THE DEATH SHIP: A STRANGE STORY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9163, 19 September 1888, Page 3

THE DEATH SHIP: A STRANGE STORY.

[NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.]

AN ACCOUNT OP A CRUISE IN THE FLYING DUTCH MAN, COLLECTED FROM THE PAPERS OF THE LATE MR. GEOFFREY FENTON, OF POPLAR, MASTER MARINER By W. CLARK RUSSELL, Author of " The Wreck of the Grosvenor,' "The Golden Hope," &c., &c. (All Rights Reserved.] CHAPTER XXXV. WE TELL OUR LOVE AGAIN. I had passed from the deck, where I slept, to the cabin in too great a hurry to notice the weather. Now, reaching the poop, I stood a moment or two to look around, bping in my way as concerned about the direction of the wind as Vanderdccken himself. It still blew fresh, but the heavens lay open among the clouds, that had thickened their bulk into great drooping, shining bosoms, a3 though indeed the crystalline blue under which they sailed in solemn procession mirrored the swelling brows of mighty snow-covered mountains. The sea ran in a very dark shade of azure, and offered a most glorious surface of colours, with the heave of its violet hills bearing silver and pearly streakings of sunshine and foam upon their buoyant floating slopes, and the jewelled and living masses of froth which flashed from their heights and stormed into their valleys as they raced before the wind, which chased them with noisy whistlings and notes as of bugles. The Death Ship was close-hauled—when was the day to come when I should find her with her yards squared?—but on the larboard tack, so that they must have put the ship about since midnight; and the sun standing almost over the mizzen topsail yard arm, showed me that we were doing some westing, for which I could have fallen on my knees and thanked God.

The captain and the mate were on deck, Vanderdecken abreast of the tiller, Van Vogelaar twenty paces forward of him, both still and stiff, gazing seawards with faces whose exprsssionlessness forbade your comparing them to sleeping dreamers. They looked the eternity that was upon them, and their ghastliness, the age and the doom of the ship, fell with a shock upon the perception to the horrible suggestions of those two figures and of the face at the tiller, whoso tense and bloodless skin glared white to the sun, as the little eyes, like rings of fire eating into the sockets beneath the brows, glanced from tho card to the weather edges of the canvas. I quitted the poop, not choosing to keep myself in view of Vanderdecken and Van Vogelaar, and walked about the quarterdeck, struggling hard with the dreadful despondency which clouded my mind, whilst imagination furiously beat against the iron-hard conditions which imprisoned me, as a bird, rends its plumage in a cage, till my heart pulsed with the soreness of a real wound in my breast. The only glimmer of hope I could find lay, as I had again and again told Imogene, in the direction of the land Bub who was to say how long a time would pass before the needs of the ship would force Vanderdecken shorewards? And if the wind grew northerly and came feeble, how many weeks might we have to count ere this intolerable sailer brought the land into sight? Oh ! I toll you, such speculations were sheerly maddening, when I added to them the reflection that the heaving of the land into view might, by no means, prove a signal for our deliverance.

