My Shipmate Louise: The Romance of a Wreck, Volume 2 (of 3)

It speedily ran amongst us of the cuddy that the dead sailor who had been so very impressively interred by old Keeling had returned to the ship, and was alive in some part of her, secure in handcuffs or in leg-irons; but so much was made of the fire which had broken out that Crabb’s reappearance lost as a miracle half the weight it would have carried had it happened alone. Besides, the sense of the people soon gathered that the business was a plot which had been managed with astonishing cleverness, and it all seemed plain as mud in a wine-glass when the whisper went round that Hemmeridge was under arrest as an arch-conspirator in the matter. And certainly it made one feel far from comfortable even to think that for the past weeks a ruffian of a true piratical complexion had been secreted in the ship’s hold, where his confederates would keep him supplied with tobacco and the means of lighting it, and where, in his borings and pryings, he was tolerably certain to have stumbled upon something inflammatory in the shape of spirits. Indeed, it made me draw my breath short when my mind went to the rum puncheons and the powder-magazine below, and to the vision of Crabb, drunk, stupidly groping with a naked light in his hand, during some midnight hour, maybe, when we were all in bed.

However, the imagination of the passengers would hardly go to these lengths. Their thoughts held to the fire, and their talk chiefly concerned it. When the skipper came below for a glass of grog that night, the ladies so baited him with questions that one pitied him almost for not being able to enjoy the privilege of venting his heated soul in a few strong words.

‘I cannot satisfy myself, Captain Keeling, that the fire is utterly extinguished,’ said Mrs. Bannister.

‘Might it not burst out again, capting?’ cried Mrs. Hudson. ‘There should be plenty of pails kept filled with water ready to empty if smoke is smelt.’

‘Perhaps something may be on fire even now!’ exclaimed Mrs Joliffe, ‘something that doesn’t make a smoke; and how then are the sailors to tell if all is right in the bottom of the ship?’

‘Captain Keeling,’ cried Mrs. Trevor, ‘is it quite safe to go to bed, do you think?’

‘If a fire should break out,’ said Miss Hudson in a trembling voice, as though shudder after shudder were chasing through her, ‘how can we depend upon being called? It is impossible to hear downstairs what is going on on deck.’

Poor old marline-spike made a bolt of it at last, fairly turning tail and rushing up the companion steps when it came to the colonel striking in and topping off the female broadsides by inquiries of a like nature delivered at the very height of his pipes.

However, the night passed quietly; and when next morning came and the people assembled at breakfast, all fear of fire was seemingly gone, and little more was talked about than Crabb and what his designs had been, the topic gathering no mean accentuation from the doctor’s vacant place. Somewhere about ten o’clock I was standing at the taffrail watching the ship’s wake, that was languidly streaming off in a short oily surface, and wondering whether, if we were to fall in with nothing brisker than these faint airs and draughts of wind, all hands would not have grown white-haired and decrepit by the time we were up with the Cape, leaving the Indian Ocean and Bombay out of consideration, when the head-steward came up to me.

‘Captain Keeling’s compliments, sir, and he’ll feel greatly hobliged, providing you’re not hotherwise occupied, by your stepping to his cabin, sir.’

‘Oh yes, with pleasure,’ said I. ‘Is he alone?’

‘He is not, sir.’

I went down the companion steps, knocked at the captain’s door, and entered. It was a roomy interior, a very noble ship’s berth, occupying hard upon the width of the deck right aft, saving, as I have before described, a sort of small chart-room alongside, bulkheaded off. There was a large stern window, after the olden fashion, with the blue line of the horizon gently sliding up and down it, and a shivering light lifting off the sea to the glass, sharp and of a sort of azure brilliancy, as though from diamonds set a-trembling. Keeling, in full fig, his face showing of a dark red against some maple-coloured ground of bulkhead or ship’s side, was seated at a table. He instantly rose on my entering, gave me one of his wire-drawn bows, and motioned me to a seat, thanking me in a few words for coming. On the starboard hand stood Crabb and the sailmaker, handcuffed, and on either side of them was a seaman with a cutlass dangling at his hip. On the port hand sat Dr. Hemmeridge, his legs crossed, his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, and his head drooped. He was deadly pale, and looked horribly ill and worried. Near him was one of the sailors, a young fellow of some seven or eight and twenty, with a quantity of hair falling over his brow, a straggling beard, and small black eyes, which roamed swiftly in glances charged methought with the spirit of mutiny and menace and defiance. Mr. Prance was at the captain’s elbow; and the third mate was seated at an end of the table with a pen in his hand and some paper in front of him.

I bowed to Hemmeridge, but he took no notice. Until the captain addressed me, I stared hard at Crabb; for even now, with the ugly ruffian standing before me, my mind found it difficult to realise that he was alive; that the creature I gazed at was the man whom all hands of us, with an exception or two, supposed overboard a thousand fathoms deep. There was, besides, the fascination of his ugliness. The hunch-like curve of his back, his little blood-stained eyes looking away from his nose, as though they sought to peer at something at the back of his head, the greasy trail of carroty hair upon his back, the fragment of nose over his hare-lip, these and the rest of him combined into the representation of the most extravagantly grotesque, ill-favoured figure ever witnessed outside the bars of a menagerie. The sailmaker’s face was as white as one of his bolts of canvas, but it wore a determined look, though I noticed a quivering in the nostrils of his high-perched nose, and a constant uneasy movement of the fingers, as of dying hands plucking at bedclothes.

