V
When Destiny knocks the first nail in the coffin of a tyrant, it is seldom long before she knocks the last.
It was the very next morning that the schooner, in the lightest of airs, was sidling gently to leeward. The mate was at the wheel, shifting his weight from foot to foot with that rhythmic motion many steersmen affect, the better to get the feel of a finicky helm; and Edward was teaching the captain’s terrier to beg, on the cabin-top. The mate shouted to him to hang on to something.
“Why?” said Edward.
“Hang on!” cried the mate again, spinning the wheel over as fast as he could to bring her into the wind.
The howling squall took her, through his promptness, almost straight in the nose; or it would have carried all away. Edward clung to the skylight. The terrier skidded about alarmedly all over the cabin-top, slipped off onto the deck, and was kicked by a dashing sailor clean through the galley door. But not so that poor big pig, who was taking an airing on deck at the time. Overboard he went, and vanished to windward, his snout (sometimes) sticking up manfully out of the water. God, Who had sent him the goat and the monkey for a sign, now required his soul of him. Overboard, too, went the coops of fowls, three new-washed shirts, and—of all strange things to get washed away—the grindstone.
Up out of his cabin appeared the captain’s shapeless brown head, cursing the mate as if it was he who had upset the applecart. He came up without his boots, in grey wool socks, and his braces hanging down his back.
“Get below!” muttered the mate furiously. “I can manage her!”
The captain did not, however: still in his socks, he came up on deck and took the wheel out of the mate’s hand. The latter went a dull brick-red: walked for’ard: then aft again: then went below and shut himself in his cabin.
In a few moments the wind had combed up some quite hearty waves: then it blew their tops off, and so flattened the sea out again, a sea that was black except for little whipt-up fountains of iridescent foam.
“Get my boots!” bellowed Jonsen at Edward.
Edward dashed down the companion with alacrity. It is a great moment, one’s first order at sea; especially when it comes in an emergency. He reappeared with a boot in each hand, and a lurch flung him boots and all at the captain’s feet. “Never carry things in both hands,” said the captain, smiling pleasantly.
“Why?” asked Edward.
“Keep one hand to lay hold with.”
There was a pause.
“Some day I will teach you the three Sovereign Rules of Life.” He shook his head meditatively. “They are very wise. But not yet. You are too young.”
“Why not?” asked Edward. “When shall I be old enough?”
The captain considered, going over the Rules in his head.
“When you know which is windward and which is leeward, then I will teach you the first rule.”
Edward made his way forward, determined to qualify as soon as he possibly could.
When the worst of the squall was over they got the advantage of it, the schooner lying over lissomly and spinning along like a racehorse. The crew were in great spirits—chaffing the carpenter, who, they declared, had thrown his grindstone overboard as a lifebuoy for the pig.
The children were in good spirits also. Their shyness was all gone now. The schooner lying over as she did, her wet deck made a most admirable toboggan-slide; and for half an hour they tobogganed happily on their bottoms from windward to leeward, shrieking with joy, fetching up in the lee-scuppers, which were mostly awash, and then climbing from thing to thing to the windward bulwarks raised high in the air, and so all over again.
Throughout that half hour, Jonsen at the wheel said not a single word. But at last his pent-up irritation broke out:
“Hi! You! Stop that!”
They gazed at him in astonishment and disillusion.
There is a period in the relations of children with any new grownup in charge of them, the period between first acquaintance and the first reproof, which can only be compared to the primordial innocence of Eden. Once a reproof has been administered, this can never be recovered again.
Jonsen now had done it.
But he was not content with that—he was still bursting with rage:
“Stop it! Stop it, I tell you!”
(They had already done so, of course.)
The whole unreasonableness, the monstrousness of the imposition of these brats on his ship suddenly came over him, and summed itself up in a single symbol:
“If you go and wear holes in your drawers, do you think I am going to mend them?—Lieber Gott! What do you think I am, eh? What do you think this ship is? What do you think we all are? To mend your drawers for you, eh? To mend … your … drawers?”
There was a pause, while they all stood thunderstruck.
But even now he had not finished:
“Where do you think you’ll get new ones, eh?” he asked, in a voice explosive with rage. Then he added, with an insulting coarseness of tone: “And I’ll not have you going about my ship without them! See?”