However, by the time Imogene arrived on deck, I had succeeded in tranquillising my mind. She took some turns with me and then went to the captain on the poop and stayed with him, that is, stood near him, though I do not know that they conversed, till he went to his cabin; whereupon I joined her, neither of us designing to heed the mate's observation of us, and for the rest of the morning we were together knitting our hearts closer and closer whilst we talked of England, of her parents, the ship her father had commanded, and the like, amusing ourselves with dreams of escape, till hope grew lustrous with the fairy light our amorous fancies flung upon it. And lo! here on the deck of this Death Ship, Van Vogelaar standing like a statue within twenty paces of us, and the dead face of a breathing man at the tiller, and silent sailors languidly stirring forwards or voieelessly plying the marlinespike or the ser-ving-mallet aloft, where the swollen can vas swayed under the deep-breasted cloudlike spaces of ancient tapestry from which Time has sponged out . all bright colours —here, in this fated and faded craft, that surged with the silence of the tomb in her, through hissing seas and aslant whistling winds, did I, in the course of our talk, find myself presently speaking of my mother, of the little town in which she lived, of the church to which, under God, I would lead my sweetest, there to make her my bride. She blushed rosy with delight, and I marked the passionate gladness of her love in the glance she gave me, as she lifted the fringes of her white eyelids to dart that exquisite gleam, whilst she held her chaste face drooped. But looking, as though some power drew me to look, at Van Vogelaar, I met his malignant; stare full; and the chill and venom of his storm-bruised countenance fell upon my heart like a sensible atmosphere and poison. For the life of me I could not help the shudder that ran through my frame. "Do you believe," said I, " that the men of this Death Ship have any power of blighting hope and emotion by their glance '! The mere sighting of this vessel, it is said, is sufficient to procure tho doom of another." She shook her head as though she would say she could not tell. "There is something," said I, "to ice the strongest man's blood in the expression Van Vogelaar sometimes turns upon me. There is an ancient story of a bald-pated philosopher who, at a marriage feast, looked and looked a bride, and the wondrous pavilion which the demons she commanded had built into emptiness. He stared her and her splendours into thin air, sending the bridegroom to die with nothing but memory to clasp. There may be no philosophy in yonder Dutch villain, but surely he has all the malignity of Apollonius in his eyes." " Do you fear he will stare me into air ?" she said, smiling. "I would blind him, if I thought so, said I, with a temper that owed not a little of its heat to the heavy fit of superstition then upon me. "In the times of that rogue it was believed a man could pray another dead ; but did one ever hear of a stare powerful enough to dematerialise a body ? Sweet one, if that pale ruffian there couid look you into space, what form would your spirit take? Would you become to me, as did the girl of his heart to the old poet —

' The very figure of that Morniiijr Star That, dropping pearls and shedding dewy sweets, Fled from the greedy waves when I approached V "

"He cannot part us!" she exclaimed. " Let me be your Morning Star, indeed, flying to you from the greedy waves, not from you, Geoffrey. Do not speak to me of Van Vogelaar, nor look his way. Tell me again, dear, of your mother's home ; talk to me of flowers—of English flowers— of that old church."

CHAPTER XXXVI. WE SIGHT A SAIL.

As the day advanced the breeze weakened, the sea grew smoother, the surge flattened to the swell, and the wind did little more than crisp with snowy feathers those long, low, broad-browed folds swinging steadily and cradlingly out of the heart of the mighty Southern Ocean. Every cloth the Bra&ve carried had been sheeted home and hoisted. She looked as if she had been coated with sulphur, as she slipped rolling up one slant and down another brimming to her channels ; the hue of her was as if she had been anchored all night near to a flaming hill and had received for hours the plumy, pumice-coloured discharge of the volcano. There was nothing to relieve this sulphurous reflection with flash or sparkle; the sunshine died in the green backs of the brass swivels, it lay lustreless upon the rusty iron cannons, it found no mirror in the dry and honeycombed masts, and it touched without vitalising the rounded canvas whose breasts had nothing of that hearkening, seeking' look which you

