Wacousta (42 page)

Another deep and exulting “Ugh!” was now heaved from the chest of the Indian, who stood calmly on the spot on which he had first rested, while Fuller prepared a coil of rope to throw to the active steersman.

“Avast there, Jack!” growled the boatswain, addressing the sailor; “how can the stranger keep the bow of his craft on, and grapple at the same time? Just pass one end of the coil round your waist, and swing yourself gently into her.”

The head of the canoe was now near enough for the purpose. The sailor did as he was desired, having previously divested himself of his shoes, and leaping forward, alighted on what appeared to be a bundle of blankets stowed away in her bows. No sooner, however, had he secured his footing, when with another desperate leap, and greatly to the astonishment of all around, he bounded once more to the deck of the schooner, his countenance exhibiting every mark of superstitious alarm. In the act of quitting the canoe he had spurned her violently several feet from the vessel, which the silent steersman was again making every effort to reach.

“Why what the devil’s the matter with you now?” exclaimed the rough boatswain, who, as well as Captain de Haldimar and the rest of the crew, had quitted the gangway to learn the cause of this extraordinary conduct. “Damn my eyes, if you ar’n’t worse scared than when the Ingian stood over you in the jolly boat.”

“Scared, ay, to be sure I am; and so would you be scared too, if you’d a see’d what I did. May I never touch the point at Portsmouth, if I a’n’t seen her ghost.”

“Where?–whose ghost?–what ghost?–what do you mean, Jack?” exclaimed several of the startled men in the same breath, while the superstitious dread so common to mariners drew them still closer in the group that encircled their companion.

“Well, then, as I am a miserable sinner,” returned the man, impressively, and in a low tone, “I see’d in the bows of the canoe,–and the hand that steered it was not made of flesh and blood like ours,–what do you think?–the ghost of ____”

Captain de Haldimar heard no more. At a single bound he had gained the ship’s side. He strained his eyes anxiously
over the gangway in search of the canoe, but it was gone. A death-like silence throughout the deck followed the communication of the sailor, and in that pause the sound of the receding boat could be heard, not urged, as it had approached, by one paddle, but by two. The heart of the officer throbbed almost to suffocation; and his firmness, hitherto supported by the manly energies of his nature, now failed him quite. Heedless of appearances, regardless of being overlooked, he tottered like a drunken man for support against the mainmast. For a moment or two he leant his head upon his hand, with the air of one immersed in the most profound abstraction; while the crew, at once alarmed and touched by the deep distress into which this mysterious circumstance had plunged him, stood silently and respectfully watching his emotion. Suddenly he started from his attitude of painful repose, like one awaking from a dream, and demanded what had become of the Indian.

Every one looked around, but the captive was nowhere to be seen. Search was made below, both in the cabin and in the fore decks, and men were sent up aloft to see if he had secreted himself in the rigging; but all returned, stating he was nowhere to be found. He had disappeared from the vessel altogether, yet no one knew how; for he had not been observed to stir from the spot on which he had first planted himself. It was plain, however, he had joined the mysterious party in the canoe, from the fact of the second paddle having been detected; and all attempts at pursuit, without endangering the vessel on the shallows, whither the course of the fugitives was now directed, was declared by the boatswain utterly impracticable.

The announcement of the Indian’s disappearance seemed to put the climax to the despair of the unfortunate officer.–“Then is our every hope lost!” he groaned aloud, as, quitting the centre of the vessel, he slowly traversed the
deck, and once more stood at the side of his no less unhappy and excited sister. For a moment or two he remained with his arms folded across his chest, gazing on the dark outline of her form; and then, in a wild paroxysm of silent, tearless grief, threw himself suddenly on the edge of the couch, and clasping her in a long close embrace to his audibly beating heart, lay like one bereft of all sense and consciousness of surrounding objects.

