My Danish Sweetheart Volume III Part 8

'A fine time to tell you such a thing! Does that sort of sea-captain wait for a gale of wind to propose to a girl?' I exclaimed, with a sudden irritation of jealousy tingling through me, and I looked at her closely and suspiciously.

'I wanted to be angry, but could not,' said she. 'I hate the man, yet I could not be angry with him. He spoke of his daughter--he did not talk through his nose--he did not cant at all. Is "cant" the right word? I felt sorry; I had not the heart to answer him in rudeness, and to have risen and left him whilst he was speaking would have been rudeness.'

I made a slight effort to disengage my arm from her clasp.

'He told me--no doubt you heard him,' said I--'he told me he believed there would be no necessity to keep me long. He is a clever man--a shrewd man. Well, after this I shall believe in all the proverbs about women.'

'What do you mean?' she exclaimed in a startled voice, letting fall her hands and staring at me.

'What do _you_ mean?'

'Why, that I am sorry for the man, and hate him.'

'Oh! if you keep sorry long you will soon cease to hate him.'

'No, no!' she cried with a little pa.s.sion, making as if to clasp my arm afresh, and then shrinking. 'I could not help his coming here and speaking to me.'

'That is true.'

'Why are you angry?'

Her gaze pleaded, her lips twitched, even as she looked at me her blue eyes filled. Her grieved, pretty face, her wistful, tender, tearful face, must have transformed my temper into impa.s.sioned pity, into self-reproach, into keen self-resentment, even had there been solid ground for vexation. I took her hand and lifted it to my lips.

'Forgive me; we have been much together. Our a.s.sociation and your father's dying words make me think of you as mine until--until--the long and short of it is, Helga, I am jealous!'

An expression of delight entered and vanished from her face. She stood thoughtfully looking down on the deck. Just then Punmeamootty entered to prepare the table for supper, and Helga again went to the cabin window and stood looking out, lightly, with unconscious ease and grace, swaying to the stormy heave of the deck, with her hands clasped behind her in a posture of meditation.

CHAPTER IV.

A NIGHT OF HORROR.

The gale broke on the morning of Thursday, November 2. The compacted heaven of cloud scattered in swelling cream-coloured ma.s.ses; the sun shone out of the wide lakes of moist blue, and the sea turned from the cold and sickly gray of the stormy hours into a rich sapphire, with a high swell and a plentiful chasing of foaming billows. By four o'clock in the afternoon the ocean had smoothed down into a tropical expanse of quietly rising and falling waters, with the hot sun sliding westwards and the barque stemming the sea afresh under all cloths which could be piled upon her, the wind a small breeze, about west, and the sea-line a flawless girdle.

The evening that followed was one of quiet beauty. There was a young moon overhead, with power enough to drop a little trickling of silver into the dark sea under her; the clouds had vanished, and the stars shone brightly with a very abundant showering of meteoric lights above the trucks of the silent swaying masts.

As we paced the deck the Captain joined us. Short of going to our respective cabins, there was no means of getting rid of him; so we continued to patrol the planks, with him at Helga's side, talking, talking--oh, Heaven! how he talked! His manner was distressingly caressing. Helga kept hold of my arm, and meanwhile I, true to that posture I had maintained for the past three days, listened or sent my thoughts elsewhere, rarely speaking. In the course of his ceaseless chatter he struck upon the subject of his crew and their victuals, and told us he was sorry that we were not present when Nakier and two other coloured men came aft into the cuddy after he had taken sights and gone below.

'I am certain,' he exclaimed, smiting his leg, 'that I have made them reflective! I believe I could not mistake. Nakier in particular listened with attention, and looked at his mates with an expression as though conviction were being slowly borne in upon him.'

I p.r.i.c.ked up my ears at this, for here was a matter that had been causing me some anxious thought, and I broke away from my sullen, resentful behaviour to question him.

'What brought the men aft?'

'The same tiresome story,' he answered, speaking loudly, and seemingly forgetful of or indifferent to the pair of yellow ears which, I might warrant him, were thirstily listening at the helm. 'They ask for beef, for beef, for nothing but beef, and I say yes--beef one day, pork another; beef for your bodies and pork for your souls. I shall conquer them; and what a triumph it will be! Though I should make no further progress with them, yet I could never feel too grateful for a decisive victory over a gross imbecile superst.i.tion that, like a shutter, though it be one of many, helps to keep out the light.'

He then went on to tell us what he had said, how he had reasoned, and I shall not soon forget the unctuous, self-satisfied chuckle which broke from the folds of his throat as he paused before asking Helga what she thought of _that_ as an example of pure logic. I listened, wondering that a man who could talk as he did could be crazy enough to attempt so perilous an experiment as the attempting to win his crew over to his own views of religion by as dangerous an insult as his fanatical mind could have lighted upon. It was the more incomprehensible to me in that the fellow had started upon his crude missionary scheme when there were but two whites in the s.h.i.+p to eleven believers in the Prophet.

