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Marriage at Sea

<h3> CHAPTER VIII </h3> <h4> OUTWARD BOUND </h4> On a sudden, much about the hour of noon, there came a lull; the wind dropped as if by magic, here and there over the wide green surface of ocean the foam glanced, but in the main the billows ceased to break and washed along in a troubled but fast moderating swell. A kind of brightness sat in the east, and the horizon opened to its normal confines; but it was a desolate sea, nothing in sight save the ship, though I eagerly and anxiously scanned the whole circle of the waters. The two vessels had widened their distance, yet the note of the hail, if dull, was perfectly distinct. "Yacht ahoy! We're going to send a boat." I saw a number of figures in motion on the ship's poop. The aftermost boat was then swung through the davits over the side, four or five men entered her, and a minute later she sank to the water. "Here they come, Grace!" cried I. "At last, thank Heaven!" "Oh, Herbert, I shall never be able to enter her," she exclaimed, shrinking to my side. But I knew better, and made answer with a caress only. The oars rose and fell, the boat showed and vanished, showed and vanished again as she came buzzing to the yacht, to the impulse of the powerfully swept blades. Caudel stood by with some coils of line in his hand; the end was flung, caught, and in a trice the boat was alongside, and a sun-burnt, reddish-haired man, in a suit of serge, and a naval peak to his cap, tumbled with the dexterity of a monkey over the yacht's rail. He looked round him an instant, and then came straight up to Grace and me, taking the heaving and slanting deck as easily as though it were the floor of a ball-room. "I am the second mate of the Carthusian," said he, touching his cap with an expression of astonishment and admiration in his eyes as he looked at Grace. "Are all your people ready to leave, sir? Captain Parsons is anxious that there should be no delay." "The lady and I are perfectly ready," said I, "but my men have made up their minds to stick to the yacht with the hope of carrying her home." He looked round to Caudel who stood near. "Ay, sir, that's right," exclaimed the worthy fellow, "it's agoing to be fine weather and the water's to be kept under." The second mate ran his eye over the yacht with a short-lived look of puzzlement in his face, then addressed me: "We had thought your case a hopeless one, sir." "So it is," I answered. "Are you wise in your resolution, my man?" he exclaimed, turning to Caudel again. "Ay, sir," answered Caudel doggedly, as though anticipating an argument, "who's agoing to leave such a dandy craft as this to founder for the want of keeping a pump going for a day or two? There are four men and a boy all resolved, and we'll manage it," he added emphatically. "The yacht is in no fit state for the young lady, anyway," said the second mate. "Now, sir, and you, madam, if you are ready," and he put his head over the side to look at his boat. I helped Grace to stand, and whilst I supported her I extended my hand to Caudel. "God bless you and send you safe home!" said I; "your pluck and determination make me feel but half a man. But my mind is resolved too. Not for worlds would Miss Bellassys and I pass another hour in this craft." He shook me cordially by the hand, and respectfully bade Grace farewell. The others of my crew approached, leaving one pumping, and amongst the strong fellows on deck and over the side—sinewy arms to raise and muscular fists to receive her—Grace, white and shrinking and exclaiming, was handed dexterously and swiftly down over the side. Watching my chance, I sprang, and plumped heavily but safely into the boat. The second mate then followed and we shoved off. The crew of the yacht raised a cheer and waved their caps to us, and I felt heartily grieved to leave them. They had behaved well throughout the wild hours of storm now passed, and it seemed but a poor return, so to speak, on my part to quit the yacht in this fashion, as if, indeed, I was abandoning them to their fate, though, of course, they had made up their minds and knew very well what they were about; so that it was little more than sensitiveness that made me think of them as I did whilst I watched them flourishing to me and listened to their cheers. By this time, the light that I had taken notice of in the east had brightened; there were breaks in it, with here and there a dim view of blue sky, and the waters beneath had a gleam of steel as they rolled frothless and swollen. In fact, it was easy to see that fine weather was at hand, and this assurance it was that reconciled me as nothing else could to the fancy of Caudel and my little crew carrying the leaking, crippled yacht home. The men in the boat pulled sturdily, eyeing Grace and me out of the corner of their eyes, and gnawing upon the hunks of tobacco in their cheeks, as though in the most literal manner they were chewing the cud of the thoughts put into them by this encounter. The second mate uttered a remark or two about the weather, but the business of the tiller held him too busy to talk. There was the heavy swell to watch, and the tall, slowly-rolling metal fabric ahead of us to sheer alongside of. For my part, I could not see how Grace was to get aboard, and, observing no ladder over the side as we rounded under the vessel's stern, I asked the second mate how we were to manage it. "Oh," said he, "we shall send you both up in a chair with a whip. There's the block," he added, pointing