Читать книгу The Gentleman - Alfred Ollivant - Страница 49

Kit ran up the ladder out of that bellowing Inferno.

The Tremendous and her enemy lay side by side with locked spars; the Coquette becalmed beyond.

Then Kit understood the ruse of that wary old fighter, his Commander. Old Ding-dong had placed the Cocotte as a bulwark between him and her consort. As he had foreseen, the wind, falling away this hour past, had dropped to nothing now. The Coquette could not bring a gun into action.

Four hundred yards away, she might have been as many miles for all the assistance she could render her sister-ship.

As the boy came up, the old Commander was leaning against the wheel, bending towards his knee, and breathing hard.

There was a dark and peevish look about his face; and a trickle of red was running down his white knee-breeches.

"Tell ye 'taint etiquette to have men in your tops only in general actions and duels atween ships of the line," he was saying in slow and painful voice, very querulous. "In all my fifty years' experience o sea fightin, I never see sich a thing afoor, never! Dirty trick I call it."

The little Frenchman across the narrow lane of water dividing the ships, chattered excuses, all sympathy and shrugged shoulders.

"Ah, I so grieve. Pain! pain! terrible, n'est-ce-pas?—But what would you, my Captain?—It is no fault of mine. The Emperor's orders. 'I trust you, my Commodore,' says he. 'Coûte que coûte.'

"Emperor! about as much a h'Emperor as you are Commodore! And you're welcome to tell him so with my compliments," snorted the old man.

He threw his eye aloft.

"Mr. Caryll, take a party o small-arm men aloft, and clear them sneakin blay-guards out of her tops. Else they'll be boardin by the yards."

The boy rushed away.

Beneath his feet the deck staggered and shook. On the lower-deck of the Tremendous hell had broken loose, in flame and smoke and horrible bellowings. The little ship was racked. In her agony she quivered from truck to keel.

Suddenly the spars of the Cocotte above him began to crackle and blaze. Plip-plop-plank! the bullets smacked all about him. He was under fire and he didn't like it. He wanted to dodge under the bulwark and lie there; but he daren't. So he ran breathlessly, skipping as a bullet spanked the deck at his feet.

They were in the enemy's main-top, swarms of them, tiny figures, crowding along the spars, grinning at him, he thought.

How on earth with a handful of men, climbing up the rigging under a pelting fire, he would ever clear that lot out! …

Even as he wondered the enemy's main-mast seemed to become alive. It swayed; it shook; it almost danced; the taut shrouds sagged.

At first the boy thought that horror had turned his brain, and he was going mad. He stopped dead and gazed.

Yes, it was coming down, coming towards him, towering, tremendous, like a falling spire.

It came in jerks, tearing its way with a snapping of stays and crashing of spars. Figures, like black birds, seemed to detach themselves, and flop through the air. They were men, thrown clear, and falling with floating coat-tails as they revolved.

One fell with an appalling bump on the deck of the sloop hard by the wheel, a man in a red coat, bear-skinn'd and gaitered. He did not stir, kneeling, his hands before him, head bowed, in attitude of adoration. A sudden pool of scarlet seemed to spurt out of the deck and island him.

Kit, his work accomplished for him, ran back to the wheel.

"Reck'n that's the chap as got me," said old Ding-dong, nodding at the dead man with a certain grim friendliness. "A red-coat, d'ye see?—Now what's the meanin o that?—I never yeard tell of a privateer carrying regulars afoor."

The old man was leaning against the wheel. His brow was puckered; and there was a tense, breathless air about his face. It came to the boy with a shock of surprise that a man hard-hit makes just the same sort of face as a man who has got one on the funny bone at cricket.

"Are you hurt?" he asked anxiously.

"Nay, I'm none hurt, but I am hit. They've took fifty years doin it, but they've done it at last. It was yon chap with the bashed skull. Haul him alongside o me, wilta? I'll set on him—ease my old stumps!"

He lowered himself.

"I'll larn him shoot me," he said, arranging himself comfortably on his corpse.

Kit giggled. Somehow this old man with the twinkle in his eye made him feel at home among these screaming horrors.

"Lucky shot o Lanyon's," continued old Ding-dong. "There's a lot o luck in fightin; and good job for us too. Luck's the favour o God. He always favours us. We're straight, ye see."

He peered through the eddying smoke-drift.

"That there top-hamper o their'n makes a tidy bridge atween ships. Now if they was to tumble to that, reckon they'd boord—and we'd be about done."

Kit looked round.

The enemy's main-top had fallen across the deck of the sloop.

The lightning that is genius flashed in the boy's mind.

In a second he was across the self-fashioned drawbridge between the two ships and on to the deck of the Frenchman. It was deserted save for the dead men, red-coats all, flung from the falling top, and sprawling broadcast everywhere. Even Mouche had disappeared.

Beneath him on the lower deck was the same bellowing Inferno as on the Tremendous. He felt the privateer stagger and rend to a broadside of the sloop, as though her bowels were being torn out. He rushed to a hatchway belching smoke. In the pit below he could see dim figures flitting about, and could hear the howls of those in torment. Deafened, blinded, dizzied, he slammed the hatch upon them, clamping it down. Swiftly he passed from hatchway to hatchway, making all fast.

With dancing heart, he ran back to the bridge.

As he did so a whimpering voice stayed him.

"O mon enfant!"

The French skipper was lying abaft the binnacle, a yard across his lower body.

There was no make-believe about him now, no mockery. He was naked man, stripped of his tinsel, and laid bare to the soul by the inexorable Master, Pain. Across his chin, as though to mock him, lay his false moustachios.

"Tuez-moi!" he whimpered hoarsely. "Tuez-moi!"

"I can't!" gasped Kit—"not in cold blood!"

The lad was face to face with one of the most appalling of God's mysteries, and was unhinged by it. Gwen with the toothache had been nothing to this.

The agonised man rolled his head from side to side.

"Sainte Mere de Dieu, intercédez pour moi!" he wailed.

Again that lightning flashed in the boy's mind.

The man's silver-mounted pistol lay on the deck beside him. He thrust it into the other's hand.

"Here, sir!"

The man clutched it, as one dying in a desert may clutch the flagon of water that means life to him.

The head ceased its dreadful weaving.

"Petit ange! petit Anglais!" he whispered, and tried to smile.

Kit ran for his bridge. Halfway across it, he heard a crack, and looked back.

He could not see the French skipper; but what he could see made his heart sick.

Boats, crammed to the teeth, were putting away from the Coquette. Black and scurrying, they tore across the water towards him, like rats racing for blood.