Marjorie Read online

  CHAPTER XXII

  WE LOSE CORNELYS JENSEN

  It was on the night when we had well-nigh finished our two rafts that avery unexpected thing happened--a thing which I took at the time to be apiece of good fortune, but which, as it happened, proved to be amisfortune for some of us. The unexpected event was, namely, that welost Cornelys Jensen; and this was the way in which the thing cameabout.

  The nights during that spell of foul weather were very dark andmoonless, not because there was no moon, though she was now waning intoher last quarter, but because of the quantity of clouds that muffled upthe face of the heavens and hid the moon and the stars from us. But wemade shift as well as we could, working hard all the time that thedaylight lasted, and giving up the night to the rest we were all in suchsore need of. Of course, the usual discipline of the ship was preserved,the usual watches set, and all observed exactly as if Captain Amberhimself had been aboard, for, though the Royal Christopher was sadlyshaken, she was still uninjured as to her inward parts, and we were allable to sleep under cover and out of the way of wind or weather.

  On the night before the weather mended, although it was not my watch andI was below in my cabin, I found that I could not sleep. The air wasclose and oppressive, full of a heat that heralded, though I did notknow it, the coming of a spell of fine weather. I was feverish anddistressed of body, and tossed for long enough in my hammock, tryingvery hard to get to sleep; but, though I was tired as a dog, the graceof sleep would not come to me. At last, in very desperation, I resolvedto continue the struggle no longer. If I could not sleep I could not,and there was an end of it. I would go on deck and get there a littleair to cool my hot body.

  So up on deck I went and looked about me. All was quiet, all was dark.Here and there a ship's lanthorn made a star in the gloom; the shipseemed like a black rock rising out of blackness. I could hear the treadof the watch; I could hear the noisy lapping of the water. There was nowind, there was no moon; the air seemed to be thick and choking. I feltscarcely more refreshed than I had been in my cabin, but as I had comeup I thought that I might as well stay up for a bit and have the benefitof whatever air there was. So I made my way cautiously in the darknessto the side of the vessel, and, leaning upon the bulwark, looked outover the sea, and fell to thinking of Marjorie and of my love for herand all its hopelessness.

  Presently I heard voices. Those who spoke drew nearer and nearer to me,and I soon recognised the speakers as Lancelot and Cornelys Jensen. Atthe spot where I was standing a great pile of boxes and water barrelshad been raised for transfer to the rafts, and I, being on the one sideof this pile, was invisible to them as they approached, and would havebeen passed unnoticed had the night been brighter than it was. I couldalmost hear what they were saying; I am certain that I heard Jensenutter my name.

  I came out of the shadow, or rather out of my corner--for it was allshadow alike--and called out Lancelot's name. Lancelot called back tome, and then I heard Jensen wish him good-night and turn and trampheavily down the stairs that led below. He seemed to tramp very heavily,heavier than was his wont, for he was a light, alert man, even when hisbiggest sea-boots were on him, as I make no doubt they now were.Lancelot joined me, and I drew him with me into the place where I hadbeen standing, after first casting a glance around the deck to see thatno one was within hearing. All seemed deserted, save for the distantwalk of the watch. We leaned over the bulwark together and began totalk.

  I asked him what Jensen had been saying to him. He told me that Cornelyshad come to him and expressed great surprise and anger at the doubtswhich he believed, from my manner and from some words that I haduttered, I entertained of him. It seemed that he had said again toLancelot what he had said to me about the flag; that he insisted thatthere was no mystery at all about the matter, but that he was proud ofits possession and superstitious as to its luck, and that he never waswillingly parted from it. At the same time he offered to give itLancelot, as he had already offered to give it me, if Lancelot wasminded or wishful to take possession of it; an offer which Lancelot hadrefused.

  I could see from Lancelot's manner that he was largely convinced of theintegrity of Jensen, and I must confess that Jensen's conduct had givenhim grounds for confidence, and that I had very little in the way ofreasonable argument to shake that confidence. Still, I made bold to besomewhat importunate with Lancelot. When he spoke of his uncle's trustin Jensen's integrity, when he urged the value of Jensen's services tous on the voyage, and the way in which he had kept the sailors undercontrol at the first symptom of mutiny, I had, it must be confessed,little to say in reply that could seriously damage Jensen's character.But I was so thoroughly convinced of the man's treachery that I arguedhotly, and it may be that as I grew hot I raised my voice a trifle,which is a way of mine; and, indeed, my voice is never a good whisperingvoice. I entreated Lancelot, at all events, to have a very watchful eyeupon Jensen, and I urged that on the first symptom of anything in theleast like double-dealing he should place Jensen under arrest.

