;” and then in a commiserating tone—”Poor young fellow, what a pity!”
When I got on deck all was quiet. The cool fresh air had an instantaneous effect on my shattered nerves, the violent throbbing in my head ceased, and I began to hug myself with the notion that my distemper, whatever it might have been, had beaten a retreat.
Suddenly I felt so collected and comfortable, as to be quite alive to the loveliness of the scene. It was a beautiful moonlight night; such a night as is nowhere to be seen without the tropics, and not often within them. There was just breeze enough to set the sails to sleep, although not so strong as to prevent their giving a low murmuring flap now and then, when the corvette rolled a little heavier than usual on the long swell. There was not a cloud to be seen in the sky, not even a stray shred of thin fleecy gauze-like vapour, to mark the direction of the upper current of the air, by its course across the moon’s disk, which was now at the full, and about half-way up her track in the liquid heavens.
The small twinkling lights from millions of lesser stars, in that part of the firmament where she hung, round as a silver pot-lid—shield, I mean—were swamped in the flood of greenish-white radiance shed by her, and it was only a few of the first magnitude, with a planet here and there, that were visible to the naked eye, in the neighbourhood of her crystal bright globe; but the clear depth, and dark translucent purity of the profound, when the eye tried to pierce into it at the zenith, where the stars once more shone and sparkled thick and brightly, beyond the merging influence of the pale cold orb, no man can describe now—one could, once—but, rest his soul, he is dead—and then to look forth far into the night, across the dark ridge of many a heaving swell of living water—but “Thomas Cringle, ahoy—where the devil are you cruising to?” So, to come back to my story. I went aft, and mounted the small poop, and looked towards the aforesaid moon—a glorious, resplendent, tropical moon, and not the paper lantern affair hanging in an atmosphere of fog and smoke, about which your blear-eyed poets haver so much. By the by, these gentry are fond of singing of the blessed sun—were they sailors they would bless the moon also, and be ——— to them, in place of writing much wearisome poetry regarding her blighting propensities. But I have lost the end of my yarn once more, in the strands of these parentheses.—Lord, what a word to pronounce in the plural!—I can no more g
et out now than a girl’s silk-worm from the innermost of a nest of pill-boxes, where, to ride the simile to death at once, I have warped the thread of my story so round and round me, that I can’t for the life of me unravel it. Very odd all this. Since I have recovered of this fever, everything is slack about me; I can’t set up the shrouds and backstays of my mind, not to speak of bobstays, if I should die for it. The running rigging is all right enough, and the canvass is there; but I either can’t set it, or when I do, I find I have too little ballast, or I get involved amongst shoals, and white water, and breakers,—don’t you hear them roar?—which I cannot weather, and crooked channels, under some lee-shore, through which I cannot scrape clear. So down must go the anchor, as at present, and there—there goes the chain-cable rushing and rumbling through the hawse-hole. But I suppose it will be all right by-and-by, as I get stronger.
“But rouse thee, Thomas! Where is the end of this yarn, that you are blarneying about?”
“Avast heaving, you swab you—avast; if you had as much calomel in your corpus as I have at this present speaking—why, you would be a lad of more mettle than I take you for, that is all. You would have about as much quicksilver in your stomach, as I have in my purse, and all my silver has been quick, ever since I remember, like the jests of the gravedigger in Hamlet. But, as you say, where the devil is the end of this yarn?”
All here it is! so off we go again—And looked forward towards the rising moon, whose shining wake of glow-worm coloured light, sparkling in the small waves, that danced in the gentle wind on the heaving bosom of the dark-blue sea, was right ahead of us, like a river of quicksilver with its course diminished in the distance to a point, flowing towards us, from the extreme verge of the horizon, through a rolling sea of ink, with the waters of which, for a time, it disdained to blend. Concentrated, and shining like polished silver afar off— intense and sparkling as it streamed down nearer, but becoming less and less brilliant as it widened in its approach to us, until, like the stream of the great estuary of the Magdalena, losing itself in the salt waste of waters, it gradually melted beneath us and around us into the darkness.
I looked aloft—every object appeared sharply cut out against the dark firmament, and the swaying of the mastheads to and fro, as the vessel rolled, was so steady and slow, that they seemed stationary, while it was the moon and stars which appeared to vibrate and swing from side to side, high over head, like the vacillation of the clouds in a theatre, when the scene is first let down.
The masts and yards, and standing and running rigging, looked like black pillars, and bars, and wires of iron, reared against the sky, by some mighty spirit of the night; and the sails, as the moon shone dimly through them, were as dark as if they had been tarpaulings. But when I walked forward and looked aft, what a beauteous change! Now each mast, with its gently swelling canvass, the higher sails decreasing in size, until they tapered away nearly to a point, through topsail, topgallant-sail, royal and skysails, showed like towers of snow, and the cordage like silver threads, while each dark spar seemed to be of ebony, fished with ivory, as a flood of cold, pale, mild light streamed from the beauteous planet over the whole stupendous machine, lighting up the sand-white decks, on which the shadows of the men, and of every object that intercepted the moonbeams, were cast as strongly as if the planks had been inlaid with jet.
