Chapter III: Part 3

“When the ship was five days out from the Thames an extraordinary incident occurred. A young man named William Peploe, a stowaway, whilst hidden in the lazarette of the vessel, saw a man enter the place in which he was hiding and attach a slow match and an infernal machine to a barrel of gunpowder stored amidships of the lazarette, and, from what we can gather, _on top of the cargo_! When the man left the hold, young Peploe heroically withdrew the match from the powder and carried the machine on deck. The youth described the man, who proved to be a second-class passenger, who had embarked under the name of John Howland. When the villain’s cabin was entered he was found lying in his bunk dead, with a severe wound in his throat inflicted by his own hand. No reason is assigned for this dastardly attempt to destroy a valuable ship and cargo and a company of souls numbering two hundred and ten, though there seems little reason to doubt that the man was mad. It is certain that but for the fortunate circumstance of young Peploe lying hidden in the lazarette the ship’s stern or side would have been blown out, and she must have gone down like a stone, carrying all hands with her. On the passengers in due course being apprised of their narrow escape, a purse of a hundred guineas was subscribed and presented by his Excellency to young Peploe. The captain granted him a free passage, and provided him with a comfortable outfit from the ship’s slop-chest. It is also understood that some situation under Government has been promised to Mr. William Peploe in consideration of the extraordinary service rendered on this memorable occasion.”

My next quotation is from the pages of the _Nautical Magazine_, dated two years subsequent to the publication of the above in the Australian paper:—

“A bottle was picked up in March last upon the beach of Terceira, one of the Azores, containing a paper bearing a narrative which, unless it be a hoax, seems to throw some light on the mysterious affair of the _Huntress_, for the particulars of which we refer our readers to our volume of last year. The paper, as transmitted by the British Consul, is as follows:—

“Ship _Huntress_. At sea, such and such a date, 1853.

“I, who am known on board this vessel as John Howland, am
the writer of this document. Twenty years ago I was unjustly
sentenced to a term of transportation across seas, and my
treatment at Norfolk Island was such that I vowed by the
God who made me to be revenged on the man who, acting on the
representation of his creatures, had caused me to be sent from
Hobart Town to that hellish penal settlement. That man, with
his wife and children, attended by a suite, is a passenger in
this ship, and I have concerted my plan to dispatch him and
those who may be dear to him to that Devil to whom the wretch
consigned my soul when he ordered me to be sent as a further
punishment to Norfolk Island. The destruction of this ship is
ensured. Nothing can avert it. A barrel of gunpowder was stowed
by well-bribed hands in the East India Docks in the lazarette,
to which part of the hold access is easy by means of a small
trap-door. I am writing this three-quarters of an hour before
I proceed to the execution of my scheme, and the realization
of my dream of vengeance. When I have completed this document
I will place it in a bottle, which I shall carefully cork
and seal and cast into the sea through my cabin porthole. I
am sorry for the many who must suffer because of the sins of
one; but that one must perish, and immediately, in which hope,
craving that, when this paper is found, it may be transmitted
to the authorities at home, so that the fate of my bitter enemy
may be known, I subscribe myself,

“ISRAEL THOMAS WILKINSON,
“Ex-Convict and Ticket-of-Leave Man.”

_A MEMORY OF THE PACIFIC._

It was in December, 1858, that the ship _Walter Hood_ shifted her berth to the wool-sheds at Sydney to load a cargo for London. I was chief officer of the vessel; my name, let me say here, is Adam Chichester.

I was standing on the wharf near the ship, waiting for the arrival of some waggons of wool, when the master of a German vessel that lay just astern of us came up to me, and said—

“Dot vhas a bad shob last night.”

“What was?” said I.

“Haf not you heard of der brudal murder in Shorge Street?”

“I have not seen a morning paper.”

“She vhas dot small chop vhere dey sells grocery und odder tings on der left going oop. She vhas a Meester Abney, dey say. Der murderer vhas a beas’ly rogue called Murray; she helped in der shop; she hod been a soldier. Dis morning poor Abney vhas found dead in her bedt mit her troat cut und her skull sphlit.”

“Have they got the murderer?”

“No. Dot vhas der pity. He make clean off mit sixty pound.”

Throughout the day people coming and going talked of this murder. The yarn ran thus:—Mrs. Abney occupied a room next to the murdered man’s; the son, Thomas, a youth of about eighteen, used an apartment at the back of the shop; the servant lay in the attics; the assistant, Murray, lodged out. Neither Mrs. Abney, her son, nor the servant had heard a sound in the night; Murray had broken into the house, passed into Abney’s room, and murdered him; then from a safe, whose key Abney kept under his pillow, he had taken about sixty sovereigns; all so noiselessly, the footfalls of a cat are not stiller. The family slept on, and the murder was not discovered till half-past seven in the morning.

It was known by these damning tokens that Murray was the murderer: first, the knife Abney’s throat had been cut with was Murray’s; after using it he had dropped it behind some paper in the bedroom grate. Next, when he had shifted himself at his lodgings he had buried the clothes in the back garden; a dog belonging to the woman of the house was observed to run into the garden with its nose stooped as though on a trail, and, stopping where the bundle was buried, it began to scratch and howl. The woman called a neighbour; they went to the place with a spade and found Murray’s clothes, covered with bloodstains.

