My Danish Sweetheart Volume II Part 3

'We han't asked your name yet, sir,' said Abraham, who was at the tiller again, while the other two were busy at the stove getting the breakfast.

'Hugh Tregarthen,' said I.

'Thank ye,' said he; 'and the lady?'

'Helga Nielsen.'

He nodded approvingly, as though pleased with the sound of the name.

'She's a nice little gal, upon my word!' said he; 'too good to belong to any other country nor Britain. Them Danes gets hold of the English tongue wonderful fast. Take a Swede or a Dutchman: it's _yaw yaw_ with them to the end of their time. But I've met Danes as ye wouldn't know from Deal men, so fust-cla.s.s was their speech.' He slowly carried his chin to his shoulder, to take a view of the weather astern, and then, fastening his eyes with 'longsh.o.r.e leisureliness upon my face--and I now noticed for the first time that he slightly squinted--he said, 'It's a good job that we fell in with 'ee, Mr. Tregarthen; for if so be as you two had kept all on was.h.i.+ng about on that there raft till noon to-day--and I give ye till noon--ye'd be wanting no man's help nor prayers afterwards. It's agoing to blow.'

'Yes,' said I, 'there's wind enough in that sky there; in fact it's freshening a bit already, isn't it?' For I now perceived the keener feathering and sharper play upon the waters, and the harder and broader racing of the yeast that was pouring away from either quarter of the lugger. 'There's been a s.h.i.+ft of the wind, too, I think,' I added, trying to catch a sight of the dusky interior of a little compa.s.s-box that stood on the seat close against Abraham.

'Yes, it's drawed norradly,' he answered. 'I ain't sorry, for it's like justifying of me for not setting ye ash.o.r.e. I _did_ think, when the young lady asked me to steer for England, that I wasn't acting the part of a humane man in refusing of her, and for keeping all on stretching the distance between you and your home. But I reckoned upon the wind drawing ahead for a homeward-bound course, and now it _has_; so that if we was to keep you a week and get ye aboard a steamer at the end of it you'd stand to get home sooner than if we was to down h.e.l.lum now and start aratching for your coast.'

'We owe our lives to you,' said I cordially. 'Not likely that we could wish to inconvenience you by causing your lugger to swerve by so much as a foot from her course.'

CHAPTER II.

HEADING SOUTH.

Just then Helga rose through the hatch. I caught an expression of admiration in Abraham's face at her floating, graceful manner of pa.s.sing through the little aperture.

'She might ha' been born and bred in a lugger,' said he to me in a hoa.r.s.e whisper. 'Whoy, with the werry choicest and elegantest o' females it 'ud be no more 'n an awkward scramble to squeeze through that hole.

Has she wings to her feet? I didn't see her use her elbows, did you?

And, my precious limbs! how easily she takes them thwarts!' by which he meant her manner of pa.s.sing over the seats of the boat.

Perhaps now I could find heart to admire the girl's figure. Certainly I had had but small spirit for observation of that kind aboard the raft, and THERE only had her shape been revealed to me; for in the barque no hint was conveyed by her boyish attire of the charms it rudely and heavily concealed. The sparkling brine with which she had refreshed her face had put something of life into her pale cheeks, and there was a faint bloom in her complexion that was slightly deepened by a delicate glow as she smiled in response to my smile, and took a seat at my side.

'Them rashers smells first-cla.s.s,' said Abraham, with a hungry snuffle.

'It must be prime ham as 'll steal to the nose, while cooking, dead in the vind's eye.'

