Foul Play - Dion Boucicault (the best books to read txt) 📗

board the Proserpine, in monosyllables at first; but, the ice once fairly broken, the intercourse of mind became rather rapid.

At first it was a mere intellectual exchange, but one very agreeable to Miss Rolleston; for a fine memory, and omnivorous reading from his very boyhood, with the habit of taking notes, and reviewing them, had made Mr. Hazel a walking dictionary, and a walking essayist if required.

But when it came to something which, most of all, the young lady had hoped from this temporary acquaintance, viz., religious instruction, she found him indeed as learned on that as on other topics, but cold and devoid of unction. So much so, that one day she said to him, “I can hardly believe you have ever been a missionary.” But at that he seemed so distressed that she was sorry for him, and said, sweetly, “Excuse me, Mr. Hazel, my remark was in rather bad taste, I fear.”

“Not at all,” said he. “Of course I am unfit for missionary work, or I should not be here.”

Miss Rolleston took a good look at him, but said nothing. However, his reply and her perusal of his countenance satisfied her that he was a man with very little petty vanity and petty irritability.

One day they were discoursing of gratitude; and Mr. Hazel said he had a poor opinion of those persons who speak of the burden of gratitude, and make a fuss about being “laid under an obligation.”

“As for me,” said he, “I have owed such a debt, and found the sense of it very sweet.”

“But perhaps you were always hoping to make a return,” said Helen.

“That I was. Hoping against hope.”

“Do you think people are grateful, in general?”

“No, Miss Rolleston, I do not.”

“Well, I think they are. To me at least. Why, I have experienced gratitude even in a convict. It was a poor man, who had been transported, for something or other, and he begged papa to take him for his gardener. Papa did, and he was so grateful that, do you know, he suspected our house was to be robbed, and he actually watched in the garden night after night. And, what do you think? the house was attacked by a whole gang; but poor Mr. Seaton confronted them and shot one, and was wounded cruelly; but he beat them off for us; and was not that gratitude?”

While she was speaking so earnestly, Mr. Hazel’s blood seemed to run through his veins like heavenly fire, but he said nothing, and the lady resumed with gentle fervor, “Well, we got him a clerk’s place in a shipping-office, and heard no more of him; but he did not forget us; my cabin here was fitted up with every comfort and every delicacy. I thanked papa for it; but he looked so blank I saw directly he knew nothing about it, and, now I think of it, it was Mr. Seaton. I am positive it was. Poor fellow! And I should not even know him if I saw him.”

Mr. Hazel observed, in a low voice, that Mr. Seaton’s conduct did not seem wonderful to him. “Still,” said he, “one is glad to find there is some good left even in a criminal.”

“A criminal!” cried Helen Rolleston, firing up. “Pray, who says he was a criminal? Mr. Hazel, once for all, no friend of mine ever deserves such a name as that. A friend of mine may commit some great error or imprudence; but that is all. The poor grateful soul was never guilty of any downright wickedness. That stands to reason.”

Mr. Hazel did not encounter this feminine logic with his usual ability; he muttered something or other, with a trembling lip, and left her so abruptly that she asked herself whether she had inadvertently said anything that could have offended him; and awaited an explanation. But none came. The topic was never revived by Mr. Hazel; and his manner, at their next meeting, showed he liked her none the worse that she stood up for her friends.

 

The wind steady from the west for two whole days, and the Proserpine showed her best sailing qualities, and ran four hundred and fifty miles in that time.

Then came a dead calm, and the sails flapped lazily and the masts described an arc; and the sun broiled; and the sailors whistled; and the captain drank; and the mate encouraged him.

During this calm Miss Rolleston fell downright ill, and quitted the deck. Then Mr. Hazel was very sad; borrowed all the books in the ship and read them, and took notes; and when he had done this he was at leisure to read men, and so began to study Hiram Hudson, Joseph Wylie, and others, and take a few notes about them.

From these we select some that are better worth the reader’s attention than anything we could relate in our own persons at this stagnant part of the story.

<CENTER>PASSAGES FROM MR. HAZEL’S DIARY.

“CHARACTERS ON BOARD THE ‘PROSERPINE.’</CENTER>

“There are two sailors, messmates, who have formed an antique friendship; their names are John Welch and Samuel Cooper. Welch is a very able seaman and a chatterbox. Cooper is a good sailor, but very silent; only what he does say is much to the purpose.

“The gabble of Welch is agreeable to the silent Cooper; and Welch admires Cooper’s taciturnity.

“I asked Welch what made him like Cooper so much. And he said, ‘Why, you see, sir, he is my messmate, for one thing, and a seaman that knows his work; and then he has been well eddycated, and he knows when to hold his tongue, does Sam.’

