Chapter Nine.
“That’s number one!” said old Masters, the boatswain, meeting me at the door of the saloon as I came out on deck, Weston having already told him the sad news. “Master Stokes’ll foller next, and then you or hi, Master Haldane, for we be all doomed men, I know, arter seein’ that there ghost-ship!”
I made no reply to the superstitious old seaman’s ominous prediction, but as I made my way forward to the bridge to inform Captain Applegarth and the others of what had happened, I could not help thinking how strange it was that poor Jackson should have recalled, at the very moment the spirit was quitting his crippled body, the fact of my sighting the ship in distress and the account I had given the skipper of what I had seen on board that mysterious craft!
Mr Fosset, or some of the hands who accompanied him, must have taken down the yarn to the stoke-hold, only just before the unfortunate man met with his terrible accident, though I had no doubt that he must have seen the man-of-war through the port hole of the cabin, which was right opposite his bunk, as she brought up under our stern to speak to us earlier in the afternoon, and the sight of HMS Aurora had, somehow or other, amid the wanderings of his unconscious brain, got mixed up with the remembrance of what he had previously heard concerning the vessel I had seen at sunset the two days prior.
It was now getting dark, the evening closing in quickly, and, what with the dying man’s queer talk and the boatswain harping on the same theme immediately afterwards, I confess I felt far from comfortable, my nerves being in a state of constant tension from the painful scene in the cabin that I had just witnessed, while the gloomy shades of the night that were fast enwrapping us, the dull roar of the ever-breaking sea and the groaning of the ship as she rolled, like a living creature in pain, all worked on my overtried fancy and made me almost afraid of my own shadow as I slipped and stumbled along the sloppy deck, my mind being in a complete whirl till I reached my goal—the bridge.
“What’s the matther, me bhoy?” asked Garry O’Neil, who was speaking to the skipper, the two examining a chart in the wheel-house, the light from the doorway of which fell on my face. “Faith, ye look quite skeared, Haldane, jist as if ye’d sane a ghoast, sure!”
I mentioned what had happened, however, and he at once dropped his chaffing manner, looking as grave as a judge.
“Begorrah, it’s moighty sorry I am to hear that, now!” said he in a more serious tone. “Sure, and he was a foine, h’ilthy man entirely, barrin’ that accident, bad cess to it! He moight have lived till a hundred, an’ then aunly died of auld age; for he’d the constitution of an illiphent. Faith, I never saw such a chist and thorax on a chap in me loife before!”
“Poor fellow!” observed the skipper. “He seems to have gone off awfully sudden at the last. I thought you said he was getting on well when you went down to see him awhile ago?”
“Bedad, I did that, sir; father’s no denyin’ it,” answered the Irishman, off-hand. “But I niver s’id he’d git over it, cap’en. I tuld ye from the first he couldn’t reciver, for he was paralysed, poor craytur’, from the waist downwards, and had a lot of internal injury besides. It was aunly bekase he was sich a shtrang man that he’s lasted so long, sir. Any one else would have died directly outright afther the accident, for he was pretty well smashed to pieces!”
“Strange!” muttered Captain Applegarth, who, although hasty of temper sometimes, was a man of deep feeling. “Sunday night again and that man dead! Only a week ago, this very evening, he came up to me here as I was standing by the binnacle to ask about some carpenter’s stores that were wanted in the engine-room. He and I then got talking, I recollect, it being Sunday, I suppose, of religious matters. He imagined himself—poor chap—a ‘materialist,’ as they call themselves, but his arguments on the point were very weak. He argued that there was no hereafter, no future state; the heaven and hell spoken of in Scripture, he suggested, being the happiness or punishment we meet with below here, while living, in accordance with our own lives.”
“Faith!” said Garry O’Neil, who was not a deep thinker, not troubling himself much about anything beyond the present. “That’s a puzzling question; but I, for one, wouldn’t care to be of that way of thinkin’, sure, sir.”
“That question however, poor Jackson has solved, long ere this!”
As Captain Applegarth uttered these words, solemnly enough, the fireman’s ravings, when in the agonies of death, came back to me, and I thought that, if confident in his materialism when in health and strength, his creed had not altogether eased his mind at the last, when I saw him raise his eyes, for a few minutes, to heaven in prayer.
That night the gale, which had moderated considerably during the afternoon, assailed us again with renewed vigour, as if old Boreas had put a fresh hand to the bellows, as sailor folk say.
It began in the middle watch, when the wind suddenly veered to the southwards, and it came on to blow great guns, causing the skipper the utmost uneasiness, as he feared we would break away from our spar anchor, when, disabled as we were, a steamer in a storm without the use of the engines being no better off than a baby in arms deprived of its nurse, it seemed almost impossible to prevent the vessel from broaching-to, in which case she would more than likely founder with all hands.
Consequently, not a soul turned in the livelong night, the port and starboard watches both remaining on duty, with Captain Applegarth and Mr Fosset on the bridge, while Garry O’Neil relieved the boatswain, who now had eight men under him in charge of the wheel, where the utmost caution and the greatest vigilance were necessary to keep the old barquey’s head to the sea. I had fearfully hard work, too, for the big waves ever and anon leapt up over her bows, burying the fo’c’s’le in clouds of spray and spent water that came pouring down into the waist and rushing aft, flooding the whole deck almost up to the gunwhales taking everything movable overboard, the boats being lifted off the chocks amidships even and swept away, and the cook’s galley in the forward part of the deckhouse got badly damaged.
This was in the height of the storm, just before daybreak, about two bells in the morning watch, or five o’clock AM.
Our poor old barquey then rolled so much that the skipper thought the wire hawser attached to the spars had parted and that we were at the very mercy of the tempest. So certain, indeed, was he, that he yelled out for all hands to make sail, with the idea of trying one last desperate venture and beard the winds with our puny canvas.
Fortunately, however, there was no need for us to essay this futile expedient, breaking the force of the billows as they reared up in their colossal grandeur to annihilate us and keeping us steadily facing their attack; and presently, shortly after six bells, when we really experienced pretty nearly the worst of it, there was a muttered growl of thunder, accompanied by a lightning flash that illuminated the whole of the heavens from pole to pole, and then rain came down in a deluge, the wind dropping, as suddenly, with a wild, weird shrill shriek of disappointed rage that wailed and whistled through the rigging, and then quietly died away.
Of course the sea did not quiet down all at once, old Neptune not being easily pacified after being stirred up to so great an extent, and the waves ran high most of the day, while the sky was overcast and the ocean of a dull leaden colour; but towards evening it cleared up and, the water being a bit calmer, the captain thought it a fitting time to bury poor Jackson.
All the hands were mustered on deck, the engineers and stokers stopping their busy repairing work below, which they had kept at night and day without intermission ever since our breakdown, and coming up with the rest of the crew to pay the last tribute of respect to their departed comrade, even Mr Stokes, though he was still in a very weak state of health and had his head and broken arm bandaged up, insisting on being present, Garry O’Neil and Stoddart supporting him between them for the purpose.
Then the body of the unfortunate fireman, enclosed in a hammock covered by the ship’s ensign and having a pig of ballast tied to the feet to ensure its submersion, was brought up from the cabin where he had died, and placed on a plank by the gangway where the waves had washed away our bulwarks, leaving a wide open space.
Captain Applegarth read over the remains the beautiful prayers of the Church Service appointed for the burial of those who die at sea, all of us standing bareheaded around.
A faint gleam of light from the setting sun, away on our port bow, shone through a mist of cloud that obscured the horizon to windward; and, as this disappeared, the skipper came to the end of the viaticum, when, at a signal from the boatswain, the plank was tipped and poor Jackson’s body was committed to the deep with a sigh of regret at his untimely end, and the devout hope that though his earthly voyage had been cut short, he might yet reach that haven where there are no accidents nor shipwrecks, and where seas swallow not up, or stormy winds blow!
Some little while after this a slight breeze sprang up from the southward and westward, bringing a cool feeling with it, and I shivered as I stood on the bridge looking out over the dark waste of waters, feeling rather melancholy, if the truth be told.
“That’s a bad sign, Master Haldane,” said old Masters close to my ear, making me jump, for I did not know he was there. “They say that when a ship chap shivers like that there, it be meaning that somebody or summit be a-walking over his grave!”
“Stave that, bo’sun!” I cried impatiently. “You’re a regular old Jonah, and enough to give a fellow the creeps!”
“Ah, you may try to laugh it off, Mister Haldane,” he retorted in his lugubrious way. “But, as I says to ye last night, says I, when that poor chap kicked the bucket as we’ve just been a-burying on, we ain’t seen the end on it yet. I misdoubts the weather, too, sir. There’s a great bank of cloud now rising up to win’ard, and I fancies I heard jist now the sound o’ thunder ag’in.”
“Thunder?” I exclaimed. “Nonsense!”
“No, Mister Haldane, it ain’t no nonsense,” said the old fellow solemnly. “You ain’t known me to croak afore without re’sin, and I tells ye I don’t likes the look o’ things to-night. There’s summit a-brewin’ up over there, or I’m a Dutchman!”
“What’s that, bo’sun?” cried the skipper, coming up on the bridge at the moment to look for the chart of the North Atlantic, which he had left in the wheel-house the night before, and overheard the old growler’s remark. “Got the Flying Dutchman on the brain again?”
“No, sir, I weren’t talking o’ that,” replied Masters. “I was a-saying to Master Haldane that it were precious misty and thick to win’ard and I feared thunder over there.”
“Thunder! thunder your grandmother!” cried the skipper testily. “I’ve pretty sharp ears, bo’sun, and I have heard none to-night. Have you, Haldane?”
“N–n–o, sir, not thunder,” I answered, listening attentively for a moment. “Stay, sir, though. I do hear something now, but the sound seems more like firing in the distance.”
“What, guns?”
“No sir, more like rifle shots, or the discharge of a revolver firing quickly at intervals.”
Captain Applegarth thereupon listened attentively, too, in his turn, while Masters went out to the end of the bridge and peered out over the side to windward with rapt gaze.
“By George, yes, you’re right, boy!” cried the skipper the next moment. “I can hear the shots quite plainly, I do believe. Hullo, there! What the deuce is going on over there, I wonder?”
There was reason for exclamation.
At that instant the dark mass of cloud on the horizon, towards which we were all looking, was rent by a flash, and we could see, standing against the black background in vivid relief, the masts and spars of a large full-rigged ship.
She was evidently burning a “flare-up” to attract attention, and, ere the light waned, I noticed that her yards were all a cock-bill and her sails and rigging torn and disordered; while, stranger still, she had her flag astern hoisted half-mast high—the French tricolour, too!
Both the boatswain and I, simultaneously, involuntarily, uttered a cry of dismay.
The vessel in sight was the very identical ship I had seen three nights before, flying the same signal of distress; and here she was now, sailing, as then, four points off our weather bows and eight before the wind, which was, as I’ve already said, blowing a light breeze from the southward and westward.
What new calamity did this second appearance of the “ghost-ship,” as the old boatswain called her, portend to all of us?
Aye, what, indeed!
Time alone could tell.