I waited until his having to fetch breath enabled me to put in a word. I then briefly and quietly related what had pa.s.sed in the forecastle as described to me by Jacob Minnikin.

'And what then, Mr. Tregarthen?' said he, and I seemed to catch a sneer threading, so to speak, his bland utterance: the moon gave but little light, as I have said, and I could not see his face. 'When a man starts on the work of converting, he must not be afraid.'

'Your men have knives--they are devils, so I have heard, when aroused--_you_ may not be afraid, but you have no right to provoke peril for us,' I said.

'The c.o.xswain of a lifeboat should have a stout heart,' he exclaimed.

'Miss Nielsen, do not be alarmed by your courageous friend's apprehension. My duty is exceedingly simple. I must do what is right.

Right is divinely protected;' and I saw by the pose of his head that he cast his eyes up at the sky.

I nudged Helga as a hint not to speak, just breathlessly whispering, 'He is not to be reasoned with.'

It was a little before ten o'clock that night when the girl retired to her cabin. The Captain, addressing her in a simpering, loverlike voice, had importuned her to change her cabin. She needed to grow fretful before her determined refusals silenced him. He entered his berth when she had gone, and I took my pipe to enjoy a quiet smoke on deck. After the uproar of the past three days, the serenity of the night was exquisitely soothing. The moon shone in a curl of silver; the canvas soared in pallid visible s.p.a.ces starwards; there was a pleasant rippling sound of gently stirred waters alongside, and the soft westerly night-wind fanned the cheek with the warmth of an infant's breath. The decks ran darkling forwards; the shadow of the courses flung a dye that was deeper than the gloom of the hour betwixt the rails, and nothing stirred save the low-lying stars which slipped up and down past the forecastle rail under the crescent of the foresail as the barque curtseyed.

Nevertheless, though I could not see the men, I heard a delicate sound of voices proceeding from the block of darkness where the forecastle front lay. Mr. Jones had charge of the watch, and, on my stepping aft to the wheel, I found Jacob grasping the spokes, having relieved the helm at four bells--ten o'clock. He was not to be accosted while on that duty; and my dislike of the mate had not been lessened by the few words which had pa.s.sed between us since the day when the Cape steamer had gone by, and by my observation of his fawning behaviour to the Captain. I briefly exclaimed that it was a fine night, received some careless, drowsy answer from him, and, with pipe betwixt my lips, lounged lonely on the lee side of the deck, often overhanging the rail, and viewing the sea-glow as it crept by, with my mind full of Helga, of my home, of our experiences so far, and of what might lie before us.

I was startled out of a fit of musing by the forecastle bell ringing five. The clear, keen chimes floated like an echo from the sea, and I caught a faint reverberation of them in the hollow canvas. It was half-past ten. I knocked the ashes out of my pipe, and, going on to the quarter-deck, dropped through the hatch.

The lantern swinging in the corridor betwixt the berths was burning. I lightly called to Helga to know if all was well with her, but she was silent, and, as I might suppose, asleep. I put out the light, as my custom now was, and, partially unclothing myself in the dark, got into my bunk and lay for a little watching the dance of a phantom star or two in the dim black round of the scuttle close against my head, sleepily wondering how long this sort of life was to continue, what time was to pa.s.s, and how much was to happen before I should be restored to the comfort of my own snug bedroom at home; and thus musing, too drowsy perhaps for melancholy, I fell asleep.

I was awakened by someone beating heavily upon the bulkhead of the next-door cabin.

'Mr. Tregarthen! Mr. Tregarthen!' roared a voice; then thump! thump!

went the blows of a ma.s.sive fist or handspike. 'For Gor' a'mighty's sake wake up and turn out!--there's murder a-doing! Which is your cabin?'

I recognised the voice of Abraham, disguised as it was by horror and by the panting of his breath.

The exclamation, _There's murder a-doing!_ collected my wits in a flash, and I was wide awake and conscious of the man's meaning ere he had fairly delivered himself of his cry.

'I am here--I will be with you!' I shouted, and, without pausing further to attire myself, dropped from my bunk and made with outstretched hands for the door, which I felt for and opened.

It was pitch dark in this pa.s.sage betwixt the cabins, without even the dim gleam the porthole in the berth offered to the eye to rest on.

'Where are you, Abraham?' I cried.

'Here, sir!' he exclaimed, almost in my ear, and, lifting my hand, I touched him.

'The crew's up!' he cried. 'They've killed the mate, and by this time, I allow, the Capt'n's done for.'

'Where's Jacob?'

'Gor' He only knows, sir!'

'Are you armed? Do you grip anything?'

'Nothen, nothen. I run without stopping to arm myself. I'll tell ye about it--but it's awful to be a-talking in this here blackness with murder happening close by.'