Volume II Part 7 (1/2)

'At last, Helga!' I cried, with a triumphant face, pointing.

She looked with her clear blue eyes for a little while in silence at the approaching vessel, as though to make sure of the direction she was heading in, then, clasping her hands, she exclaimed, drawing a breath like a sigh, 'Yes, at last. Hugh, your home is not so very far off now.'

'What's she loike?' said Abraham, bringing his knuckles out of his eyes and staring.

He went to the locker for a little old-fas.h.i.+oned 'longsh.o.r.e telescope, pointed it, and said, 'A bit of a barque. A furriner.' He peered again, 'A Hamburger,' cried he. 'Look, Tommy!'

The man put the gla.s.s to his eye and leaned against the rail, and his mouth lay with a sour curl under the little telescope as he stared through it.

'Yes, a whoite hull and a Hamburger,' said he 'and she's coming along tew. There'll be no time, I allow, to bile the coffee-pot afore she's abreast,' he added, casting a hungry, morose eye towards the little cooking-stove.

'Ye can loight the foire, Tommy,' said Abraham, 'whoilst I signalize her,' saying which he took an English Jack out of that locker in which he kept the soap, towels, and, it seemed to me, pretty well all the crew's little belongings, and, having secured the flag to the end of the pole, he thrust it over the side and fell to motioning with it, continuing to do so until it was impossible to doubt that the people of the little barque had beheld the signal. He then let the pole with the flag flying upon it rest upon the rail, and took hold of the fore-halliards in readiness to let the sail drop.

I awaited the approach of the barque with breathless anxiety. I never questioned for a moment that she would take us aboard, and my thoughts flew ahead to the moment when Helga and I should be safely in her: when we should be looking round and finding a stout little s.h.i.+p under our feet, the lugger with her poor plucky Deal sailors standing away from us to the southward, and the horizon, past which lay the coast of Old England, fair over the bows.

'Shove us close alongside, Jacob,' cried Abraham.

'Shall 'ee hook on, Abraham?' inquired Jacob.

'No call to it,' answered Abraham. 'We'll down lug and hail her. She'll back her tawps'l, and I'll put the parties aboard in the punt.'

'I have left my parcel in the forepeak,' said Helga, and was going for it.

'I'm nimbler than you can be now, Helga,' said I, smiling, and meaning that now she was in her girlish attire she had not my activity.

I jumped forward, and plunged down the hatch, took the parcel out of the bunk, and returned with it, all in such a wild, feverish hurry that one might have supposed the lugger was sinking, and that a moment of time might signify life or death to me. Abraham grinned, but made no remark.

Thomas, on his knees before the stove, was sulkily blowing some shavings he had kindled. Jacob, with a wooden face at the tiller, was keeping the bows of the _Early Morn_ on a line with the oncoming vessel.

The barque was under a full breast of canvas, and was heeling prettily to the pleasant breeze of wind that was gus.h.i.+ng brilliantly out of the eastern range of heaven, made glorious by the soaring sun. Her hull sat white as milk upon the dark-blue water, and her canvas rose in squares which resembled mother-of-pearl with the intermixture of shadow and flas.h.i.+ng light upon them occasioned by her rolling, so that the cloths looked shot like watered silk or like the inside of an oyster-sh.e.l.l. But it was distance on top of the delight that her coming raised in me which gave her the enchantment I found in her, for, as she approached, her hull lost its snowstormglare and showed somewhat dingily with rusty stains from the scupper-holes. Her canvas, too, lost its symmetry, and exhibited an ill-set pile of cloths, most of the clews straining at a distance from the yardarm sheave holes, and I also took notice of the disfigurement of a stump-foretop-gallant-mast.

'Dirty as a Portugee,' said Abraham; 'yet she's Jarman all the same.'

'I never took kindly to the Jarmans, myself,' said Jacob; 'they're a shoving people, but they arn't clean. Give me the Dutch. What's to beat their cheeses? There's nothing made in England in the cheese line as aquils them Dutch cannon-b.a.l.l.s, all pink outside and all cream hin.'

'Do you mean by a Hamburger a Hamburg s.h.i.+p?' asked Helga.

'Yes, lady, that's right,' answered Abraham.

'Then she's bound to Hamburg,' said the girl.

'Ask yourself the question,' answered Abraham--which is the Deal boatmen's way of saying yes.

She looked at me.

'It will be all the same,' said I, interpreting the glance; 'England is but over the way from Hamburg. Let us be homeward-bound, in any case. We have made southing enough, Helga.'

'Tommy!' sung out Abraham, 'give that there Jack another flourish, will ye?'

The man did so, with many strange contortions of his powerful frame, and then put down the pole and returned to the stove.

'There don't seem much life aboard of her,' said Jacob, eying the barque. 'I can only count wan head ower the fo'k'sle rail.'