The Seafarers

'Oh, how cruel to kick that poor little half-drowned thing!' Bella exclaimed reproachfully; 'it never meant to hurt you, only it was frightened. Poor little thing!' she said again, and, even as she spoke, she knelt down on the deck and stroked the wet, striped ball that lay there. And it seemed as if her gentleness had some power to soothe whatever ferocious instincts-still dormant and undeveloped at present-were smouldering within it. For, instead of now using its paws as weapons with which to strike out and attack anything near it, it played with her as a kitten plays with a ball, tapping at her hand and trying to catch it, and pushing and kicking against her with its hind legs.

'You see,' she said, looking up at Charke with a glance in which she could not disguise her dislike of his violence, 'you see, at present, at least, it does not try to harm those who treat it well.'

'Yes,' he said, 'I see.' Then he added, half-bitterly, half-morosely: 'No one doubts your powers of fascination, Miss Waldron.'

CHAPTER VIII

'HIS NAME IS-WHAT?'

The saving of this creature, which Bella elected to call Bengalee, because she said she was sure it came from Bengal, and also because she had once sung a song having that name, was followed by no other events of any importance whatever. Nor need their stay at the Cape be dwelt upon, because it consisted simply of various visits which were paid in the outskirts by Mr. and Mrs. Pooley, accompanied by Bella; by the unloading of a considerable portion of the cargo of the Emperor of the Moon, and by the refilling of the hold with other goods saleable in India.

And, now, they were once more on their way towards the Equator, going due north instead of due south, as when they had last approached it, and with a cool southern breeze driving the Emperor along under full sail. Yet, so gentle was this breeze that, even if there had been any who were not sailors in the ship-as Bella, as well as Mrs. Pooley, might now well be considered, after the length of voyage she had already gone through, added to a few extra days and nights of turbulence and storm-scarcely would they have felt any inconvenience from the motion. Thus, therefore, with occasionally a dropping of the wind which reduced their speed a few knots, and, sometimes, with a total drop in it, so that they did not progress a knot an hour, while the ship swung slowly round and round the compass, they found themselves at the time which is about to be described in about Latitude 45.10 S., and Longitude 30.50 E., or, as near as may be, about 250 miles to the S.W. of Mauritius.

Wherefore, since the Emperor of the Moon has arrived thus far in the Indian Ocean there has now to be set down a series of strange events which befell her, of so remarkable and peculiar a nature that one wonders that those events have never been chronicled before. For, far different from the ordinary stress and disasters which overtake ships at sea were those which have to be described; far different from those which the recorders of maritime calamities are in the habit of chronicling either in romance or dry-as-dust descriptions of facts.

All of which the writer now proceeds to relate, beginning with so strange a coincidence as, perhaps, none but those readers who, in their voyage through life, have recognised that truth is more strange than the wildest fiction, will be willing to allow within the bounds of likelihood. However, to make a beginning-since the coincidence is true-the Emperor of the Moon was in those latitudes above described when, it being a bright hot morning with the sea already gleaming like molten brass, with the pitch between the planks already of the consistency of putty, and with the brasswork in such a state of heat that it was unsafe to touch it unless one wanted to leave the skin of his palms and fingers behind them, the look-out on the fo'c's'le head yelled: 'Sail, right ahead!' Now, since nothing of this kind, neither steamer nor sailing vessel, had been seen since they had northed out of the west-wind drift, and since, also, the liners were rarely found outside of the Equatorial current, this cry was sufficient to fill every one on board with a considerable amount of interest and excitement.

'Whereaway?' called out Charke, who was on the poop at this moment, the captain, his wife, and Bella being below at breakfast; and, ere the man could repeat that the sail was right ahead and about five miles off, all those others there had come on deck.

'How pretty it looks, shining in the sun!' the girl exclaimed, as she regarded it through a pair of marine glasses which her uncle had placed at her disposal; 'and how the sail glistens! It looks like a star.'

'Humph!' said the captain, as he gazed through his binocular. 'Like a star! True enough, so it does. And,' he said, addressing the two mates who were standing near him, 'we have seen such stars hereabouts before, eh? Do you think,' he went on, addressing Charke, lowering his voice a little, 'it is one of those?'

'Don't know,' Charke said, working his own glass a good deal. 'Can't see how it can be; too far to the east. Bussorah, Muscat, Ras-el-Had, Mohamrah, Oman-that's their mark. What should they be doing here?'

'All the same,' exclaimed Pooley, 'it's the rig, and the true shape, that of a Jargonelle pear cut in half. I do believe that's what it is. They might have been blown out of their course, you know, or chased by one of Her Majesty's ships. What do you think?'

'I think,' said Charke, who always spoke of everything connected with his calling in the most unemotional manner possible, 'I think we shall know when we come up to her, as we must do in about half an hour. While,' he continued, with a subdued tone in his voice, while his eye glinted sideways towards where Bella stood, 'we are not naval officers but only humble merchant seamen. There's no prize-money for us, therefore it is not our business.'