“I asked Cooper why he was so fond of Welch. He only grunted in an uneasy way at first; but, when I pressed for a reply, he let out two words—‘Capital company’; and got away from me.

“Their friendship, though often roughly expressed, is really a tender and touching sentiment. I think either of these sailors would bare his back and take a dozen lashes in place of his messmate. I too once thought I had made such a friend. Eheu!

“Both Cooper and Welch seem, by their talk, to consider the ship a living creature. Cooper chews. Welch only smokes, and often lets his pipe out; he is so voluble.

“Captain Hudson is quite a character, or, I might say, two characters; for he is one man when he is sober, and another when he is the worse for liquor; and that, I am sorry to see, is very often. Captain Hudson, sober, is a rough, bearish seaman, with a quick, experienced eye, that takes in every rope in the ship, as he walks up and down his quarter-deck. He either evades or bluntly declines conversation, and gives his whole mind to sailing his ship.

“Captain Hudson, drunk, is a garrulous man, who seems to have drifted back into the past. He comes up to you and talks of his own accord, and always about himself, and what he did fifteen or twenty years since. He forgets whatever has occurred half an hour ago; and his eye, which was an eagle’s, is now a mole’s. He no longer sees what his sailors are doing alow or aloft; to be sure he no longer cares; his present ship may take care of herself while he is talking of his past ones. But the surest indicia of inebriety in Hudson are these two. First, his nose is red. Secondly, he discourses upon a seaman’s duty to his employers. Ebrius rings the changes on his ‘duty to his employers’ till drowsiness attacks his hearers. Cicero de officiis was all very well at a certain period of one’s life, but bibulus nauta de officiis is rather too much.

“N. B.—Except when his nose is red not a word about his ‘duty to his employers.’ That phrase, like a fine lady, never ventures into the morning air. It is purely post-prandial, and sacred to occasions when he is utterly neglecting his duty to his employers, and to everybody else.

“All this is ridiculous enough, but somewhat alarming. To think that her precious life should be intrusted to the care and skill of so unreliable a captain!

“Joseph Wylie, the mate, is less eccentric but even more remarkable. He is one of those powerfully built fellows whom Nature, one would think, constructed to gain all their ends by force and directness. But no such thing; he goes about as softly as a cat; is always popping out of holes and corners; and I can see he watches me and tries to hear what I say to her. He is civil to me when I speak to him; yet I notice he avoids me quietly. Altogether, there is something about him that puzzles me. Why was he so reluctant to let me on board as a passenger? Why did he tell a downright falsehood? For he said there was no room for me; yet, even now, there are two cabins vacant, and he has taken possession of them.

 

“The mate of this ship has several barrels of spirits in his cabin, or rather cabins, and it is he who makes the captain drunk. I learned this from one of the boys. This looks ugly. I fear Wylie is a bad, designing man, who wishes to ruin the captain, and so get his place. But, meantime, the ship might be endangered by this drunkard’s misconduct. I shall watch Wylie closely, and perhaps put the captain on his guard against this false friend.

“Last night, a breeze got up about sunset, and H. R. came on deck for half an hour. I welcomed her as calmly as I could: but I felt my voice tremble and my heart throb. She told me the voyage tired her much; but it was the last she should have to make. How strange, how hellish (God forgive me for saying so!) it seems that she should love him. But, does she love him? Can she love him? Could she love him if she knew all? Know him she shall before she marries him. For the present, be still, my heart.

“She soon went below and left me desolate. I wandered all about the ship, and, at last, I came upon the inseparables, Welch and Cooper. They were squatted on the deck, and Welch’s tongue was going as usual. He was talking about this Wylie, and saying that, in all his ships, he had never known such a mate as this; why, the captain was under his thumb, he then gave a string of captains, each of whom would have given his mate a round dozen at the gangway, if he had taken so much on him as this one does.

“‘Grog!’ suggested Cooper, in extenuation.

“Welch admitted Wylie was liberal with that, and friendly enough with the men; but, still, he preferred to see a ship commanded by the captain, and not by a lubber like Wylie.

“I expressed some surprise at this term, and said I had envied Wylie’s nerves in a gale of wind we encountered early in the voyage.

“The talking sailor explained, ‘In course, he has been to sea afore this, and weathered many a gale. But so has the cook. That don’t make a man a sailor. You ask him how to send down a to’-gallant yard or gammon a bowsprit, or even mark a lead line, and he’ll stare at ye like Old Nick, when the angel caught him with the red-hot tongs, and questioned him out of the Church Catechism. Ask Sam there if ye don’t believe me. Sam, what do you think of this Wylie for a seaman?’

“Cooper could not afford anything so precious, in his estimate of things, as a word; but he lifted a