Captain Mordaunt followed Mr. Ricardo down to the spare cabin in the stern of the ketch.
“We will dine early, if you don’t mind. There are only four of us all told, the skipper, the mate, the steward and myself, and at night we want two on deck when we are crossing the Channel, even if the night’s fine. I can, by the way, lend you a thick coat and a yachting cap.”
The first sign of any change came, indeed, when they were eating their dinner, side by side on the cushioned lounge in the little saloon. The ketch rose and dipped suddenly with a thud, as if it had met some unexpected swell of the sea and, a few moments later, the sheets of the mainsail rattled on the deck as the great wing of canvas was drawn in. Mordaunt looked up at the tell tale compass fixed above his head.
“The wind has shifted to the north,” he said.
The yachtsman of the quiet waters looked anxiously at his host. “Is that”—he searched for a word—“awkward?” he asked, hoping that the tremor was unnoticeable in his voice. After all, they were a very long way from the land.
Mordaunt shrugged his shoulders.
“Prolongs our passage. A cigar?” He reached for a box behind on the shelf. “Try those dates in brandy! We’ll have some coffee,” and he rang the hand-bell.
But whilst they drank their coffee, the movement of the ketch increased. To Mr. Ricardo she seemed now to hop forward and come down with a noisy crunch. Mordaunt smiled.
“There’s some wind somewhere ahead of us,” he said. “Let’s go up and see. You had better put that thick coat on.”
When they stepped from the tiny deck-house on to the deck, Mr. Ricardo was disturbed.
“Glary,” said Hamlin the skipper at the wheel; glary it certainly was. The sun was sinking in the west, a plate without effulgence, a plate as yellow as an old spade guinea. The kindness had all died out of the sky and, when the sun had gone, there were left a livid glare, a cold sea and this little ship alone in the midst of it.
Mordaunt looked up at the topsail.
“We might carry on until we get the weather news,” he said. For these were the days before the Second War, when Broadcasting House flung out her warnings and good tidings to all the ships on the near seas.
By nine o’clock night was closing in. Mr. Ricardo was seated in a corner of the deckhouse. Mordaunt leaned over a small receiver mounted on a revolving pedestal. Hamlin’s big figure blocked the doorway as he bent to listen; and suddenly, startlingly, a new voice spoke clearly out of the darkness at their elbows, giving them the weather report.
“A deep depression over Ireland is moving rapidly to the south-east. There will be a gale in the Channel to-night.”
“As a rule, that gives us half an hour,” said Hamlin. He and Mordaunt were out of the deck-cabin in an instant, leaving Ricardo almost sick with indignation against the radiant cheerful voice which had announced the direful news.
“Doesn’t he know we’re out here in a cockle-shell?” he exclaimed. “He’s going home to have supper—a nice hot supper in a nice hot room—on land! And we’re here, drowned men practically.”
But there was activity enough upon the dick. A storm jib was set, the topsail taken down and folded away with the big jib in the locker, the main and mizzen sails were reefed, and the sidelights burning brightly lifted on their shelves. The ship was snug and her crew clothed in oilskins and high boots.
Mr. Ricardo stood in the doorway of the cabin looking forward over its roof. The ketch still rose and dipped upon the unbroken swell, but ahead in the darkness lines of white ran out to right and left on the crests of waves with extraordinary speed.
“Here it comes,” said Mordaunt. He raised his hand to the mizzen rigging on the port side. Hamlin, the skipper, was at the wheel, lifting the boat gently up to the wind. Mordaunt grinned at Ricardo.
“I should go down and get into your bunk whilst you can,” he cried.
Mr. Ricardo shook his head. That was quite unthink able.
“I’ll stay in the deckhouse for a little,” he said, and then more bravely, “This is a new experience for me.”
He crouched on the divan in the deckhouse with a foot against the rail-guard of the companion, and a few moments afterwards the gale broke upon them like an army. A wave smote the ketch so that it shuddered. Its crest leaped gaily over the port bow and ran in streams along the deck, whilst the bulk of it roared away to leeward from under the keel in an angry tumble of white fire.
