As Captain March went up the companionway after supper, he thought he felt a puff of air across his face. Stepping out upon the deck, his eyes instinctively turned to the northeast, from which direction he expected the wind. A dove-colored light still shone in the eastern sky; below it the sea was a darker color, irradiated by the glowing west.
His daughter and the young men had followed him, and now she touched his arm.
"Isn't that a catspaw?" she asked, and pointed northward, where a dark film of purple seemed to roughen the long slope of a swell that shone like pink satin. Even as they looked, the slope became a shallow bowl, and the patch of purple faded to the uniform gray of the hollowed wave.
Captain March shook his head and sighed.
"It does beat the deuce," he said.
This was as wide a departure from the placid philosophy with which he looked upon life as he ever gave expression to; and his daughter and his mate, who knew him equally well, recognized in it the extent of his mental disturbance. To them both the prolonged calm, in the changing twilight, took on an aspect of uncanniness. It was as if they stood absolutely alone, the last of living things, in a chaos of dead waters, under the sweeping throng of stars, which saw not and heeded not the blotting out of their small world. Tacitly both had agreed to give no sign of their changed relations so long as they were compelled to meet daily.
Medbury slipped away forward for a turn about the deck. He looked at the lights to see if they were in order."They might as well be kept burning," he muttered, "though God knows what good they are."
Back on the quarter-deck, when he returned from his round, he found the others leaning over the rail in silence. It had suddenly grown dark, and a haze had come up, obscuring the stars and the sea. He paused near Hetty, who looked up, smiled, and made room for him.
"We thought we heard the beat of a steamer's paddle just now," she said. "Listen!"
He leaned over the rail beside her, but for a long time heard nothing but the whine of spars, the rattle of the main-sheet blocks as the boom swung them taut, and the jump of the wheel in its becket. At intervals there came the sound of water dripping from the channels or spouting from the scuppers. These sounds seemed to make more acute the silence of the sea, which seemed like a living, threatening presence. At last Medbury stood up.
"There's nothing," he said.
"Listen!" said Hetty, in a low voice, and again he dropped his elbows to the rail.
Suddenly there came a quick succession of muffled throbs, like the far-off churning sound of a steamer's paddle-wheel; then it ceased as absolutely as if a door had been closed noiselessly upon it.
"There!" cried Hetty.
Fully ten minutes passed before they heard it again.
"It's queer," said Medbury. "There wasn't a sign of a steamer in sight at sunset. She must be far away, and we hear her only when we're both on the top of a swell. Sound carries a long way on a night like this."
Captain March straightened up.
"Bring me the glasses, Mr. Medbury," he said.
Medbury brought them, and the captain slowly swept the horizon; then he crossed the deck and walked to the main-rigging. Coming back, he handed the glasses to Medbury.
"Go forward and take a look," he said.
In five minutes the mate came back, and went up the main-rigging to the crosstrees. When he descended, he came aft.
"It's getting thick," he said; "she ought to blow her whistle."
"Better get your fog-horn forward," said the captain, and took the glasses for another look as Medbury went below. A moment later the mate returned to the deck with the long box of the patent fog-horn, and presently the dreary wail began to sound at intervals from the forecastle-deck. Hetty shivered as she heard it.
"It frightens me!" she murmured, with a little catch in her voice. "It frightens me!"
The crew were at the rail forward, silent and listening. The fog had blotted out the fore part of the vessel, but the forecastle door was open, and the swinging lamp was like an orange center of light in a nebulous haze. Once a sailor passed before it, and his shape loomed black and huge against the luminous interior. At short intervals the fog-horn sounded like a wailing banshee through the darkness; but there was no answering signal: only at long intervals came that strange, throbbing beat, like an uncanny chuckle, but seemingly neither nearer nor farther away than at first. Hardly two aboard agreed as to its direction, for the opaque walls of fog deflect sound-waves at sea, as a crystal breaks a ray of light.
Back on the quarter-deck Medbury was telling a curious story.
"Two years ago," he began slowly, with the hesitation of a man who feels moved to confidence against his better judgment, "we were running up the straits to Singapore, when it suddenly came on thick. We were close-hauled and had just about wind enough for steerageway, and we had the fog-horn going and were keeping a sharp lookout, for we were right in the track of shipping, and you know how vessels drift together in a fog, no matter which way they were heading before it thickened up. Well, we hadn't heard a peep all day, and toward night it seemed to be lifting a little, when I heard the man at the wheel give a little cry, and, looking astern, there, not a cable's length away, was a dingy, raveled-out, full-rigged Portuguese brig slipping right across our wake. They hadn't made a sound, and they didn't even then, though our old man got black in the face with cursing them for their sins. There was a black-whiskered old fellow, with his coat-collar turned up about his ears, at the wheel; but he scarcely looked our direction: only once he wagged his beard at us, and threw one arm over his head in a funny way, and then squinted aloft again, paying no more attention to us than if we'd been so much seaweed. But just forward the fore-rigging there was a row of sailormen leaning over the rail, and their eyes followed us like a lot of beady birds' eyes till the fog swallowed them up again. Well, the day after we reached Singapore the old man came aboard in a brown study. He said he'd heard ashore that there'd been a lot of dirty weather knocking about the straits, and a Portuguese brig called the Villa Real was forty days overdue. Well, she stayed overdue, and not a splinter or spun-yarn of her ever came ashore." He paused a moment to relight his pipe, and then added: "On the stern of the Portuguese brig that we had seen, in big white letters a foot high, was the name Villa Real."
In the silence that followed some one forward gave a low laugh; in the fog it sounded strange and unnatural.