Bella had, of course, been listening attentively to all that had been said since she had come on deck after running lightly up the poop ladder, and now, hearing these words about 'naval officers' and 'prize-money,' her interest became more intense than before.

'Oh, uncle!' she exclaimed, putting her hand on his sleeve, 'what does it all mean? Naval officers and prize-money! That's not one of Her Majesty's ships?'

'No, my dear,' the captain replied, 'that is not one of Her Majesty's ships; but I shall be precious surprised if she doesn't turn out to be one of the very craft that Her Majesty's ships are always on the look-out for hereabouts, only rather closer in towards the African coast than this. She has all the build of an Arab slave-dhow.'

'Ay,' exclaimed Charke, who was still using his glass freely, from where he stood behind them. 'Ay, and something more than the build, too. If I'm not mistaken, her hatches have open gratings. What do you say, Fagg?' turning to his junior.

'Seems so, sir,' said that young officer, who never wasted more words than necessary, 'though I'm not quite sure.'

'I am,' replied Charke. 'I can see the grating slits perfectly as we get nearer.'

'What does that mean?' asked Bella, to whom this conversation conveyed nothing.

'It means,' said Pooley, 'that there is live stock below those gratings. Black cattle, as they used to be called on the West Coast. Ordinary hatches, to simply cover up cargo, are not made to let the air in. Cargo can do without breathing.'

'How awful!' Bella exclaimed, while through her mind there ran recollections of what she had heard or read casually of the slave trade in the old days, and also of the horrors of the North-West passage. 'How awful!'

'Bad enough,' replied Pooley, 'though not as bad as the old West African days, nor as shocking as you might think. The slave trade is a valuable one in this ocean, and those who are carried in the dhows are well enough fed. Rice, Indian corn, maize, and cassava is given them for food, and they have mats and matting galore to sleep on. Persian merchants and Arab gentlemen don't buy starved scarecrows for their domestic servants.'

'Whatever she is, and whatever her cargo is, there's something wrong with her,' the chief mate suddenly exclaimed. 'She's off the wind now, and the fellow who was at the helm has left it. It is abandoned. By Jove!' he exclaimed, 'he is lying wriggling by it. What on earth's the matter?'

'And,' added the second mate, 'there's a negro woman waving a red scarf. Something's wrong there, no doubt.'

'We shall be up to them in ten minutes,' the master said, all bustle and excitement now. 'Let go the foretack. Stand by to lower the starboard-quarter boat'; while, as he spoke, the men of the watch who had been leaning on the fife-rail rushed to the falls to be ready to let the boat sink to the water when the proper moment came. To Bella this seemed the most exciting moment of her life! There, in front of her, was one of those vessels, the name of which, or class of which, was almost unknown to her, except that, from odds and ends of conversation with her lover, she had gathered that these were the things in the chasing of which part of his existence might be passed until they met once more at Bombay. Here, on this glistening, glassy sea, the dhow lay-her one mast raking towards her bow instead of her stern, as is the case with most vessels of the Western world, and her long white triangle of a sail unfilled and flapping listlessly. A dhow-perhaps a slaver! as her uncle and the mate had said-a dhow in sore distress with, writhing by her helm, the man who had lately been steering her, and, over her bow, that negro woman waving frantically the red scarf. Excitement there was, indeed, in all this; excitement which caused Bella, even as she eagerly watched the vessel they were approaching, to wonder how the striking up of the band at a ball, or the ring of the prompter's bell ere the curtain rose on a drama that all London was flocking to see, could have ever stirred her pulses. What were they, those trivialities, to the smiling, glistening face of this Eastern sea-to the horror and the cruelties that this now tranquil ocean's bosom had enfolded through the ages.

Still the negress waved, not recognising, perhaps, in her blind, besotted, dumb, animal-like ignorance that help was at hand, and still, through their glasses, they could see that he who had steered the dhow now lay motionless. Then, at her ear, as the Emperor came within six cable-lengths of the dhow, her uncle gave a few rapid orders, the second mate, accompanied by the boat's crew, jumped into the quarter-boat-the man at the wheel luffed until the vessel had not a motion in her. Swiftly the boat was lowered, the rudder and thole pins shipped, and she was on her way to the dhow.

'What do you make of it?' the master roared to Fagg ten minutes later, as, by then, the Emperor of the Moon had come closer to the dhow through the motion of the swell. 'What?'

'I don't know what to make of it, sir,' the second mate called back. 'The man who was steering is, I think, dead. He does not move, and there is a white film over his eyes. The woman who waved the handkerchief seems well, but I cannot understand what she means. She does nothing but howl and point below.'

'Are the hatches grated?'

'Yes, sir, and there are four negroes beneath them. It is a slave dhow for certain. The negroes are shackled and handcuffed.'

