For Jacinta Part 5

This was plain enough, and Austin decided that if Jefferson meant to stay on board it was his affair, while he was far from sure that he would gain anything by attempting to dissuade him, even had there been time available. As it was, he realised that the lighter would probably go ash.o.r.e while they discussed the question, and he signed to the Spanish fireman, who started the little engine full speed ahead, and then opened the furnace door. There was a gush of flame from the funnel, and the tow-rope tightened with a bang that jerked the launch's stern under. Then, while she was held down by the wallowing lighter a big, white-topped sea burst across her forward, and for a few seconds Austin, drenched and battered by the flying spray, could see nothing at all.

When it blew astern he made out Jefferson standing knee deep in water at the lighter's helm, though there was very little else visible through the rush of white-streaked brine. Austin shouted to the fireman, who once more opened the furnace door, for that cold douche had suddenly made a different man of him.

He did, for the most part, very little on board the _Estremedura_, and took life as easily as he could, but there was another side of his nature which, though it had been little stirred as yet, came uppermost then, as it did occasionally when he brought his despatches off at night in an open roadstead through the trade-wind surf. It was also known to the _Estremedura_'s skipper that he had once swum off to the steamer from the roaring beach at Orotava when no fishermen in the little port would launch a barquillo out. Thus he felt himself in entire sympathy with Jefferson as every big comber hove the launch up and the spray lashed his tingling skin, while for five anxious minutes the issue hung in the balance. Launch and lighter went astern with the heavier seas, and barely recovered the lost ground in the smooths when a roller failed to break quite so fiercely as its predecessors.

Then the Spanish fireman either raised more steam, or the heavy weight of coal astern at last acquired momentum, for they commenced to forge ahead, the launch plunging and rolling, with red flame at her funnel, and the smoke and spray and sparks blowing aft on Austin, who stood, dripping to the skin, at the tiller. Ahead, the long seas that hove themselves up steeply in shoal water came foaming down on him, but there was a little grim smile in his eyes, and he felt his blood tingle as he watched them. When he glanced over his shoulder, which it was not advisable to do unguardedly, he could see Jefferson swung up above him on the lighter's lifted stern, and the long white smoother that ran seething up the reef.

It, however, fell further behind them, until he could put the helm over and run the lighter into smoother water behind the mole, when Jefferson flung up his arm again.

"Swing her alongside the grain boat, and then hold on a minute. I'll come ash.o.r.e with you," he said.

Austin stopped the launch and cast the tow-rope off, and the lighter, driving forward, slid in under the big grain tramp's side. A few minutes later Jefferson appeared at her gangway, and when Austin ran in jumped on board. He was a tall man, and was just then very wet, and as black as any coal heaver. This, however, rather added to the suggestion of forcefulness that usually characterised him.

"That fellow has been waiting several hours for his coal, and as I couldn't get a man worth anything on to the crane, I ran the thing myself," he said. "The way the wind was it blew the grit all over me, and I'm coming across for a wash with you. I'm 'most afraid to walk through the port as I am just now."

He laughed happily, and Austin fancied that he understood him, since he felt that if he had held Miss Gascoyne's promise he would not have liked to run any risk of meeting her in the state in which Jefferson was just then. As it happened, it did not occur to either of them that they had done anything unusual, which had, perhaps, its significance.

Austin took him on board the _Estremedura_, and when he had removed most of the coal-dust from his person they sat down with a bottle of thin wine before them in the sobrecargo's room. Jefferson was lean in face and person, though he was largely made, and had dark eyes that could smile and yet retain a certain intentness and gravity. His voice had a little ring in it, and, big as he was, he was seldom altogether still.

When he filled his gla.s.s his long fingers tightened on it curiously.

"I owe you a little for pulling us off just now, but that's by no means all," he said. "Miss Gascoyne told me how you stopped the boat that night three weeks ago. Now----"

Austin laughed. "We'll take it item by item. When you get started you're just a little overwhelming. In the first place, what are you coaling grain tramps for when somebody has left you a fortune?"

"It's not quite that," said Jefferson. "Forty thousand dollars. They're busy at the coal wharf, and wanted me to stay on until the month was up, any way."