Scarlet to the eyes with outrage they retreated to the bows. They could hardly believe so unspeakable a remark had crossed human lips. They assumed an air of lightness, and talked together in studied loud voices: but their joy was dashed for the day.
So it was that—small as a man’s hand—a spectre began to show over their horizon: the suspicion at last that this was not all according to plan, that they might even not be wanted. For a while their actions showed the unhappy wariness of the uninvited guest.
Later in the afternoon, Jonsen, who had not spoken again, but looked from time to time acutely miserable, was still at the wheel. The mate had shaved himself and put on shore clothes, as a parable: he now appeared on deck: pretended not to see the captain, but strolled like a passenger up to the children and entered into conversation with them.
“If I’m not fit to steer in foul weather, I’m not fit to steer in fair!” he muttered, but without glancing at the captain. “He can take the helum all day and night, for all the help I’ll give him!”
The captain appeared equally not to see the mate. He looked quite ready to take both watches till kingdom come.
“If he’d been at the wheel when that squall struck us,” said the mate under his voice but with biting passion, “he’d have lost the ship! He’s no more eye for a squall coming than a suckerfish! And he knows it, too: that’s what makes him go on this way!”
The children did not answer. It shocked them deeply to have to see a grownup, a should-be Olympian, displaying his feelings. In exact opposition to the witnesses at the Transfiguration, they felt it would have been good for them to be almost anywhere rather than there. He was totally unconscious of their discomfort, however: too self-occupied to notice how they avoided catching his eye.
“Look! There’s a steamship!” exclaimed Margaret, with much too bright a brightness.
The mate glowered at it.
“Aye, they’ll be the death of us, those steamers,” he said. “Every year there’s more of them. They’ll be using them for men-of-war next, and then where’ll we be? Times are bad enough without steamers.”
But while he spoke he wore a preoccupied expression, as if he were more concerned with what was going on at the back of his mind than with what went on in the front.
“Did you ever hear about what happened when the first steamer put to sea in the Gulf of Paria?” he asked, however.
“No, what?” asked Margaret, with an eagerness that even exceeded the necessities of politeness in its falsity.
“She was built on the Clyde, and sailed over. (Nobody thought of using steam for a long ocean voyage in those days.) The Company thought they ought to make a to-do—to popularise her, so to speak. So the first time she put to sea under her own power, they invited all the bigwigs on board: all the Members of Assembly in Trinidad, and the Governor and his Staff, and a Bishop. It was the Bishop what did the trick.”
His story died out: he became completely absorbed in watching sidelong the effect of his bravado on the captain.
“Did what?” asked Margaret.
“Ran ’em aground.”
“But what did they let him steer for?” asked Edward. “They might have known he couldn’t!”
“Edward! How dare you talk about a Bishop in that rude way!” admonished Rachel.
“It wasn’t the steamer he ran aground, sonny,” said the mate: “it was a poor innocent little devil of a pirate craft, that was just beating up for the Boca Grande in a northerly breeze.”
“Good for him!” said Edward. “How did he do it?”
“They were all seasick, being on a steamer for the first time: the way she rolls, not like a decent sailing-vessel. There wasn’t a man who could stay on deck—except the Bishop, and he just thrived on it. So when the poor little pirate cut under her bows, and seen her coming up in the eye of the wind, no sail set, with a cloud of smoke amidships and an old Bishop bung in the middle of the smoke, and her paddles making as much turmoil as a whale trying to scratch a flea in its ear, he just beached his vessel and took to the woods. Never went to sea again, he didn’t; started growing coconuts. But there was one poor fish was in such a hurry he broke his leg, and they came ashore and found him. When he saw the Bishop coming for him he started yelling out it was the Devil.”
“O‑oh!” gasped Rachel, horror-struck.
“How silly of him,” said Edward.
“I don’t know so much!” said the mate. “He wasn’t too far wrong! Ever since that, they’ve been the death of our profession, Steam and the Church … what with steaming, and what with preaching, and steaming and preaching. … Now that’s a funny thing,” he broke off, suddenly interested by what he was saying: “Steam and the Church! What have they got in common, eh? Nothing, you’d say: you’d think they’d fight each other cat-and-dog: but no: they’re thick as two thieves … thick as thieves.—Not like in the days of Parson Audain.”
“Who was he?” asked Margaret helpfully.
“He was a right sort of a parson, he was, yn wyr iawn! He was Rector of Roseau—oh, a long time back.”
