CHAPTER XII. WE FIND OURSELVES BOUND ON A VOYAGE

It seemed to me that I had but taken a turn from right to left, or gone round a wheel, when I repeated the same words, and I heard Temple somewhere near me mumble something like them. He drew a long breath, so did I: we cleared our throats with a sort of whinny simultaneously. The enjoyment of lying perfectly still, refreshed, incurious, unexcited, yet having our minds animated, excursive, reaping all the incidents of our lives at leisure, and making a dream of our latest experiences, kept us tranquil and incommunicative. Occasionally we let fall a sigh fathoms deep, then by-and-by began blowing a bit of a wanton laugh at the end of it. I raised my foot and saw the boot on it, which accounted for an uneasy sensation setting in through my frame.

I said softly, ‘What a pleasure it must be for horses to be groomed!’

‘Just what I was thinking!’ said Temple.

We started up on our elbows, and one or the other cried:

‘There’s a chart! These are bunks! Hark at the row overhead! We’re in a ship! The ship’s moving! Is it foggy this morning? It’s time to get up! I’ve slept in my clothes! Oh, for a dip! How I smell of smoke! What a noise of a steamer! And the squire at Riversley! Fancy Uberly’s tale!’

Temple, with averted face, asked me whether I meant to return to Riversley that day. I assured him I would, on my honour, if possible; and of course he also would have to return there. ‘Why, you’ve an appointment with Janet Ilchester,’ said I, ‘and we may find a pug; we’ll buy the hunting-knife and the skates. And she shall know you saved an old woman’s life.’

‘No, don’t talk about that,’ Temple entreated me, biting his lip. ‘Richie, we’re going fast through the water. It reminds me of breakfast. I should guess the hour to be nine A.M.’

My watch was unable to assist us; the hands pointed to half-past four, and were fixed. We ran up on deck. Looking over the stern of the vessel, across a line of rippling eddying red gold, we saw the sun low upon cushions of beautiful cloud; no trace of fog anywhere; blue sky overhead, and a mild breeze blowing.

‘Sunrise,’ I said.

Temple answered, ‘Yes,’ most uncertainly.

We looked round. A steam-tug was towing our ship out toward banks of red-reflecting cloud, and a smell of sea air.

‘Why, that’s the East there!’ cried Temple. We faced about to the sun, and behold, he was actually sinking!

‘Nonsense!’ we exclaimed in a breath. From seaward to this stupefying sunset we stood staring. The river stretched to broad lengths; gulls were on the grey water, knots of seaweed, and the sea-foam curled in advance of us.

‘By jingo!’ Temple spoke out, musing, ‘here’s a whole day struck out of our existence.’

‘It can’t be!’ said I, for that any sensible being could be tricked of a piece of his life in that manner I thought a preposterous notion.

But the sight of a lessening windmill in the West, shadows eastward, the wide water, and the air now full salt, convinced me we two had slept through an entire day, and were passing rapidly out of hail of our native land.

‘We must get these fellows to put us on shore at once,’ said Temple: ‘we won’t stop to eat. There’s a town; a boat will row us there in half-an-hour. Then we can wash, too. I’ve got an idea nothing’s clean here. And confound these fellows for not having the civility to tell us they were going to start!’

We were rather angry, a little amused, not in the least alarmed at our position. A sailor, to whom we applied for an introduction to the captain, said he was busy. Another gave us a similar reply, with a monstrous grimace which was beyond our comprehension. The sailor Joe was nowhere to be seen. None of the sailors appeared willing to listen to us, though they stopped as they were running by to lend half an ear to what we had to say. Some particular movement was going on in the ship. Temple was the first to observe that the steamtug was casting us loose, and cried he, ‘She’ll take us on board and back to London Bridge. Let’s hail her.’ He sang out, ‘Whoop! ahoy!’ I meanwhile had caught sight of Joe.

‘Well, young gentleman!’ he accosted me, and he hoped I had slept well. My courteous request to him to bid the tug stand by to take us on board, only caused him to wear a look of awful gravity. ‘You’re such a deuce of a sleeper,’ he said. ‘You see, we had to be off early to make up for forty hours lost by that there fog. I tried to wake you both; no good; so I let you snore away. We took up our captain mid-way down the river, and now you’re in his hands, and he’ll do what he likes with you, and that ‘s a fact, and my opinion is you ‘ll see a foreign shore before you’re in the arms of your family again.’