"I don't think you owe them very much," said Austin. "In fact, I'm not sure that if I'd been you I'd have saved that coal for them; but we'll get on. I want to congratulate you on another thing, and I really think you are a lucky man."

The smile sank out of Jefferson's eyes. "I'm quite sure of it," he said gravely. "I get wondering sometimes how she ever came to listen to such a man as I am, who isn't fit to look at her."

Austin made a little gesture of sympathy. This was not what he would have said himself, but he was an insular Englishman, and the reticence which usually characterises the species is less highly thought of across the Atlantic. The average American is more or less addicted to saying just what he means, which is, after all, usually a convenience to everybody. Before he could speak Jefferson went on:

"I've been wanting to thank you for stopping that steamer," he said.

"It's the best turn anybody ever did me, and I'm not going to forget it.

Now----"

"If you're pleased, I am," said Austin, who did not care for protestations of grat.i.tude, a trifle hastily. "Any way, you have got her, and though it's not my business, the question is what you're going to do. Eight thousand pounds isn't very much, after all, and English girls are apt to want a good deal, you know."

Jefferson laughed. "Forty thousand dollars is quite a nice little sum to start with; but I've got to double it before I'm married."

"There are people who would spend most of their life doing it," said Austin, reflectively. "How long do you propose to allow yourself?"

"Six months," and there was a snap in Jefferson's voice and eyes. "If I haven't got eighty thousand dollars in that time I'm going to have no use for them."

"When you come to think of it, that isn't very long to make forty thousand dollars in," said Austin.

He said nothing further, for he had met other Americans in his time, and knew the cheerful optimism that not infrequently characterises them.

Jefferson looked at him steadily with the little glow still in his eyes.

"You stopped the _Estremedura_, and, in one respect, you're not quite the same as most Englishmen. They're hide-bound. It takes a month to find out what they're thinking, and then, quite often, it isn't worth while. Any way, I'm going to talk. I feel I've got to. Wouldn't you consider Miss Gascoyne was worth taking a big risk for?"

"Yes," said Austin, remembering what he had seen in the girl's face. "I should almost think she was."

"You would almost think!" and Jefferson gazed at him a moment in astonishment. "Well, I guess you were made that way, and you can't help it. Now, I'm open to tell anybody who cares to listen that that girl was a revelation to me. She's good all through, there's not a thought in her that isn't clean and wholesome. After all, that's what a man wants to fall back upon. Then she's dainty, clever, and refined, with sweetness and graciousness just oozing out of her. It's all round her like an atmosphere."

Austin was slightly amused, though he would not for his life have shown it. It occurred to him that an excess of the qualities his companion admired in Miss Gascoyne might prove monotonous, especially if they were, as in her case, a little too obtrusive. He also fancied that this was the first time anybody had called her clever. Still, Jefferson's supreme belief in the woman he loved appealed to him in spite of its somewhat too vehement expression, and he reflected that there was probably some truth in Jacinta's observation that the woman whose lover credited her with all the graces might, at least, acquire some of them.

It seemed that a simple and somewhat narrow-minded English girl, without imagination, such as Miss Gascoyne was in reality, might still hear what Jacinta called the celestial music, and, listening, become transformed.

After all, it was not mere pa.s.sion which vibrated in Jefferson's voice and had shone in Muriel Gascoyne's eyes, and Austin vaguely realised that the faith that can believe in the apparently impossible and the charity that sees no shortcomings are not altogether of this earth.

Then he brushed these thoughts aside and turned to his companion with a little smile.

"How did you ever come to be here, Jefferson?" he asked, irrelevantly.

"It's rather a long way from the land of progress and liberty."

Jefferson laughed in a somewhat curious fas.h.i.+on. "Well," he said, "others have asked me, but I'll tell you, and I've told Miss Gascoyne. I had a good education, and I'm thankful for it now. There is money in the family, but it was born in most of us to go to sea. I went because I had to, and it made trouble. The man who had the money had plotted out quite a different course for me. Still, I did well enough until the night the _Sachem_--there are several of them, but I guess you know the one I mean--went down. I was mate, but it wasn't in my watch the Dutchman struck her."

