‘The sight of the prize will cure it, I am sure.’
The deck – the world in general – now had a very different appearance. The great spread of canvas had shrunk to courses, reefed topsails and spritsail; the deck itself was canted some twenty degrees and the bow-wave flung high white and wide to leeward. A few sparse clouds were racing over the bright blue sky and dark banks had gathered far in the south, but the air was still flashing clear and filled with light – a slightly pinkish light already, the glorious sun so low.
‘Clap on to the line,’ said Jack, leading him forward; and as Stephen edged along the weather gangway many a hand took his elbow, passing him to a sure hold and telling him to watch
out, to take great care; and behind their kindness to him there was a certain grim ferocity.
Pullings was waiting for them in the bows. He said, ‘She has not altered course, no not by half a point since first we seen her; she must surely be running for the Cove of Cork, or a little south.’
Jack nodded, and over his shoulder he called, ‘Duck up.’
The spritsail puckered and turned, and to his astonishment Stephen saw the chase right ahead, almost within gunshot, very, very much closer than he had expected. She was a black, low ship, all the blacker for her great foaming wake, brilliant white in the sun; and she seemed all the lower for the great breadth of her yards, the dun sails drum-tight upon them as she raced along. Jack had given him his telescope and as Stephen listened with half his mind to the sailors’ remarks about double and even triple preventer-stays –
extraordinary speed for a snow, even one so well handled – Surprise shockingly handicapped – trim not at all that could be wished, by any means: distinctly by the head –
he gazed at the men gathered at the snow’s taffrail, and they steadily watching the Surprise, never moving, though the spray often swept across their faces. The glass was exceptionally good and the air so perfectly clear that he distinguished a kittiwake as it
moved along the side of the snow, the bird too faintly tinged with pink. He had directed the telescope at the two guns, probably nine-pounders, pointing through the snow’s chase-ports when his mind as it were leapt to attention and he instantly returned to the man, to the third man from the left: he focussed with even greater sharpness and there was not the least possible doubt. He was looking at Robert Gough.
Gough too had been a member of the United Irishmen: he and Maturin had agreed that Irishmen should govern Ireland and that Catholics should be emancipated: on everything else they were opposed and had been from the beginning. Gough was one of the leaders of that part of the movement which was in favour of French intervention whereas Maturin was wholly against it – he was against violence and he was even more against importing or in any way helping the new kind of tyranny that had arisen in France, the horribly disappointing sequel of that Revolution which Maturin and most of his friends had welcomed with such joy. When the rising of 1798 was put down with revolting cruelty and with the help of swarms of informers, native, foreign and half-bred, their lives were equally in danger, but since then all similarity had vanished. Gough, with the survivors of his school of thought, had become even more committed to France, whereas Maturin, once he had recovered from the stunning shock, which had coincided with the loss of his sweetheart, had observed the development of an exceedingly dangerous dictatorship, entirely replacing the generous ideas of 1789 but at the same time profiting from them. He had seen the treatment of the Catholic church in France, of the Italian sympathizers in those unfortunate regions overrun by the French, and of the Catalans in his own Catalonia; and well before the end of the Revolutionary War he had seen that this whole system of pillage and oppression, this whole series of police-states must, before everything else, be brought to an end. And everything he had seen since, the subversion of countless states by brute force, the imprisonment of the Pope, the universal bad faith, had confirmed his diagnosis, strengthening him in his conviction that this tyranny, far more intelligent and invasive than anything that had been known, must be destroyed. The freedom of Ireland and of Catalonia were dependent upon its destruction – the defeat of French imperialism was a necessary condition for all the rest.
Yet there was Gough, just over the water, eager for another French landing; and Stephen had the absolute certainty that he was on a mission to Ireland. If the snow were taken Gough would be hanged: the tyranny would be by so much the weaker. But at this all Stephen’s old loathing for informers rose up with overwhelming force, his utter revulsion from anything and everything to do with them and the result of their betrayals, the torture, the floggings, the melted pitch on men’s heads; and of course the hangings. He could not bear the slightest
hint of a connexion between himself and such people; he could not bear being connected in any way whatsoever with the taking of Gough.
He heard Pullings say, ‘I have had the bow-guns cleared away, sir, in case you would like to try a random shot before it gets dark.’
‘Well, Tom,’ said Aubrey, considering the range with narrowed eyes and stroking the larboard chaser, a beautiful brass long nine, ‘I have been thinking of it, naturally: and with
luck we might knock away a spar or two and kill some of her people, though the distance is so great and the ship is behaving more like a rocking-horse than a Christian. But I do hate battering a prize, particularly a small one. Apart from anything else it takes so much time, what with repairing and towing and perhaps having to send her in with a prize-crew we have to wait for. No. What I should like best would be to range up alongside and offer her a full broadside if she don’t strike:
nobody but a mad lunatic would refuse – we carry five times her weight of metal. Then without any slaughter or repairing or fuss we carry her into the nearest port and so proceed to Lisbon, where we are likely to be uncommon late in any case, after such a run.’
‘To be sure,’ said Pullings, ‘there is not much likelihood of our losing her tonight, with the moon so near the full; and to be sure, we have the weather-gage – could not have it more.
But I was only thinking that if we do not check her in some way, at this pace it will be a great while before we can show her our broadside clear and close; and by then we may have run almost the whole length of the Irish Sea; and beating into a south-wester off Galloway is tedious work.’
They discussed a variety of possibilities; and then, breaking off, Jack said, ‘Where is the Doctor?’
‘I believe he went aft some minutes ago,’ said Pullings. ‘How dark it has grown.’
Maturin had indeed gone aft, aft and below to the orlop, where he sat on a three-legged stool by the medicine-chest, staring at the candle in the lantern he had brought with him: he was more likely to be alone here than anywhere in the ship, alone and in silence, for although there was the ship’s own voice and the tumultuous roar of the sea echoing down here in a general confusion of sound, it was an unceasing noise and could be set aside in time, forgotten, quite unlike the spasmodic cries and orders, the footsteps and clashing that would break in upon his thoughts if he were to sit in the coach.
He had long since accepted that Gough was now of no real importance and that in view of the disastrous outcome of all the attempted French landings hitherto it was extremely unlikely that they would in fact ever launch another, whatever promises Gough might be carrying. His loss would not weaken Bonaparte’s machine to any perceptible degree. Yet although Maturin could and did look upon this as axiomatic, it in no way affected his determination not to be associated with Gough’s arrest and his mind had now been turning for some considerable time on possible ways of dealing with the situation.
Yet so far his mind had produced little; it turned and turned, but the turning, though arduous, was sterile. Some great man had said, ‘A thought is like a flash between two dark nights’: at present Stephen’s nights were running into one uninterrupted darkness, lit by no gleams at all. The coca-leaves he chewed had the property of doing away with hunger and fatigue, giving some degree of euphoria, and making one feel clever and even witty; he certainly had no appetite and he did not feel physically tired, but as for the rest he might have been eating hay.