The Honour of the Flag Part 10

It was no business of mine, and seemingly I gave the matter no heed, though I could find leisure and curiosity sometimes for an askant glance at the captain and his beauty when they were at table or when the weather permitted the lady to come on deck, and their behaviour left me in very little doubt that he was deeply in love with her; but whether she was equally enamoured of him I could not guess.

We beat clear of the lat.i.tude of roaring gales blind with snow, and mountainous ice-islands like cities of alabaster in ruins, and seas ridging in thunder and foam to the height of our mizzentop, and heading north blew under wide wings of studding sails towards the sun, every day sinking some southern stars out of sight, and every night lifting above the sea-line some gem of the heavens dear to northern eyes.

I went below at eight bells on a Friday morning when we were two months "out" from Sydney, as I very well remember. The s.h.i.+p had then caught the first of the south-east trade-wind. All was well when I left the deck. I was awakened by a hand violently shaking my shoulder.

I sprang up and found Robson, the second mate, standing beside my bunk. He was pale as the ghost the Dane had described.

"There's been murder done, sir," he cried. "The captain's killed."

I stared at him like a fool, and echoed mechanically and dully: "Murder done! Captain killed!" Then collecting my wits I tumbled into my clothes and rushed to the captain's cabin, where I found the doctor and the third mate examining poor Griffith's body. It was half-past-six o'clock in the morning, and the daylight strong, but none of the pa.s.sengers were moving. The captain had been stabbed to the heart. The doctor said he had been killed by a single thrust. The body was clothed in white drill trousers and a white linen s.h.i.+rt, which was slightly stained with blood where the knife had pierced it.

Who had done this thing? It was horrible, unprovoked murder!

throughout the s.h.i.+p the captain had been the most popular man on board. The forecastle liking for him was as strong as sentiment of any sort can find expression in that part of a vessel. There had never been a murmur. Indeed I had never sailed with a better crew. Not a man had deserted us at Sydney and of the hands on board at least half had sailed with the captain before.

We carefully searched the cabin, but there was nothing whatever to tell us that robbery had been committed. However, a ghastly, shocking murder had been perpetrated; the man on whose skill and judgment had depended the safety of the s.h.i.+p and the many lives within her had been foully done to death in his sleep by some mysterious hand, and we determined at once upon a course.

First, I sent for some of the best and most trustworthy seamen amongst the crew, and bringing them into the captain's cabin, showed them the body. I then, in my capacity as commander of the vessel, authorised them to act as a sort of detectives or policemen, and to search every part of the s.h.i.+p and all the berths in the steerage and 'tween-decks for any clue to the doer of the deed. It was arranged that the cabins of the first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers should be thoroughly overhauled by the second and third mates.

All this brought us to the hour when the pa.s.sengers arose, and the s.h.i.+p was presently alive. The news swept from lip to lip magically; in all parts of the s.h.i.+p I saw men and women talking, with their faces pale with consternation and horror. I had not the courage to break the news to Miss Le Grand, and asked the doctor, a quiet, gentlemanly man, to speak to her. I was on the p.o.o.p looking after the s.h.i.+p when the doctor came from the young lady's berth.

"How did she receive the news?" said I.

"I wish it may not break her heart," said he, gravely. "She was turned into stone. Her stare of grief was dreadful--not the greatest actress could imagine such a look. There'll be no comforting her this side of England."

"Doctor, could he have done it himself?"

"Oh, heaven, no, sir!" and he explained, by recalling the posture of the body and the situation of the hands, not to mention the absence of the weapon, why it was impossible the captain should have killed himself.

I don't know how it came about; but whilst I paced the deck waiting for the reports of the mates and the seamen and the pa.s.sengers who were helping me in the search, it entered my head to mix up with this murder the spectre, or ghost, that had frightened the Dane at the wheel into a fit, along with the memory of a sort of quarrel which I guessed had happened between Captain Griffiths and Miss Le Grand. It was a mere muddle of fancies at best, and yet they took a hold of my imagination. I think it was about a week before this murder that I had observed the coolness of what you might call a lovers' quarrel betwixt the captain and his young lady, and without taking any further notice of it I quietly set the cause down to Mrs. Burney, who, as a thorough-paced flirt, with fine languis.h.i.+ng black eyes, and a saucy tongue, had often done her best to engage the skipper in one of those little asides which are as brimstone and the undying worm to the jealous of either s.e.x. The lovers had made it up soon after, and for two or three days previously had been as thick and lover-like as sweet-hearts ought to be.

But what had the ghost that had affrighted the Dane to do with this murder? And how were Mrs. Burney's blandishments, and the short-lived quarrel betwixt the lovers to be a.s.sociated with it? Nevertheless, these matters ran in my head as I walked the deck on the morning of that crime, and I thought and thought, scarce knowing, however, in what direction imagination was heading.