'Have you searched further?'

'I am going to do so now. The ship is settling, I think. There is a kind of poop superstructure forming cabins.'

'Search at once; then bring all alive on board us.'

In a moment Mr. Fagg had disappeared into what he had termed a 'kind of poop superstructure,' and, while he was in it, all on board the Emperor were occupied in speculating on what could have brought a slaver so far to the East and out of her ordinary course, and also in wondering what the mate would find during his further search.

But that wonderment was soon to be resolved, for, ere Mr. Fagg had been out of their sight five minutes, he rushed back from the superstructure to the deck, and bawled through his hands:

'There is a young naval officer lying in the poop cabin, and he is slightly wounded. His name is-is-'

'What?' roared Pooley, astonished at the mate's hesitation.

'It is marked on the rim of his cap-inside. It is-I-I am afraid it is Miss Waldron's fiancé. The-the-name is Bampfyld.'

CHAPTER IX

Come over, come home
Through the salt sea foam.

Never, perhaps, on all that old highway of the waters, that silent road along which so many had steered their course to fabled Ormuz and to Ind, nor amidst fierce sea-fights 'twixt Arab and Persian, or Arab and European in later centuries, nor in the howl of storm when the waters closed around the shipwrecked and doomed, had there arisen a more piercing shriek than that which now issued from Bella Waldron's blanched lips.

'My God!' she screamed, repeating the second mate's words. '"The name is Bampfyld!" Oh, it's Gilbert-Gilbert! There is no other in the Navy List. Let me go to him, uncle!'

'No, no,' the master said, while good Mrs. Pooley put her arms round the girl as she stood there by the poop-rails and endeavoured to calm and soothe her. 'No, no, Bella; they will bring him on board directly, then,'-and in his desire to ease the girl's heart he raised the ghost of a smile to his lips-'then you shall nurse him till he is well. Yet,' he muttered to Charke, as he walked over to where the first mate stood, 'yet, how on earth does he find himself in that infernal dhow!'

'Heaven knows,' the other answered. 'But, perhaps, 'tis not so strange, after all. There may have been a fight between his ship and the slaver-though there's not much fight in them when they get a sight of the British Flag! – or he may have been sent to board her and got cut down, or half-a-hundred things. All of which,' he added, with his now usual cynicism, 'are equally likely or unlikely. Anyhow, he is here-or will be in a few moments-and we shall have him for a passenger to Bombay. Your niece is in luck, sir,' and he turned on his heel and went down the ladder to the deck to see to the raising of the boat, which was now making its way back to the ship.

To Stephen Charke, still loving the girl as madly as he did, still raging inwardly at the knowledge that every knot which the ship made was bringing her nearer to the man who, as he considered, had torn her from him, this incident seemed the last and most crushing blow of all. God knows what hopes the mate had cherished in his bosom since first he had learnt that Bella was to be a passenger in her uncle's ship for about four months; what ideas might have been revolving in his mind as to whether, in those four months, something extraordinary, something almost unheard of-not to be dreamt of nor foreseen-might happen to give him one more chance of winning her. He was a romantically-minded man, a man with so rich an imagination that, to him, there sometimes came ideas that few are ever burdened with. And, in that full and teeming imagination, there had been pictured to him visions of the Emperor of the Moon being wrecked and Bella and he alone spared-he, of course, saving her at the peril of his own life and winning her away from her more aristocratic lover by so doing. Or, he dreamt of that lover being himself wrecked and lost, or pierced by an Arab spear in some affray, or shot in a hand-to-hand fight with a particularly bold slaver (since he knew well enough that the ships of the Bombay station were often enough down here) or-or-or he cherished any mad vision that first rose to his brain.

And now-now-this very man, this successful rival, this aristocratic naval officer, with his high birth and future peerage, was actually being brought aboard the ship where the woman was whom they both loved-brought on board 'slightly wounded,' and his own last chance thus gone. Gone for ever now! Perhaps, therefore, it was no wonder he should bite his lip and smother unholy murmurs deep down in his throat; perhaps, too, he merits compassion. He had loved this girl fondly since first he set eyes on her, and once, at one time, he thought he had almost won her. Then this other had come in his way, had swept him out of Bella's heart, or the approach to it, and his chance was over. Yet, once again, they had met through an almost unheard of, and scarcely to be imagined, opportunity, and-lo! here was his successful rival once more at hand to thwart him. It was hard on him, or, as he muttered to himself, 'devilish rough.'

The quarter-boat was coming back to the ship now, Fagg steering her, while, between him and the stroke oar, there lay the body of the young naval officer, clad in his 'whites.' And again as Bella, madly whispering 'Gilbert, Gilbert, my darling,' stood by the head of the accommodation ladder-which had been lowered while the boat was gone to the dhow-the men brought her lover gently up and laid him on the deck under the awning.