ONE

The night passed away without further event on board the schooner, yet in all the anxiety that might be supposed incident to men so perilously situated. Habits of long-since acquired superstition, too powerful to be easily shaken off, moreover contributed to the dejection of the mariners, among whom there were not wanting those who believed the silent steersman was in reality what their comrade had represented,–an immaterial being, sent from the world of spirits to warn them of some impending evil. What principally gave weight to this impression were the repeated asseverations of Fuller, during the sleepless night passed by all on deck, that what he had seen was no other, could be no other, than a ghost! exhibiting in its hueless, fleshless cheek, the well-known lineaments of one who was supposed to be no more: and, if the story of their comrade had needed confirmation among men in whom faith in, rather than love for, the marvellous was a constitutional ingredient, the terrible effect that seemed to have been produced on Captain de Haldimar by the same mysterious visitation would have been more than conclusive. The very appearance of the night, too, favoured the delusion.
The heavens, comparatively clear at the moment when the canoe approached the vessel, became suddenly enveloped in the deepest gloom at its departure, as if to enshroud the course of those who, having so mysteriously approached, had also so unaccountably disappeared. Nor had this threatening state of the atmosphere the counterbalancing advantage of storm and tempest to drive them onward through the narrow waters of the Sinclair, and enable them, by anticipating the pursuit of their enemies, to shun the Scylla and Charybdis that awaited their more leisure advance. The wind increased not; and the disappointed seamen remarked, with dismay, that their craft scarcely made more progress than at the moment when she first quitted her anchorage.

It was now near the first hours of day; and although, perhaps, none slept, there were few who were not apparently at rest, and plunged in the most painful reflections. Still occupying her humble couch, and shielded from the night air merely by the cloak that covered her own blood-stained garments, lay the unhappy Clara, her deep groans and stifled sobs bursting occasionally from her pent-up heart, and falling on the ears of the mariners like sounds of fearful import, produced by the mysterious agency that already bore such undivided power over their thoughts. On the bare deck, at her side, lay her brother, his face turned upon the planks, as if to shut out all objects from eyes he had not the power to close; and, with one arm supporting his heavy brow, while the other, cast around the restless form of his beloved sister, seemed to offer protection and to impart confidence, even while his lips denied the accents of consolation. Seated on an empty hen-coop at their head, was Sir Everard Valletort, his back reposing against the bulwarks of the vessel, his arms folded across his chest, and his eyes bent mechanically on the
man at the helm, who stood within a few paces of him,–an attitude of absorption, which he, ever and anon, changed to one of anxious and enquiring interest, whenever the agitation of Clara was manifested in the manner already shown.

The main deck and forecastle of the vessel presented a similar picture of mingled unquietness and repose. Many of the seamen might be seen seated on the gun-carriages, with their cheeks pressing the rude metal that served them for a pillow. Others lay along the decks, with their heads resting on the elevated hatches; while not a few, squatted on their haunches with their knees doubled up to their very chins, supported in that position the aching head that rested between their rough and horny palms. A first glance might have induced the belief that all were buried in the most profound slumber; but the quick jerking of a limb,–the fitful, sudden shifting of a position,–the utter absence of that deep breathing which indicates the unconsciousness of repose, and the occasional spirting of tobacco juice upon the deck,–all these symptoms only required to be noticed, to prove the living silence that reigned throughout was not born either of apathy or sleep.

At the gangway at which the canoe had approached now stood the individual already introduced to our readers as Jack Fuller. The same superstitious terror that caused his flight had once more attracted him to the spot where the subject of his alarm first appeared to him; and, without seeming to reflect that the vessel, in her slow but certain progress, had left all vestige of the mysterious visitant behind, he continued gazing over the bulwarks on the dark waters, as if he expected at each moment to find his sight stricken by the same appalling vision. It was at the moment when he had worked up his naturally dull imagination to its highest perception of the supernatural, that
he was joined by the rugged boatswain, who had passed the greater part of the night in pacing up and down the decks, watching the aspect of the heavens, and occasionally tauting a rope or squaring a light yard, unassisted, as the fluttering of the canvass in the wind rendered the alteration necessary.

“Well, Jack!” bluntly observed the latter in a gruff whisper that resembled the suppressed growling of a mastiff, “what the hell are ye thinking of now?–Not got over your flumbustification yet, that ye stand here, looking as sanctified as an old parson!”