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find in the flowing swelling of a ship's sails yearning horizon-wards to the land beyond the sea. It was half-past five o'clock in the afternoon. I had come up from supper, leaving Vanderdecken smoking at the head of the table. Imogene had gone to her cabin for her hat. Van Vogelsar was off duty, and very likely lying down. Arents had the watch. There was a fine sailing wind blowing, and but for the choking grip of the trim of the yards on the creaking, high, old fabric, I believe the ship would have got some life out of it. It was the first dog-watch —an idle hour —and all the ghostly crew were assembled forward, every man smoking, for tobacco was now plentiful, and their postures, their faces, their different kinds of dress, their lifelessness, save for the lifting of their hands to their pipes, and above all their silence, made a most wonderful picture of the decks their way ; the foreground formed of the boats, a number of spare booms, the close quarters for the live stock, the cook-house chimney coming up through the deck, and trailing a thin line of blue smoke, whilst under the arched and transverse foot of the foresail you saw the ship's beak, the amazing relic of a figurehead, the clews of the sprit-sail and sprittopsail pulling aslant— being the men, a dismal, white, and speechless company, with the thick foremast rising straight up out of the jumble of them, whilst the red western light flowed over the pallid edges of the canvas, that widened out to the crimson gold whose blaze stole into the darkened hollows this aide, and enriched the aged surfaces with a rosy atmosphere. I stood right aft, carelessly running my eye along the sea-line that floated darkening out of the fiery haze under the sun on our weather beam, till in the east it curved in a deep, blue line, so exquisitely clear and pure that it made you think of the sweep of i a camel's hairbrush dipped in indigo. I j gazed without expectation of observing the least break or flaw in that lovely, darkling continuity, and 'twas with a skirt of surprise and doubt that I suddenly caught sight of an object orango-coloured by the light far down in the east —that is to say, fair upon our lee-quarter. It was a vessel's canvas beyond question ; the mirroring of the western glory by some gleaming cloths ; and my heart started off in a canter to the sight, it being impossible now for a ship to heave into view without filling me with dread of a separation from Imogene, and agitating me with other considerations, such as how I should be dealt with, on a ship receiving mo, if they discovered I had come from the Flying Dutchman. I waited a little to make sure, and then called to the second mate, who stood staring at God knows what, with unspeeulative eyes. " Here Arents, yonder is a sail—there, as I point." He quickened out of his death-like repose with the extraordinary swiftness observable in all these men in this particular sort of behaviour, came to my side, gazed attentively, and said, "Yes; how will she be heading He went for the glass, and whilst he adjusted the tubes to his focus, Captain Vanderdecken arrived with Imogene. " What do you see, Arents?" asked the captain. "A sail, sir, just now sighted by Herr Fenton."

Vanderdecken took the glass and levelled it, and after a brief inspection handed me the tube. The atmosphere was so bright that the lenses could do little in the way of clarification. However, I took a view for courtesy's sake, and seemed to make out the square canvas and long-headed gafftopsail of a schooner as the sails slided like the wings of a sea-bird along the swell. "How doth she steer, mynheer?" said Vanderdecken, as I passed the telescope to Arents. "Why," I answered, "unless the cut of her canvas be a mere imagination of mine, she is close hauled on the larboard tack and looking up for us as only a schooner knows how." "What do you call her?" he exclaimed, imperiously. " A schooner, sir." Whether he had. seen vessels of that rig since their invention I could not know, but it was certain the word schooner conveyed no idea. It was amazing beyond language that hints of this kind should not have made his ignorance significant to nini. The sight of the amber shadow on the lee quarter put an expression of anxiety into Imogene's face. She stood looking at it in silence, with parted lips and shortened breathing, her too fragile profile like a cameo of surpassing workmanship, against the soft western splendour, the gilding of which made a trembling flame of one side of the hair that streamed upon her back. Presently turning and catching me watching she smiled faintly, and said in our tongue, "Tho time was, dear, when I welcomed a strange sail for the relief—the breakit promised. But you have taught me to dread the sight, now.'' I answered, speaking lightly and easily, and looking towards the distant sail as though we talked of her as an object of slender interest, " If our friend here attempts to transfer me without you, I shall hail tho stranger's people and tell them what ship this is, and warrant them destruction if they offer to receive me." The time passed : Imogene and I continued watchipg, now and again taking a turn for the warmth of exercise. As on the occasion of our pursuit by the Centaur, so now Vanderdecken stood to windward, rigid and staring, at long intervals addressing Arents, who from time to time pointed the glass as mechanically as over Vanderdecken's piping shepherd lilted his oaten reed to his mouth. Shortly after six arrived Van Vogelaar, who was followed by the boatswain, Jans ; and there they hung, a grisly group, whilst the crew got upon the booms, or overhung the rail, or stood upon the lower ratlines, with their backs to the shrouds, suggesting interest and excitement by their posture alone, for, as to their faces, 'twas mere expressionless glimmer and too far off for the wild light in their eyes to show. Thus in silence swam the Death Ship, heaving solemnly as she went, with tinkling noises breaking from the silver water that seethed from her ponderous bow, as though every foam bell were of precious metal and rang a little music of its own as it glided past. By this time the sail upon our leequarter had greatly grown ; and the vigorous red radiance, rained by the sinking luminary in such searching storms of light as crimsoned the very nethermost east to the black water-line, clearly showed her to be a small but stout schooner, hugging the wind under a prodigious pile of canvas, and eating her way into the steady breeze with the ease and speed of a frigate-bird that slopes its black pinions for the windward flight. Her hull was plain to the naked eye and resembled rich old mahoghany in the sunset. Her sails blending into one, she might, to the instant's gaze, have passed for a great star rising out of the yellow deep and somewhat empurpled by the atmosphere. It was our own desperately sluggish pace that made her approach magical for swiftness; but there could be no question as to the astonishing nimbleness of her heels. After a while Vanderdecken and his men warmed to the sight, and fell a talking to one another with some show of eagerness, and a deal of pointing on the part of Jans and Arents, whilst Van Vogelaar watched with a hung head and a sudden scowl. Occasionally Vanderdecken would direct a hot, interrogative glance at nic; suddenly he came to where we stood. "What do you make of that vessel, mynheer ?" said he. "Sir," I replied, "to speak honestly, I do not like her appearance. Two voyages ago my ship was overhauled by just another fellow as that yonder; she proved to be a Spanish picaroon. We had a hundred and fifty troops, who, with our sailors, crouched behind the bulwarks and fired into her decks when she shifted her helm to lay us aboard, and this reception made her, I suppose, think us a battle-ship, for she sheared off with a great sound of groaning rising out of her, and pelted from us under a press as if Satan had got hold of her towrope." " What country does her peculiar rig represent?" he asked, looking at the vessel with his hands raised to keep the level rays of the sun off his eyes. " I cannot be sure, mynheer ; French or Spanish ; I do not believe her English by the complexion of hor canvas. She may prove an American, for you see that her cloths are mixed with cotton." The word American seemed to puzzle him as much as the word schooner had, for in his day an American signified an Indian of that continent. However, I noticed that if ever I used a term that was incomprehensible to him he either dismissed it as coming from one who did not always talk as if he had his full mind, or as some English expression of which the meaning—as beinjr English—was

