The Coxswain's Bride; also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue

We have referred to an incident of the quarter-deck, but the same laws and influences prevailed in the forepart of the vessel in which our coxswain and his friend had embarked.

It was the evening of the fifth day out, and Massey, Joe Slag, the long lugubrious man, whose name was Mitford, and his pretty little lackadaisical wife, whose name was Peggy, were seated at one end of a long mess-table having supper—a meal which included tea and bread and butter, as well as salt junk, etcetera.

“You don’t seem quite to have recovered your spirits yet, Mitford,” said Massey to the long comrade. “Have a bit o’ pork? There’s nothin’ like that for givin’ heart to a man.”

“Ay, ’specially arter a bout o’ sea-sickness,” put in Slag, who was himself busily engaged with a mass of the proposed remedy. “It ’ud do yer wife good too. Try it, ma’am. You’re not half yerself yit. There’s too much green round your eyes an’ yaller about yer cheeks for a healthy young ooman.”

“Thank you, I—I’d rather not,” said poor Mrs Mitford, with a faint smile—and, really, though faint, and called forth in adverse circumstances, it was a very sweet little smile, despite the objectionable colours above referred to. “I was never a great ’and with victuals, an’ I find that the sea don’t improve appetite—though, after all, I can’t see why it should, and—”

Poor Mrs Mitford stopped abruptly, for reasons best known to herself. She was by nature rather a loquacious and, so to speak, irrelevant talker. She delivered herself in a soft, unmeaning monotone, which, like “the brook,” flowed “on for ever”—at least until some desperate listener interrupted her discourteously. In the present instance it was her own indescribable feelings which interrupted her.

“Try a bit o’ plum-duff, Mrs Mitford,” suggested Massey, with well-intentioned sincerity, holding up a lump of the viand on his fork.

“Oh! please—don’t! Some tea! Quick! I’ll go—”

And she went.

“Poor Peggy, she never could stand much rough an’ tumble,” said her husband, returning from the berth to which he had escorted his wife, and seating himself again at the table. “She’s been very bad since we left, an’ don’t seem to be much on the mend.”

He spoke as one who not only felt but required sympathy—and he got it.

“Och! niver give in,” said the assistant cook, who had overheard the remark in passing. “The ould girl’ll be all right before the end o’ this wake. It niver lasts more nor tin days at the outside. An’ the waker the patients is, the sooner they comes round; so don’t let yer sperrits down, Mr Mitford.”

“Thank ’ee, kindly, Terrence, for your encouragin’ words; but I’m doubtful. My poor Peggy is so weak and helpless!”

He sighed, shook his head as he concluded, and applied himself with such energy to the plum-duff that it was evident he expected to find refuge from his woes in solid food.

“You don’t seem to be much troubled wi’ sickness yourself,” remarked Massey, after eyeing the lugubrious man for some time in silence.

“No, I am not, which is a blessin’. I hope that Mrs Massey ain’t ill?”

“No; my Nell is never ill,” returned the coxswain, in a hearty tone. “She’d have been suppin’ along with us to-night, but she’s nursin’ that poor sick lad, Ian Stuart, that’s dyin’.”

“Is the lad really dyin’?” asked Mitford, laying down his knife and fork, and looking earnestly into his companion’s face.

“Well, it looks like it. The poor little fellow seemed to me past recoverin’ the day he came on board, and the stuffy cabin, wi’ the heavin’ o’ the ship, has bin over much for him.”

While he was speaking Nellie herself came softly to her husband’s side and sat down. Her face was very grave.

“The doctor says there’s no hope,” she said. “The poor boy may last a few days, so he tells us, but he may be taken away at any moment. Pour me out a cup o’ tea, Bob. I must go back to him immediately. His poor mother is so broken down that she’s not fit to attend to him, and the father’s o’ no use at all. He can only go about groanin’. No wonder; Ian is their only child, Bob—their first-born. I can’t bear to think of it.”