'Before breakfast is ready,' said I, 'I'll imitate Miss Nielsen's example;' and with that I went forward, drew a bucket of water, dropped into the forepeak, and enjoyed the most refres.h.i.+ng wash that I can call to mind. One needs to be s.h.i.+pwrecked to appreciate these seeming trifles. For my own part, I could scarcely realize that, saving my oilskin-coat, I had not removed a st.i.tch of my clothes since I had run from my mother's house to the lifeboat. I came into the light that streamed into the little hatch, and took a view of myself in the looking-gla.s.s, and was surprised to find how trifling were the marks I bore of the severe, I may truly say the desperate, experiences I had pa.s.sed through. My eyes retained their brightness, my cheeks their colour. I was bearded, and therefore able to emerge triumphantly from a prolonged pa.s.sage of marine disaster without requiring to use a razor.

It is the stubbled chin that completes the gauntness of the s.h.i.+pwrecked countenance.

I have a lively recollection of that breakfast--our first meal aboard the _Early Morn_. Rashers of ham hissed in the frying-pan: each of us grasped a thick china mug full of black coffee; the bag of biscuits we had brought with us from the barque lay yawning at our feet, and everyone helped himself. The boatmen chawed away solemnly, as though they were masticating quids of tobacco, each man falling to with a huge clasp-knife that doubtless communicated a distinct flavour of tarred hemp to whatever the blade came in contact with. Indeed, they cut up their victuals as they might cut up tobacco: working at it with extended arms and backward-leaning posture, putting bits of the food together as though to fit their mouths, and then whipping the morsel on the tips of their knives through their leathery lips with a slow chaw-chaw of their under-jaws that made one think of a cow busy with the cud. Their leisurely behaviour carried me in imagination to the English seaside; for these were the sort of men who, swift as might be their movements in an hour of necessity, were the most loafing of loungers in times of idleness--men who could not stand upright, who polished the hardest granite by constant friction with their fearnaught trousers, but who were yet the fittest central objects imaginable for that prospect of golden sand, calm blue sea, marble-white pier and terraces of cliff lifting their summits of sloping green high into the sweet clear atmosphere which one has in mind when one thinks of the holiday coast of the old home.

The man named Thomas, having cooked the breakfast, had taken the helm, but the obligation of steering did not interfere with his eating. In fact, I observed that he steered with the small of his back, helping the helm now and again by a slight touch of the tiller with his elbow, while he fell to on the plate upon his knee. For my part, I was as hungry as a wolf, and fed heartily, as the old voyagers would have said. Helga, too, did very well; indeed, her grief had half starved her; and mighty glad was I to see this fair and dainty little heart of oak making a meal, for it was a good a.s.surance in its way that she was fighting with her sorrow and was beginning to look at the future without the bitter sadness that was in her gaze yesterday.

But while we sat eating and chatting, the wind continued to slowly freshen; the foresheet had tautened to the rigidity of iron, and now and again the lugger made a plunge that would send a bright ma.s.s of white water rolling away from either bow. The wind, however, was almost over the stern, and we bowled along before it on a level keel, save when some scend of sea, lifting her under the quarter, threw the little fabric along with a slanting mast and a sharper drum-like rolling out of the heart of the distended canvas as the lugger recovered herself with a saucy swing to starboard.

'Who says we ain't going to reach Australey?' exclaimed Abraham, pulling out a short pipe and filling it, with a slow, satisfied grin at the yeasty dazzle over the lee-rail, to which the eye, fastened upon it, was stooped at times so close that the brain seemed to dance to the wild and brilliant gyrations of the milky race.

'A strange fancy,' said I, 'for a man to buy a Deal lugger for Sydney Bay.'

'If it warn't for strange fancies,' said Thomas, with a sour glance, 'it 'ud be a poor look-out for the likes of such as me.'

'Tell ye what I'm agoing to miss in this here ramble,' exclaimed Jacob.

'That's beer, mates!'

'Beer 'll come the sweeter for the want of it,' said Abraham, with a sympathetic face. 'Still, I must say, when a man feels down there's nothin' like a point o' beer.'

'What's drunk in your country, mum?' said Jacob.

'Everything that you drink in England,' Helga answered.