The man himself was off, and the people who from time to time during the day gave me news of this thing told me he was still at large, that the police were in hot pursuit, and there was no hope for him.

That evening I strolled up George Street for a walk, and saw a great crowd at the Abneys’ shop. I stopped to stare with the rest of them. They call this sort of curiosity vulgar and debasing. But crime puts the significance of human emotion, misery, and remorse into stocks and stones. Human passion gives the vitality of romance, tragic or comic, to the most sordid and contemptible aspects of the commonplace. I had passed that grocer’s shop twenty times, and often looked at the house. I looked at it again now, and found the matter-of-fact structure as strange, grotesque, repulsive as a nightmare.

The days rolled on; Murray remained at large. His escape, or at least his marvellous manner of hiding, was the source of more excitement than the murder itself had proved. Most people supposed he had got clean away and was lurking among the islands, unless he was halfway on the road to Europe or America; others, that he had struck inland and had perished in the wilds.

But by degrees of course the matter went out of one’s head; out of mine certainly. Before the ship sailed I could walk up George Street and look at the shop and think of other things than the murder. Yet the memory of it was freshened a day or two before the tug got hold of us by the commander of the ship, Captain Charles Lytton, telling me that amongst those who had taken berths in the steerage were the widow and son of the murdered man.

“I’m almost sorry they chose this ship,” said he, with an uneasy half-laugh. “For my part I’d as lief sail on a Friday as carry anything with such a shadow upon it as murder.”

“They’re long in catching Murray,” said I.

“It’s no fault of the police,” he answered. “We’re not in England here. A brisk walk takes a man into desolation. When you talk of catching a murderer, you think of beadles and fire-engines, and the electric telegraph. But the black man is still in this country; there’s never a village pump betwixt Wooloomooloo and the Antarctic circle. Small wonder your bush-ranger flourishes.”

We sailed on a Monday in the beginning of February, having been belated by the breakdown of some transport machinery in the interior. There went about a dozen people to the steerage company, and we carried ten passengers in the saloon. The _Walter Hood_ was a smart and beautiful clipper of a vanished type; elliptical stern, a swelling lift of head with an exquisite entry of cut-water, coppered to the bends, a green hull, yards as square as a frigate’s, with a noble breast of topsail and royal yards hoisting close under the trucks, man-of-war style. On a wind, one point free, she could have given her tow-rope to any Blackwall liner then afloat and not known there was anything in her wake.

When we were clear of the Heads, I came aft after seeing to the ground tackle, and in the waist saw a woman in deep mourning, looking over the rail at the receding land. A young fellow stood beside her. He too was in black. I cannot recall a finer specimen of a young man than that youth. His height was about six feet. He held himself erect as a soldier. His breadth of shoulder warranted in him the hurricane lungs of a boatswain. He was looking at the land, and his face was hard with a fixed and dark expression of grief.

The third mate was near. I whispered to him to say if those two were the Abneys. He answered they were. When some time later on I had leisure to look about me, I observed that the widow of the murdered man and her son held aloof from their fellow-passengers down on the main-deck. She always appeared with a veil on. She and the youth would get together in some corner or recess, and there sit, talking low. The steerage folks treated them with a sort of commiserative respect, as though affliction had dignified the pair. The steward told me he had picked up that, after the murder of Abney, the widow had sold off the contents of the shop and her furniture; she was going home to live with her sister, the wife of a tradesman at Stepney. He told me that the son often spoke of his father’s murder.

“His notion is,” said the steward, “that Murray’s out of the colony, and’s to be found in England. That’s his ’ope. He’s a bit crazed, I think, with some queer dream of meeting of him, and talks, with his eyes shining, of a day of reckoning. Otherwise he’d have stayed in Sydney, where he’s got friends, and where his father’s murder was likely to have improved his prospects by bringing him pity and business.”

When the Australian coast was out of sight, the wind chopped from the westward into the south, and blew a wonderful sailing breeze, bowling a wide heave of sea from horizon to horizon in lines of milky ridges and soft, dark blue valleys, freckled as with melting snow, and along this splendid foaming surface rushed the ship with the westering sunlight red as blood in every lifting flash of her wet sheathing. So through the night; the white water full of fire poured away on either hand the thunderous stem; the purely-shining stars reeled above our phantom heights of sail faint as steam.

At ten a corner of crimson moon rose over our bows, to be eclipsed for awhile by the shadowy square of a ship’s canvas right ahead; but before the moon had brightened into silver we had the stranger abeam of us, and were passing her as though she were at anchor—a lubberly, blubberly whaler, square-ended, with stump topgallant-masts—a splashing grease-box gamely tumbling in our wake with a convulsive sawing and shearing of her masts and yardarms, as though, sentient but drunken too, the lonely fabric sought to foul the stars with her trucks, and drag the stellar system out of gear.

So through next day, and a whole week of days and nights following; then the breeze scanted one afternoon, and at sundown it was a glassy calm, with a languid pulse of swell out of the south-east, and a sky of red gold, shaded with violet cloud, brighter eastwards when the sun was set than astern where the light had been.

The middle watch was mine that night. I turned out with a yawn at midnight, and going on deck found the reflection of the moon trembling with the brushing of a delicate warm catspaw of wind; the sails were asleep, and the ship was wrinkling onwards at two knots. The moon was over our port main-topsail yardarm, and being now hard upon her full, and hanging in a perfectly cloudless sky, she filled the night with a fine white glory till the atmosphere looked to brim to the very stars with her light; the Southern Cross itself in the south shone faint in that spacious firmament of moonlight.

I never remember the like of the silence that was upon that sea; the sense of the solitude of the prodigious distances worked in one like a spirit, subduing the heart with a perception of some mysterious inaudible _hush_! floating to and meeting _in_ the ship out of every remote pale ocean recess. I had used the sea for years, and knew what it was to lie motionless under the Line for three weeks, stirless as though the keel had been bedded in a sheet-flat surface of ice or glass; but never before had the mystery, the wonder, the awe which dwell like sensations of the soul itself in any vast scene of ocean night that is silent as death, and white as death too with overflowing moonlight, affected and governed me as the beauties and sublime silence of this midnight did.

The second mate went below, and I paced the deck alone. Saving the fellow at the helm, I seemed to be the only man in the ship. Not a figure was visible. But then I very well knew that to my call the deck would be instantly clamorous and alive with running shapes of seamen.

After I had walked a little while, I crossed to the port side where the flood of moonshine lay shivering upon the ocean, and looked at the bright white rim of the sea under the moon, thinking I saw a sail there. It was then I heard a faint cry; it sounded like a halloaing out upon the water on the port bow. I strained my ears, staring ahead with intensity. Then, hearing nothing, I supposed the sound that had been like a human voice hailing was some creaking or chafing noise aloft, and I was about to resume my walk when I heard it again, this time a distinct, melancholy cry.

“Did you hear that, sir?” cried the fellow at the wheel.

I answered “Yes,” and sung out for some hands to get upon the forecastle and report anything in sight. The halloaing was repeated; in a few minutes a man forward hailed the poop and told me there was a boat or something black two points on the port bow; on which I shifted the helm for the object, which the night-glass speedily resolved into the proportions of a small open boat, with a man standing up in her.

By this time the captain, who had been aroused by our voices, was on deck. We floated slowly down upon the little boat, and the captain hailed to know if the man had strength to scramble aboard alone.

“Yes, sir,” was the answer.

“Then look out for a line.”

The boat came under the bow; a rope’s end was thrown and caught. The man languidly climbed into the fore-channels, omitting to secure the boat, which drove past and was already in our wake whilst the fellow was crawling over the side. Some of our seamen helped him over the rail, and he then came aft, walking very slowly, with an occasional reel in his gait, as though drunk or excessively weak.

He mounted the poop ladder with the assistance of a seaman. The moonlight was so bright it was almost the same as seeing things by day. He was a short, powerfully built man, habited in the Pacific beach-comber’s garb of flannel shirt and dungaree breeches, without a hat or shoes; his hair was long and wild, his beard ragged; he was about thirty years of age, with a hawksbill nose, and large protruding eyes, hollow-cheeked, and he was of the colour of a corpse as he faced the moon.

He begged for a drink and for something to eat, and food and a glass of rum and water were given to him before he was questioned.

He then told us he had belonged to the Colonial schooner _Cordelia_ that had been wrecked five days before on a reef, how far distant from the present situation of our ship he did not know. The master and Kanaka crew left the wreck in what he called the long-boat. He said he was asleep when the schooner grounded. He did not apparently awaken until some time after the disaster; when he came on deck he found the schooner hard and fast and deserted. A small boat was swinging in davits; he lowered her and left the wreck, unable to bring away anything to eat or drink with him, as the hold was awash and the vessel quickly going to pieces and floating off in staves.

He delivered this yarn in a feeble voice, but fluently. Undoubtedly he had suffered; but somehow, as I listened, I could not satisfy myself that what had befallen him had happened just as he stated.

He asked what ship ours was, and looked round quickly when he was told she was the _Walter Hood_ from Sydney bound to London. The captain asked him what his rating had been aboard the schooner; he answered, “Able seaman.” He was then sent forward into the forecastle.

I went below at four, and was again on deck at eight, and learned that the man we had rescued was too ill to “turn to,” as we call it. The ship’s doctor told me he was suffering from the effects of privation and exposure, but that he was a hearty man, and would be fit for work in a day or two. He had told the doctor his name was Jonathan Love, and that the _Cordelia_ belonged to Hobart Town, at which place he had joined her. The doctor said to me he did not like his looks.

“I make every allowance,” he went on, “for hairiness and colour, and for the expression which the sufferings a man endures in a dry, starving, open boat at sea will stamp upon his face, sometimes lastingly. There’s an evil memory in the eyes of that chap. He glances at you as though he saw something _beyond_.”

