Part 29 (1/2)
”What do you suppose, Sir, to have become of my niece?”
”Eloped.”
”And with whom?”
Van Staats of Kinderhook stretched an arm towards the open ocean, and again nodded. The Alderman mused a moment; and then he chuckled, as if some amusing idea had at once gotten the better of his ill-humor.
”Come, come, Patroon,” he said, in his wonted amicable tone, when addressing the lord of a hundred thousand acres, ”this business is like a complicated account, a little difficult till one gets acquainted with the books, and then all becomes plain as your hand. There were referees in the settlement of the estate of Kobus Van Klinck, whom I will not name; but what between the handwriting of the old grocer, and some inaccuracy in the figures, they had but a blind time of it until they discovered which way the balance ought to come; and then by working backward and forward, which is the true spirit of your just referee, they got all straight in the end.
Kobus was not very lucid in his statements, and he was a little apt to be careless of ink. His leger might be called a book of the black art; for it was little else than fly-tracks and blots, though the last were found of great a.s.sistance in rendering the statements satisfactory. By calling three of the biggest of them sugar-hogsheads, a very fair balance was struck between him and a peddling Yankee who was breeding trouble for the estate; and I challenge, even at this distant day, when all near interests in the results may be said to sleep, any responsible man to say that they did not look as much like those articles as any thing else. Something they must have been, and as Kobus dealt largely in sugar, there was also a strong moral probability that they were the said hogsheads. Come, come, Patroon; we shall have the jade back again, in proper time. Thy ardor gets the better of reason; but this is the way with true love, which is none the worse for a little delay Alida is not one to balk thy merriment; these Norman wenches are not heavy of foot at a dance, or apt to go to sleep when the fiddles are stirring!”
With this consolation, Alderman Van Beverout saw fit to close the dialogue, for the moment. How far he succeeded in bringing back the mind of the Patroon to its allegiance, the result must show; though we shall take this occasion to observe again, that the young proprietor found a satisfaction in the excitement of the present scene, that, in the course of a short and little diversified life, he had never before experienced.
While others slept, Ludlow pa.s.sed most of the night on deck. He laid himself down in the hammock-cloths, for an hour or two, towards morning though the wind did not sigh through the rigging louder than common, without arousing him from his slumbers. At each low call of the officer of the watch to the crew, his head was raised to glance around the narrow horizon; and the s.h.i.+p never rolled heavily without causing him to awake.
He believed that the brigantine was near, and, for the first watch, he was not without expectation that the two vessels might unexpectedly meet in the obscurity. When this hope failed, the young seaman had recourse to artifice, in his turn, in order to entrap one who appeared so practised and so expert in the devices of the sea.
About midnight, when the watches were changed, and the whole crew, with the exception of the idlers, were on deck, orders were given to hoist out the boats. This operation, one of exceeding toil and difficulty in lightly-manned s.h.i.+ps, was soon performed on board the Queen's cruiser, by the aid of yard and stay-tackles, to which the force of a hundred seamen was applied. When four of these little attendants on the s.h.i.+p were in the water, they were entered by their crews, prepared for serious service.
Officers, on whom Ludlow could rely, were put in command of the three smallest, while he took charge of the fourth in person. When all were ready, and each inferior had received his especial instructions, they quitted the side of the vessel, pulling off, in diverging lines, into the gloom of the ocean. The boat of Ludlow had not gone fifty fathoms, before he was perfectly conscious of the inutility of a chase; for the obscurity of the night was so great, as to render the spars of his own s.h.i.+p nearly indistinct, even at that short distance. After pulling by compa.s.s some ten or fifteen minutes, in a direction that carried him to windward of the Coquette, the young man commanded the crew to cease rowing, and prepared himself to await, patiently, for the result of his undertaking.
There was nothing to vary the monotony of such a scene, for an hour, but the regular rolling of a sea that was but little agitated, a few occasional strokes of the oars, that were given in order to keep the barge in its place, or the heavy breathing of some smaller fish of the cetaceous kind, as it rose to the surface to inhale the atmosphere. In no quarter of the heavens was any thing visible; not even a star was peeping out, to cheer the solitude and silence of that solitary place. The men were nodding on the thwarts and our young sailor was about to relinquish his design as fruitless, when suddenly a noise was heard, at no great distance from the spot where they lay. It was one of those sounds which would have been inexplicable to any but a seaman, but which conveyed a meaning to the ears of Ludlow, as plain as that which could be imparted by speech to a landsman. A moaning creak was followed by the low rumbling of a rope, as it rubbed on some hard or distended substance; and then succeeded the heavy flap of canvas, that, yielding first to a powerful impulse, was suddenly checked.
”Hear ye that?” exclaimed Ludlow, a little above a whisper. ”'Tis the brigantine, gybing his main-boom! Give way, men--see all ready to lay him aboard!”
The crew started from their slumbers; the splash of oars was heard, and, in the succeeding moment, the sails of a vessel, gliding through the obscurity, nearly across their course, were visible.
”Now spring to your oars, men!” continued Ludlow, with the eagerness of one engaged in chase. ”We have him to advantage, and he is ours!--a long pull and a strong pull--steadily, boys, and together!”
The practised crew did their duty. It seemed but a moment, before they were close upon the chase.
”Another stroke of the oars, and she is ours!” cried Ludlow.--”Grapple!--to your arms!--away, boarders, away!”