of no concern whatever to his Dutch prejudices. " Doth she suggest a privateer to your judgment ?" he inquired. I answered " Yes ; and more like a pirate than a privateer, if indeed the terms are not interchangeable." On this he went to the others, and they conversed as if he had called a council of them ; but I could not catch his words, nor did I deem it polite to seem as if I desired to hear what was said.

" Do you really believe her to be what you say, Geoffrey ?" said Imogene. "I do indeed. The dusk will have fallen before we shall have her near enough to make out her batteries and judge of her crew, but she has the true piratical look ; a most lovely hull—low-lying, long, and powerful—do you observe it, dearest? A cutwater like a knife, a noble length of bowsprit and jibbooms, and a mainsail big enough to hold sufficient wind to send a Royal George along at ten knots. If she be not a picaroon, what is her business here ? No trader goes rigged like that in these seas. 'Twould be otherwise were this the Pacific. She may be a letter of marque." " Look !" cried Imogene; " she hoists her flag." I hollowed my hands and used them for telescopes. The bunting streamed away over the stranger's quarter, but it was a very big flag, and its size, coupled with the wonderful searching light going to her in crimson lancing beams out of the hot flushed west, helped me to discern the tricolour.

" French 1" I exclaimed, fetching a quick breath.

Vanderdecken bad seen the flag, and was examining it through his ancient tubes. After a little he gave t.he glass to Van Vogelaar, who, after inspecting the colour, handed it to Arents ; then Jans looked. Vanderdecken called to me, " What signal is that she hath flying !" I responded, "The flag of the French Republic." He started, gazed at the others, and then glanced steadfastly at me as if he would assure himself that I did not mock him. He turned again to the schooner, taking the telescope from Jans. "The French Republic I heard him say, with a tremble of wonderment in his rich notes. The mate shrugged his shoulders, with a quick, insolent turning of his back upon me; and the white, fat face of Jans glimmered past him, staring with a gape from me to the schooner. But now the lower limb of the sun was upon the sealine ; it was all cloudless sky just where he was, and the vast, ray less orb, palpitating in waving folds of fire, sank intohis own wake of flames. The heavens glowed red to the zenith, and the ruby - coloured clouds moving before the wind looked like smoke issuing from behind the sea, where the world was burning furiously. The grey twilight followed fast, and the ocean turned ashen under the slip of moon over the foreyardarm. The stealing in of the dusk put a new life into the wind, and the harping in our dingy, faded heights was as if many spirits had gathered together up there, and were saluting the moon with wild hymns faintly chanted.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

THE DEATH SHIP 19 BOARDED BY A PIRATE.