The two mates, the seamen, and the pa.s.sengers arrived with their reports. They had nothing to tell. The steward and the stewardess had searched with the two mates in the saloon or cuddy. Every cabin had been ransacked, with the willing consent of its occupants. The forecastle, and 'tween-decks, and steerage, and lazarette had been minutely overhauled. Every accessible part of the bowels of the s.h.i.+p had been visited; to no purpose. No stowaway of any sort, no rag of evidence, or weapon to supply a clue was discovered.

That afternoon we buried the body and I took command of the s.h.i.+p.

I saw nothing of Miss Le Grand for two days. She kept her cabin, and was seen only by the stewardess, who waited upon her. At the expiration of that time I received a message, and went at once to her berth. I never could have figured so striking a change in a fine woman full of beauty in so short a time, as I now beheld. The fire had died out of her eyes, and still there lurked something weird in the very spiritlessness, and dull and vacant sadness of her gaze. Her cheeks were hollow. Under each eye rested a shadow as though it was cast by a green leaf.

Her first words were: "Cannot you find out who did it?"

"No, madam. We have tried hard; harder for the captain's sake than had he been another, for the responsibility that rests upon the master of an ocean-going vessel makes him an object of mighty significance, believe me, to us sailors."

"But the person who killed him must be in the s.h.i.+p," she cried, in a voice that wanted much of its old clear music.

"One should suppose so; and he is undoubtedly on board the s.h.i.+p; but we can't find him."

"Did he commit suicide?"

"No. Everybody is accounted for."

"What motive," she exclaimed, with a sudden burst of desperate pa.s.sionate grief, that wrung her like a fit from head to foot, "could any one have for killing Captain Griffiths! He was the gentlest, the kindest--oh, my heart! my heart!" and, hiding her face, she rocked herself in her misery.

I tried my rough, seafaring best to soothe her. Certainly, until this moment I never could have supposed her love for the poor man was so great.

The fear bred of this mysterious a.s.sa.s.sination lay in a dark and heavy shadow upon the s.h.i.+p. None of us, pa.s.sengers or sailors, turned in of a night but with a fear of the secret b.l.o.o.d.y hand that had slain the captain making its presence tragically known once more before the morning.

It happened one midnight, when we were something north of the equator, in the calms and stinging heat of the inter-tropic lat.i.tudes, that, having come on deck to relieve the second mate, and take charge of the s.h.i.+p till four o'clock, I felt thirsty, and returned to the cuddy for a drink of water. Of the three lamps only one was alight, and burnt very dimly. There was no moonlight, but a plenty of stars.h.i.+ne, which showered in a very rippling of spangled silver through the yawning cas.e.m.e.nts of the skylights.

Just as I returned the tumbler to the rack whence I had removed it, the door of Miss Le Grand's cabin was opened, and the girl stepped forth. She was arrayed in white; probably she was attired in her bed-clothes. She seemed to see me at once, for she emerged directly opposite; and I thought she would speak, or hastily retire. But, after appearing to stare for a little while, she came to the table and leaned upon it with her left hand, sighing several times in the most heart-broken manner; and now I saw by the help of the dim lamplight that her right hand grasped a knife--the gleam of the blade caught my eye in a breath!

"Good gracious!" I cried to myself, instantly, "the woman's asleep!

This, then, is the ghost that frightened the Dane. And this, too, was the hand that murdered the captain!"

I stood motionless watching her. Presently, taking her hand off the table, she turned her face aft, and with a wonderfully subtle, stealthy, sneaking gait, reminding one strangely of the folding motion of the snake, she made for the captain's cabin.

Now, that cabin, ever since Griffith's death, I had occupied, and you may guess the sensations with which I followed the armed and murderous sleep-walker as she glided to what I must call my berth, and noiselessly opened the door of it. The moment she was in the cabin her motions grew amazingly swift. She stepped to the side of the bunk I was in the habit of using, and lifting the knife plunged it once, deep and hard--then came away, so nimbly that it was with difficulty I made room for her in the doorway to pa.s.s. I heard her breathe hard and fast as she swept by, and I stood in the doorway of my cabin watching her till her figure disappeared in her own berth.

So, then, the mystery was at an end. Poor Captain Griffith's murderess was his adored sweetheart! She had killed him in her sleep, and knew it not. In the blindness of slumber she had repeated the enormous tragedy, as sinless nevertheless as the angel who looked down and beheld her and pitied her!

I went on deck and sent for the doctor, to whom I communicated what I had seen, and he at once repaired to Miss Le Grand's berth accompanied by the stewardess, and found her peacefully resting in her bunk. No knife was to be seen. However, next morning, the young lady being then on deck, veiled as she always now went, and sitting in a retired part of the p.o.o.p, the second mate, the doctor, and the stewardess again thoroughly searched Miss Le Grand's berth, and they found in a hollow in the s.h.i.+p's side, a sort of scupper in fact for the porthole, a carving knife, rusted with old stains of blood. It had belonged to the s.h.i.+p, and it was a knife the steward had missed on the day the captain was killed.