At these words I had the horrible sensation of being caged, and worse, transported into the bargain.

I insisted on seeing the captain. A big bright round moon was dancing over the vessel’s bowsprit, and this, together with the tug thumping into the distance, and the land receding, gave me—coming on my wrath—suffocating emotions.

No difficulties were presented in my way. I was led up to a broad man in a pilot-coat, who stood square, and looked by the bend of his eyebrows as if he were always making head against a gale. He nodded to my respectful salute. ‘Cabin,’ he said, and turned his back to me.

I addressed him, ‘Excuse me, I want to go on shore, captain. I must and will go! I am here by some accident; you have accidentally overlooked me here. I wish to treat you like a gentleman, but I won’t be detained.’

Joe spoke a word to the captain, who kept his back as broad to me as a school-slate for geography and Euclid’s propositions.

‘Cabin, cabin,’ the captain repeated.

I tried to get round him to dash a furious sentence or so in his face, since there was no producing any impression on his back; but he occupied the whole of a way blocked with wire-coil, and rope, and boxes, and it would have been ridiculous to climb this barricade when by another right-about-face he could in a minute leave me volleying at the blank space between his shoulders.

Joe touched my arm, which, in as friendly a way as I could assume, I bade him not do a second time; for I could ill contain myself as it was, and beginning to think I had been duped and tricked, I was ready for hostilities. I could hardly bear meeting Temple on my passage to the cabin. ‘Captain Jasper Welsh,’ he was reiterating, as if sounding it to discover whether it had an ominous ring: it was the captain’s name, that he had learnt from one of the seamen.

Irritated by his repetition of it, I said, I know not why, or how the words came: ‘A highwayman notorious for his depredations in the vicinity of the city of Bristol.’

This set Temple off laughing: ‘And so he bought a ship and had traps laid down to catch young fellows for ransom.’

I was obliged to request Temple not to joke, but the next moment I had launched Captain Jasper Welsh on a piratical exploit; Temple lifted the veil from his history, revealing him amid the excesses of a cannibal feast. I dragged him before a British jury; Temple hanged him in view of an excited multitude. As he boasted that there was the end of Captain Welsh, I broke the rope. But Temple spoiled my triumph by depriving him of the use of his lower limbs after the fall, for he was a heavy man. I could not contradict it, and therefore pitched all his ship’s crew upon the gallows in a rescue. Temple allowed him to be carried off by his faithful ruffians, only stipulating that the captain was never after able to release his neck from the hangman’s slip knot. The consequence was that he wore a shirt-collar up to his eyebrows for concealment by day, and a pillow-case over his head at night, and his wife said she was a deceived unhappy woman, and died of curiosity.

The talking of even such nonsense as this was a relief to us in our impatience and helplessness, with the lights of land heaving far distant to our fretful sight through the cabin windows.

When we had to talk reasonably we were not so successful. Captain Welsh was one of those men who show you, whether you care to see them or not, all the processes by which they arrive at an idea of you, upon which they forthwith shape their course. Thus, when he came to us in the cabin, he took the oil-lamp in his hand and examined our faces by its light; he had no reply to our remonstrances and petitions: all he said was, ‘Humph! well, I suppose you’re both gentlemen born’; and he insisted on prosecuting his scrutiny without any reference to the tenour of our observations.

We entreated him half imperiously to bring his ship to and put us on shore in a boat. He bunched up his mouth, remarking, ‘Know their grammar: habit o’ speaking to grooms, eh? humph.’ We offered to pay largely. ‘Loose o’ their cash,’ was his comment, and so on; and he was the more exasperating to us because he did not look an evil-minded man; only he appeared to be cursed with an evil opinion of us. I tried to remove it; I spoke forbearingly. Temple, imitating me, was sugar-sweet. We exonerated the captain from blame, excused him for his error, named the case a mistake on both sides. That long sleep of ours, we said, was really something laughable; we laughed at the recollection of it, a lamentable piece of merriment.

Our artfulness and patience becoming exhausted, for the captain had vouchsafed us no direct answer, I said at last, ‘Captain Welsh, here we are on board your ship will you tell us what you mean to do with us?’

He now said bluntly, ‘I will.’

‘You’ll behave like a man of honour,’ said I, and to that he cried vehemently, ‘I will.’

‘Well, then,’ said I, ‘call out the boat, if you please; we’re anxious to be home.’

