Miss or Mrs.?. Wilkie Collins

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СКАЧАТЬ of the frown, “Yes, he is”). Launce looked down again into the plate. Natalie instantly pushed all the pieces of ham together in a little heap (meaning of the heap, “No more to say”).

      “Well?” said Richard Turlington, turning sharply on Sir Joseph. “Get on with your story. What next?”

      Thus far he had not troubled himself to show even a decent pretense of interest in his old friend’s perpetually-interrupted narrative. It was only when Sir Joseph had reached his last sentence—intimating that the man overboard might turn out in course of time not to be a man of the pilot-boat’s crew—it was only then that Turlington sat up in his chair, and showed signs of suddenly feeling a strong interest in the progress of the story.

      Sir Joseph went on:

      “As soon as we got on deck, we saw the man in the water, astern. Our vessel was hove up in the wind, and the boat was lowered. The master and one of the men took the oars. All told, our crew were seven in number. Two away in the boat, a third at the helm, and, to my amazement, when I looked round, the other four behind me making our number complete. At the same moment Mahogany Dobbs, who was looking through a telescope, called out, ‘Who the devil can he be? The man is floating on a hen-coop, and we have got nothing of the sort on board this pilot-boat.’”

      The one person present who happened to notice Richard Turlington’s face when those words were pronounced was Launcelot Linzie. He—and he alone—saw the Levant trader’s swarthy complexion fade slowly to a livid ashen gray; his eyes the while fixing themselves on Sir Joseph Graybrooke with a furtive glare in them like the glare in the eyes of a wild beast. Apparently conscious that Launce was looking at him—though he never turned his head Launce’s way—he laid his elbow on the table, lifted his arm, and so rested his face on his hand, while the story went on, as to screen it effectually from the young surgeon’s view.

      “The man was brought on board,” proceeded Sir Joseph, “sure enough, with a hen-coop—on which he had been found floating. The poor wretch was blue with terror and exposure in the water; he fainted when we lifted him on deck. When he came to himself he told us a horrible story. He was a sick and destitute foreign seaman, and he had hidden himself in the hold of an English vessel (bound to a port in his native country) which had sailed from Liverpool that morning. He had been discovered, and brought before the captain. The captain, a monster in human form, if ever there was one yet—”

      Before the next word of the sentence could pass Sir Joseph’s lips, Turlington startled the little party in the cabin by springing suddenly to his feet.

      “The breeze!” he cried; “the breeze at last!”

      As he spoke, he wheeled round to the cabin door so as to turn his back on his guests, and hailed the deck.

      “Which way is the wind?”

      “There is not a breath of wind, sir.”

      Not the slightest movement in the vessel had been perceptible in the cabin; not a sound had been audible indicating the rising of the breeze. The owner of the yacht—accustomed to the sea, capable, if necessary, of sailing his own vessel—had surely committed a strange mistake! He turned again to his friends, and made his apologies with an excess of polite regret far from characteristic of him at other times and under other circumstances.

      “Go on,” he said to Sir Joseph, when he had got to the end of his excuses; “I never heard such an interesting story in my life. Pray go on!”

      The request was not an easy one to comply with. Sir Joseph’s ideas had been thrown into confusion. Miss Lavinia’s contradictions (held in reserve) had been scattered beyond recall. Both brother and sister were, moreover, additionally hindered in recovering the control of their own resources by the look and manner of their host. He alarmed, instead of encouraging the two harmless old people, by fronting them almost fiercely, with his elbows squared on the table, and his face expressive of a dogged resolution to sit there and listen, if need be, for the rest of his life. Launce was the person who set Sir Joseph going again. After first looking attentively at Richard, he took his uncle straight back to the story by means of a question, thus:

      “You don’t mean to say that the captain of the ship threw the man overboard?”

      “That is just what he did, Launce. The poor wretch was too ill to work his passage. The captain declared he would have no idle foreign vagabond in his ship to eat up the provisions of Englishmen who worked. With his own hands he cast the hen-coop into the water, and (assisted by one of his sailors) he threw the man after it, and told him to float back to Liverpool with the evening tide.”

      “A lie!” cried Turlington, addressing himself, not to Sir Joseph, but to Launce.

      “Are you acquainted with the circumstances?” asked Launce, quietly.

      “I know nothing about the circumstances. I say, from my own experience, that foreign sailors are even greater blackguards than English sailors. The man had met with an accident, no doubt. The rest of his story was a lie, and the object of it was to open Sir Joseph’s purse.”

      Sir Joseph mildly shook his head.

      “No lie, Richard. Witnesses proved that the man had spoken the truth.”

      “Witnesses? Pooh! More liars, you mean.”

      “I went to the owners of the vessel,” pursued Sir Joseph. “I got from them the names of the officers and the crew, and I waited, leaving the case in the hands of the Liverpool police. The ship was wrecked at the mouth of the Amazon, but the crew and the cargo were saved. The men belonging to Liverpool came back. They were a bad set, I grant you. But they were examined separately about the treatment of the foreign sailor, and they all told the same story. They could give no account of their captain, nor of the sailor who had been his accomplice in the crime, except that they had not embarked in the ship which brought the rest of the crew to England. Whatever may have become of the captain since, he certainly never returned to Liverpool.”

      “Did you find out his name?”

      The question was asked by Turlington. Even Sir Joseph, the least observant of men, noticed that it was put with a perfectly unaccountable irritability of manner.

      “Don’t be angry, Richard.” said the old gentleman. “What is there to be angry about?”

      “I don’t know what you mean. I’m not angry—I’m only curious. Did you find out who he was?”

      “I did. His name was Goward. He was well known at Liverpool as a very clever and a very dangerous man. Quite young at the time I am speaking of, and a first-rate sailor; famous for taking command of unseaworthy ships and vagabond crews. Report described him to me as having made considerable sums of money in that way, for a man in his position; serving firms, you know, with a bad name, and running all sorts of desperate risks. A sad ruffian, Richard! More than once in trouble, on both sides of the Atlantic, for acts of violence and cruelty. Dead, I dare say, long since.”

      “Or possibly,” said Launce, “alive, under another name, and thriving in a new way of life, with more desperate risks in it, of some other sort.”

      “Are you acquainted with the circumstances?” asked Turlington, retorting Launce’s question on him, with a harsh ring of defiance in his brassy voice.

      “What became of the poor foreign sailor, papa?” said Natalie, purposely interrupting Launce before he could СКАЧАТЬ