“Men of a sweet and angelic expression of countenance are rarely met with in these seas,” said I.

“Likely as not he will prove an escaped convict,” said the doctor.

Three days passed, and Love still kept his hammock. But now the doctor reported him well, and the captain sent orders to the boatswain to turn the man to and find out what he was fit for. This happened during a forenoon watch which was mine. The day had broken in splendour. Masses of white cloud were rolling their stately bulk, prismatic as oyster-shells, into the north-east, and the blue in the breaks of them was of the heavenly dye of the Pacific. The ship was curtsying forwards under breathing topsails and studding-sails, and the cuddy breakfast being ended, all the passengers were on deck.

I stood at the head of the starboard poop ladder, watching the steerage passengers on the main deck. I took particular notice, I recollect, on this occasion, of the Abneys, widow and son, as they sat on the coaming of the main-hatch, the youth reading aloud to his mother. It was the contrast, I suppose, of the heavy crape and thick veil of the woman with the light tropic garments of the rest of the people which invited my eyes to the couple. I found my mind recalling as best my memory could the particulars of the horrible crime the widow’s sombre clothes perpetuated.

Then it was, and whilst I was recreating the picture of the shop in George Street, that I observed the young fellow lift his gaze from the page it had been fastened to, violently start, then leap to his feet with a sudden shriek. He was looking at the man we had rescued; _he_ stood in the waist, trousers upturned, arms bared, posture as erect as a soldier’s; a formidable iron figure of a fellow of medium height, ragged with hair about the head and face.

“Mother,” yelled the young fellow almost in the instant of his first shriek, whilst the rescued man turned to look at him. “Father’s murderer!—James Murray!—There he is!”

“Not by the son—not by the son!” shouted Murray, holding out his arms as the other rushed towards him. “Not by _you_! He’s got his father’s looks! Any man else—but——”

Before the young fellow could grasp him, Murray, in a single leap, swift and agile as a goat’s, had gained the fore-rigging, and was halfway up the shrouds, the young fellow after him.

“Not you!” roared the murderer, “not with your father’s face on you! S’elp me God, it _shan’t_ be, then!” and, rounding to the sea, he put his hands together and shot overboard, brushing the outstretched hand of his pursuer as he flashed past him.

“Pick us up! He must hang for it. Drowning’s too easy! He murdered my father!” and thus shouting the lad sprang into the water.

Such a scene of confusion as now followed defies my pen. The ceaseless screaming of the poor widow complicated the uproar. I bawled to the man at the wheel to put the helm down, then for hands to lay aft to clear away and lower a boat. All our passengers were from Sydney; most of the crew had shipped at that port; every one there had heard of the murder of Mr. Abney; and the effect of the discovery that we had fallen in with the murderer who had so long and successfully eluded justice, that he had been on board the ship three days, that he was yonder floating on our quarter, with the murdered man’s son making for him with bold furious sweeps of his arm—was electrical! Women shrieked and men roared; overhead the sails flapped as the ship came to the wind, and there was the further noise of the heavy tread of seamen, the flinging down of ropes, my own and the captain’s sharp commands.

When I had time to look, I beheld a death-struggle in the sea some quarter of a mile distant. They had grappled. God knows what intention was in the young fellow’s mind; it may be he hoped to keep the murderer afloat till the boat reached them. They churned up the foam as though it was white water there boiling on some fang of rock.

The moment the boat put off, an awful silence fell upon the ship.

“Pull, men, pull!” the captain shouted, and the brine flew in sheets from the oars as the little fabric sprang forward. But though the crew with the second mate in the stern-sheets toiled like demons, they were too late. The boat was within three of her own lengths of the spot, when the two men disappeared. We watched breathless, with a very madness and anguish of expectation, for a sight of the head of one or the other of them; but idly: and after the boat had hung some three-quarters of an hour about the place where they had vanished, with the second mate standing up in her, eagerly looking around, she was recalled, hoisted, and we proceeded on our voyage.

“_SO UNNECESSARY!_”

In 1851 (he began—and who it was that began will quickly appear) I was in command of a small but well-known East Indiaman. She was loading for Bombay in the West India Docks in the month of August, and on returning home one afternoon I found a letter from an old friend whom I had not set eyes on for above three years. His name was Mills—Captain Francis Mills.

He had just heard (he wrote) that I was in command of the _Hecla_, and that she was to sail for Bombay in the middle of September. He wanted to send his daughter to India in charge of a trustworthy friend. Would I dine with him and talk the matter over?

I was then living in Shadwell, and Mills hailed from the other end of London. However, I promised to dine with him on the following Sunday, and with the help of the Blackwall railway and omnibuses I kept my word.

Mills was about sixty years old, a white-haired, red-faced man; he had used the sea for above thirty years, had built, owned, and commanded ships, and was now moored in a plain, comfortable house out of Westbourne Grove. His wife had long been dead. He had one child, a daughter, to whom I had supposed him so deeply attached, that I was surprised on reading his letter to find him willing to part with her. I recollected her as a pretty girl; but after three years of ocean and travel one’s memory of a person grows dim. Miss Minnie Mills was not at home when I arrived. The old skipper and I found many things to talk about before we came to the point; by-and-by he said—

“My daughter—do you remember her, Cleaver?”

