Читать книгу The Masters of Murder Mystery - Max Pemberton Edition - Pemberton Max - Страница 55

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And Learns the Truth There.

Our surmise that the rogues would agree presently among themselves and fall upon us for their common satisfaction was not supported by the facts. We breakfasted at our leisure and smoked a full pipe upon it, still unmolested and apparently unobserved. It may be that they had become accustomed to our presence. For seven days and nights now we had harassed them unceasingly. By messages, by gunshots, by our searchlight, had we pursued that policy of persistence which, we believed, would most surely demoralise and defeat them. And they had been powerless to harm us; helpless before our attack, as I judged from the first that they would be.

They fired no shot at us, and the morning passed in patient waiting. Great as our hopes were—my own too great for any expression—the Diamond Ship had no further message for us, nor did the sea speak. Void from horizon to horizon, the southern ocean fretted to sleep beneath a torrid sun and left us with that sense of isolation from the world and from men which the great sea alone can inspire. Some among us, it may be, had fallen almost to despair when the rogues set to again. This would have been at three bells of the afternoon watch. A gunshot heard faintly across the waters appeared to be the signal for some new attack. I heard the rattling echoes of a volley, and upon that a second and a third. Our glasses showed us a great press of men, engaged almost hand to hand amidships. Then a haze of smoke settled down upon the ship, and for many minutes it hid her completely from our sight.

You may imagine with what beating hearts and almost breathless hopes we watched this second encounter and waited for its issue. Very wisely, Larry would not approach the scene a second time or risk again those perils we had so readily faced before. Whatever harvest we might reap, our garners would be as readily filled afar as by any mad concession to curiosity which should drive us within the danger zone. If the rogues were killing each other, as evidently they were, it could serve us not at all to witness the horrors of that tragedy or seek in some vague way to take part in it. As for its deeper meaning, I had from the first clenched my thoughts against that and refused to take cognisance of it. The knowledge that Joan Fordibras was the prisoner of such a crew, that other decent women might be aboard the Diamond Ship with her—that, I say, had I permitted it once to master me, would have brought me to such a state of frenzy that no sane act afterwards could have atoned for its follies. Earnestly, persistently, I strove to drive the truth away, and to blind my eyes to it. “She is not on the ship,” I would say—or again, “They will not harm her, for she alone stands between them and the gallows.” God knows how much of a pretence it was—and yet, I think, the very effect of will brought salvation to us. A mad attack upon them would have undone all. I realise to-day the good providence which saved me from that.

Now, we had been waiting all this time for the smoke to lift from the hull of the Leviathan, and permit us to see, as far as it might be seen at such a distance, that which happened upon those woeful decks. As for the curtain of the vapour, it was but a spur to the imagination, a terrible cloud interposed between our burning eyes and those scenes of horror and of bloodshed it hid from us. Rifle shots we heard incessantly—now in volleys, again by twos and threes, then once more in a general exchange which seemed to speak of the crisis of battle. Nor might we argue a good omen of the stillness which fell afterwards. For, surely, it could be nothing else than the silence of victory, the final triumph of one faction above the others. This I pointed out to Larry as we lifted our glasses for the twentieth time unavailingly.

“I take it that the men are up against the rogues, Larry. We could wish for nothing better than news of their success.”

“You think so, sir?”

“I trust a seaman before a landshark any day, whatever his ship or nationality. He is more likely to honour a woman, Larry—there will be some measure of honesty in him; and if it is put to the vote, he will haul down that flag the first time he is asked. Why should he not? He has nothing to fear ashore. The rogues keep him afloat. I’d wager a hundred guineas that homesickness began this fight, and will carry it to a conclusion—that is if the seamen win⁠——”

“And if they do not, sir?”

“Then God help the ship, Larry—she will not be afloat a week.”

McShanus interposed to say that they were between the devil and the deep sea, surely. I found him wonderfully serious. It is odd to think how many cheery fellows, who write gaily of life and death in the newspaper, have never seen a gun fired in earnest or looked unflinchingly upon the face of death.

“’Tis a coward I was,” said he, “and not ashamed of it. This very minute I tremble like a woman—though ’tis often of kindness a woman trembles and not of fear. Look yonder at the smoke lifting from off the face of the ship. What lies under it, my friends?—God Almighty, what are those feeling and thinking and suffering now that they are going to their Maker. ’Tis as though I, myself, had been called this instant to remember that I shall be as they—who knows when, who knows how? A cruel torment of a thought—God help me for it.”

Here was a McShanus mood to be laughed off, and that it would have been but for the panorama suddenly disclosed by the soaring smoke which gradually lifted from the face of the hidden ship. Nor was it clear in a twinkling that the seamen (as I supposed would be the case) had obtained the upper hand, and were become the masters of the vessel.

We could see them by our glasses running hither and thither, from the fo’castle to the poop, in and out of the companion hatch; now up, now down, sometimes in single combat with one or other of the vanquished; again slashing in a glut of mad desire at a prostrate figure or an enemy already dead. What weapons they had, I found it quite impossible to say. From time to time, it is true, a pistol was discharged as though it were at some lurking or hidden foe; but in the main, I believe they must just have used common marline-spikes or had gone to it with their clasp-knives in their hands. And their anger, however it had been provoked, defied all words to measure. As beasts to the carcase, so they returned again and again to the bodies of those whom they had destroyed. We espied victors in all the attitudes of bravado and defiance, dancing, leaping, even striking at each other. And this endured so great a while that I began to say the holocaust would go on to the end and hardly a man of them live to tell the tale.