I will not say that there is more ot melancholy in the slow creeping of darkness over the sea than in the first pale streaking of the dawn, hut the shining of the stars one by one, the stretching of the great plain of the deep into a midnight surfacewhether snow-covered with tossing surges or smooth as black marble and placid as the dark velvet sky that bends to the liquid confines—has a mystic character, which, even if the dawn held it, would-be weak as an impression through the quick dispelling of it by the joyous sun, but which is accentuated in the twilight shadows by their gradual darkening into the blackness of night, I particularly felt the oncoming of the dusk this evening. The glory of the sunset had been great, the twilight brief. Even as the gold and orange faded in the west, so did the canvas of our ship steal out spectrally into the grey gloom of the north and east; the water rushed past wan as the light of the horny paring of moon ; the figures of the four men to windward were changed into dusky, staring statues, and the wake sloped out from the starboard quarter full of eddying sparkles as green as emeralds. The canvas of the schooner, that had shone to the sunset with the glare of yellow satin, faded into a pallid cloud that often bothered the sight with its resemblance to the large puffs of vapour blowing into the east. "I should be glad to know her intentions," said I, uneasily. "If she be a piratical craft it will not do for you to be seen by her people, Imogene. Is it curiosity only thai, brings them racing up to us *" May be—may be : they will be having good glasses aboard and have been excited by our extraordinary rig." " Why should I not be seen, Geoffrey ?" asked my innocent girl. " Because, dearest, they may fall in love with you and carry you off." " But if they should take us both 5" said she, planting her little hand under my arm. "Ay, but 0110 would first like to know their calling," I replied, straining my eyes at the vessel that, at the pace she was tearing through it, would bo on our quarter within hailing distance in twenty minutes. What did Vanderdacken mean to do ? He made no sign. Fear and passion enough had been raised in him by the Centaur's pursuit; was I to suppose that yonder schooner had failed to alarm him because he was puzzled by her rig and by the substitution of the tricolour for the royal JJeur de ly s ? " Speak to him, Imogene," said I, " that I may follow. They may resent any hints from me if I break in upon them on a 1 sudden.

"Captain," she called in her gentle voice, " is not that vessel chasing us ?' He rounded gravely upon her : " She is apparently desirous of speaking with us, my child. She will be hailing us shortly." But if .she be a pirate, captain ?" "Doth Herr Fenton still think her so?" he demanded.

"She has the cut of one,, sir," said I; " and in any case her hurry to come at us, her careful luff - and heavy press of sail, should justify us in suspecting her intentions and preparing for her as an enemy." "Will the Englishman fight, think ye, captain, if it. comes to that?" exclaimed Van Vogeluar, in his harshest, most scoffing voice.

Taking no notice of the mate, I said in a low voice to Imogene, speaking quickly. They have nothing to fear. It is not for a Frenchman's cutlass to end these wretches' doom. 1 am worried on your account. Dearest, when I bid you. steal to my cabin —you know where it is ?" " Yes."

" And remain there. 'Tis the only hiding-place I can think of. If they board us and rummage the ship—well, I must wait upon events. In a business of this kind the turns are sudden. All that I can plan now is to take care that you are not .seen."

I should have been glad to arm myself, but knew not where to seek for a. weapon ; but thinking of this for a moment, it struck me that if the schooner threw her people aboard us, my being the only man armed might cost me my life ; therefore, unless the whole crew equipped themselves, I should find ray safest posture one of defencelessness.