“Disappointed, that’s what it was,” Mr. Ricardo began, but he could not go on.
For all about them was noise, noise unbelievable and yet combined into an awful harmony. The waves hammered and roared; the wind shrilled through the rigging like a Sabbath of lost souls; the planks groaned and clamoured that not for one moment longer could they cling together; and, above all other sounds, the topping-lift thrashed the belly of the mainsail with the crack of a hundred pistols.
Ricardo was terrified into a hopeless acquiescence.
“It can’t go on,” he said to himself as he clutched at anything which was clutchable in the deck-cabin. “That’s all. It can’t go on.”
But it did go on, hour after hour, until Mr. Ricardo actually dozed and then woke to an incident very pleasant but quite incredible. Mordaunt was at the helm, the skipper by the port rigging, when Mordaunt held the ship up to meet a more passionately venomous wave than any which had gone before. The two men bent their heads as the brine cut their faces like a whiplash.
“That was a nasty one,” cried the skipper.
“A beast!” answered Mordaunt; and then, to Ricardo’s stupefaction, they laughed, not with the wry laughter of the defeated, but heartily, enjoyably.
“Well, perhaps, after all” thought Ricardo. He was glad that he had not taken Mordaunt’s advice and retired to his bunk. He would have been ice-cold with terror. He couldn’t say that it was warm up here in the deckhouse, but it was friendly, and near to people who could laugh at the right moment. Again Mr. Ricardo dozed and woke; and now the mate was at the wheel whilst Mordaunt stood on one side unclenching his frozen fingers and Hamlin upon the other. Suddenly they all looked up and, as they looked, a ghostly twilight was diffused about the world. Mr. Ricardo was in the mood to believe that here at last was the Day of Judgement, so unillumined was the light, so pallid the faces lifted to it. But the mate broke the solemnity of the moment by asserting “’Tis the dawning,” and after both men had stared at him in admiration of his optimism, the laughter and the raillery were renewed. The mate was the incorrigible consoler. Somewhere, high up, beyond apprehension, and almost beyond faith, a full moon was riding in a blue sky and some sliver of its radiance slipped through. Mr. Ricardo clambered through the doorway and looked forward over its roof, clinging with both hands. As far as the eyes could reach, great black seas, like mountains, raced after each other in a riot of foam, whilst above his head the swaying topmast seemed on the point of scraping and snapping; a roof of grey cement, so solid and so low was the canopy of cloud. But whilst he watched the chink closed up again and once more there was no light but the white fire of the waves and the more friendly gleam of the binnacle lamp.
Mr. Ricardo scrambled back to his corner in the deck house. He pulled up the cushion behind him so that his head rested more comfortably upon it.
“After all, we’re still afloat,” he reflected. “I have not been seasick”—this he put down less to his panic than to his quality as a yachtsman—“and those three men, though they are unalarmed, are watchful.”
They were more than ever watchful now, it seemed. For more and more often he heard the man in the bows sing out: “Light ahead, sir.”
And more and more often the answer from the man at the wheel: “Right!”
For they were crossing now the crown of the great trunk road which flows from Ushant to the Port of London.
To the sound of those cries Mr. Ricardo fell asleep, and was only awakened by someone shaking him by the shoulder. Mordaunt was leaning over him.
“We can see the light at Start Point,” he said.
The motion of the ship had diminished, the noise had lost its terror, they were feeling the protection of the land, the gale was dying. Again Mr. Ricardo stood at the cabin door and looked forward. All was darkness, but in a few seconds he saw, as at the end of a long black iron tube, a faint glimmer which broadened out to the likeness of a beautiful incandescent moth and shrivelled again into nothing. Mordaunt, at his side, began to count: “One, two, three..”
He counted up to twenty, and the light shone again.
“Yes, Start Point,” said Mordaunt. “But, of course, we’re a long way from it yet.”
Mr. Ricardo stayed thereafter at the deckhouse door, and so was a witness of the incident which made that night more than ever memorable to him and perplexed the forgotten Hanaud for so long.
A big ancient rusty iron steamer came lumbering up from the west across the bows of Agamemnon but yawing as she came, as if she had not made up her mind whether to run ashore on the long ledge of Start Point or strike away for the French coast.