“But you’ll break down yourself, Nell, if you go nursin’ him every night, an’ all night, like this. Surely there’s some o’ the women on board that’ll be glad to lend a helpin’ hand.”

“I know one who’ll be only too happy to do that, whether she’s well or ill,” said Mitford, rising with unwonted alacrity, and hastening to his wife’s berth.

Just then the bo’s’n’s stentorian voice was heard giving the order to close reef tops’ls, and the hurried tramping of many feet on the deck overhead, coupled with one or two heavy lurches of the ship, seemed to justify the assistant cook’s remark—“Sure it’s durty weather we’re goin’ to have, annyhow.”

Story 1 – Chapter 4

The indications of bad weather which had been observed were not misleading, for it not only became what Terrence O’Connor had termed “durty,” but it went on next day to develop a regular gale, insomuch that every rag of canvas, except storm-sails, had to be taken in and the hatches battened down, thus confining the passengers to the cabins.

These passengers looked at matters from wonderfully different points of view, and felt accordingly. Surroundings had undoubtedly far greater influence on some of them than was reasonable. Of course we refer to the landsmen only. In the after-cabin, where all was light, cosy, and comfortable, and well fastened, and where a considerable degree of propriety existed, feelings were comparatively serene. Most of the ladies sought the retirement of berths, and became invisible, though not necessarily inaudible; a few, who were happily weather-proof, jammed themselves into velvety corners, held on to something fixed, and lost themselves in books. The gentlemen, linking themselves to articles of stability, did the same, or, retiring to an appropriate room, played cards and draughts and enveloped themselves in smoke. Few, if any of them, bestowed much thought on the weather. Beyond giving them, occasionally, a little involuntary exercise, it did not seriously affect them.

Very different was the state of matters in the steerage. There the difference in comfort was not proportioned to the difference in passage-money. There was no velvet, not much light, little space to move about, and nothing soft. In short, discomfort reigned, so that the unfortunate passengers could not easily read, and the falling of tin panikins and plates, the crashing of things that had broken loose, the rough exclamations of men, and the squalling of miserable children, affected the nerves of the timid to such an extent that they naturally took the most gloomy view of the situation.

Of course the mere surroundings had no influence whatever on the views held by Bob Massey and Joe Slag.

“My dear,” said the latter, in a kindly but vain endeavour to comfort Mrs Mitford, “rumpusses below ain’t got nothin’ to do wi’ rows overhead—leastways they’re only an effect, not a cause.”

“There! there’s another,” interrupted Mrs Mitford, with a little scream, as a tremendous crash of crockery burst upon her ear.

“Well, my dear,” said Slag, in a soothing, fatherly tone, “if all the crockery in the ship was to go in universal smash into the lee scuppers, it couldn’t make the wind blow harder.”

Poor Mrs Mitford failed to derive consolation from this remark. She was still sick enough to be totally and hopelessly wretched, but not sufficiently so to be indifferent to life or death. Every superlative howl of the blast she echoed with a sigh, and each excessive plunge of the ship she emphasised with a weak scream.

“I don’t know what you think,” she said, faintly, when two little boys rolled out of their berths and went yelling to leeward with a mass of miscellaneous rubbish, “but it do seem to be as if the end of the world ’ad come. Not that the sea could be the end of the world, for if it was, of course it would spill over and then we would be left dry on the bottom—or moist, if not dry. I don’t mean that, you know, but these crashes are so dreadful, an’ my poor ’ead is like to split—which the planks of this ship will do if they go on creakin’ so. I know they will, for ’uman-made things can’t—”

“You make your mind easy, my woman,” said her husband, coming forward at the moment and sitting down to comfort her. “Things are lookin’ a little better overhead, so one o’ the men told me, an’ I heard Terrence say that we’re goin’ to have lobscouse for dinner to-day, though what that may be I can’t tell—somethin’ good, I suppose.”

“Something thick, an’ luke-warm, an’ greasy, I know,” groaned Peggy, with a shudder.

