Fiction > Serialisations > London, 1896-1897 - St. Ives > Volume 13

268 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.
Then, worked by degrees to an ecstasy, they broke into cries of thanksgiving and
mutual encouragement ; they jostled for the rostrum (a long nine-pounder swivel) ;
and then speaker after speaker declaimed his souls experiences until his voice
cracked, while the others sobbed, exhorted, even leapt in the air. " Stronger,
brother ! " " Tis working, 'tis working ! " " O deliverance ! " " O streams of redemption ! "
For ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour maybe, the ship was a Babel, a Bedlam.
And then the tumult would die down as suddenly as it had arisen ; and, dismissed
by the old man, the crew, with faces once more inscrutable, but twitching with
spent emotion, scattered to their usual tasks.
Five minutes after these singular outbreaks it was difficult to believe in
them. Captain Colenso paced the quarter-deck once more with his customary
shuffle, his hands beneath his coat-tails, his eyes conning the ship with their
usual air of mild abstraction. Now and again he paused to instruct one of his
incapables in the trimming of a brace, or to correct the tie of a knot. He never
scolded; seldom lifted his voice. By his manner of speech, and the ease of his
authority, he and his family might have belonged to separate ranks of life. Yet
I seemed to detect method in their obedience. The veriest fumbler went about
his work with a concentrated gravity of bearing, as if he fulfilled a remoter
purpose, and understood it while he tied his knots into " grannies," and generally
mismanaged the job in hand.
Towards the middle of our second week out, we fell in with a storm — a
rotatory affair, and soon over by reason that we struck the outer fringe of it ; but
to a landsman sufficiently daunting while it lasted. Late in the afternoon I thrust
my head up for a look around. We were weltering along in horrible forty-foot
seas, over which our bulwarks tilted at times until from the companion hatchway
I stared plumb into the grey sliding chasms, and felt like a fly on the wall. The
Lady Nepean hurled her old timbers along under close-reefed maintopsail, and
a rag of a foresail only. The captain had housed topgallant masts and lashed
his guns inboard ; yet she rolled so that you would not have trusted a cat on
her storm-washed decks. They were desolate but for the captain and helmsman
on the poop ; the helmsman, a mere lad — the one, in tact, who had pulled the
bow-oar to our rescue — lashed and gripping the spokes pluckily, but with a white
face which told that, though his eyes were strained on the binnacle, his mind
ran on the infernal seas astern. Over him, in sea-boots and oilskins, towered
Captain Colenso — rejuvenated, transfigured ; his body swaying easily to every
lurch and plunge of the brig, his face entirely composed and cheerful, his salt-
rimmed eyes contracted a little, but alert and even boyishly bright. An heroical
figure of a man !
My heart warmed to Captain Colenso ; and next morning, as we bowled
forward again with a temperate breeze on our beam, I took occasion to compliment
him on the Lady Nepearis behaviour.
" Ay," said he abstractedly ; " the old girl made pretty good weather of it."
" I suppose we were never in what you would call real danger ? "
He faced me with sudden earnestness. " Mr. Ducie, I have served the Lord
all my days, and He will not sink the ship that carries my honour." Giving me
no time to puzzle over this, he changed his tone. " You'll scarce believe it, but
in her young days she had a very fair turn of speed."
" Her business surely demands it still," said I. Only an arrant landsman
could have reconciled the lumbering old craft with any idea of privateering ; but
this was my only theory, and I clung to it.
" We shall not need to test her."