“I do.”

“She is engaged to be married. She got in tow with a parson two years ago. He was home from India, and we met him at the house of a clergyman whose church we attend. He’s chaplain at Junglepore, in a corner of the Punjaub, and is now ready to marry her. He’s come into a trifle of money, and I want to send her out to him.”

“I wonder you can part with her.”

“Why, yes, and so do I wonder. But I’m getting on in years. I wish to see her settled with some one to look after her before my life-lines are unrove. She has no mother. Then, again, I don’t mind owning she’s a bit uneasy, and she makes me so too; hankers a trifle too much after pleasure; wants to go to the theatre when there’s nobody to take her; pines for a few friends when I don’t feel well. She’s young, and her animal spirits run high, and custom, I dare say, is beginning to sicken the sympathy in her,” said he, looking at his left hand, which was rugged with gout, every finger with a “list to port.” “Parting with her will be like parting with half my heart; but it’s for her good, and the man she’s going to is as worthy, sober, straight-headed and pious a person as the most anxious parent could wish to see his daughter in charge of.”

“You want to send her out by the _Hecla_?”

“I want to send her out with you.”

“I suppose you know I’m a bachelor?” said I.

“Pah!” he exclaimed, grinning. “An old ape hath an old eye. You are to windward now, Cleaver. Keep so, my lad, keep so.”

“I was never commissioned in this way before,” said I; “but I shall be happy to oblige you in anything. If your daughter goes as passenger in my ship, she shan’t lack care and kindness. No man better than you knows a skipper’s duties. A captain’s eyes aren’t like a cod’s. He can’t see round corners without a shift of nose—scarcely more than straight ahead, mostly. But I’ll do my best, and that best shall be a pleasure to me.”

We shook hands. Soon after this Miss Minnie Mills came into the room. I stood up and bowed to as handsome a young creature as ever flashed an eye at a man. Indeed, the instant impression of her beauty was disheartening; it flung a sudden weight into my obligation, and I bowed a little nervously over the hand I held. At seventeen she had been pretty merely, slight in form, reserved in manner; now she was a woman, very handsomely clothed with her sex’s charms. Her face was full of life; vivacity and spirit were in every turn and move of her. She had dark brown eyes, deep, bland, and eloquent with light; her hair was a dark red, like bronze, and she had plenty of it; her complexion was of a charming soft whiteness, tinged with colour, as though either cheek reflected the shadow of a rose; and my bachelor eyes found a particular beauty in a very delicate spangling of golden freckles—they gave a summer sunny look to her beauty, ripening it till somehow you thought of orchards, and a prospect of cornfields reddened with poppies.

At dinner our talk was mainly of India and the voyage to it, of Junglepore and the duties of the Reverend Joseph Moxon. Miss Minnie did not flush, nor did her eyes sparkle, nor did she manifest any particular emotion of any sort when we talked of India and Mr. Moxon. I thought she tried to divert the conversation from those topics: she asked me what theatres I had been to since my arrival in England; if I did not love dancing; for her part she adored it, she said—dancing and music. Old Captain Mills stuck stoutly in his talk to India and Moxon. When I asked Miss Minnie how she liked the notion of a residence in India, she pouted her lips kissingly, and glanced at her father, but not wistfully.

“You’ll get plenty of dancing out in India,” said I. “At most of the stations a man, I understand, has little more to do than cut capers.”

“Moxon won’t have it,” said Captain Mills.

“He shan’t prevent me from enjoying myself!” exclaimed the girl, with a note of mutiny.

Captain Mills, with one eye closed, viewed me steadfastly with the other over the top of the wine-glass he poised.

It was arranged that he should bring his daughter to the ship on the following Tuesday, to look at the vessel and choose a cabin. I turned the fancy of her marriage over in my head from time to time till she came to the ship with her father, wondering that the old skipper did not see what would be plain to everybody: I mean that he was sending the girl out to be married to a man she had no liking for, who did not dance and would not allow his wife to dance; who did not sing, and possibly objected to profane music; who, as my imagination figured, and as, indeed, I had gathered from what Mills had let fall, was just a plain, homely clergyman of decided views, without title to a bride of beauty and gaiety. His choice would have been well enough in a captain of Dragoons; in a parson it was highly improper. I suppose Mills counted upon association doing the work of sentiment. It might end in the girl making a devoted wife, and in the clergyman looking coldly upon her. I had sailed with some romantic commodities in my time, and had lived to see more than one surprising, unexpected issue.

Father and daughter came to the ship, and I was on board when they arrived. The _Hecla_ was a comfortable, handsomely equipped vessel. She carried a cuddy, or saloon, with sleeping-berths on either hand; the furniture and fittings were of the old-world sort; strips of mirror panelled the bulkheads; the shaft of mizzen-mast was hand-painted; a pianoforte was secured to the back of it; the skylights were large and handsome.

