• Main
  • Catatlog
  • For Authors
  • Contacts



    accompanied him. She
    was glad of his society, for Mrs. Hastings was seldom in evidence, and
    no efforts could get Miss Rawlinson out of her berth. The gale,
    however, blew itself out at length, and the evening after it moderated
    Agatha was sitting near the head of one fiddle-guarded table in the
    saloon waiting for dinner, which the stewards had still some difficulty
    in bringing in. Wyllard's place was next to hers, but he had not
    appeared yet, nor, as it happened, had the skipper, who, however, did
    not invariably dine with the passengers. One of the two doors which
    led from the foot of the branching companion stairway into either side
    of the saloon stood open, and presently she saw Wyllard standing just
    outside it.

    He beckoned to the doctor, who sat at the foot of her table, and the
    latter merely raised his brows a trifle. He was a rather consequential
    person, and it was evident to the girl that he resented being summoned
    by a gesture. She did not think anybody else had noticed Wyllard, and
    she waited with some curiosity to see what he would do. He made a sign
    with a lifted hand, and she felt that the other would obey it, as, in
    fact, he did, though his manner was very far from conciliatory. By
    dint of listening closely, she could hear their conversation.

    "I'm sorry," said Wyllard, "to trouble you just now, and I didn't come
    in because that would have set everybody wondering what you were wanted
    for; but one of those boys forward has been thrown down the ladder, and
    has cut his head."

    "Ah!" said the doctor. "I'll see to him--after dinner."

    "It's a nasty cut," said Wyllard. "He's losing a good deal of blood."

    "Then I would suggest that you apply to my assistant."

    "As I don't know where he is, I have come to you."

    The doctor made a sign of impatience. "Well," he said, "you have told
    me, which I think is as far as your concern in the matter goes. I may
    add that I'm not accustomed to dictation on behalf of a steerage
    passenger."

    Agatha saw Wyllard quietly slip between him and the entrance to the
    saloon, but she also saw, as neither of the others apparently did, the
    skipper appear a few paces behind them, and glance at them sharply. He
    was usually a silent man, at home in the ice and the clammy fog, but
    not a great acquisition in the saloon.

    "Something wrong down forward, Mr. Wyllard? They were making a great
    row a little while ago," he said.

    "Nothing very serious," said Wyllard. "One of the boys, however, has
    cut his head."

    The skipper turned towards the doctor quietly; but Agatha fancied he
    had overheard part of the conversation.

    "Don't you think you had better go--at once?" he said.

    The doctor evidently did, for he disappeared, and Wyllard, who entered
    the saloon with the skipper, sat down at Agatha's side.

    "How do you do it?" she asked.

    "What?" asked Wyllard, attacking his dinner.

    "We'll say persuade other folks to see things as you do."

    "You evidently mean the skipper, and I suppose you heard something of
    what was going on. In this case, as it happens, I'm indebted to his
    prejudices. He's one of the old type--a seaman first of all--and what
    we call bluff, and you call bounce, has only one effect upon men of his
    kind. It gets their backs up."

    Agatha fancied that he did not like it, either, but she changed the
    subject.

    "There really was a row forward," she said. "What was the trouble
    over? You were, no doubt, somewhere near the scene of it."

    Wyllard laughed. "I sat upon the steerage ladder, and am afraid I
    cheered the combatants on. It was really a glorious row. They
    hammered each other with tin plates, and some of them tried to use
    hoop-iron knives, which fortunately doubled up. They broke quite a few
    of the benches, and wrecked the mess table, but so far as I noticed the
    only one seriously hurt was a little chap who was quietly looking on."

    "And you encouraged them?"

    "I certainly did. It was a protest against dirt, disorder, and the
    slothfulness that's a plague to the community. Isn't physical force
    warranted when there's no other remedy?"

