On the night of December 20, in the same year of the mutiny of the Mowbray, a large full-rigged ship, homeward bound, was, to the north of the Equator, stealing silently through the dusk. The hour was about half-past nine. The moon rode high and shone gloriously, and the edge of the plain of ocean came in two sweeps of ebony to the clasp of splendour under the satellite. The ship lifted a cloud of sail to the stars. The night-wind was lightly breathing, and every cloth was asleep, stirless as alabaster mouldings, curving from each yard-arm, and climbing with the whiteness of the moon into three spires.

This ship was the Alfred, but not the famous Thames East Indiaman of that name. She was about sixteen hundred tons, with an abundant crew, a captain and four mates. She was carrying a valuable cargo and a number of passengers from India to London, and once only had she halted—at Simon's Bay, where she put a lieutenant of Marines and fifteen men ashore, and then proceeded, after filling her fresh-water casks. She was a flush-decked ship, and when you stood at the wheel your eye ran along a spacious length of deck, rounding with the exquisite art of the shipwright into flaring bows which sank into the true clipper lines, high above the keen and coppered forefoot.

A number of ladies and gentlemen sat and moved about the decks. The awnings were furled, and the moonshine glistened upon these people, and sparkled in the jewellery of the ladies, and silvered the whiskers of the gentlemen. On the weather side of the long quarter-deck walked the commander of the ship, Captain Barrington. A lady's hand was tucked under his arm, and he frequently looked to windward whilst he talked. To leeward paced the mate, and a little distance forward, in the deep shadows of the main-rigging, stood a group of midshipmen.

Right aft, upon the taffrail, sat three gentlemen. One smoked a pipe, the others cheroots. Captain Barrington permitted his guests—as he, with facetious politeness, called his passengers—to smoke upon the quarter-deck after five bells in the first watch. A considerable surface of grating stretched betwixt these three gentlemen and the wheel. The wheel was something forward of the grating, and the helmsman, therefore, absorbed in the business of keeping the ship to her course, could hear little more than the rumble of the tones of the gentlemen who conversed on the taffrail.

'I say, Parry,' said one of the gentlemen, who was, indeed, no less a personage than the surgeon of the ship, casting his eyes up at the moon, and tasting his tobacco, with slow enjoyment, in the discharge of each little cloud of it; 'did it ever occur to you to consider that all the great processes of this world—that all creation, in short, is based on circles?'

'Why do you address yourself to me?' said Captain Parry. 'What do I know about circles?'

'Behold yonder moon,' continued the doctor, pointing with the stem of his pipe to the luminary, beautiful with her greenish tinge, so sparklingly and brilliantly edged, too, so marvellously clear-cut, that you might then realize, if you never did before, the miracle of her self-poised flight through the domain of violet ether. 'She is a circle,' said the doctor. 'So is the sun. So are the stars. The flight of our system through space, if not a circle, is nearly so—enough to justify my theory that, when the Great Hand launched Creation, the design was one of circles.'

'Oh, blow that!' said one of the gentlemen. 'Parry, hand us a cheroot.'

'Whatever brings God closer to us is good,' said the doctor. 'This theory of construction proves the existence of a genius like to man's in the Great Spirit, and we can be in sympathy with it.'

'The breeze seems scanting,' said Captain Parry. 'If this voyage goes on lasting, I shall be like the sailor who, when he was washed ashore on a desert island in his shirt, complained that he certainly did feel the want of a few necessaries.'

'A man going home to be married ought not to be becalmed,' said the doctor.

'How do you like the idea of being married, Parry?' said the third gentleman, who was one Lieutenant Piercy.

Captain Parry viewed the beautiful moon in silence.

'Until I got married myself,' said the Doctor, 'I used to express marriage by what I consider an excellent image. A man marrying is like unto a ship that grounds on a bar and beats over, where she lies unable to get out; so other ships passing behold her riding, royal yards across, and the bar thick under the bows.'

Captain Parry continued to view the moon.

'A man for comfort,' said Piercy, 'should marry a roomy woman. You know what I mean—a woman who'll give him plenty of geographical and intellectual room to move in. He's still contained in her, d'ye see, still in sympathy, still sacramentally one, yet he's got plenty of room,' he drawled. 'I remember some idiots who berthed a number of horses on board ship, and allowed no room for the toss of their heads. It's room that a chap wants in marriage.'

'Isn't that something white ahead there?' said Parry, pointing into the starry visionary distance, right over the bow.

The others seemed to look.

'Something white should be a ghost,' said Piercy. 'I wonder if ghosts walk the sea as they do churchyards?'