I had supposed that the girl would take some interest in, or show some pleasure at, the sights about her. She glanced languidly, and exhibited a spiritlessness of manner, as though the thought of leaving her father was beginning to sit very heavily upon her heart.

I observed, however, that, whilst she barely had eyes for the ship, she did not neglect to look at the chief mate, Mr. Aiken, who stood at the main-hatch superintending some work that was going on. He was a good-looking man, and it was therefore intelligible that the girl should notice him. He was a smart officer, and understood his duty, and continued to shout orders and sing down instructions to the fellows in the hold, insensible of our presence. Aiken was about thirty years of age; his face was coloured by weather into the manly hue of the ocean calling; he had white teeth, a finely chiselled profile, an arch, intelligent, dark grey eye. Captain Mills looked at him whilst we stood on the quarter-deck after coming out of the cuddy, but seemed more struck by the smartness of his demeanour and general air than by the beauty of his face. The old salt was full of the ship, and could think of little else. All sorts of memories crowded upon him now that he was in the docks.

“I wouldn’t go to it again,” he exclaimed in a broken voice; “yet I love the life—I love the life!”

Miss Minnie chose a berth on the port side. I asked if she meant to bring a maid with her.

“No,” says Captain Mills. “She can do without a maid. What scope of purse, Cleaver, do you suppose I ride to?”

“If I can do without a maid on shore,” said Miss Minnie, “I can do without one at sea.”

A note of complaint ran through her sentences, as though she had a mind to make a trouble of things.

“A maid,” said Captain Mills, “will be sea-sick till you’re up with the Cape, and idle and useless and carrying on with the steward for the rest of the time till you go ashore, and then she’ll leave you to get married.”

As we went to the gangway the mate made a step to let us pass. Miss Minnie looked at him again, and went over the side holding her father’s arm with a sudden life in her movements, as though the sight of a handsome man had worked up the whole spirit of the coquette in her.

I felt rather sorry for the Reverend Joseph Moxon as I followed the couple on to the quay, hugely admiring the fine floating grace of the girl’s figure, the sparkle of her dark eye as she turned her head to look at the ship, the rich tinge her hair took from the sun. In fact, I seemed to find an image of the Reverend Joseph Moxon in old Mills’ square, lurching figure alongside the sweet shape of his daughter; and _that_ set me thinking of well-bred, jingling, handsome young officers at Moxon’s station, where life would provide plenty of leisure for looking and for sighing.

We towed down to Gravesend on a wet morning. Nature is incapable of a gloomier exhibition of wretchedness than the scene she will paint you of the Isle of Dogs and Bugsby’s Beach and the yellow stretch of water past Woolwich on a wet day. We had convict hulks moored in the river in those times, and they fitted the dark weeping weather as though they were creations of the spirit of the stream in its sulkiest and most depraved temper of invention. Their influence, too, as a spectacle was a sickness to the soul of the outward-bound, whilst the decks streamed and the scuppers gushed and the rigging howled to the whipping of the wet blast, and the greasy water washed into the wake in a sort of oily ironic chuckling, as though the filthy god of the flood was in tow, and laughing under the ship’s counter at the general misery aboard.

We moored to a buoy off Gravesend in the afternoon, and next morning, whilst it was still raining, the passengers arrived. Amongst the first to mount the gangway ladder were Captain Mills and his daughter. I received them and took them into the cuddy, and did my best to cheer up the old man; but to no purpose. He broke down when the three of us were by ourselves, and sobbed in a strange, dry-eyed, most affecting manner, often turning to his daughter and bringing her to his heart and blessing her in tones which I confess made my own vision dim. She was pale with weeping.

She cried out once when he turned to fondle her—

“Father, I don’t want to go! I don’t love him enough to leave you. Let me remain with you; we will return home together. It is not too late. Captain Cleaver will send my baggage ashore.”

This, I think, served to rally the old chap somewhat. He pulled his faculties together, and in a trembling voice bade his daughter remember that the man she was going to loved her, and was worthy to be loved in return. He himself was getting old, he said, and his closing days would be miserable if he believed he should die and leave her without a protector. A year is quickly lived through: she would soon be coming on a visit to England; or perhaps—who could tell?—he might himself go out the next voyage in this very identical ship, with his friend Cleaver, if he then commanded her.

When he was gone I called to the stewardess and bade her see to Miss Mills’ comfort in every direction of the cabin life. The rest of the cuddy passengers arrived quickly from Gravesend. I forget how many they were in all. I believe that every cabin was occupied. The people were of the usual sort in those days of the voyage to India by way of the Cape: a colonel and his wife, the colonel a black-faced man, with gleaming eyes that followed you to the extremities of their sockets; the wife a vast, shapeless bulk of a woman, her head covered by a wig of scarlet curls and her fingers with flashing rings, sheathing them to the first joints; several military officers of various ages; a parson; two merchants of Bombay; five or six ladies, and as many children.