“Here! Come and take this wheel while I have a spell!” grunted the captain.
“I couldn’t well say how long back,” continued the mate in a loud, unnatural, and now slightly exultant voice: “forty years or more.”
He began to tell the story of the famous Rector of Roseau: one of the finest pathetic preachers of his age, according to contemporaries; whose appearance was fine, gentle, and venerable, and who supplemented his stipend by owning a small privateer.
“Here! Otto!” called Jonsen.
But the mate had a long recital of the parson’s misfortunes before him: beginning with the capture of his schooner (while smuggling negroes to Guadaloupe) by another privateer, from Nevis; and how the parson went to Nevis, posted his rival’s name on the courthouse door, and stood on guard there with loaded pistols for three days in the hope the man would come and challenge him.
“What, to fight a duel?” asked Harry.
“But wasn’t he a clergyman, you said?” asked Emily.
But duels, it appeared, did not come amiss to this priest. He fought thirteen altogether in his life, the mate told them: and on one occasion, while waiting for the seconds to reload, he went up to his opponent, suggested “just a little something to fill in time, good sir”—and knocked him flat with his fist.
This time, however, his enemy lay low: so he fitted out a second schooner, and took command of her, weekdays, himself. His first quarry was an apparently harmless Spanish merchantman: but she suddenly opened fourteen masked gun-ports and it was he who had to surrender. All his crew were massacred but himself and his carpenter, who hid behind a water-cask all night.
“But I don’t understand,” said Margaret: “was he a pirate?”
“Of course he was!” said Otto the mate.
“Then why did you say he was a clergyman?” pursued Emily.
The mate looked as puzzled as she did. “Well, he was Rector of Roseau, wasn’t he? And B.A., B.D.? Anyway, he was Rector until the new Governor listened to some cock-and-bull story against him, and made him resign. He was the best preacher they ever had—he’d have been a Bishop one day, if someone hadn’t slandered him to the Governor!”
“Otto!” called the captain in a conciliatory voice. “Come over here, I want to speak to you.”
But the deaf and exulting mate had plenty of his story still to run: how Audain now turned trader, and took a cargo of corn to San Domingo, and settled there: how he challenged two black generals to a duel, and shot them both, and Christophe threatened to hang him if they died. But the parson (having little faith in Domingan doctors) escaped by night in an open boat and went to St. Eustatius. There he found many religions but no ministers; so he recommenced clergyman of every kind: in the morning he celebrated a mass for the Catholics, then a Lutheran service in Dutch, then Church of England matins: in the evening he sang hymns and preached hellfire to the Methodists. Meanwhile his wife, who had more tranquil tastes, lived at Bristol: so he now married a Dutch widow, resourcefully conducting the ceremony himself.
“But I don’t understand!” said Emily despairingly: “Was he a real clergyman?”
“Of course he wasn’t,” said Margaret.
“But he couldn’t have married himself himself if he wasn’t,” argued Edward. “Could he?”
The mate heaved a sigh.
“But the English Church aren’t like that nowadays,” he said. “They’re all against us.”
“I should think not, indeed!” pronounced Rachel slowly, in a deep indignant voice. “He was a very wicked man!”
“He was a most respectable person,” replied the mate severely, “and a wonderful pathetic preacher!—You may take it they were chagrined at Roseau, when they heard St. Eustatius had got him!”
Captain Jonsen had lashed the wheel, and came up, his face piteous with distress.
“Otto! Mein Schatz … !” he began, laying his great bear’s-arm round the mate’s neck. Without more ado they went below together, and a sailor came aft unbidden and took the wheel.
Ten minutes later the mate reappeared on deck for a moment, and sought out the children.
“What’s the captain been saying to you?” he asked. “Flashed out at you about something, did he?”
He took their complex, uncomfortable silence for assent.
“Don’t you take too much notice of what he says,” he went on. “He flashes out like that sometimes; but a minute after he could eat himself, fair eat himself!”
The children stared at him in astonishment: what on earth was he trying to say?
But he seemed to think he had explained his mission fully: turned, and once more went below.
For hours a merry but rather tedious hubble-bubble, suggesting liquor, was heard ascending from the cabin skylight. As evening drew on, the breeze having dropped away almost to a calm, the steersman reported that both Jonsen and Otto were now fast asleep, their heads on each other’s shoulders across the cabin table. As he had long forgotten what the course was, but had been simply steering by the wind, and there was now no wind to steer by, he (the steersman) concluded the wheel could get on very well without him.