to the yard-arm, "and the line's already rove, you'll observe." There were some seventy or eighty people watching us as we drew alongside, all staring over the rail and from the forecastle and from the poop, as one man. I remarked a few bonnets and shawled heads forward, and two or three well-dressed women aft, otherwise the crowd of heads belonged to men-emigrants—shabby and grimy; most of them looking seasick, I thought, as they overhung the side. A line was thrown from the ship, and the boat was hauled under the yard-arm whip, where she lay rising and falling, carefully fended off from the vessel's iron side by a couple of the men in her. "Now, then, bear a hand!" shouted a voice from the poop; "get your gangway unshipped, and stand by to hoist away handsomely." A minute later a large chair with arms dangled over our heads, and was caught by the fellows in the boat. A more uncomfortable, nerve-capsizing performance I never took a part in. The water washed with a thunderous sobbing sound along the metal bends of the ship, that, as she stooped her side into the brine, flashed up the swell in froth, hurling towards us also a recoiling billow, which made the dance of the boat horribly bewildering and nauseating. One moment we were floated, as it seemed to my eye, to the level of the bulwarks of the stooping ship; the next we were in a valley, with the great bare hull leaning away from us—an immense wet surface of red and black and chequered band, her shrouds vanishing in a slope, and her yard-arms forking up sky high. "Now, madam," said the second mate, "will you please seat yourself in that chair?" Grace was very white, but she saw that it must be done, and with set lips and in silence, was helped by the sailors to seat herself. I adored her then for her spirit, for I confess that I had dreaded she would hang back, shriek out, cling to me, and complicate and delay the miserable business by her terrors. She was securely fastened into the chair, and the second mate paused for the chance. "Hoist away!" he yelled, and up went my darling, uttering one little scream only as she soared. "Lower away!" and by the line that was attached to the chair, she was dragged through the gangway where I lost sight of her. It was now my turn. The chair descended, and I sat upon it, not without several yearning glances at the sloping side of the ship, which, however, only satisfied me that there was no other method by which I might enter the vessel than the chair, active as I was. "Hoist away!" was shouted, and up I went, and I shall not readily forget the sensation. My brains seemed to sink into my boots as I mounted. I was hoisted needlessly high, almost to the yard-arm itself, I fancy, through some blunder on the part of the men who manned the "whip." For some breathless moments I dangled between heaven and ocean, seeing nothing but grey sky and heaving waters. But the torture was brief. I felt the chair sinking, saw the open gangway sweep past me, and presently I was out of the chair at Grace's side, stared at by some eighty or a hundred emigrants, all 'tweendecks passengers, who had left the bulwarks to congregate on the main deck. "Well, thank Heaven, here we are, anyway!" was my first exclamation to Grace. "It was a thousand times worse than the Spitfire whilst it lasted," she answered. "You behaved magnificently," said I. "Will you step this way?" exclaimed a voice overhead. On looking up I found that we were addressed by a short, somewhat thick-set man, who stood at the rail that protected the forward extremity of the poop deck. This was the person who had talked to us through the speaking-trumpet, and I at once guessed him to be the captain. There were about a dozen first-class passengers gazing at us from either side of him, two or three of whom were ladies. I took Grace by the hand, and conducted her up a short flight of steps, and approached the captain, raising my hat as I did so, and receiving from him a sea-flourish of the tall hat he wore. He was buttoned up in a cloth coat, and his cheeks rested in a pair of high, sharp-pointed collars, starched to an iron hardness, so that his body and head moved as one piece. His short legs arched outwards, and his feet were encased in long boots, the toes of which were of the shape of a shovel. He wore the familiar tall hat of the streets; it looked to be brushed the wrong way, was bronze at the rims, and on the whole showed as a hat that had made several voyages. Yet, if there was but little of the sailor in his costume, his face suggested itself to me as a very good example of the nautical life. His nose was scarcely more than a pimple of a reddish tincture, and his small, moist, grey eyes lying deep in their sockets seemed, as they gazed at you, to be boring their way through the apertures which Nature had provided for the admission of light. A short piece of white whisker decorated either cheek, and his hair that was cropped close as a soldier's was also white. "Is that your yacht, young gentleman?" said he, bringing his eyes from Grace to me, at whom he had to stare up as at his masthead, so considerably did I tower over the little man. "Yes," said I, "she is the Spitfire—belongs to Southampton. I am very much obliged to you for receiving this lady and me." "Not at all," said he, looking hard at Grace; "your wife, sir?" "No," said I, greatly embarrassed by the question, and by the gaze of the ten or dozen passengers who hung near, eyeing us intently and whispering, yet, for the most part, with no lack of