We met with heavy weather down Channel. In this time I saw nothing of Miss Mills, though I was constant in my inquiries after her. She was not very ill, the stewardess told me. She ate and drank, but she chose to keep her cabin. One morning, when the ship was flapping sluggishly over a wide heave of swell, clothed to the trucks in misty sunshine, which poured like pale steam into the recesses of the ocean, the girl came on deck. She was charmingly attired (I thought); her dark red hair glowed like bronze under the proudly feathered hat. Her complexion was raised; her eyes shone; the Channel dusting had done her good, and I told her so, looking with helpless admiration into her beautiful face as I gave her my arm for a turn.

After this she was punctual at table and constantly on deck. I then considered it fortunate for the Rev. Joseph Moxon that our military passengers should be, without exception, married men; the two or three who were going out alone were either leaving or joining their wives: hence the attention the girl received was without significance. They hung about her; they ran on errands; they were full of business when she hove in sight, so as to plant a chair for her and the like: but it never could come to more than that. The wives looked on, and were civil and kind in a ladylike way to the girl; but I guess she was too pretty to please them; her looks and coquettish vivacity were too conquering; whenever she spoke at table there was an eager sweep of moustache, a universal rounding of Roman and other noses in the direction of her chair. I don’t think the wives liked it; but, as I have said, they were all very kind in a genteel way.

I had made up my mind, judging from the glances the girl had directed at the handsome mate Aiken in dock, that she would, though perhaps without losing her heart, yield to the influence of his manly beauty, and be very willing to carry on an aimless flirtation when I was out of sight and the man in charge of the ship. I had also made up my mind, if I caught the mate attempting to fool with the girl, to bring him up with a “round turn.” In fact, I chose to be a taut hand in those matters, quite irrespective of private feelings. Apparently, however, I was to be spared the trouble of bidding my handsome mate keep himself to himself and his weather-eye lifting for the ship and his duties only. Day after day passed, and I never caught him speaking to her.

Once only, and this was at some early date, when she and I were pacing the deck together, and Aiken was standing at the head of the weather-poop ladder, she asked me to tell her about him. Was he married? I said I believed not—I happened to _know_ he was not. Who and what was his father? How long had he been at sea? When was he likely to get command? The subject was then changed, and afterwards, though I watched them somewhat jealously, I never detected so much as a glance pass between them.

The long and short of it was—I am bound to confess it—before we had struck the Canary parallels, I—myself—I—Captain Cleaver, commander of the ship _Hecla_—was seriously in love with the girl, and making my days and nights uneasy by contemplation of a proposal of marriage based on these considerations: first, that I was in love with her; next, that she was not in love with the Rev. Joseph Moxon; third, that I could give her a home in England; and then, again, her father was my friend, one of my own cloth, and I had no doubt he would be delighted if I brought her home with me as my wife.

No good, in a short yarn like this, to enter into the question of what was due from me to Joseph Moxon. Enough that I was in love with the girl, and that I had quite clearly discovered she had no affection for—she did not even like or respect—Joseph. I was eight-and-thirty years of age, and a young man at that, as I chose to think; yet somehow Miss Minnie, by no means unintentionally, as I _now_ know, contrived to keep sentiment at bay by making me feel that in taking the place of her father whilst we were at sea I had become her father. Never by word of lip did I give her to know that I was in love with her; but I saw she was perfectly sensible that I was her devoted admirer, and that something was bound to happen before we should climb very far north into the Indian Ocean.

One night at about eleven o’clock—six bells—I stepped on deck from my cabin to take a look round. The ship’s latitude was then about 25° south. It was a cool, very quiet, dark night, with a piece of dusky-red moon dying out bulbous and distorted in the liquid blackness north-west; a few stars shone sparely; the canvas rose pale and silent; saving the lift of the fabric on the long-drawn heave of the swell, all the life in her was in a little music of ripples, breaking from her stem and tinkling aft in the noise of a summer shower upon water.

I looked into the binnacle, and not immediately seeing the officer of the watch, went a little way forward, and perceived two figures to leeward standing against the poop rail. I walked straight to them quickly. One was Mr. Aiken and the other Miss Minnie Mills. She laughed when I stepped up to her, and exclaimed, “No scolding, I beg. I was disturbed by a nightmare, and came on deck to see if I was really upon the ocean instead of at Junglepore. Mr. Aiken has reassured me. I shall be able to sleep now, I think. So good night to you both,” and with that she left us and disappeared.

I was angry, excited, exceedingly jealous. I guessed I had been tricked, and that a deal had passed between these two, for many a long day gone, utterly unobserved by me. I gave Mr. Aiken a piece of my mind.

Never had I “hazed” any man as I did that fellow as he stood before me. He said it was not his fault; the girl had come on deck and accosted him: he was no ship’s constable to order the passengers about; if he was spoken to, he answered; I expected he would be civil to the passengers, he supposed.

I bestowed several sea blessings on his eyes and limbs, and bade him understand that Miss Minnie Mills was under my protection; if I caught him speaking to her I would break him for insubordination. He was mate of the ship, and his business lay in doing his duty. If he went beyond it, he should sling his hammock in the forecastle for the rest of the voyage.