The reconciliation of the captain and the mate deserved to be celebrated by all hands with a blind.
A rum-cask was broached: and the common sailors were soon as unconscious as their betters.
Altogether this was one of the unpleasantest days the children had spent in their lives.
When dawn came, everyone was still pretty incapable, and the neglected vessel drooped uncertainly. Jonsen, still rather unsteady on his feet, his head aching and his mind Napoleonic but muddled, came on deck and looked about him. The sun had come up like a searchlight: but it was about all there was to be seen. No land was anywhere in sight, and the sea and sky seemed very uncertain as to the most becoming place to locate their mutual firmament. It was not till he had looked round and round a fair number of times that he perceived a vessel, up in what by all appearances must be sky, yet not very far distant.
For some little while he could not remember what it is a pirate captain does when he sees a sail; and he felt in no mood to overtax his brain by trying to. But after a time it came back unbidden—one gives chase.
“Give chase!” he ordered solemnly to the morning air: and then went below again and roused the mate, who roused the crew.
No one had the least idea where they were, or what kind of a craft this quarry might be: but such considerations were altogether too complicated for the moment. As the sun parted further from his reflection a breeze sprang up: so the sails were trimmed after a fashion, and chase was duly given.
In an hour or two, as the air grew clearer, it was plain their quarry was a merchant brig, not too heavily laden, and making a fair pace: a pace, indeed, which in their incompetently trimmed condition they were finding it pretty difficult to equal. Jonsen shuffled rapidly up and down the deck like a shuttle, passing his woof backwards and forwards through the real business of the ship. He was hugging himself with excitement, trying to evolve some crafty scheme of capture. The chase went on: but noon passed, the distance between the two vessels was barely, if at all, lessened. Jonsen, however, was much too optimistic to realise this.
It used to be a common device of pirates when in chase of a vessel to tow behind them a spare topmast, or some other bulky object. This would act as a drogue, or brake: and the pursued, seeing them with all sail set apparently doing their utmost, would underestimate their powers of speed. Then when night fell the pirate would haul the spar on board, overtake the other vessel rapidly, and catch it unprepared.
There were several reasons why this device was unsuitable to the present occasion. First and most obviously, it was doubtful whether, in their present condition, they were capable of overtaking the brig at all, leaving such handicaps altogether out of consideration. A second was that the brig showed no signs of alarm. She was proceeding on her voyage at her natural pace, quite unaware of the honour they were doing her.
However, Captain Jonsen was nothing if not a crafty man; and during the afternoon he gave orders for a spare spar to be towed behind as I have described. The result was that the schooner lost ground rapidly: and when night fell they were at least a couple of miles further from the brig than they had been at dawn. When night fell, of course, they hauled the spar on board and prepared for the last act. They followed the brig by compass through the hours of darkness, without catching sight of her. When morning came, all hands crowded expectantly at the rail.
But the brig was vanished. The sea was as bare as an egg.
If they were lost before, now they were double-lost. Jonsen did not know where he might be within two hundred miles; and being no sextant-man, but an incurable dead-reckoner, he had no means of finding out. This did not worry him very greatly, however, because sooner or later one of two things might happen: he might catch sight of some bit of land he recognised, or he might capture some vessel better informed than himself. Meanwhile, since he had no particular destination, one bit of sea was much the same to him as another.
The piece he was wandering in, however, was evidently out of the main track of shipping; for days went by, and weeks, without his coming even so near to effecting a capture as he had been in the case of the brig.
But Captain Jonsen was not sorry to be out of the public eye for a while. Before he had left Santa Lucia, news had reached him of the Clorinda putting into Havana; and of the fantastic tale Marpole was telling. The “twelve masked gun-ports” had amused him hugely, since he was altogether without artillery: but when he heard Marpole accused him of murdering the children—Marpole, that least reputable of skunks—his anger had broken out in one of its sudden explosions. For it was unthinkable—during those first few days—that he would ever touch a hair of their heads, or even speak a cross word to them. They were still a sort of holy novelty then: it was not till their shyness had worn off that he had begun to regret so wholeheartedly the failure of his attempt to leave them behind with the Chief Magistrate’s wife.