'The most terrifying ghost that, to my mind, ever appeared,' said the doctor, 'must have been the spirit of the Prince of Saxony. He came in complete steel, suddenly, upon his unhappy relative, who had idly pronounced his name, never dreaming to see him, and said: "Karl, Karl, was wollst du mit mich?" Is it the German that makes this question awful?'

'The worst of all ghosts,' said Captain Parry, who had been straining his eyes at the elusive gleam ahead, 'are the phantasies of the sick eye.'

'Right,' said the doctor.

'When I was ill some years ago in India, I had been reading Boswell's "Life of Johnson," and every night at a certain hour a miniature figure of Dr. Johnson would sit upon the mantelpiece and play the spinet. I knew the old cock hadn't a note of music in his soul. His head wagged like a simmering cauliflower. I was in a mortal funk whilst he played, but was too weak to throw anything at him. When the vision first appeared, I thought it might have been a large bottle. The mantelpiece was cleared, and still old Sam came and played upon the spinet for five nights running.'

'The most inconvenient of all ghosts is the living ghost,' said Lieutenant Piercy. 'An Irish sergeant told me that, before he left Ireland, he lent an uncle five pounds. On returning, after fourteen years, he called upon his uncle, and asked him for the money. "Och, shure," said the man, "haven't I spent the double of it in masses for yez?"'

'Talking of ghosts,' said the doctor, 'what do you say, gentlemen, to this psychological touch? A young man—call him Brown—after years of deliberation, seriously considers that he has been born into the wrong family. He is wholly out of sympathy with his relations. He is superior to them. He loves music, the fine arts, literature, and so on. His sisters are vulgar, his father a cad. The young man, feeling convinced that a serious mistake has happened, goes forth to search for his own family. He finds them at last, a cultivated circle of people, and they all seem to know that he belongs to them. Strangely enough, young Brown meets in this family with one of the sons, a young fellow of his own age—call him Jones. Jones laments to Brown that he is entirely out of sympathy with his family. They are superior to him. He likes vulgar songs, the diverting company of ostlers and billiard-markers. He objects to young ladies. He prefers shop-girls. The point is clear,' said the doctor. 'These young men were born into the wrong families. Brown hinted to Jones that he would meet with the right parties at the Browns', and Jones was received by the Browns with that instinctive perception of his claims as a member of the family which had characterized the meeting between Brown and the Jones's.'

'Brown is a snob and Jones an ass,' said Parry.

Here the chief officer came right aft, and looked into the binnacle. As the cheeks are sucked in, so the sails hollowed to the sudden emptiness of the atmosphere along with the slight floating roll of the whole fabric. A low thunder fore and aft broke from the masts.

'I'm sick of that noise!' exclaimed Lieutenant Piercy. 'The cockroaches dance to it. The kitchen offal that the cook threw overboard yesterday delights in it, and dwells alongside, a loving listener. I say, Mr. Mulready,' he called to the mate, 'when are you going to give us a whole gale over the taffrail—something that shall come roaring down upon the ship in a cloudless thunder of wind?'

'Ha, sir, when?' answered the mate, a dry man.

Captain Parry, with a slight yawn, stood up, stretched his arms, stepped across the grating, and sprang upon the deck, then stood looking over the bulwark-rail at the distant icy gleam on the bow.

'The heat seems to have baked the life out of Parry,' said Lieutenant Piercy, 'or is it that his spirits sink as he approaches home, knowing what lies before him?'

'A man should feel himself a poor creature,' exclaimed the doctor, 'when he understands that a fit of despondency, a mood of unspeakable depression, reaching even unto tears, may be caused, not by the affections—oh no!—but by a little piece of celery, or half a pickled walnut.'

'I am thirsty,' said Piercy; 'come below, doctor, and have a drink.'

Four bells were struck. The ladies disappeared. Five bells—then most of the gentlemen vanished. Six bells, and now the ship seemed clothed in sleep and silence. At intervals faint catspaws stirred, none of which were neglected by the mate of the watch, who, regardless of the smothered curses of the seamen, hoarsely roared orders for the braces to be manned. Thus, stealthily, the ship floated through the midnight sea, flooded with moonshine.

Then came the dawn, the resurrection of the day, trailing its ghastly shroud across the face of the eastern sky. The watch of the mate came round again at eight bells—four o'clock—and when the day broke it found him on deck, standing at the rail, and peering ahead.

'Bring me the glass,' said he to a midshipman.

Some three points on the bow of the ship lay a schooner. She had all cloths showing, saving her little top-gallant sail and royal. She was certainly not under command, and yet she did not seem derelict. Mr. Mulready levelled the ship's glass. What was she?