This fearful encounter ceased finally about four o’clock of the afternoon watch. Ironically enough, I heard them strike eight bells just as though it had been upon a ship in good order at sea; and as the sounds came floating over the water to us, I reflected upon the amazing force of habit which governs a sailor even in the most terrible of situations.

“Larry,” I said. “They would change the watch even if the sea dried up. What’s to be done now? what, in God’s name, can we do? I’d go aboard if it were not criminal to take the risk. That’s not to be thought of—a man would be safer in a lion’s den at present. And yet think of what it must be over there⁠——”

“I’ve been trying not to think of it all along, sir. Whatever’s happened, it’s over now. They’re putting the dead overboard—and, what’s more, launching a boat. I shouldn’t wonder if they came alongside, sir.”

“Alongside us, Larry? That would be something new. Do you really mean it?”

“You must judge for yourself, sir——”

We put up our glasses, Timothy declaring, as usual, that there was a plaster across the end of his (for he never learned to use the telescope), and followed with new interest the movements of the victorious seamen. Certainly, they were putting the dead overboard, and, as Larry had perceived, they had lowered a boat. Possessed, I suppose, of what they thought to be a fine idea (for seamen are gregarious beyond all others), they presently lowered a second boat, and upon this a third. Someone firing a gun to call our attention, they next flagged a message to us, so plainly honest that I caused it to be answered without a moment’s loss of time.

“We want help. Stand by to pick up a boat.”

To this our reply fluttered out, that we would permit their boat to come alongside; and the more to encourage them, we steamed toward the great ship and met them when they were little more than the half of a mile distant from it. There were seven in all, I made out, and a little lad at the tiller, the boat itself being an ordinary lifeboat, painted white, but ill kept and shabby. As to the nationality of its crew, I could detect a huge nigger at the bow oar, and another man of colour amidships, while the rest were mostly dark skinned, and one I took to be an Egyptian. Whoever they were they came towards us with great spirit, as though pleased to be free of the shambles they had quitted and very anxious to deliver some message. In this we encouraged them, lowering a gangway and bidding them send a spokesman aboard—which they did immediately without any parley or suspicion, so that I no longer doubted their honesty or even considered the possibility of a trap.

“Let Bill Evans go up,” was their cry; and, sure enough, up came a ferret-faced, red-whiskered, simple-looking fellow, who answered to this very English designation. Standing in an odd attitude before us, shuffling his feet nervously, and fingering a broad-brimmed felt hat, William Evans certainly expressed himself with difficulty.

“Mates,” he said, “I’d be very obliged to know if you carry a doctor on this ship?”

Larry looked at me, but I made no response. We must hear much, I reflected, before we answered such a question as that.

“Is that your message, sir?” Larry asked a little severely.

Again the man thumbed his hat and continued parrot-like:—

“I’d be obliged to know if you carry a doctor on this ship. That’s first. We’re in a clove-hitch and no mistake. Some’s gone and that’s an end of them. The rest would be thankful for a doctor, and there’s no denying it. Mates, if you’re Christian men, you’ll come aboard and help poor seamen⁠——”

His candour was really remarkable. I thought it quite time to take up his cross-examination myself.

“Come,” I said, “we must know more about it than that. What ship is yonder and who is in command of her? Answer my questions properly, and it is possible that we may help you. There has been a mutiny, and you have the upper hand. Why should we take any part in it?”

He looked up at me, a foxy look, I thought, and stumbled through as strange a narrative as I have ever heard.

“Old Salt-Horse went off in the relief,” he began, and I knew he meant Imroth thereby. “Captain Ross has been first since. He was for lying in this——hair-oil of a sea; we was for going ashore. That’s what the lady wanted, and d——n me, who was to stand agen it? Eight months have me and my mates been floating about this ocean like a flock of —— ducks. Did I ship with Salt-Horse for that? As true as God’s in heaven, I come from London Road, Plymouth, and Bill Evans is my name, same as my father and mother before me. You come aboard and do what you can for us, and we sail the ship to Rio. No harm comes to the young lady, but she stops aboard until we’re ashore, and that’s my last word if I swing for it.”

The man had become bolder as he went on, and now he threw his hat defiantly upon deck and looked at us all as though he had been an ambassador carrying a message to a king. Perchance he but little understood the significance of his words or the surpassing interest with which I heard them. Val Imroth escaped? All well with my little Joan—how could it be otherwise since they asked us aboard! Here were two facts which changed in an instant the whole complexion of our schemes and shattered them to the very base. I no longer thought of plan or prudence or any human consideration at all, but that of carrying Joan Fordibras the tidings of her safety, so far as that safety lay within our power to ensure. I must board the Diamond Ship. At any cost, I must speak with Joan.

“Larry,” I cried, shouting it out so that those in the boat below could hear every word of it—“Larry, I am going to help these men. Stand by for my signal. If there is any treachery, you will know what to do. Show this fellow what we carry—let there be no mistake about it. They sink or swim—no half measure, Larry! So help me Heaven, I will send them to the bottom in less than five minutes if they so much as think a word against me.”

Larry’s answer was to command our own crew to lower the launch and to stand by the guns. Delaying only to call Okyada to my side, I followed the strange ambassador down the gangway stairs and began my voyage to the great unknown.