‘So you shall!’ the captain shouted, ‘and per ship—my barque Priscilla; and better men than you left, or I ‘m no Christian.’

Temple said briskly, ‘Thank you, captain.’

‘You may wait awhile with that, my lad,’ he answered; and, to our astonishment, recommended us to go and clean our faces and prepare to drink some tea at his table.

‘Thank you very much, captain, we’ll do that when we ‘re on shore,’ said we.

‘You’ll have black figure-heads and empty gizzards, then, by that time,’ he remarked. We beheld him turning over the leaves of a Bible.

Now, this sight of the Bible gave me a sense of personal security, and a notion of hypocrisy in his conduct as well; and perceiving that we had conjectured falsely as to his meaning to cast us on shore per ship, his barque Priscilla, I burst out in great heat, ‘What! we are prisoners? You dare to detain us?’

Temple chimed in, in a similar strain. Fairly enraged, we flung at him without anything of what I thought eloquence.

The captain ruminated up and down the columns of his Bible.

I was stung to feel that we were like two small terriers baiting a huge mild bull. At last he said, ‘The story of the Prodigal Son.’

‘Oh!’ groaned Temple, at the mention of this worn-out old fellow, who has gone in harness to tracts ever since he ate the fatted calf.

But the captain never heeded his interruption.

‘Young gentlemen, I’ve finished it while you ‘ve been barking at me. If I ‘d had him early in life on board my vessel, I hope I’m not presumptuous in saying—the Lord forgive me if I be so!—I’d have stopped his downward career—ay, so!—with a trip in the right direction. The Lord, young gentlemen, has not thrown you into my hands for no purpose whatsoever. Thank him on your knees to-night, and thank Joseph Double, my mate, when you rise, for he was the instrument of saving you from bad company. If this was a vessel where you ‘d hear an oath or smell the smell of liquor, I ‘d have let you run when there was terra firma within stone’s throw. I came on board, I found you both asleep, with those marks of dissipation round your eyes, and I swore—in the Lord’s name, mind you—I’d help pluck you out of the pit while you had none but one leg in. It’s said! It’s no use barking. I am not to be roused. The devil in me is chained by the waist, and a twenty-pound weight on his tongue. With your assistance I’ll do the same for the devil in you. Since you’ve had plenty of sleep, I ‘ll trouble you to commit to memory the whole story of the Prodigal Son ‘twixt now and morrow’s sunrise. We ‘ll have our commentary on it after labour done. Labour you will in my vessel, for your soul’s health. And let me advise you not to talk; in your situation talking’s temptation to lying. You’ll do me the obligation to feed at my table. And when I hand you back to your parents, why, they’ll thank me, if you won’t. But it’s not thanks I look for: it’s my bounden Christian duty I look to. I reckon a couple o’ stray lambs equal to one lost sheep.’

The captain uplifted his arm, ejaculating solemnly, ‘By!’ and faltered. ‘You were going to swear!’ said Temple, with savage disdain.

‘By the blessing of Omnipotence! I’ll save a pair o’ pups from turning wolves. And I’m a weak mortal man, that ‘s too true.’

‘He was going to swear,’ Temple muttered to me.

I considered the detection of Captain Welsh’s hypocrisy unnecessary, almost a condescension toward familiarity; but the ire in my bosom was boiling so that I found it impossible to roll out the flood of eloquence with which I was big. Soon after, I was trying to bribe the man with all my money and my watch.

‘Who gave you that watch?’ said he.

‘Downright Church catechism!’ muttered Temple.

‘My grandfather,’ said I.

The captain’s head went like a mechanical hammer, to express something indescribable.

‘My grandfather,’ I continued, ‘will pay you handsomely for any service you do to me and my friend.’

‘Now, that’s not far off forgoing,’ said the captain, in a tone as much as to say we were bad all over.

I saw the waters slide by his cabin-windows. My desolation, my humiliation, my chained fury, tumbled together. Out it came—

‘Captain, do behave to us like a gentleman, and you shall never repent it. Our relatives will be miserable about us. They—captain!—they don’t know where we are. We haven’t even a change of clothes. Of course we know we’re at your mercy, but do behave like an honest man. You shall be paid or not, just as you please, for putting us on shore, but we shall be eternally grateful to you. Of course you mean kindly to us; we see that—’

‘I thank the Lord for it!’ he interposed.