Scarcely a yacht, yet of yacht-like finish and delicacy. The faint breeze trembled in her moon-white canvas. She lay head to wind, and the long pulse of ocean swell, in lifting and sinking her, exposed her sheathing in flashes, and submitted to the eye of Mr. Mulready the handsomest sea-going model he had ever looked at.

'Something wrong there,' thought he, carefully covering her with his glass, and intently examining her for any signs of life, for smoke in the caboose chimney, for a head peering in sickness over the bulwark rail.

About a mile and a half separated the two vessels, and it had taken the Alfred nearly the whole night long to measure the space betwixt the gleam over the bows and the spot of waters whence it had first been sighted by Captain Parry.

The chief mate could do nothing without the captain; but, whilst the crew were washing down the decks, often pausing for a breath or two in their scrubbing to glance at the graceful, helpless, lonely fabric that was now drawing abeam, Captain Barrington stepped through the companion-hatch. His sight immediately went to the schooner.

'What vessel have we there?' he exclaimed, and he picked up the telescope that lay upon the skylight. 'She is abandoned, sir,' said he to his chief mate.

'She looks too beautiful for ill-luck,' answered the mate. 'The man who moulded her knew his art.'

'What's she doing all this way down here?' said Captain Barrington, talking with the telescope at his eye. 'She's a gentleman's pleasure-boat. Has she been sacked, and her crew and pleasure-party murdered? Brace the foretopsail aback. I'll send a boat aboard.'

The ship came to a stand, with a lazy sigh of the light breeze in her canvas, the yards of the fore creaking on parrel and truss as they came round to the drag of hauling sailors. A boat was manned, lowered, and despatched in charge of the third officer, an intelligent young gentleman of the name of Blundell.

'Thoroughly overhaul her,' the captain had said. 'If she is derelict, bring away the log-book and papers.'

And as the boat swept towards the schooner the skipper turned to Mr. Mulready and exclaimed:

'If she be abandoned, I'll put a crew aboard, and we'll sail home together. There is value in that little ship, sir, and she is too handsome a craft to be allowed to wash about down here.'

Some of the male passengers arrived for their customary bath in the head. Do not believe the bath-room of the metal palace of this day comparable as a luxury to the old head-pump.

You stripped, you sprang on to a grating betwixt the head-boards, and an ordinary seaman went to work. The gushing blue brine sank to your marrow. It gushed in cold sweetness through and through you. You gazed down, and saw the clear blue profound out of which the sparkling coil that hissed over your body was being drawn. It was the one delight of the tropics, the one joy that haply sometimes checked the profanities in the passengers' mouths when they came on deck and found the ship motionless.

One of the first to come on deck to taste the sweetness of the head-pump was Captain Parry. The instant he rose through the hatch his eye caught sight of the schooner. He stood awhile staring; someone coming up behind him forced him to move out of the hatch. He stepped out, still with his eyes glued to the schooner, and advancing, that his vision might clear the quarter-boat, he again came to a stand, staring.

He was a tall, well-built young man, about eight-and-twenty years of age, close-shaven and dark, and there was something Roman and heroic in the cast of his countenance. He was airily clothed for the bath, and watched the schooner with a towel or two dangling in his grasp.

By this time the boat had reached the side of the apparently abandoned vessel, and the third officer might with the naked eye easily have been seen to spring aboard, followed by a seaman. He stood awhile taking a view of the decks, then disappeared.

'Captain Barrington,' exclaimed Captain Parry, wheeling suddenly upon the skipper of the ship as he approached him, 'is anything known of that vessel?'

'I have just sent a boat to board her,' answered the captain.

'Will you allow me to use that glass?'

He took the telescope from the captain's hands, and resting the tubes on the bulwark rail, gazed thirstily. There was something of astonishment—indeed, of amazement—in his face when he turned to Captain Barrington.

'I don't think I can be mistaken,' he exclaimed in a low voice, talking to the captain, but looking at the schooner. 'It is the same figure-head, exactly the same rig, the same size, so far as the eye can measure her at this distance. She has a deck-house for her sailors, and her paintwork is the same. It will be extraordinary!'

He fetched his breath in a half-gasp.

'Do you know that vessel, d'ye say, Captain Parry?' asked old Barrington, looking with curiosity and interest at the fine young fellow.

'I would swear that she is the Mowbray,' answered Captain Parry, picking up the glass afresh, and continuing to talk. 'She was purchased by Mr. Vanderholt, who made a yacht of her, and, when I was last in England, I went a short cruise in her along with Mr. Vanderholt and his daughter, the lady to whom—to whom—— Good God! the longer I look, the more I am satisfied. No name is painted on her; you will find her name in the boats. What, under heaven, brings her here, lying abandoned? Yes, oh yes! I'd pick her out if she were in a fleet of five hundred sail.'

