masts, spars, boats; and so did their guilty messmates, for the Sophies were much given to rapine The outcome of all these factors was an odd busy restrained quietly cheerful attentiveness, with a note of anxiety in it.
With all hands so busy, Stephen scrupled to go forward to his elm-tree pump, through whose unshipped head he daily observed the wonders of the deep and where his presence was now so usual that he might have been the pump itself for all the restraint he placed upon the men’s conversation; but he caught this note and he shared the uneasiness that produced it.
James was in tearing spirits at dinner; he had invited Pullings and Babbington informally, and their presence, together with Marshall’s absence, gave the meal something of the air of a festivity, in spite of the purser’s brooding silence. Stephen watched him as he joined in the chorus of Rabbington’s song, thundering out
And this is law, I will maintain
Until my dying day, sir,
That whatsoever king shall reign,
I will be Vicar of Bray, sir
in a steady roar.
‘Well done,’ he cried, thumping the table. ‘Now a glass of wine all round to whet our whistles, and then we must
be on deck again, though that is a cursed thing for a host to say. What a relief it is, to be fighting with king’s ships again, rather than these damned privateers,’ he observed, a propos of nothing, when the young men and the purser had withdrawn.
‘What a romantic creature you are, to be sure,’ said Stephen. ‘A ball fired from a privateer’s cannon makes the same hole as a king’s.’
‘Me, romantic?’ cried James with real indignation, an angry light coming into his green eyes.
‘Yes, my dear,’ said Stephen, taking snuff. ‘You will be telling me next about their divine right.’
‘Well, at least even you, with your wild enthusiastic levelling notions, will not deny that the King is the sole fount of honour?’
‘Not I,’ said Stephen. ‘Not for a moment.’
‘When I was last at home,’ said James, filling Stephen’s glass, ‘we waked old Terence Healy. He had been my grandfather’s tenant. And there was a song they sang there has been in the middle part of my mind all day – I cannot quite bring it to the front, to sing it.’
‘Was it an Irish song or an English?’
‘There were English words as well. One line went Oh the wild geese a-flying a-flying a-flying,
The wild geese a-swimming upon the grey sea.’
Stephen whistled a bar and then, in his disagreeable crake, he sang
‘They will never return, for the white horse has scunnered
Has scunnered has scunnered
The white horse has scunnered upon the green lea.’
‘That’s it – that’s it. Bless you,’ cried James, and walked off, humming the air, to see that the Sophie was gathering the utmost of her strength.
She made her way out to sea at sunset, with a great show of farewell for ever and set her course soberly for Minorca; and some time before dawn she ran inshore again, still with the same good breeze a little east of north. But now there was a true autumnal nip in it, and a dampness that brought fungi in beech woods to Stephen’s mind; and over the water lay impalpable wafting hazes, some of them a most uncommon brown.
The Sophie was standing in with her starboard tacks aboard, steering west-north-west; hammocks had been piped up and
stowed in the nettings; the smell of coffee and frying bacon mingled together in the eddies that swirled on the weatherside of her taut trysail. Wide on the port bow the brown mist still hid the Llobregat valley and the mouth of the river, but farther up the coast towards the dim city looming there on the horizon, the rising sun had burnt off all but a few patches of haze – those that remained might have been headlands, islands, sandbanks.
‘I know, I know, those gunboats were trying to lead us into some trap,’ said Jack, ‘and am with child to know what it was.’ Jack was no great hand at dissembling, and Stephen was instantly persuaded that he knew the nature of the trap perfectly well, or at least had a very good notion of what it was likely to be.
The sun worked upon the surface of the water, doing wonderful things to its colour, raising new mists, dissolving others, sending exquisite patterns of shadow among the taut lines of the rigging and the pure curves of the sails and down on to the white deck, now being scrubbed whiter, to the steady grinding noise of holystones: with a swift yet imperceptible movement it breathed away a blue-grey cape and revealed a large ship three points on the starboard bow, running southwards under the land. The look-out called that she was there, but in a matter-of-fact voice, formally, for as the cloud-bank dissolved she was hull-up from the deck.
‘Very well,’ said Jack, clasping his glass to after a long stare. ‘What do you make of her, Mr Dillon?’
‘I rather think she is our old friend, sir,’ said James.
‘So do I. Set the mainstaysail and haul up to close her. Swabs aft, dry the deck. And let the hands go to breakfast at once, Mr Dillon. Should you care to take a cup of coffee with the Doctor and me? It would be a sad shame to waste it.’
‘Very happy, sir.’
There was almost no conversation during their breakfast. Jack said, ‘I suppose you would like us to put on silk stockings, Doctor?’
‘Why silk stockings, for all love?’
‘Oh, everyone says it is easier for the surgeon, if he has to cut one up.’
‘Yes. Yes, certainly. Pray do by all means put on silk stockings.’
No conversation, but there was a remarkable feeling of easy companionship, and Jack, standing up to put on his uniform coat, said to James, ‘You are certainly right, you know,’
as though they had been talking about the identity of the stranger throughout the meal.
On deck again he saw that it was so, of course: the vessel over there was the Cacafuego; she had altered course to meet the Sophie, and she was in the act of setting her studdingsails. In his telescope he could see the vermilion gleam of her side in the sun.
‘All hands aft,’ he said, and as they waited for the crew to assemble Stephen could see that a smile kept spreading on his face – that he had to make a conscious effort to repress it and look grave.
‘Men,’ he said, looking over them with pleasure. ‘That’s the Cacafuego to windward, you know. Now some of you were not quite pleased when we let her go without a compliment last time; but now, with our gunnery the best in the fleet, why, it is another thing. So, Mr Dillon, we will clear for action, if you please.’
When he began to speak perhaps half the Sophies were gazing at him with uncomplicated pleasurable excitement; perhaps a quarter looked a little troubled; and the rest had downcast and anxious faces. But the self-possessed happiness radiating from their captain and his lieutenant, and the spontaneous delighted cheer from the first half of the crew, changed this wonderfully; and as they set about clearing the sloop there were not above four or five who looked glum -the others might have been going to the fair.
The Cacafuego, square-rigged at present, was running down, turning in a steady westward sweep to get to windward and seaward of the Sophie; and the Sophie was pointing up close into the wind; so that by the time they were a long half-mile apart she was directly open to a raking broadside from the frigate, the thirty-two-gun frigate.
‘The pleasant thing about fighting with the Spaniards, Mr Ellis,’ said Jack, smiling at his great round eyes and solemn face, ‘is not that they are shy, for they are not, but that they are never, never ready.’
The Cacafuego had now almost reached the station that her captain had set his mind upon: she fired a gun and broke out the Spanish colours.
‘The American flag, Mr Babbington,’ said Jack. ‘That will give them something to think about. Note down the time, Mr Richards.’
The distance was lessening very fast now. Second after second; not minute after minute.
The Sophie was pointing astern of the Cacafuego, as though she meant to cut her wake; and not a gun could the sloop bring to bear. There was a total silence aboard as every man stood ready for the order to tack an order that might not come before the broadside.
‘Stand by with the ensign,’ said Jack in a low voice:
and louder, ‘Right, Mr Dillon.’
‘Helm’s a-lee,’ and the bosun’s call sounded almost at the same moment; the Sophie spun on her heel, ran up the English colours, steadied and filled on her new course and ran close-hauled straight for the Spaniard’s side. The Cacafuego fired at once, a crashing broadside that shot over and among the Sophie’s topgallants, making four holes, no more. The Sophies cheered to a man and stood tense and eager by their treble-shotted guns.