    A grey-haired Canadian looked up. "Yes," he said, "I guess it is. The
    first man who pulled his gun in British Columbia was hanged right away,
    and they've scarcely had to make an example of another ever since,
    though it's quite a while ago."

    He paused, and smiled approvingly. "A mess of any kind worries us, and
    we don't take long to straighten it out. Same feelings in the Germans
    and Scandinavians. I'll say that for them, any way. Your friends
    swept up the steerage?"

    "They took the Slavs and Jews, and pitched them down the second hatch
    on to the orlop deck. Things will go smoothly now our crowd are on
    top."

    "Your crowd?" said Agatha.

    The Canadian nodded. "That's what he meant," he said. "There are two
    kinds of folks you and the rest of them are dumping into Canada. One's
    the kind that will get up and hustle, break land, and build new
    homes--log at first, frame and stone afterwards. They go on from a
    quarter-section and a team of oxen to the biggest farm they can handle,
    and every fresh furrow they cut enriches all of us. The other kind
    want to sit down in the dirt and take life easily, as they've always
    done. The dirt worries everybody else, and we've no use for them. By
    and bye our Legislature will have to wake up and stop them getting in."

    He went on with his dinner after this, but his observations left Agatha
    thoughtful. She was, for one thing, beginning to understand one side
    of her companion's character. He, it seemed, stood for practical
    efficiency. There was a driving force in him that made for progress
    and order. It was apparently his mission to straighten things out.
    Some folks of his kind, she reflected, now and then made a good deal of
    avoidable trouble; but there was in this man, at least, a
    half-whimsical toleration, which rendered that an unlikely thing in his
    particular case. Besides, she had already recognised that she was in
    some respects fortunate in having such a man for her companion.

    Her deck chair was always set out in the most sheltered and comfortable
    place. If there was anything to be seen, a cargo boat plunging along
    forecastle under, or a great iron sailing ship thrashing out to the
    westwards, with the spray clouds flying about her hove up weather side,
    he almost invariably appeared with a pair of powerful glasses. She was
    watched over, her wishes anticipated, and the man was seldom
    obtrusively present when she felt disposed to talk to somebody else.
    It struck her that she had thought a good deal about him during the
    last few days, and rather less than usual about Gregory, which was
    partly why she did not walk up and down the deck with him, as usual,
    after dinner that evening.

    Three or four days later the _Scarrowmania_ ran into the Bank fog, and
    burrowed through it with whistle hooting dolefully at regular
    intervals. Now and then an answering ringing of bells came out of the
    clammy vapour, and the half-seen shape of an anchored schooner loomed
    up, rolling wildly on grey slopes of sea. Once, too, a tiny dory, half
    filled with lines and buoys, slid by plunging on the wash flung off by
    the _Scarrowmania's_ bows, and Agatha understood that the men in her
    had escaped death by a hairsbreadth. They were cod fishers, Wyllard
    told her, and he added that there was a host of them at work somewhere
    in the sliding haze. She, however, fancied, now and then, that the fog
    had a depressing effect on him, and that when the dory lay beneath the
    rail there had been a somewhat unusual look in his face.

    Then a breeze came out of the north-west, with the sting of the ice in
    it, but the fog did not lift, and the _Scarrowmania_ plunged on through
    it with spray-wet decks and the grey seas smashing about her bows. It
    was bitterly cold and clammy, the raw wind pierced to the bone, but the
    voyage was, at least, rapidly shortening, and one evening Agatha paced
    the deck with Wyllard in a somewhat curious mood. Perhaps it was
    merely the gloom re-acting upon her, for she was looking forward to the
    landing with a certain half-conscious shrinking.

    They stopped by the rails presently, looking out upon the tumbling seas
    that rolled out of the sliding haze tipped with livid froth, and the
    dreariness of the surroundings intensified the girl's depression.
    There was something unpleasantly suggestive in the sight of the fog
    that hid everything, for she had of late been troubled with a
    half-apprehensive longing to see what lay before her. In the
    meanwhile, she noticed the look-out standing, a lonely, shapeless
    figure, amidst the spray that whirled about the plunging bows. By and
    bye she saw him turn and wave an arm apparently towards the bridge
    behind her, and she heard a hoarse, wind-out cry. What it meant she
    could not tell, but in another moment the _Scarrowmania's_ whistle
    shrieked again.