‘Only you really are under a delusion. It ‘s extraordinary. You can’t be quite in your right senses about us; you must be—I don’t mean to speak disrespectfully-what we call on shore, cracked about us....

‘Doddered, don’t they say in one of the shires?’ he remarked.

Half-encouraged, and in the belief that I might be getting eloquent, I appealed to his manliness. Why should he take advantage of a couple of boys? I struck the key of his possible fatherly feelings: What misery were not our friends suffering now. (‘Ay, a bucketful now saves an ocean in time to come!’ he flung in his word.) I bade him, with more pathetic dignity reflect on the dreadful hiatus in our studies.

‘Is that Latin or Greek?’ he asked.

I would not reply to the cold-blooded question. He said the New Testament was written in Greek, he knew, and happy were those who could read it in the original.

‘Well, and how can we be learning to read it on board ship?’ said Temple, an observation that exasperated me because it seemed more to the point than my lengthy speech, and betrayed that he thought so; however, I took it up:—

‘How can we be graduating for our sphere in life, Captain Welsh, on board your vessel? Tell us that.’

He played thumb and knuckles on his table. Just when I was hoping that good would come of the senseless tune, Temple cried,

‘Tell us what your exact intentions are, Captain Welsh. What do you mean to do with us?’

‘Mean to take you the voyage out and the voyage home, Providence willing,’ said the captain, and he rose.

We declined his offer of tea, though I fancy we could have gnawed at a bone.

‘There’s no compulsion in that matter,’ he said. ‘You share my cabin while you’re my guests, shipmates, and apprentices in the path of living; my cabin and my substance, the same as if you were what the North-countrymen call bairns o’ mine: I’ve none o’ my own. My wife was a barren woman. I’ve none but my old mother at home. Have your sulks out, lads; you’ll come round like the Priscilla on a tack, and discover you’ve made way by it.’

We quitted his cabin, bowing stiffly.

Temple declared old Rippenger was better than this canting rascal.

The sea was around us, a distant yellow twinkle telling of land.

‘His wife a barren woman! what’s that to us!’ Temple went on, exploding at intervals. ‘So was Sarah. His cabin and his substance! He talks more like a preacher than a sailor. I should like to see him in a storm! He’s no sailor at all. His men hate him. It wouldn’t be difficult to get up a mutiny on board this ship. Richie, I understand the whole plot: he’s in want of cabin-boys. The fellow has impressed us. We shall have to serve till we touch land. Thank God, there’s a British consul everywhere; I say that seriously. I love my country; may she always be powerful! My life is always at her—Did you feel that pitch of the ship? Of all the names ever given to a vessel, I do think Priscilla is without exception the most utterly detestable. Oh! there again. No, it’ll be too bad, Richie, if we ‘re beaten in this way.’

‘If YOU are beaten,’ said I, scarcely venturing to speak lest I should cry or be sick.

We both felt that the vessel was conspiring to ruin our self-respect. I set my head to think as hard as possible on Latin verses (my instinct must have drawn me to them as to a species of intellectual biscuit steeped in spirit, tough, and comforting, and fundamentally opposed to existing circumstances, otherwise I cannot account for the attraction). They helped me for a time; they kept off self-pity, and kept the machinery of the mind at work. They lifted me, as it were, to an upper floor removed from the treacherously sighing Priscilla. But I came down quickly with a crash; no dexterous management of my mental resources could save me from the hemp-like smell of the ship, nor would leaning over the taffrail, nor lying curled under a tarpaulin. The sailors heaped pilot-coats upon us. It was a bad ship, they said, to be sick on board of, for no such thing as brandy was allowed in the old Priscilla. Still I am sure I tasted some before I fell into a state of semi-insensibility. As in a trance I heard Temple’s moans, and the captain’s voice across the gusty wind, and the forlorn crunching of the ship down great waves. The captain’s figure was sometimes stooping over us, more great-coats were piled on us; sometimes the wind whistled thinner than one fancies the shrieks of creatures dead of starvation and restless, that spend their souls in a shriek as long as they can hold it on, say nursery-maids; the ship made a truce with the waters and grunted; we took two or three playful blows, we were drenched with spray, uphill we laboured, we caught the moon in a net of rigging, away we plunged; we mounted to plunge again and again. I reproached the vessel in argument for some imaginary inconsistency. Memory was like a heavy barrel on my breast, rolling with the sea.