'But I allow,' grunted Thomas, fixing a morose eye upon the horizon, 'that the Scandinavians, as the Danes and likevise the Svedes, along with other nations, incloodin' of the Roosians, is called, ben't so particular in the matter o' drink as the English, to say nothen o' Deal men. Whoy,' he added, with a voice of contempt, 'they're often content to do without it. Capt'ns and owners know that. The Scandinavian fancies is so cheap that you may fill your fo'k'sle with twenty sailors on tarms that'ud starve six Englishmen.'

'The Danes are good sailors,' said Helga, looking at him, 'and they are the better sailors because they are a sober people.'

'I've got nothen to say agin 'em as sailors,' retorted Thomas; 'but they s.h.i.+ps too cheap, mum--they s.h.i.+ps too cheap.'

'They will take what an Englishman will take!' exclaimed Helga, with a little sparkle in her eye.

'So they will, mum--so they will!' exclaimed Abraham soothingly. 'The Dane's a fust-cla.s.s sailor and a temperate man, and when Tommy there'll give me an opportunity of saying as much for _him_ I'll proclaim it.'

I was standing up, peering round the sea, for perhaps the tenth time that morning, when, happening to have my eyes directed astern, as the lugger ran in one of her graceful, buoyant, soaring launches to the summit of a little surge--for the freshening of the wind had already set the water running in heaps, noticeable even now for weight and velocity aboard that open craft of eighteen tons, though from the height of a big s.h.i.+p the seas would have been no more than a pleasant wrinkling of the northerly swell--I say, happening to look astern at that moment, I caught sight of a flake of white poised starlike over the rim of the ocean. The lugger sank, then rose again, and again I spied that bland moonlike point of canvas.

'A sail!' said I; 'but unhappily in chase of us. Always, in such times as these, whatever shows shows at the wrong end.'

Abraham stood up to look, saw the object, and seated himself in silence.

'How are you heading the lugger?' cried I.

'Sou'-sou'-west,' he answered.

'What course have you determined on?' said I, anxious to gather from the character of his navigation what might be our chances of falling in with the homeward-bounders.

'Why, keep on heading as we go,' he answered, 'till we strike the north-east trades, which are to be met with a-blowing at about two-and-twenty degrees no'the; then bring the _Airly Marn_ to about south. When the hequator's crossed,' continued he, smoking, with his head well sunk between his coat-collars, 'we strikes off to the west'ard again for the hisland of Trinidad--not to soight it; but when we gits into its lat.i.tude we starboards for the south-east trades, and goes away for the Cape o' Good Hope. Are ye anything of a navigator yourself?'

'No,' I answered, which was true enough, though I was not so wholly ignorant of the art of conducting a s.h.i.+p from one place to another, as not to listen with the utmost degree of astonishment to this simple boatman's programme of the voyage to Australia.

He whipped open the same locker from which he had taken the rough toilet articles, and extracted a little blue-backed track-chart of the world, which he opened and laid across his knees.

'I suppose ye can read, sir?' said he, not at all designing to be offensive, as was readily gatherable from his countenance, merely putting the question, as I easily saw, out of his experience of the culture of Deal beach.

Helga laughed.

'Yes, I can read a little,' said I.

'Well, then,' said he, laying a twisted stump of thumb upon the chart, 'here's the whole blooming woyage wrote down by Capt'n Israel Brown, of the _Turk's Head_, a wessel that was in the Downs when my mates and me agreed for to undertake this job. He took me into his cabin, and pulling out this here chart he marked these lines as you see down upon it.

"There, Abraham!" he says, says he; "you steer according to these here directions, and your lugger 'll hit Sydney Bay like threading a needle."'

I looked at the chart, and discovered that the course marked upon it would carry the lugger to the westward of Madeira. It was not suggested by the indications that any port was to be touched at, or, indeed, any land to be made until Table Bay was reached. The two men, Jacob and Tommy, were eyeing me eagerly, as though thirsting for an argument. This determined me not to hazard any criticism. I merely said: