Chapter Three.
“Where away, Haldane?” cried Mr Fosset, the first to notice my shout, catching up a telescope that lay handy on the top of the wheel-house of the bridge; and, in his hurry, eagerly scanning every portion of the horizon but the right one. “I don’t see her!”
“There she is, sir, away to the right!” said I, equally flurried, pointing over the lee rail in the direction where I had observed the ship only a second before as I mounted the bridge-ladder, although I could not actually make her out distinctly at the moment now, on account of the smoke from our funnels, which, just then, came belching forth in a thick, black cloud that streamed away to leeward, athwart our starboard beam, obscuring the outlook.
“There away, sir; out there!”
“Well, I can’t see anything!” ejaculated Mr Fosset impatiently, rising to his feet after stooping down to the level of the bridge cloth, trying to get a sight of the strange vessel as best he could under the cloud of smoke, which was now trailing out along the horizon, blown far away to leeward by the strong wind across our beam. “I’m sure I can’t see anything over there, youngster; you must have dreamt it!”
“Yes, when you were lolling about in the waist below there, just now,” put in my friend, Master Spokeshave, who had been pretending to look-out from his end of the bridge because he thought he ought to do so as Mr Fosset was there, although he really couldn’t possibly see anything aft from that position on the port side, on account of the wheel-house and funnel, which were of course abaft the bridge, blocking the view. The cantankerous little beggar sniffed his beak of a nose in the air as if trying to look down on me, though he was half a head shorter, and spoke in that nasty sneering way of his that always made me mad. He did enjoy growling at any one when he had the chance; and so he went on snarling now, like a cat behind an area railing at a dog which couldn’t get at it to stop its venomous spitting. “I saw you, my joker, star-gazing down there, instead of coming up here to relieve me at the proper time! I believe you only sang out about the ship to cover your laziness and take a rise out of us!”
“I did nothing of the sort, Mr Spokeshave,” I answered indignantly, for the little beast sniggered away and grinned at Mr Fosset as if he had said something uncommonly smart at my expense. I saw, however, where the shoe pinched. He was angry at my having kept him waiting for his tea, and hence his spiteful allusion to my being late coming on watch; so I was just going to give him a sharp rejoinder, referring to his love for his little stomach, a weak point with him and a common joke with us all below at meal-times, when, ere I could get a word out of the scathing rebuke I intended for him, the smoke trail suddenly lifted a bit to leeward and leaving the horizon clear, I caught sight again of the ship I had seen over the rail. This, of course, at once changed the current of my thoughts; and so, without troubling my head any further about “Conky,” I sang out as eagerly as before to the first mate, all the more anxious now to prove that I had been right in the first instance, “There she is, Mr Fosset, there she is!”
“Where on earth are you squinting now, boy?” said he, a bit huffy at not making her out and apparently inclined to Spokeshave’s opinion that I had not really seen her at all. “Where away?”
“There, sir, away to leeward,” cried I, almost jumping over the bridge rail in my excitement. “She’s nearly abreast of our mizzen chains and not a mile off. She seems coming up on the port tack, sir!”
For, strangely enough, although we were going ten knots good by the aid of the wind that had worked round more abeam, so that all our fore and aft sail drew, while the ship, which, when I saw her before, seemed to be running with the nor’-easter and sailing at a tangent to our course so that she ought really to have increased her distance from us, now, on the contrary, appeared ever so much nearer, as if she had either altered her helm or drifted closer by the aid of some ocean current in the interim; albeit, barely five minutes at the best, if that, had only elapsed since I first sighted her.
But, stranger still, Mr Fosset could not see her, when there she was as plain as the sun setting in the west awhile ago—at least to my eyes; and, as she approached nearer yet in some unaccountable way, for her bows were pointed from us and the wind, of course, was blowing in the opposite direction, she being on our lee, I declare I could distinctly see a female figure, like that of a young girl with long hair, on the deck aft; and beside her I also noticed a large black dog, jumping up and down!
“I’m sure I can’t see any ship, youngster,” said Mr Fosset at the moment. Even while he was actually speaking, I observed the sailing vessel to yaw in her course, her ragged canvas flattening against the masts as if she were coming about, although from the way her head veered about, she did not seem to be under any control. “There’s nothing in sight, Haldane, I tell you. What you perhaps thought was a ship is that big black cloud rising to the southward. It looks like one of those nasty sea fogs working up, and we’ll have to keep a precious sharp look-out to-night, I know.”
“There’s no ship there,” echoed my friend “Conky,” tapping his forehead in a very offensive way to intimate that I had “a screw loose in the upper storey,” as the saying goes, grinning the while as I could see very well in the dim light and poking his long nose up in the air in supreme contempt. “The boy is either mad, or drunk, or dreaming, as you say, sir. It is all a cock and a bull yarn about his sighting a vessel, and he only wants to brave it out. There’s no ship there!”
“Can you see anything, Atkins?” asked Mr Fosset of the man steering. “There away to leeward, I mean.”
“No, sir,” answered the sailor; “not a speck, sir.”
“Do you see anything, lamp-trimmer?”
“No; can’t say I does, sir,” replied old Greazer, after a long squint over our lee in the direction pointed out, “Not a sight of a sail, nor a light, nor nothink!”
It was curious.
For, at that very moment, when the first mate and Spokeshave and the helmsman and lamp-trimmer, standing on the bridge beside me, one and all said they could see nothing, I declare to you I saw not only the ship and the figures on her deck, but I noticed that the girl on the poop waved a scarf or handkerchief, as if imploring our assistance; and, at the same time, the dog near her bounded up against the bulwarks, and I can solemnly assert from the evidence of my ears that I heard the animal distinctly bark, giving out that joyous sort of bark with which a well-dispositioned dog invariably greets a friend of his master or mistress.
I could not make it out at all.
It was most mysterious.
“Look, look, Mr Fosset!” I cried excitedly. “There she is now! There she is, coming up on our lee quarter! Why, you must be all blind! I can not only see the ship distinctly, but also right down on to her deck!”
“Nonsense, boy; you’d better go below!” said the first mate brusquely, while Spokeshave sniggered and whispered something to the lamp-trimmer and man at the wheel that made them both laugh out right. “There’s something wrong with you to-night, Haldane, for you seem quite off your chump, so you’d better go below and sleep it off. There’s no ship near us, I tell you! What you imagined to be a sailing vessel is that dark cloud there, coming up from the leeward, which is fast shutting out the horizon from view. It’s a sea fog, such as are frequently met with hereabouts below the Banks, as we are now!”
It was true enough about the cloud, or mist, or fog, or whatever it was; for, as Mr Fosset spoke, the darkness closed in around us like a wall and the ship that I swear I had seen the moment before vanished, sky and sea and everything else disappearing also at the same instant, leaving us, as it were, isolated in space, the veil of vapour being impenetrable!