I was horribly in earnest and angry; and when I returned to my cabin, I paced the floor of it as sick at heart as a jilted woman with jealousy and spleen. However, after a while I contrived to console myself with believing that their being together was an accident, and that it might have been as Aiken had put it. At all events, it made me somewhat easy to reflect that I had never observed them in company before, never even caught them looking at each other—that is, significantly.

She was in a sullen and pouting temper all next day.

“Why mayn’t I go on deck at night if I choose?” said she.

“Your father would object,” said I. “You are under my care. I am responsible for you,” I added, with a tender look.

“Would you prohibit the other lady passengers from going on deck at night?”

“You shall have your way in anything that is good for you,” said I.

She flashed an arch, saucy glance at me, then sighed, and seemed intensely miserable on a sudden. I believe but for having caught her in Aiken’s company I should then and there have offered her my hand.

For a week following she was so completely in the dumps it was hard to get a word from her. Sometimes she looked as if she had been secretly crying, yet I never could persuade myself that the appearance her eyes would at such times present was due to weeping. She moped apart. Some of the passengers noticed her behaviour and spoke to me about it, thinking she was ill. The ship’s surgeon talked with her, and assured me privately he could find nothing wrong save that she complained of poorness of spirits.

“She seems to hate the idea of India,” said he, “and wants to go home.”

And so she shall (thought I), but she must arrive in India first, where she may leave it to me to square the yards for her with the Reverend Joseph Moxon.

We blew westwards round the Cape before a strong gale of wind. One morning, at the grey of dawn, I was aroused by a knocking on my cabin door. The second mate entered. He was a man named Wickham, a bullet-headed, immensely strong, active seaman, the younger son of a baronet: he would have held command at that time but for “the drink.” He grasped a woman’s hat and handkerchief, and exclaimed—

“I’ve just found these in the port mizzen chains, sir. I can’t tell how they happen to have come there. It looks like mischief.”

I sprang from my cot partially clothed, as I invariably was on turning in, and taking the hat in my hand, and bringing it to the clearer light of the large cabin window, I seemed to remember it as having been worn by Minnie Mills. I snatched the handkerchief from the man, and saw the initials M. M. marked upon it. This sufficed. I swiftly and completely clothed myself and entered the saloon.

My first act was to send the second mate for the stewardess. The woman arrived out of the steerage, where she slept. I said—speaking softly that the people in the berths on either hand might not be disturbed—

“Go and look into Miss Mills’ cabin, and report to me if all is well there.”

She went, vanished, was some little while out of sight; then reappeared and approached me, pale in the ashen light that was filtering through the skylights.

“Miss Mills’ cabin is empty, sir.”

I was prepared for this piece of news; yet my heart beat with a fast sick pulse when, without speech, I went to the girl’s berth, followed by the stewardess. The bunk had been occupied—the bed-clothes lay tossed in it. My eye, travelling rapidly over the interior, was quickly taken by a note lying upon a chest of drawers. It was addressed to me, and ran thus:—

“I am weary of life, and have resolved to end it. The thought of living even for a short while with Mr. Moxon at Junglepore has broken my heart, and you are as tyrannical and cruel to me as life itself. Farewell, and thank you for such kindness as you have shown me, and when you see my father tell him that I died loving him and blessing him.”

“Good God! She’s committed suicide!” cried I.

The stewardess shrieked.

I felt mad with amazement and grief. I read and re-read her letter, and then looked round the berth again, wondering if this were not some practical joke which she intended should be tragical by the fright it excited. I then went to work to make inquiries. I roused up Mr. Aiken, and, showing him the girl’s note, asked him if he had seen her on deck during his watch—if he himself had at any time foreboded this dreadful thing—if he could help me with any suggestions or information. He read the letter and stared blankly; his handsome countenance was as pale as milk whilst he eyed me. I seemed to find the ghastly mildness of a dead man’s face in his looks. He had nothing to say. No lady had come on deck in his watch. He had not exchanged a sentence with Miss Mills since that night when I threatened to break him if I found him in her company.

The men who had steered the ship throughout the night were brought out of the forecastle: no man had seen any lady jump overboard or slip into the mizzen-chains—not likely! Wouldn’t the helmsman, seeing such a thing, yell out?

The morning was now advanced. The passengers came from their berths, and it was quickly known fore and aft that the beautiful young girl who had been moping apart for three weeks past as though slowly going mad with melancholy had committed suicide by jumping overboard. The doctor and I and the two mates spent a long time whilst we overhung the mizzen-chains in conjecturing how she had managed it. The cabin windows were small: she had certainly never squeezed her fine ripe figure through the porthole of her berth; therefore she had come on to the poop in some black hour of the night by way of the quarter-deck, passing like a shadow to leeward till she arrived at the mizzen-rigging, where the deep dye flung upon the blackness by the mizzen—for it had been a quiet night, the ship under all plain sail—completely shrouded her. The rest would be easy, and if she dropped from the chains, which, through the angle of the deck, were depressed to within a few feet of the water, her fall might have been almost soundless.