“I’ll tell ye what it is, Mr. Mullins,” returned the sailor, in the same key; “you may make as much game on me as you like; but these here strange sort of doings are somehow quizzical; and, though I fears nothing in the shape of flesh and blood, still, when it comes to having to do with those as is gone to Davy Jones’s locker like, it gives a fellow an all-overishness as isn’t quite the thing. You understand me?”

“I’m damned if I do!” was the brief but energetic rejoinder.

“Well, then,” continued Fuller, “if I must out with it, I must. I think that ’ere Ingian must have been the devil, or how could he come so sudden and unbeknownst upon me, with the head of a ’possum: and then, agin, how could he get away from the craft without our seeing him? and how came the ghost on board of the canoe?”

“Avast there, old fellow; you means not the head of a ’possum, but a beaver: but that ’ere’s all nat’r’l enough, and easily ’counted for; but you hav’n’t told us whose ghost it was, after all.”

“No; the captain made such a spring to the gunwale, as frighted it all out of my head: but come closer, Mr. Mullins, and I’ll whisper it in your ear.–Hark! what was that?”

“I hears nothing,” said the boatswain, after a pause.

“It’s very odd,” continued Fuller; “but I thought as how I heard it several times afore you came.”

“There’s something wrong, I take it, in your upper story, Jack Fuller,” coolly observed his companion; “that ’ere ghost has quite capsized you.”

“Hark, again!” repeated the sailor. “Didn’t you hear it then? A sort of a groan like.”

“Where, in what part?” calmly demanded the boatswain, though in the same suppressed tone in which the dialogue had been carried on.

“Why, from the canoe that lies alongside there. I heard it several times afore.”

“Well, damn my eyes, if you a’rn’t turned a real coward at last,” politely remarked Mr. Mullins. “Can’t the poor fat devil of a Canadian snooze a bit in his hammock, without putting you so completely out of your reckoning?”

“The Canadian–the Canadian!” hurriedly returned Fuller: “why, don’t you see him there, leaning with his back to the mainmast, and as fast asleep as if the devil himself couldn’t wake him?”

“Then it was the devil, you heard, if you like,” quaintly retorted Mullins: “but bear a hand, and tell us all about this here ghost.”

“Hark, again! what was that?” once more enquired the excited sailor.

“Only a gust of wind passing through the dried boughs of the canoe,” said the boatswain: “but since we can get nothing out of that crazed noddle of yours, see if you can’t do something with your hands. That ’ere canoe running alongside, takes half a knot off the ship’s way. Bear a hand then, and cast off the painter, and let her drop astarn, that she may
follow in our wake. Hilloa! what the hell’s the matter with the man now?”

And well might he ask. With his eyeballs staring, his teeth chattering, his body half bent, and his arms thrown forward, yet pendent as if suddenly arrested in that position while in the act of reaching the rope, the terrified sailor stood gazing on the stern of the canoe; in which, by the faint light of the dawning day, was to be seen an object well calculated to fill the least superstitious heart with terror and dismay. Through an opening in the foliage peered the pale and spectral face of a human being, with its dull eyes bent fixedly and mechanically upon the vessel. In the centre of the wan forehead was a dark incrustation, as of blood covering the superficies of a newly closed wound. The pallid mouth was partially unclosed, so as to display a row of white and apparently lipless teeth; and the features were otherwise set and drawn, as those of one who is no longer of earth. Around the head was bound a covering so close, as to conceal every part save the face; and once or twice a hand was slowly raised, and pressed upon the blood spot that dimmed the passing fairness of the brow. Every other portion of the form was invisible.

“Lord have mercy upon us!” exclaimed the boatswain, in a voice that, now elevated to more than its natural tone, sounded startlingly on the stillness of the scene; “sure enough it is, indeed, a ghost!”

“Ha! do you believe me now?” returned Fuller, gaining confidence from the admission of his companion, and in the same elevated key. “It is, as I hope to be saved, the ghost I see’d afore.”

The commotion on deck was now every where universal. The sailors started to their feet, and, with horror and alarm
visibly imprinted on their countenances, rushed tumultuously towards the dreaded gangway.