THE

CHAPTER V

THE WRECK

HE Flying Spur anchored in Falmouth Bay on the noon of October 13, 1890. She had no business at that port. When Mr. Blaney of Leadenhall Street, her owner, read the report in the shipping news of her having touched at Falmouth, he would probably assume that the crew had given trouble; a Dutchman, perhaps, had stabbed an Englishman, and the captain had been forced to put into Falmouth to supply the deficiencies caused by the knife, and to hand over the prisoner.

As a matter of fact, Reynolds was here to fetch his wife's clothes, and the owner's demands on him as a skipper must yield to that skipper's claims upon himself as a newly married man. And now his wife was going ashore to fetch her clothes herself, and take them home with her, and leave him.

The ship brought up with only her lighter canvas furled, for she was to sail again as soon as might be. It was noon; sweet and calm were the waters of this lovely harbour, glorious the land in the mantle of October, pleasant and fair to see the ships floating upon the mirror, whose margin reflected the burning leaf of autumn. Lucretia was in her cabin when the anchor was let go. She felt the thrill of the chain cable as it thundered through the hawse-pipe, but did

not know what it meant. Came a knock upon her door. The inevitable, "Who is there?" followed.

"Mr. Ralland."

"Oh, walk in!"

The second mate entered, purple and shiny, cuplike in form, very nervous in demeanour.

"If you are ready to go ashore, madam," said he, "the boat is ready alongside, and I will steer you to the landing-place."

She started, not until then realizing the arrival of the ship. Into the pallor of her face passed a subtler shade of whiteness, if one may so speak, indicating the presence of the heart.

"I shall be on deck in five minutes," she answered; and Mr. Ralland left her.

In five minutes she was attired in hat and jacket, and with her went the umbrella which she had brought from Chepstow Place. She passed through the companionway into an atmosphere quivering with brilliance, and, without intention, met the eyes of her husband, who was seated upon the grating abaft the wheel, in a place to command a view of the deck and the departure of the boat. She instantly looked away: no flush of cheek indicated emotion, no dulness of eye, the sudden gush of sadness from the springs of the soul. She saw Mr. Ralland waiting at the open gangway, and went to him. Mr. Featherbridge was doing some business of the ship on the forecastle; but all the sailors on the deck, idling or working, took a look at that fine figure as it passed to the side, and, could their secret thoughts have been interpreted, literature would be the richer by several pages of original ideas.

The port quarter-boat had been lowered and manned, and lay under the gangway ladder. Without looking

aft, where her husband was, without a glance around her at the ship she was deserting, Lucretia put her foot upon the steps and descended, and took her place in the stern-sheets, where she was joined by Mr. Ralland, who, catching hold of the yoke-lines, sang out, "Shove off!" The oars dipped, and Lucretia was going home.

Reynolds, with his arms folded, watched the shape of the receding boat, watched the diminishing form of his wife, and his manhood broke from him in a great sigh and a little hysterical shake of the head, as though he was wrenched by an inward agony, and, but for his being in full view of the sailors, he would have covered his face and vented himself in the convulsed dry sob of his sex, to whom the tears of women who make men weep in their way, are denied.

She was gone. He rose and slowly went below, not unmarked by some of the men, who, rough seamen as they were, could, in their crude, uninstructed fashion, enter into his thoughts. He walked into the cabin which had been occupied by his wife, and gazed around him. He looked at the trifling comforts, at the toilet fal-lals which he had provided, he looked at the pots of flowers. It is true, as Tennyson sings after Dante:

"That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things."

But the ship must start afresh. At sea, says Dana, there is no time for sentiment. The lily-white hand may be waved ashore, the dark eyes of sweet Susan, reclining on a rock, may be full of tears, but Jack on board ship must heave and pawl, must heave and raise the dead, must sheet home with a hoarse yeo-yeo, which slants tremorless to the mate's ear, unfaltering, though the heart-strings be cracking, gay as the leap of the sea

at the bow, though the sailor's sweetheart is transformed into the pickled horse of the harness cask and the pressure of her ruby lips into the benisons of the quarterdeck.

Within three hours of the arrival of the Flying Spur in Falmouth Bay, the quarter-boat, in which Lucretia had been rowed ashore, was again hanging in its place at the ship's davits, and the crew were, for the second time since leaving London, breaking out the anchor to the melody of their voices and the clanking of the revolved windlass. The upper topsail-yards were mast-headed, topgallantsails and royals loosed and set, and the sinking sun shone upon that fair and still visible picture of the sea, a fullrigged ship under all sail standing out from the land, her bowsprit pointing to the violet line of water in the south, every rope gleaming as though threaded by a hair of gold, every cloth coloured as though touched with a brush dipped in gilt varnish; every piece of brasswork burning with an eye that was like a little scarlet sun; a thin racing of beaded bubbles marked the progress of the keel, and the song of the sea, when the heavens are bright and the waters restful, and the breeze a pleasant impulse for the canvas, was chanted under the bows as the vessel slowly sailed out into the English Channel, out into the enfolding pinions of the evening, out into the star-studded raven darkness of the night on her long voyage to a port on the west coast of South America.

The reader is to be spared an account of this voyage of a sailing-ship whose lading was bricks, coke, and coal. Not but that the true romance of the deep is to be found in such vessels: for if it dwell not in them you shall seek it in vain in those steamers which, of all floating structures, are most familiar to readers of novels. The

G

marine Muse shrinks from the giant edifice whose walls might have been designed for the storage of gas, whose saloon is the coffee-room of the huge hotel, whose engine-room is indeed a noble submission of human genius, but on whose sliding rods and rotating cranks the fairy foot of Poesy finds no platform.

We pass to the month of February in the year 1891, and the date was the second. The Flying Spur was off the coast of Chili. Her voyage down to this period had been absolutely uneventful. Three days earlier—that is, on the morning of January 31, a man had come running aft to Mr. Featherbridge to report that smoke was rising from the forehatch. The covers were lifted, and the cargo of coal in the fore and main holds was found to be on fire. Drenching volumes of water by the ton were poured in by hose, by bucket, through holes cut in the deck. In vain. The stench of sulphureous gases drove the men out of the forecastle, and the captain and mates from their quarters in the cabin. The Island of Santo Cristo then bore a few leagues distant about westnorth-west. On the first of February, the day following the discovery of the fire which continued to burn with fury, rendering the decks too hot for the naked foot to endure, though no flames had as yet leapt up, it came on to blow from the south-west. It was first a fresh breeze in the tail of a heavy running swell, which it wrinkled with snappish little seas. But in the afternoon the wind had stormed up into half a gale, and the burning ship, with coils of black smoke streaming from her hatchways, flying low over the lee bulwarks, was hove to under her lower main-topsail.

A gale of wind and a ship on fire! It is difficult to conceive a more horrible combination of peril. A ship hove to and on fire, and an iron beach of an island close