There was a bad man on board the ship. There usually is a bad man on board of most ships; sometimes more than one. But this one was unusually bad, and was, unfortunately, an old acquaintance of the Mitfords. Indeed, he had been a lover of Mrs Mitford, when she was Peggy Owen, though her husband knew nothing of that. If Peggy had known that this man—Ned Jarring by name—was to be a passenger, she would have prevailed on her husband to go by another vessel; but she was not aware of it until they met in the fore-cabin the day after leaving port.

Being a dark-haired, sallow-complexioned man, he soon became known on board by the name of Black Ned. Like many bad men, Jarring was a drunkard, and, when under the influence of liquor, was apt to act incautiously as well as wickedly. On the second day of the gale he entered the fore-cabin with unsteady steps, and looked round with an air of solemn stupidity. Besides being dark and swarthy, he was big and strong, and had a good deal of the bully in his nature. Observing that Mrs Mitford was seated alone in a dark corner of the cabin with a still greenish face and an aspect of woe, he staggered towards her, and, sitting down, took her hand affectionately.

“Dear Peggy,” he began, but he got no further, for the little woman snatched her hand away, sprang up and confronted him with a look of blazing indignation. Every trace of her sickness vanished as if by magic. The greenish complexion changed to crimson, and the woebegone tones to those of firm resolution, as she exclaimed—

“Ned Jarring, if you ever again dare to take liberties with me, I’ll tell my ’usband, I will; an’ as sure as you’re a-sittin’ on that seat ’e’ll twist you up, turn you outside in, an’ fling you overboard!”

Little Mrs Mitford did not wait for a response, but, turning sharply round, left the cabin with a stride which, for a woman of her size and character, was most impressive.

Jarring gazed after her with an expression of owlish and unutterable surprise on his swarthy countenance. Then he smiled faintly at the unexpected and appalling—not to say curious—fate that awaited him; but reflecting that, although lugubrious and long, Mitford was deep-chested, broad-shouldered, and wiry, he became grave again, shook his head, and had the sense to make up his mind never again to arouse the slumbering spirit of Peggy Mitford.

It was a wild scene that presented itself to the eyes of the passengers in the Lapwing when the hatches were at last taken off, and they were permitted once more to go on deck. Grey was the prevailing colour. The great seas, which seemed unable to recover from the wild turmoil into which they had been lashed, were of a cold greenish grey, flecked and tipped with white. The sky was steely grey with clouds that verged on black; and both were so mingled together that it seemed as if the little vessel were imbedded in the very heart of a drizzling, heaving, hissing ocean.

The coxswain’s wife stood leaning on her stalwart husband’s arm, by the foremast, gazing over the side.

“It do seem more dreary than I expected,” she said. “I wouldn’t be a sailor, Bob, much as I’ve bin used to the sea, an’ like it.”

“Ah, Nell, that’s ’cause you’ve only bin used to the sea-shore. You haven’t bin long enough on blue water, lass, to know that folks’ opinions change a good deal wi’ their feelin’s. Wait till we git to the neighbour’ood o’ the line, wi’ smooth water an’ blue skies an’ sunshine, sharks, and flyin’ fish. You’ll have a different opinion then about the sea.”

“Right you are, Bob,” said Joe Slagg, coming up at that moment. “Most people change their opinions arter gittin’ to the line, specially when it comes blazin’ hot, fit to bile the sea an’ stew the ship, an’ a dead calm gits a hold of ’e an’ keeps ye swelterin’ in the doldrums for a week or two.”

“But it wasn’t that way we was lookin’ at it, Joe,” returned Nellie, with a laugh. “Bob was explainin’ to me how pleasant a change it would be after the cold grey sea an’ sky we’re havin’ just now.”

“Well, it may be so; but whatever way ye may look at it, you’ll change yer mind, more or less, when you cross the line. By the way, that minds me that some of us in the steerage are invited to cross the line to-night—the line that separates us from the cabin—to attend a lectur’ there—an’ you’ll niver guess the subjec’, Bob.”

“I know that, Joe. I never made a right guess in my life, that I knows on. Heave ahead, what is it?”