“Look out, sir!” cried Hamlin, the skipper, sharply to Mordaunt at the wheel. “She’s a dago with the cabin-boy in command and all the rest of ’em asleep.”
It was that spectral hour between night and dawn when all is magnified and yards are miles. Mordaunt held his ketch up until he had shaken what wind there was out of her sails; and it was lucky that he did, for his bowsprit hardly scraped clear of the iron monster’s side.
“There! I told you, didn’t I?” cried Hamlin, and he pointed to where a light shone on the name upon a buoy. “A dago!”
All could read the name. El Rey. But they had hardly time to read it. For a cry, like a wail, was borne to them urgently upon the breeze.
Men who sail in little boats are accustomed to see in the dark of the night and bad weather light on land, where there is no land, and to hear voices from the sea, where no men are drowning—so accustomed that they do not speak of them lest they should be thought to talk foolishly. So now Mordaunt and his crew looked each to the other, hesitating whether they should seem to have heard. But the cry reached them again, weaker, yet nearer, and just over the port bow.
The mate shouted “Hold on!” and cutting a life-buoy loose from the main rigging, hurled it out. The ketch was lying now, head in to the wind, with its sails flapping. Hamlin pulled up out of its slots the panel of bulwark which opened the port gangway and, flinging himself on his face, leaned over the side. The mate and the steward joined him, one upon his knees, the other with a boathook in his hands. From his, position at the wheel Mordaunt could see nothing of what was happening, but something or someone was being lifted on board.
It was someone, a slim young man with hair as black as ebony, and a face of a pallor so thick that it could hardly ever before have met the daylight. So Mordaunt thought, until the rescued man was stretched on deck. He was alive but snatching at the air in his exhaustion.
He was dressed in a grey cotton shirt, a jacket and a pair of trousers of canvas, and he wore sandshoes on his naked feet.
“Brandy,” said Mordaunt, and the steward dived down the companion. He came back with a full glass and, lifting the man’s shoulders against his knee, put the glass to his lips. The young man’s face was long, his body where it showed at the neck and breast just bones in an envelope of skin. He took a drink of the brandy, threw back his head on the steward’s knee and coughed.
“A martyr by El Greco, without a martyr’s saintliness,” said Mordaunt, thinking the stranger beyond hearing.
“A dago,” said Hamlin the skipper.
The stranger turned his eyes on Hamlin and said: “Damn your eyes!” in English unmistakable, and fainted away.
Mordaunt gave his orders. “You had better get him below, rub him down with a hot towel, give, him a spare suit of pyjamas, and put him to bed in Mr. Ricardo’s berth with a hot-water bottle. You don’t mind?”
Mr. Ricardo didn’t mind. He was, indeed, fluttering around, trying to help and getting in everybody’s way. Meanwhile a question was troubling his mind as much as he, in his efforts to help, was troubling Craston, the mate, and the steward. Why did the name of the ship, El Rey—“The King”—awaken some vague familiar resonance in his brain? El Rey . . . El Rey. . . . No, there was no answer.
When he climbed the companion again on to the deck, the light on Start Point had been extinguished, the day had come, and the ketch had borne away upon its course.
“Mind the Skerries’ buoy, sir,” said Hamlin. “The tide’s setting us to the east.”
“I know,” Mordaunt answered; and after a moment or two, Hamlin continued: “A queer thing. That young-fellow-my-lad must have tumbled off the stern of that ship just as she began to cross our bows. The tide brought him straight down on us. A bit of good luck, I should say.”
Mordaunt grinned and shook his head.
“A bit of good timing, I should.”
And with that Mr. Ricardo’s memory began to work. El Rey! He had read about it. Certain States of South America had chartered El Rey—Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia—to carry back to their respective countries some undesirable aliens. She was to call at Spanish and French ports and in England. Then she was to go on with the rest of her passengers to the Baltic and Germany. There lay the explanation of something which had puzzled them, all, but of which no one had spoken. The stranger had a broad black band about his right leg above the ankle, as though a heavy iron fetter had for years bitten into his flesh.