"Do these men never fight?" I asked Imogene. "There has been no occasion for them to do so since I have been in the ship," she answered. " But I do not think they would right. They are above the need of it." " Yet they have treasure, they value it, and this should prove them in possession of instincts which would prompt them to protect their property." "God manages them in His own fashion," said she. " They cannot be reasoned about as men with the hot blood of life in them and existing as we do." Yet their apathy greatly contradicted the avidity with which they seized whatever of treasure or merchandise they came across in abandoned ships; nor could I recon cile it with the ugly cupidity of the mate and the lively care Vanderdecken took of those capacious chests of which he had exposed to me the sparkling contents of two. Blind as they were, however, to those illustrations of the progress of Time which they came across in every ship they encountered, they could not be insensible to the worthlessness of their aged and cankered sakers and their green and pivotrusted swivels. Their helplessnes in this way, backed by the perception in them ail that for some reason or otner no harm ever befel them from the pursuit of ships or the approach of armed boats, might furnish a clue to the seeming indifference with

which they watched the pale shadow of the ] schooner enlarging upon the darkling froth i to leeward, though I am also- greatly persuaded that much of the reason of their stolidity lay in their being puzzled by the rig of the schooner and the flag she had flown ; nor perhaps were they able to con ceive that so small a craft signified mischief, or had room for sailors enough to venture the carrying of a great tall craft like the Braave. But Vanderdecken could not know to what heights piracy had been lifted as a fine art by the audacity and repeated triumphs of the rogues whose real ensign, no matter what other colours they fly, is composed of a skull, cross-bones, and hour-glass upon a black field. The moon shed no light; but the wind was full of a weak dawn-like glimmer from the wash of the running waters and from the stars which shone brightly among the clouds. In all this while the schooner had never started a rope-yarn. Her white and leaning fabric, swaying with stately grace to the radiant galaxies, resembled an island of ice in the gloom, and the illusion was not a little improved by the seething snow of the cleft and beaten waters about her like to the boiling of the sea at the base of a berg. She showed us her weather side, and heeled so much that I could not see her decks; but there was nothing like a gun-muzzle to be perceived along her. A gilt band under her wash-streak shone out dully at intervals to her plunges, as though a pencil had been dipped in phosphorus and a line of fire drawn.

She was looking up to cross our wake and settle herself upon our weather-quarter. Nothing finer as a spectacle did I ever behold at sea than this spaciousvessel when she crossed our wake, rearing and roaring through the smother our own keel was tossing up, flashing into the hollows and through the ridges with spray blowing aft ov?r her as though she were some bride of the ocean and streamed her veil behind her as she went, the whole figure of her showing faint in the dull light of the night, yet not so feeble in outline and detail but that I could distinguish the black, snake-like hull hissing through the seas, her sand-coloured decks, a long black gun on the forecastle, and a glittering brass stern-chaser abaft the two black figures gripping the tiller, the great surface of mainsail going pale to its clew at the boom end, a full fathom over the quarter, the swelling arid mounting canvas, from flying-jib to little'fore-royal, from the iron-hard stay-foresail to the thunderous gaff-topsail on high, dragging and tearing at the sheets and bringing shroud and backstay, guy and halliard, sheet and brace so taut that the fabric raged past with a kind of shrieking music, filling the air as though some giant harp were edging the blast with the resonance of fifty windwrung wires. Great heaven ! how did my heart go to her ! Oh, for two months' command of that storming clipper with Imogene on board !

'Twas a rush past with her; all that I saw I have told you, saving a few men in the bows and a couple of figures watching us near the two helmsmen. If she mounted guns or swivela along her bulwarks I did not see them. I overheard Vanderdecken exclaim, "It is as I surmised ; she hath but a handful of a crew ; she merely wishes to speak to us." Van Vogelaar returned some gruff answer in which he introduced my name, but tha; was all I heard of it.

Once well on our weather-quarter, the schooner ported her helm, luffing close; her gaff-topsail, flying-jib, royal and topgallant sail melted to the hauling upon clewliness and downhauls as though they had been of snow and had vanished upon the black damp wind ; but even with the tack of her mainsail up, they had to keep shaking the breeze out of the small sail she showed, to prevent her from sliding past us. "Oh, ze sheep ahoy !" sung out one of the two figures on the quarter deck, the man coming down to the lee rail to hail. " What sheep air you ?" As with the Centaur, so now Vanderdecken made no response to this inquiry. He and the others stood grimly silent, watching the schooner, as immobile as graven images. I said to Imogene, " 'Tis dark enough to show the phosphor upon the ship. That should give them a hint. Mark how vividly the shining crawls about these decks." [To be continued.]