'It may be as you say,' exclaimed Captain Barrington. 'It is a very remarkable meeting. But we can be sure of nothing until the third officer returns.'

A few passengers, attracted by this conversation, had drawn close. You heard murmurs of excitement. A voyage at sea, in the old days of tacks and sheets, was a tedious affair, in spite of flirtation, cards, the simple diversions of the dance on the quarter-deck, the heaving of the quoit, the bets on the run. Even a floating bottle was a something to cause a stir. It broke the dull continuity of the day. A sail was a Godsend. And here now, after many weeks of tedious ocean travel, here now had suddenly uprisen, all at once, coming down a-beam out of the darkness of the midnight, so to speak, an ocean mystery that would be fraught with an inexpressible significance if Captain Parry's conjecture proved accurate.

To this gentleman, for whom the head pump had magically ceased to have existence, the time of waiting and suspense was frantically long. Lieutenant Piercy came and stood beside him.

'But, supposing it is the Mowbray,' said the young officer: 'her presence in this sea needn't concern your friends. The vessel may have been sold. They may have been carrying her to some distant port. If it is fever, the dead will be found; if mutiny——' Here Lieutenant Piercy stopped, puzzled.

'I don't think Vanderholt would sell her,' exclaimed Parry. 'He was proud merely of her possession, though he did not often go afloat. How amazing to see her lying there! Of course it is the Mowbray,' he exclaimed, again levelling the glass. 'She used to carry a long-boat, and that's gone. If her people have left her, they went away in it.'

'She's certainly abandoned,' said Piercy, 'or something living would have shown itself by this time.'

'Why the deuce doesn't that fellow Blundell return?' muttered Parry, in an agony of impatience.

But, even as he spoke, the figure of the mate might have been observed to drop over the schooner's side into the boat. The oars swept the brine into steam. The boat hissed alongside, and the third mate stepped on board. All the people of the saloon or cabin had by this time heard the news; they knew that an abandoned schooner, which was an ocean mystery, lay close by, and they had made great haste to dress themselves, insomuch that a large number of them were on deck. They elbowed round the third mate, and the commander, and Captain Parry, to hear the ship's officer's report.

'She is the Mowbray, sir, of, and from, London. I can't find any papers. Here's her log-book, sir. The last entry is in a female hand. The vessel was apparently on a pleasure cruise.'

'Let me look at that book,' said Captain Parry.

He turned the pages till he came to the last entry, then began to read, now and then swaying himself, then making a step in recoil. All saw by his face and his motions, by his strange gestures, by the wild looks he would sometimes cast from the page to the schooner, that what he read was carrying the bitterness of death to his heart. Meanwhile the captain was questioning the third officer.

'There's nothing alive on board?'

'Nothing, sir. I searched everywhere.'

'No dead bodies?'

'None, sir.'

'Did you discover nothing to enable us to make a guess at what's become of her people?'

'Everything is in its place, sir. The log-book was left conspicuously open on the table of the cabin, that had, doubtless, been occupied by the captain.'

'Will you kindly accompany me below, Captain Barrington?' said Captain Parry, who was so extremely agitated and distressed that he could barely utter the words.

The passengers made room. Every face bore marks of pity and astonishment. They had heard that the last entry was in a female hand, and they had also heard—indeed, they could see—that yonder schooner was abandoned.

Captain Parry followed the commander of the ship down the companion-steps into a bright, handsomely-furnished saloon; thence they passed into an after-cabin, the door of which Captain Barrington shut. A large, old-fashioned stern window provided a spacious view of the sea. The light came off the water in a cloud of splendour, and glowed and throbbed upon the nautical brass instruments upon the table, and sparkled in a glazed framed likeness of Mrs. Barrington.

'The entry here,' exclaimed Captain Parry, trembling with excitement, and the twenty contending passions within him, 'is in the handwriting of the young lady to whom I am—to whom I was—to whom I am to be married on my arrival in England. She is Miss Violet Vanderholt. You perceive,' he said, pointing with a shaking forefinger, 'that she writes her name. The story she tells is of a diabolical mutiny. It took place on December 15. This entry is dated the 18th; to-day is the 20th. The Mowbray has, therefore, been abandoned two days only, perhaps not a day, for though this last entry is dated the 18th, the crew need not necessarily have abandoned the schooner till yesterday, or even this morning.'