"Ah!" said Austin softly, "that explains a good deal! It wasn't exactly a pleasant story."

He eat looking at his companion with grave sympathy as the details of a certain grim tragedy in which the brutally handled crew had turned upon their persecutors when the s.h.i.+p was sinking under them came back to him.

Knowing tolerably well what usually happens when official enquiry follows upon a disaster at sea, he had a suspicion that the truth had never become altogether apparent, though the affair had made a sensation two or three years earlier. Still, while Jefferson had not mentioned his part in it, he had already exonerated him.

"It was so unpleasant that I couldn't find a s.h.i.+pping company on our side who had any use for the _Sachem_'s mate," he said, and his voice sank a little. "Of course, it never all came out, but there were more than two of the men who went down that night who weren't drowned. Well, what could you expect of a man with a pistol when the one friend he had in that floating h.e.l.l dropped at his feet with his head adzed open. That left me and Nolan aft. He was a brute--a murdering, pitiless devil; but there were he and I with our backs to the jigger-mast, and a few of the rest left who meant that we should never get into the quarter-boat."

Austin was a trifle startled. "You told Miss Gascoyne that?" he said.

"How did she take it?"

Jefferson made a curious little gesture. "Of course," he said simply. "I had to. She believed in me; but do you think I'm going to tell--you--how it hurt her?"

It was borne in upon Austin that, after all, he understood very little about women. A few days earlier it would have seemed impossible to him that a girl with Muriel Gascoyne's straitened views should ever have linked her life with one who had played a leading part in that revolting tragedy. Now, however, it was evident that there was very little she would not do for the man who loved her.

"I'm sorry! You'll excuse it," he said. "Still, that scarcely explains how you came to Las Palmas."

"I came as deck-hand on board a barque bringing tomato boxes over. They were busy at the coaling wharf just then, and I got put on. You know the rest of it. I was left forty thousand dollars."

"You haven't told me yet how you're going to turn them into eighty thousand."

"I'm coming to it. You know we coaled the _c.u.mbria_ before she went out to West Africa. A nearly new 1,500-ton tramp she was, light draught at that, or she'd never have gone where she did. You could put her down at 15,000 sterling. She went up into the half-charted creeks behind the shoals and islands south of Senegal, and was lost there. Among other things, it was a new gum she went for. It appears the n.i.g.g.e.rs find gums worth up to 5 the hundredweight in the bush behind that country. A Frenchman chartered her, but he's dead now, as is almost everybody connected with the _c.u.mbria_. They've fevers that will wipe you out in a week or two yonder--more fever, in fact, than anywhere else in Africa.

Well, as everybody knows, they got oil and sundries and a little gum, and went down with fever while they crawled about those creeks loading her. She got hard in the mud up one of them, and half of the boys were buried before they pulled her out at all, and then she hit something that started a plate or two in her. They couldn't keep the water down, and they rammed her into a mangrove forest to save her. More of them died there, and the salvage expedition lost three or four men before they turned up their contract."

"That," said Austin, "is what might be termed the official version."

Jefferson nodded. "What everybody doesn't know is that the skipper played the Frenchman a crooked game," he said. "There was more gum put into her than was ever shown in her papers; while they had got at the trade gin before she went ash.o.r.e. In fact, I have a notion that it wasn't very unlike the _Sachem_ affair. I can't quite figure how they came to start those plates in the soft mud of a mangrove creek. Any way, the carpenter, who died there, was a countryman of mine. You may remember I did a few things for him, and the man was grateful. Well, the result is I know there's a good deal more than 20,000 sterling in the _c.u.mbria_."

Austin surmised that this was possible. It was not, he knew, seafarers of unexceptional character who usually ventured into the still little known creeks of Western Africa, which the coast mailboats' skippers left alone. He was also aware that more or less responsible white men are apt to go a trifle off their balance and give their pa.s.sions free rein when under the influence of cheap spirits in that land of pestilence.

"Well?" he said.

"I've bought her, as she lies, for 6,000."

Austin gasped. "You will probably die off in two or three weeks after you put your foot in her."