These orders came on the ears of the men with the effect of martial blasts. The crew shouted, the clas.h.i.+ng of arms was heard, and the tramp of feet on the deck of the vessel announced the success of the enterprise.
A minute of extreme activity and of noisy confusion followed. The cheers of the boarders had been heard, at a distance; and rockets shot into the air, from the other boats, whose crews answered the shouts with manful lungs. The whole ocean appeared in a momentary glow, and the roar of a gun from the Coquette added to the fracas. The s.h.i.+p set several lanterns, in order to indicate her position; while blue-lights, and other marine signals were constantly burning in the approaching boats, as if those who guided them were anxious to intimidate the a.s.sailed by a show of numbers.
In the midst of this scene of sudden awakening from the most profound quiet, Ludlow began to look about him, in order to secure the princ.i.p.al objects of the capture. He had repeated his orders about entering the cabins, and concerning the person of the 'Skimmer of the Seas,' among the other instructions given to the crews of the different boats; and the instant they found themselves in quiet possession of the prize, the young man dashed into the private recesses of the vessel, with a heart that throbbed even more violently than during the ardor of boarding. To cast open the door of a cabin, beneath the high quarter-deck, and to descend to the level of its floor, were the acts of a moment. But disappointment and mortification succeeded to triumph. A second glance was not necessary to show that the coa.r.s.e work and foul smells he saw and encountered, did not belong to the commodious and even elegant accommodations of the brigantine.
”Here is no Water-Witch!” he exclaimed aloud under the impulse of sudden surprise.
”G.o.d be praised!” returned a voice, which was succeeded by a frightened face from out a state-room. ”We were told the rover was in the offing, and thought the yells could come from nothing human!”
The blood, which had been rus.h.i.+ng through the arteries and veins of Ludlow so tumultuously now crept into his cheeks, and was felt tingling at his fingers'-ends. He gave a hurried order to his men to re-enter their boat, leaving every thing as they found it. A short conference between the commander of Her Majesty's s.h.i.+p Coquette, and the seaman of the state-room, succeeded; and then the former hastened on deck, whence his pa.s.sage into the barge occupied but a moment. The boat pulled away from the fancied prize, amid a silence that was uninterrupted by any other sound than that of a song, which, to all appearance, came from one who by this time had placed himself at the vessel's helm. All that can be said of the music is, that it was suited to the words, and all that could be heard of the latter, was a portion of a verse, if verse it might be called, which had exercised the talents of some thoroughly nautical mind. As we depend, for the accuracy of the quotation, altogether on the fidelity of the journal of the mids.h.i.+pman already named, it is possible that some injustice may be done the writer; but, according to that doc.u.ment, he sang a strain of the coasting song, which we have prefixed to this chapter as its motto.
The papers of the coaster did not give a more detailed description of her character and pursuits, than that which is contained in this verse. It is certain that the log-book of the Coquette was far less explicit. The latter merely said, that 'a coaster called the Stately Pine, John Turner, master, bound from New-York to the Province of North Carolina, was boarded at one o'clock, in the morning, all well.' But this description was not of a nature to satisfy the sea men of the cruiser. Those who had been actually engaged in the expedition were much too excited to see things in their true colors; and, coupled with the two previous escapes of the Water-Witch, the event just related had no small share in confirming their former opinions concerning her character. The sailing-master was not now alone, in believing that all pursuit of the brigantine was perfectly useless.
But these were conclusions that the people of the Coquette made at their leisure, rather than those which suggested themselves on the instant. The boats, led by the flashes of light, had joined each other, and were rowing fast towards the s.h.i.+p, before the pulses of the actors beat with sufficient calmness to allow of serious reflection; nor was it until the adventurers were below, and in their hammocks, that they found suitable occasion to relate what had occurred to a wondering auditory. Robert Yarn, the fore-top-man who had felt the locks of the sea-green lady blowing in his face during the squall, took advantage of the circ.u.mstance to dilate on his experiences; and, after having advanced certain positions that particularly favored his own theories, he produced one of the crew of the barge, who stood ready to affirm, in any court in Christendom, that he actually saw the process of changing the beautiful and graceful lines that distinguished the hull of the smuggler, into the coa.r.s.er and more clumsy model of the coaster.
”There are know-nothings,” continued Robert, after he had fortified his position by the testimony in question, ”who would deny that the water of the ocean is blue, because the stream that turns the parish-mill happens to be muddy. But your real mariner, who has lived much in foreign parts, is a man who understands the philosophy of life, and knows when to believe a truth and when to scorn a lie. As for a vessel changing her character when hard pushed in a chase, there are many instances; though having one so near us, there is less necessity to be roving over distant seas, in search of a case to prove it. My own opinion concerning this here brigantine, is much as follows;--that is to say, I do suppose there was once a real living hermaphrodite of her build and rig, and that she might be employed in some such trade as this craft is thought to be in; and that, in some unlucky hour, she and her people met with a mishap, that has condemned her ever since to appear on this coast at stated times. She has, however, a natural dislike to a royal cruiser; and no doubt the thing is now sailed by those who have little need of compa.s.s or observation! All this being true, it is not wonderful that when the boat's-crew got on her decks, they found her different from what they had expected. This much is certain, that when I lay within a boat-hook's length of her sprit-sail-yard-arm, she was a half-rig, with a woman figure-head, and as pretty a show of gear aloft, as eye ever looked upon; while every thing below was as snug as a tobacco-box with the lid down:--and here you all say that she is a high-decked schooner, with nothing s.h.i.+p-shape about her!