sympathy and good nature in their countenances. I saw Grace quickly bite upon her under-lip, but without colouring or any other sign of confusion than a slight turn of her head as though she viewed the yacht. "But what have you done with the rest of your people, young gentleman?" inquired the captain. "My name is Barclay—Mr. Herbert Barclay: the name of the young lady to whom I am engaged to be married," said I, significantly sending a look along the faces of the listeners, "is Miss Grace Bellassys, whose aunt, Lady Amelia Roscoe, you may probably have heard of." This, I thought, was introduction enough. My business was to assert our dignity first of all, and then as I was addressing a number of persons who were either English or Colonial, or both, the pronunciation of her ladyship's name was, I considered, a very early and essential duty. "With regard to my crew—" I continued, and I told the captain they had made up their minds to carry the vessel home. "Miss Bellassys looks very tired," exclaimed a middle-aged lady with grey hair, speaking with a gentle, concerned smile, engaging with its air of sympathetic apology, "if she will allow me to conduct her to my cabin—" "By all means, Mrs. Barstow," cried the captain. "If she has been knocking about in that bit of a craft there through the gale that's been blowing, all I can say, ladies and gentlemen, she'll have seen more tumbling and weather in forty-eight hours than you'll have any idea of though I was to keep you at sea for ten years in this ship." Mrs. Barstow, with a motherly manner, approached Grace, who bowed and thanked her, and together they walked to the companion hatch and disappeared. By this time the boat had been hoisted, and the ship was full of the animation and business of her sailors piling canvas upon her. The sudden stagnation that had fallen was now threaded by a weak draught of air out of the east where the brightness of the new weather had first shown. The compacted pall of cloud was fast breaking up, settling into large bodies of vapour, with spaces of dim blue sky between and in the south there stood a shaft of golden sunshine that flashed up a space of water at its base in splendour, though past it the sulky heaps of cloud loomed the darker for that magical and beautiful lance of radiance. Miles away in the south-west a white sail hovered, but nothing else broke the sea-line. I took all this in at a glance: also the figure of my poor, mutilated yacht heaving forlorn and naked upon the swell that still rolled heavily, as though after the savage vexing of its heart during the past hours, old ocean could not quickly draw its breath placidly. The little vessel looked but a toy from the height of the poop of the iron ship. As I surveyed her, I marvelled to think that she had successfully encountered the weather of the past two days and nights. I could see one of the men—Dick Files—steadily labouring at the pump whilst the others were busy with the tackle and gear that supported the mast. But even as I watched, the Carthusian had got way upon her, and was dwarfing yet the poor brave little Spitfire as she slided round to the government of her helm, her yards squaring, her canvas spreading, and her crew chorussing all about her decks as she went. The captain asked me many questions, most of which I answered mechanically, for my thoughts were fixed upon the little yacht, and my heart was with the poor fellows who had resolved to carry her home—but with them only! not with her. No! as I watched her rolling, and the fellow pumping, not for worlds would I have gone aboard of her again with Grace, though Caudel should have yelled out that the leak was stopped, and though a fair, bright breezy day, with promise of its quiet lasting for a week, should have opened round about us. The captain wanted to know when I had sailed, from what port I had started, where I was bound to, and the like. I kept my face with difficulty when I gave him my attention at last. It was not only his own mirth-provoking, nautical countenance; the saloon passengers could not take their eyes off me, and they bobbed and leaned forward in an eager, hearkening way to catch every syllable of my replies. Nor was this all, for below on the quarter-deck and along the waist stood the scores of steerage passengers, all straining their eyes at me. The curiosity and excitement were ridiculous. But fame is a thing very cheaply earned in these days. The captain inquired a little too curiously sometimes. So Miss Bellassys was engaged to to be married to me, hey? Was she alone with me? No relative, no maid, nobody of her own sex in attendance? To these questions the ladies listened with an odd expression on their faces. I particularly noticed one of them: she had sausage-shaped curls, lips so thin that when they were closed they formed a fine line as though produced by a single sweep of a camel's hair-brush under her nose; the pupil of one eye was considerably larger than that of the other, which gave her a very staring, knowing look on one side of her face; but there was nothing in my responses to appease hers, or the captain's, or the others' thirst for information. In fact, ever since I had resolved to quit the Spitfire for the Carthusian, I had made up my mind to keep secret the business that had brought Grace and me into this plight. The captain and the rest of them might think as they chose; Grace was not to be much hurt by their conjectures or opinions; there could be nothing to wholly occupy our thoughts whilst aboard the