‘Mr. Dugdale,’ exclaimed old Keeling with the dignity and gravity of a judge, ‘I’ve taken the liberty to send for you, as I am informed by Mr. Prance that when that man there’--inclining his head towards Crabb without looking at him--‘was lying, as it was supposed, dead in his bunk, you accompanied Mr. Hemmeridge, the ship’s surgeon’--here he indicated the doctor with a motion of his head but without looking at him either--‘into the forecastle, and stood for some considerable time surveying the so-called corpse.’

‘That is quite true,’ said I.

‘Did Mr. Hemmeridge expose the man’s face to you?’

‘He did.’

‘What impression was produced upon your mind by the sight of the--of the--body?’

Crabb gave a horrible grin.

‘That he was stone-dead, Captain Keeling; so stone-dead, sir, that I can scarcely credit the man himself is now before me.’

Hemmeridge looked up and fixed his eyes upon me.

‘It is but reasonable I should inform you, Mr. Dugdale,’ continued old marline-spike, ‘that Mr. Hemmeridge is under arrest on suspicion of conspiring with Crabb, with Willett, and with Thomas Bobbins’--he glanced at the man who stood next to the doctor--‘to plunder the ship. Bobbins has given evidence that leaves me in no doubt as to the guilt of Crabb and Willett.’

Crabb uttered a curse through his teeth, accompanied with a look at the young seaman, in the one-eyed gleam of which murder methought was writ too large to be mistaken for any other intention. Old Keeling did not heed him.

‘Bobbins’s story,’ he continued, ‘is to this effect: that Crabb was to swallow a potion which would produce the appearance of death; that the sailmaker was to have a hammock weighted, shaped, and in all respects equipped to resemble the one in which Crabb would be stitched up: that in the dead of night, when the ship was silent, and the deck forward vacant, the sham hammock was to be placed upon the fore-hatch by the sailmaker and Bobbins, and the cover containing that man’--inclining his head at Crabb--‘conveyed into the sailmaker’s cabin, where it was to be cut open, the man freed, and secreted in the berth till consciousness had returned, and he was in a fit state to seize the first opportunity of sneaking into the hold. All this was done,’ old Keeling went on, Mr. Prance meanwhile looking as grave as an owl over the skipper’s shoulder, whilst every now and again a hideous grin would distort Crabb’s frightful mouth, though the sailmaker continued to stare at the captain with a white and determined countenance, and Hemmeridge to listen with a frowning worried look, his leg that crossed the other swinging like a pendulum. ‘The man Crabb got into the hold, was supplied with food and drink by Willett and Bobbins, and with tools to enable him to break into the mail-room’----

‘And I’d ha’ done it too,’ here interrupted Crabb in a voice like a saw going through a balk of timber, ‘if it hadn’t been for the stinking smoke of them blasted blankets.’

‘This inquiry,’ continued Keeling, ‘now entirely concerns Mr. Hemmeridge. You tell me, Mr. Dugdale, that Crabb seemed to you as a stone-dead man.’

‘The devil himself couldn’t ha’ told the difference,’ bawled Crabb. ‘_He’s_ not in it,’ insolently motioning with his elbow towards the doctor. ‘Wouldn’t that blooming Bobbins ha’ said so?’ and he darted another murderous glance at the hairy young sailor.

‘I can assure you, Captain Keeling,’ said I, ‘that the man was perfectly dead. There is not a shadow of a doubt in my mind that Mr. Hemmeridge was fully convinced the body was a corpse. Convinced, captain, but dissatisfied too; and perhaps,’ said I, with a glance at Crabb, ‘it is a pity for more sakes than one that he did not carry out his idea of a post-mortem examination.’

‘Mr. Dugdale,’ exclaimed Hemmeridge in a low, deep, trembling voice, ‘before God and man, I am innocent; and I hope to live to call Captain Keeling to account for this monstrous slander, this enormous suspicion, this dishonourable and detestable accusation.’

‘I’ve never heered,’ said the man named Bobbins, in a long-drawn whining voice, ‘that this gent was consarned. I remembered Crabb asking what was to be done if so be the surgeon should cut him up to see what he died of, and Mr. Willett kissed the Bible afore Crabb and me to this: that if the surgeon made up his mind to open Crabb, Willett was to show him the bottle of physic, and to tell him that Crabb had took it for some bad complaint, and that, though he might look dead, he worn’t so.’

Crabb hove a fearful curse at the man. The bushy-whiskered sailor who guarded him on the right significantly put his hand upon the hilt of his cutlass whilst he said something to him under his breath.

‘This is new to me,’ exclaimed Keeling, screwing his eye gimlet-fashion into the face of Bobbins, and then letting it drop, as if satisfied. ‘Mr. Hemmeridge, I have suspected you, sir; but it’s a little soon for you to talk of my having accused you. You are a medical man. If anybody knows death by looking upon it you should. Yet, though this man Crabb is merely counterfeiting death, you come aft to me and report him dead! What am I to infer? Your ignorance or your guilt, sir?’