    Then a grey shape burst out of the vapour, and grew with astonishing
    swiftness into dim tiers of slanted sailcloth swaying above a strip of
    hull that moved amidst a broad white smear of foam. It was a brig
    under fore-course and topsails, and as Agatha watched her she sank to
    her tilted bowsprit, and a big grey and white sea foamed about her bows.

    "Aren't we dreadfully near?" she asked.

    Wyllard did not answer. He was gazing up at the bridge, and once more
    the whistle hurled out a great warning blast. It hardly seemed to her
    that the two vessels could pass clear of each other. Then Wyllard laid
    a hand upon her shoulder.

    "The skipper's starboarding. We'll go round her stern," he said.

    His grasp was reassuring, and she watched the straining curves of
    canvas and line of half-submerged hull. It rose with streaming bows,
    swung high above the sea, sank again, and vanished with bewildering
    suddenness into a belt of driving fog. She was not sure that there had
    been any peril, but it was certainly over now, and she was rather
    puzzled by her sensations when Wyllard had held her shoulder. For one
    thing, she had felt instinctively that she was safe with him. She,
    however, decided not to trouble herself about the reason for this, and
    by and bye she looked up at him. The expression she had already
    noticed was once more in his face.

    "I don't think you like the fog any more than I do," she said.

    "No," said Wyllard, with a quiet forcefulness that almost startled her.
    "I hate it."

    "Why do you go as far as that?"

    "It recalls something that still gives me a very bad few minutes every
    now and then. It has been worrying me again to-night."

    "I wonder," said Agatha simply, "if you would care to tell me?"

    The man looked down on her with a little wry smile. "I haven't told it
    often, but you shall hear," he said. "It's a tale of a black failure."
    He stretched out a hand and pointed to the sliding fog and ranks of
    tumbling seas. "It was very much this kind of night, and we were
    lying, reefed down, off one of the Russians' beaches, when I asked for
    volunteers. I got them--two boats' crews of the finest seamen that
    ever handled oar or sealing rifle."

    "But what did you want them for?"

    "A boat from another schooner had been cast ashore. It was blowing
    tolerably hard, as it usually does where the Polar ice comes down into
    the Behring Sea. They'd been shooting seals from her. We meant to
    bring the men off if we could manage it."

    "Wouldn't one boat have been enough?"

    "No," said Wyllard drily, "we had three, and I think that was one cause
    of the trouble. There was one from the other schooner. You see, those
    seals belonged to the Russians, and we free-lances could only shoot
    them clear off shore. I'm not sure that the men in the wrecked boat
    had been fishing outside the limit."

    Agatha did not press for further particulars, and he went on:

    "We managed to make a landing, though one boat went up bottom
    uppermost," he said. "I fancy they must have broken or lost an oar
    then. We also got the wrecked men, but we had trouble while we were
    getting the boats off again. The surf was running in savagely, and the
    fog shut down solid as a wall. Any way, we pulled off, and went out
    with a foot of water in us, while one of the rescued men took my oar
    when I let it go."

    "Why had you to let it go?"

    Wyllard laughed in a rather grim fashion.

    "I got my head laid open with a sealing club," he said. "Some of the
    rest had their scratches, but they managed to row. For one thing, they
    knew they had to. They had reasons for not wanting to fall into the
    Russians' hands. Well, we cleared the beach, and once or twice as I
    tried to bale there was a shout somewhere near us, and the loom of a
    vanishing boat. It was all we could make out, for the sea was slopping
    into her, and the spray was flying everywhere. If there

    [Back][1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][Next]