"Did you ever hear a loon cry alongshore at night?" asked Medbury. For the first time on the voyage he had become actually loquacious. "I used to hear them at home when I was a boy. It's a creepy sound, and makes a man feel lonesome and homesick." He paused, as if half-ashamed of the confession, but went on, with a boyish chuckle: "Somehow, that fellow's laugh made me think of it, though I can't say it sounded like a loon, either. It's queer how one thing'll suggest another that isn't at all like it."
"It sounded strange to me, too," confessed Hetty.
"Did it?" he said, turning to her. "Well, that's funny."
"Knocking about in fog and storm, without sleep, a sailor gets queer notions in his head at times," said Captain March, slowly. "Now I had a little experience once that seemed queer at the time, though I suppose it was natural enough, if you only knew how to explain it. You know what queer shapes will sometimes loom up at night; but walk right up to 'em and you find it's nothing but a stump or a white post or something. Well, the first vessel I ever had was the schooner Sarah J. Mason. I was pretty young at the time, and I guess I was a bit nervous, but it does seem yet as if that first voyage as master was the roughest I've ever had. I had chartered for Para, and we struck dirty weather almost from the first. About eight days out the wind came out ahead, light and baffling, and I got her topsails on for the first time. But along after sundown it freshened up again, and I took 'em in. A young fellow from up the State somewhere had stowed the maintopsail, and someway, I don't know how,—I guess he was hurrying and a little careless; it was his watch below,—he slipped. For years after that, when I wasn't feeling first-rate, I used to wake up with a start, thinking I heard his yell again. Well, it wasn't very rough, and we got a boat over, but it wasn't any use. He must have gone down like a stone. After that it was dirty weather, with scarcely a glimpse of the sun, all the way out. I was upset and worn out, I guess; but one night, looking aloft, I saw some one on the main-crosstrees. There was a good-sized moon, though the sky was overcast, but light enough to see pretty distinctly. 'Who's that aloft?' says I to the second mate. He didn't answer much of anything, but walked to the rail and looked up. 'Well, call him down,' I said sharply, and he went to the rigging, and, standing on the rail, yelled: 'Who's that up there?' Then he went half-way up and stopped. I guess he stood there five minutes before he came down and went forward. In a minute he came back, looking pretty white. 'Everybody accounted for, sir,' he said, and his teeth were chattering as if he had the ague.
"Now, it sounds funny, but I never looked aloft at night on that trip without wishing I didn't have to, and there wasn't a sailorman aboard who could have been driven to go up to that masthead after dark if he'd been killed for refusing. We had fair weather coming home, and we carried that topsail till we blew it off her one night. I was plagued glad to see it go."
"Talking about explaining things if you only walk right up to them," said Medbury—"now there 're some things you can't explain. Take the old Martha Hunter, for instance. How are you going to explain her?" He leaned forward and addressed his talk to Drew, who knew nothing of the Martha Hunter. "She was built in Blackwater when I was a boy," he went on, "and before her ribs were all up Jerry Bartow fell from the scaffolding and was killed, and Tom Martin nearly cut his foot off with an adze while he was trimming a stick of timber that went into her. It went in with the stain of his blood on it, and it wasn't the last stain of the kind that she carried before she was through. Oh, she was greedy for that sort of thing! When she was launched she must have got the notion that she was designed to dig out a new channel in the harbor, for she fetched bottom and carried away her rudder; and before the year was out she came off the Boston mud-banks so badly hogged that she looked as if she'd got her sheer on upside down. It wasn't long before a sailorman fell from aloft and was killed on her deck; and the very next trip, in warping her out of her berth in Wareham, the hawser parted and broke the leg of the man who was holding turn at the capstan. Cap'n Silas Hawkins brought her home to overhaul, and the very first day he walked down the main-hatchway and was killed. Why, she used to drag ashore in any sort of a white-ash breeze; and if there was any dirty weather knocking about, she always managed to run her nose into it, and would come limping home like a disreputable old girl out on a lark. You could have filled a book with the stories of the men she lost or maimed, and the trouble she got into first and last. But she was fortunate in a way, too, for she made money, and you couldn't lose her. I guess she's running yet."
"I saw her a year ago last fall," said Captain March. "I haven't heard anything startling about her since, so I guess she's going."
"Well," said Medbury, "how are you going to explain her, and others like her? I'm not superstitious, or any more so than the common run of folks; but things like that—" He shrugged his shoulders and laughed, then, dropping his elbows to the rail again, turned to listen.
For a long time they had not noticed the sound that puzzled them, and now, in the silence, they remembered it again, and strained their ears to catch it once more. The fog-horn boomed out at regular intervals; only the noises of the rolling brig were also heard.
While they still stood listening, all at once Medbury thought he felt a puff of wind. Yet it was not so much wind as it was a suggestion of wind: it seemed to him that a hand, wet and cold, had been thrust close to his face and then withdrawn. He could not explain the chill that seemed to run through his frame. Then he shook off the feeling, and turned to Captain March.
"Did you feel a puff, sir?" he asked, and held his finger above his head.
"No," replied the captain. "If we get a stir of air, I'll put the canvas on her. I don't want to slat the sails all to pieces, but if we get enough for steerageway, we'll try it. I don't like loafing about in a fog like this with my hands in my pockets."
Then, even while he was speaking, out of the darkness and the fog and the subdued murmurs of the ocean, without other warning than the intangible beat that had mystified them, a long roller came sweeping in, lifted them in its mighty arms, slipped past, and dropped them with a shock that shook the brig, and forced a cry from the lips of every soul aboard.