There was nothing moving about the decks. The look-outs aft, and at the gangways, sat or stood like statues half bronze, half alabaster. The old quartermaster, who was cunning the ship, and had perched himself on a carronade, with his arm leaning on the weather nettings, was equally motionless. The, watch had all disappeared forward, or were stowed out of sight under the lee of the boats; the first-lieutenant, as if captivated by the serenity of the scene, was leaning with folded arms on the weather-gangway, looking abroad upon the ocean, and whistling now and then, either for a wind or for want of thought. The only being who showed sign of life was the man at the wheel, and he scarcely moved, except now and then to give her a spoke or two, when the cheep of the tiller-rope, running through the well-greased leading-blocks, would grate on the ear as a sound of some importance; while in daylight, in the ordinary bustle of the ship, no one could say he ever heard it.
Three bells!—”Keep a bright look-out there,” sang out the lieutenant.
“Ay, ay, sir,” from the four look-out men, in a volley.
Then from the weather-gangway, “ All’s well,” rose shrill into the night air.
The watchword was echoed by the man on the forecastle, re-echoed by the lee-gangway look-out, and ending with the response of the man on the poop. My dream was dissipated—and so was the first-lieutenant’s, who had but little poetry in his composition, honest man.
“Fine night, Mr Cringle. Look aloft, how beautifully set the sails are; that mizen-topsail is well cut, eh? Sits well, don’t it? But—Confound the lubbers! Boatswain’s mate, call the watch.”
Whi-whew, whi-whew, chirrup, chip, chip—the deck was alive in an instant, “as bees bizz out wi’ angry fyke.”
“Where is the captain of the mizen-top?” growled the man in authority.
“Here, sir.”
“Here, sir!—look at the weather-clew of the mizen-topsail, sir—look at that sail, sir—how many turns can you count in that clew, sir? Spring it, you no-sailor you—spring, it, and set the sail again.”
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable all this appeared to me at the time, I well remember; but the obnoxious turns were shaken out, and the sail set again so as to please even the fastidious eye of the lieutenant, who, seeing nothing more to find fault with, addressed me once more.
“Have had no grub since morning, Mr Cringle; all the others are away in the prizes; you are as good as one of us now, only want the order to join, you know— so, will you oblige me and take charge of the deck until I go below and change my clothes and gobble a bit?”
“Unquestionably—with much pleasure.”
He forthwith dived, and I walked aft a few steps towards where the old quartermaster was standing on the gun.
“How is her head, quartermaster?”
“South-east and by south, sir. If the wind holds we shall weather Morant Point, I think, sir.”
“Very like, very like.—What is that glancing backwards and forwards across the port-hole there, quartermaster?”
“I told you so, Mafame,” said the man; “what are you skylarking about the mizen-chains for, man?—Come in, will you, come in.”
The captain’s caution to his servant flashed on me.
“Come in, my man, and give my respects to the captain, and tell him that I am quite well now; the fresh air has perfectly restored me.”
“I will, sir,” said Mafame, half ashamed at being detected in his office of inspector-general of my actions; but the doctor, to whom he had been sent, having now got a leisure moment from his labour in the shambles, came up and made inquiries as to how I felt.
“Why, doctor, I thought I was in for a fever half an hour ago, but it is quite gone off, or nearly so—there, feel my pulse.”—It was regular, and there was no particular heat of skin.
“Why, I don’t think there is much the matter with you. Mafame, tell the captain so; but turn in and take some rest as soon as you can, and I will see you in the morning—and here,” feeling in his waistcoat pocket, “here are a couple of capers for you; take them now, will you”—(And he handed me two blue pills, which I the next moment chucked overboard, to cure some bilious dolphin of the liver complaint.) I promised to do so whenever the lieutenant relieved the deck, which would, I made no question, be within half an hour.
“Very well, that will do—good night. I am regularly done up myself,” quoth the medico, as he descended to the gunroom.
At this time of night the prizes were all in a cluster under our lee quarter, like small icebergs covered with snow, and carrying every rag they could set. The Gleam was a good way astern, as if to whip them in, and to take care that no stray piccaroon should make
a dash at any of them. They slid noiselessly along like phantoms of the deep, everything in the air and in the water was so still. I crossed to the lee side of the deck to look at them. The Wave, seeing some one on the hammock-nettings, sheered close to, under the Firebrand’s lee quarter, and some one asked,” Do you want to speak us?” The man’s voice, reflected from the concave surface of the schooner’s mainsail, had a hollow, echoing sound, that startled me.
“I should know that voice,” said I to myself, “and the figure steering the schooner.” The throbbing in my head and the dizzy feel which had capsized my judgment in the cabin, again returned with increased violence—”It was no deception after all,” thought I, “no cheat of the senses—I now believe such things are.”
The same voice now called out, “Come away, Tom; come away,” no doubt to some other seaman on board the little vessel, but my heated fancy did not so construe it. The cold breathless fit again overtook me, and I ejaculated, “God have mercy upon me a sinner!”
“Why don’t you come, Tom?” said the voice once more.
It was Obed’s. At this very instant of time, the Wave forged ahead into the Firebrand’s shadow, so that her sails, but a moment before white as wool in the bright moonbeams, suffered a sudden eclipse, and became black as ink.
“His dark spirit is there,” said I audibly, “and calls me—go I will, whatever may befall.”
I hailed the schooner, or rather I had only to speak, and that in a low tone, for she was now close under the counter—”Send your boat, for since you call I know I must come.”