Since the whole ghastly tragedy was a matter of somnambulism, all points of it were easily fitted by the doctor, who quickly understood that the knife had been taken by the poor girl in her sleep just as it had been murderously used. What horrible demon governed her in her slumber, who shall tell? For my part I put it down to Mrs. Burney and a secret feeling of jealousy which had operated in the poor soul when sense was suspended in her by slumber.

We tried to keep the thing secret, taking care to lock Miss Le Grand up every night without explaining our motive; but the pa.s.sengers got wind of the truth and shrunk from her with horror. It came, in fact, to their waiting upon me in a body and insisting upon my immuring her in the steerage in company with one of the 'tween-deck's pa.s.sengers, a female who had offered her services as a nurse for hire. This action led to the poor girl herself finding out what had happened. G.o.d knows who told her or how she managed to discover it; but 't is certain she got to learn it was her hand that in sleep had killed her lover, and she went mad the selfsame day of her understanding what she had done.

Nor did she ever recover her mind. She was landed mad, and sent at once to an asylum, where she died, G.o.d rest her poor soul! exactly a year after the murder, pa.s.sing away, in fact, at the very hour the deed was done, as I afterwards heard.

_The s.h.i.+p Seen on the Ice_.

In the middle of April, in the year 1855, the three-masted schooner _Lightning_ sailed from the Mersey for Boston with a small general cargo of English manufactured goods. She was commanded by a man named Thomas Funnel. The mate, Salamon Sweers, was of Dutch extraction, and his broad-beamed face was as Dutch to the eye as was the sound of his name to the ear. Yet he spoke English with as good an accent as ever one could hear in the mouth of an Englishman; and, indeed, I pay Salamon Sweers no compliment by saying this, for he employed his _h's_ correctly, and the grammar of his sentences was fairly good, albeit salt: and how many Englishmen are there who correctly employ the letter _h_, and whose grammar is fairly good, salt or no salt?

We carried four forecastle hands and three apprentices. There was Charles Petersen, a Swede, who had once been "fancy man" in a toy shop; there was David Burton, who had been a hairdresser and proved unfortunate as a gold-digger in Australia; there was James Lussoni, an Italian, who claimed to be a descendant of the old Genoese merchants; and there was John Jones, a runaway man-of-warsman, pretty nearly worn out, and subject to apoplexy.

Four sailors and three apprentices make seven men, a cook and a boy are nine, and a mate and a captain make eleven; and eleven of a crew were we, all told, men and boy, aboard the three-masted schooner _Lightning_ when we sailed away one April morning out of the river Mersey, bound to Boston, North America.

My name was then as it still is--for during the many years I have used the sea, never had I occasion to s.h.i.+p with a "purser's name"--my name, I say, is David Kerry, and in that year of G.o.d 1855 I was a strapping young fellow, seventeen years old, making a second voyage with Captain Funnel, having been bound apprentice to that most excellent but long-departed mariner by my parents, who, finding me resolved to go to sea had determined that my probation should be thorough: no half-laughs and pursers' grins would satisfy them; my arm was to plunge deep into the tar bucket straight away; and certainly there was no man then hailing from the port of Liverpool better able to qualify a young chap for the profession of the sea--but a young chap, mind you, who liked his calling, who _meant_ to be a man and not a "sojer" in it--than Captain Funnel of the schooner _Lightning_.

The four sailors slept in a bit of a forecastle forward; we three apprentices slung our hammocks in a bulkheaded part of the run or steerage, a gloomy hole, the obscurity of which was defined rather than illuminated by the dim twilight sifting down aslant from the hatch. Here we stowed our chests, and here we took our meals, and here we slept and smoked and yarned in our watch below. I very well remember my two fellow apprentices. One was named Corbin, and the other Halsted. They were both of them smart, honest, bright lads, coming well equipped and well educated from respectable homes, in love with the calling of the sea, and resolved in time not only to command s.h.i.+ps, but to own them.

Well, nothing in any way noteworthy happened for many days. Though the schooner was called the _Lightning_, she was by no means a clipper.

She was built on lines which were fas.h.i.+onable forty years before, when the s.h.i.+pwright held that a s.h.i.+p's stability must be risked if she was one inch longer than five times her beam. She was an old vessel, but dry as a stale cheese; wallowed rather than rolled, yet was stiff; would sit upright with erect spars, like the c.o.c.ked ears of a horse, in breezes which bowed pa.s.sing vessels down to their wash-streaks. Her round bows bruised the sea, and when it entered her head to take to her heels, she would wash through it like a "gallied whale," all smothered to the hawse-pipes, and a big round polished hump of brine on either quarter.

We ambled, and wallowed, and blew, and in divers fas.h.i.+ons drove along till we were deep in the heart of the North Atlantic. It was then a morning that brought the first of May within a biscuit-toss of our reckoning of time: a very cold morning, the sea flat, green, and greasy, with a streaking of white about it, as though it were a flooring of marble; there was wind but no lift in the water; and Salamon Sweers, in whose watch I was, said to me, when the day broke and showed us the look of the ocean:

"Blowed," said he, "if a man mightn't swear that we were under the lee of a range of high land."