'It is certain,' said Captain Barrington, 'that the hands, together with the young lady, were on board the schooner on the 18th.'

'Quite certain, sir; but here is her story. Pray read it aloud to me; I did not fully master it.'

Captain Parry, with a shaking hand, gave the log-book to his companion. It was of the usual form of log-book, with a good wide space for 'Remarks' on the right-hand side of each page. Captain Barrington, a white-haired man of fifty-five, with scarlet cheeks, glanced over a few of the earlier entries. He saw that the log had been kept down to December 14, afterwards the entry was in a female hand, strong, sure, but somewhat small:

'I have ascertained that none of the men can read. I am writing an account of what has befallen us, hoping, since the men talk of leaving her and taking me with them, that this yacht may be met with, and this log-book discovered. I heartily pray any into whose hands this book may fall that he will publish my narrative to the world, so that my father's fate and my own may be made known to Captain George Parry, H.E.I.C.'s Service, to whom I am engaged to be married.'

The commander looked at Parry with brows arched by astonishment and sailorly concern. The officer brought his hands together in a convulsive gesture, and turned his eyes with a look of despair upon the sea, framed in the window.

'My father was Mr. Montagu Vanderholt, a well-known Cape merchant. We resided at —— Terrace, Hyde Park, London. I, Violet Vanderholt, am his only daughter. He thought that a sea-trip would do him good. He asked me to accompany him. I was his only companion, and we set sail from the Thames, November 1, in this year. The master was Captain Glew. He treated the crew harshly, and excited their hate, though he was cautious in his behaviour when I was on deck, so that I never could say he spoke to a man barbarously. But the dreadful tragedy of this voyage was occasioned by the bad food supplied to the sailors. This was undoubtedly Captain Glew's fault. He had been commissioned to victual the vessel, and was responsible for her stores, and I fear he knew that what he bought was not wholesome for men to eat, though the charges my poor father was at should have given the men the very best quality of food. They complained to Glew, but not to my father. Captain Glew never hinted that the men were murmuring, and the mutiny was sprung upon us with dreadful suddenness. The captain and the mate seized the boatswain, and a man stabbed the captain in the side, and mortally wounded him. My father dragged me below, and, rushing into his cabin for a pistol, returned on deck to cow the men with the weapon. They did not heed him, and he fired, and, as I have since been told, and must believe, shot the mate, Mr. Tweed, accidentally through the head. Mr. Vanderholt was killed by an iron bar, flung with murderous violence. They afterwards feigned that this bar was thrown with the intention of dashing the pistol from my father's hand. This is all that I have to relate.

'I am writing this at ten o'clock on the morning of the 18th. I cannot imagine what the men intend. I asked the boatswain, who has treated me with great civility throughout, to tell me what they mean to do. This very morning I repeated the question. He answered he could not say. The men were undecided. Some were for going away in the boat, and taking their chance of being picked up, and some for remaining in the vessel. I gathered from his manner that these were few. What are they to do with the schooner if they stick to her? They might, indeed, wreck her off some island where they could represent themselves as shipwrecked men. I know that they regard me as a witness against them, and that my life is in great danger, and the merciful God alone knows what is to become of me. It is nearly——'

Here the entry ended.

The commander of the ship looked at Captain Parry.

'The hand of Providence is in this,' said the scarlet-faced man, very soberly and seriously.

'They cannot be far off!' exclaimed Captain Parry, stepping to the stern window with an air of distraction, and staring out at the sea.

'It is a clock-calm,' said the commander, 'and if anything which moves by canvas has received the crew, we may presume that she lies as helpless as we, not far distant.'

'But what excuse could they make,' said Captain Parry, 'to be transferred from so staunch a little ship as the Mowbray?'

'They might say that they were without a navigator.'

'Wouldn't another vessel put a navigator on board so fine a craft and send her home, sooner than leave her to go to pieces? In that case we should not have found her here.'

'There's nothing to be done at sea, sir, by arguing and speculating,' said Captain Barrington, still preserving his very serious manner, as though, indeed, he had found something to awe him in the circumstance of a girl writing, so to speak, in the heart of the Atlantic, with particular reference to her lover, and that lover reading her words there. 'It is as likely as not,' he continued, 'that they have gone away in the long-boat. It is clear, from the narrative, that the majority were in favour of that measure. These are quiet waters, and the men have reason to hope that they will be picked up soon, in which case they can tell their own story.'

'But Miss Vanderholt?' exclaimed Captain Parry. 'She can bear witness against them. What will they do with her?'

'Ha!' exclaimed the commander, fetching a deep breath. 'It is certain, anyhow, that she is not in the schooner.'