Carthusian, but the obligation of leaving her as speedily as might be, of reaching Penzance, and then getting married. "There can be no doubt, I hope, Captain Parsons," said I, for the second mate had given me the skipper's name, "of our promptly falling in with something homeward bound that will land Miss Bellassys and me? What the craft may prove can signify nothing—a smack would serve our purpose." "I'll signal when I have a chance," he answered, looking round the sea and then up aloft, "but it's astonishing, ladies and gentlemen," he continued, addressing the passengers, "how lonesome the ocean is, even where you look for plenty of shipping." "Not in this age of steam, I think," observed a tall, thin man mildly. "In this age of steam, sir," responded the captain. "You may not credit it, but on three occasions I have measured the two Atlantics from abreast of Ushant to abreast of the Cape of Good Hope without sighting a single ship, steam or sail." "You amaze me," said the mild, thin man. "How far are we from Penzance, captain?" I inquired. "Why," he answered, "all a hundred and fifty miles." "If that be so then," I cried, "our drift must have been that of a balloon." "Will those poor creatures ever be able to reach the English coast in that broken boat?" exclaimed one of the ladies, indicating the Spitfire that now lay dwarfed right over the stern of the ship. "If they are longshoremen—and yet I don't know," exclaimed the captain with a short laugh, "a boatman will easily handle a craft of that sort when a blue-water sailor would be all abroad." He put his hand into the skylight and lifted a telescope off its brackets, and applied it to his eye. "Still pumping," said he, talking whilst he gazed through the glass, "and they're stretching a sail along—bending it no doubt. There's plenty of mast there for cloths enough to blow them home. The pump keeps the water under—that's certain. To my mind she looks more buoyant than she was. Ladies and gentlemen, she'll do—she'll do. If I thought not—" he viewed her for a little while in silence. "Oh, yes, ladies and gentlemen, she'll do," he repeated, and then replacing the glass, exclaimed to me, "Have you lunched, Mr. Barclay?" "No, captain, I have not, neither can I say I have breakfasted." "Oh, confound it, man, you should have said so before. Step this way, sir, step this way," and he led me to the companion hatch that conducted to the saloon, pausing on the road, however, to beckon with a square forefinger to a sober, Scotch-faced personage in a monkey jacket and loose pilot trousers—the chief mate as I afterwards learnt—to whom in a wheezy undertone he addressed some instructions, which, as I gathered from one or two syllables I overheard, referred to the speaking of inward-bound ships, and to our trans-shipment. The saloon was a fine, long, handsome interior, but I preserve no more of it than a general impression of mirrors, rich panels, a short row of lamps formed of some lustrous metal, an elaborate stove aft, a piano secured to the richly-decorated shaft of the mizzenmast; a long table with fixed revolving chairs on either hand, flanked to port and starboard by a row of cabins or berths. After our experience aboard the Spitfire, I was scarcely sensible of the motions of the deck of this big ship, albeit she was rolling and curtseying as she floated, clothed to her royal yards, over the sulky undulations of the water. But I was able to gather from certain sounds which penetrated through the closed doors of the berths that some of the passengers were not yet quite well. There was nobody in the saloon save one little man with a quantity of hair down his back after the manner of poets and professors. He was seated near the main-deck entrance with a countenance of a ghastly hue. His eyes were riveted to the deck, and when the captain cheerily called to him to know how he did, he answered without moving his figure or shifting his gaze, "Ach! Gott! don't shpeak to me." At this moment a door close beside which I was standing opened and Grace came out, followed by the kind lady, Mrs. Barstow. She had removed her hat and jacket, and was sweet and fresh with the application of such toilet conveniences as her sympathetic acquaintance could provide her with. Captain Parsons stared at her and then whipped off his tall hat. "This is better than the Spitfire, Grace," said I. "Oh, yes, Herbert," she answered, sending a glance of her fine dark eyes over the saloon; "but Mrs. Barstow tells me that the ship is going to New Zealand." "So she is, so she is," cried Captain Parsons, bursting into a laugh, "and if you like, Mr. Barclay and you shall accompany us." She looked at him with a frightened girlish air. "Oh, no, Miss Bellassys," said Mrs. Barstow. "Captain Parsons is a great humorist. I have made two voyages with him, and he keeps me laughing from port to port. He will see that you get safely home, and I wish that we could count upon arriving at Otaga as speedily as you will reach England." Just then a man in a camlet jacket entered the saloon—cuddy, I believe, is the proper word for it. He was the head steward, and Captain Parsons immediately called to him. "Jenkins, here. This lady and gentleman have not breakfasted; they have been shipwrecked, and wish to lunch. You understand? And draw the cork of a quart bottle of champagne. There is no better sea-physic, Miss Bellassys. I've known what it is to be five days in <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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