  Lancelot listened to me very patiently. He was impressed by myearnestness, and at last promised that he would scrutinise Jensen'sactions very narrowly, and that if he saw anything that was at allsuspicious in his demeanour he would immediately take steps to renderhim harmless. At this I pressed Lancelot's hand warmly, and was aboutto leave him and go below when I fancied that I heard steps stealingaway from us very softly, from the other side of the pile of barrels andboxes by which we stood. I whipped out of my corner and round the pilein an instant, but there was no one there, and I could neither see norhear anything suspicious. Lancelot declared that I was as suspicious asan old maid of her neighbour's hens. I echoed his laughter as well as Icould, but I went below again with a heavy heart, for I was oppressedwith a sense of danger which I dreaded the more because it seemed tolurk in darkness. I had laid me down again with no very great hope ofsleep, but I had no sooner laid my head upon its pillow than I fell intoa most uneasy slumber, in which all my apprehensions and all our perilsseemed to be multiplied and magnified a hundredfold. A nightmare terrorbrooded upon my breast. Suddenly I imagined, in the swift changes of mydream, that we were sinking, and that the vessel was going to pieceswith great crashes. I awoke with a start, to find that the noises of mydream were being continued into my waking life. The deck above was noisywith trampling feet and confused cries. For a moment I sat up, dizzywith surprise, and unable to realise whether I was awake or asleep.Then I pulled my wits together, and was on deck in a trice.

  I caught hold of a sailor who was hurrying rapidly by, and asked himwhat was the matter. He answered me that there was a man overboard, andthat they were doing all they could to save him by casting over the sidespars and timbers that would float, in the hope that he might be able tocatch one of them. The deck was all confusion, men running hither andthither, and some hanging over the bulwarks and peering into thedarkness, in the vain hope of catching a glimpse of their drowningcomrade. We had not a boat to lower, save only the little dinghy, whichwould not have lived a minute in such a sea.

  When I found somebody who could tell me what had happened this was whatI learnt. A man had fallen overboard; the watch had heard the splash asthe body fell into the water, and a wild cry that followed upon thesplash; a sailor had shouted out his warning of 'Man overboard!' and thecry had roused the whole ship. Up to this point nobody seemed to haveany idea who the missing man was, but when Lancelot, who was immediatelyon deck, though he had but just gone to lie down, had commandedsilence, and the men were gathered about him on the deck, the sailor whohad first made the alarm was found and questioned. This sailor said thathe saw a man standing at the vessel's side at a place where, when themast fell, the bulwark had been torn away and had left a gaping wound inthe ship's railings; that as he, surprised at seeing a man there, camenearer to try and ascertain what he was doing, the man staggered, flungup his arms--here the man who was narrating these things to us flung uphis hands in imitation--and then went over the side with a great splashand a great cry
. He believed that the man was none other than CornelysJensen.

  When Lancelot and I heard the name of Cornelys Jensen upon the man'slips we looked involuntarily at each other, and I make certain that weboth grew pale. That the man of whom we had been talking not an hourbefore in such different terms should have thus suddenly been taken outof our lives came like a shock to us both. Further investigationconfirmed the accuracy of the man's statement. The roll was called over,and every man answered to his name except Cornelys Jensen. His cabin wasat once searched, but he was not in it, and it was evident that he hadmade no attempt to sleep there that night, for his hammock wasundisturbed. On the table lay a folded sheet of paper, which Lancelottook up and opened. It contained only these words: 'Your doubts havedriven me to despair.' These words had apparently been followed by someother words, the beginning of a fresh sentence, but, whatever they were,they were so scrawled over with the pen that their meaning was aseffectually blotted out as if they had never been written.

  Of course, all efforts to rescue the unhappy man were unavailing. Therewas really nothing that we could do save to cast pieces of spar andplank overboard in the faint hope that some one of them might come inthe drowning man's way and enable him to keep afloat till daylight, ifby any chance his purpose of self-slaughter--for so it seemed to me--hadchanged with his souse into the water. The night was pitchy black, andthe waves were running a tremendous pace, so that there really seemed tobe little likelihood of the strongest swimmer keeping himself longafloat; but we did our best and hoped our hardest, even those of us who,like myself, disliked and distrusted Cornelys Jensen profoundly.

  Though Lancelot said little to Marjorie beyond the bare news of whathad happened I could see that he took the disappearance of Jensen andthat little scrawl we found in his cabin badly to heart. He wasconvinced at once that Jensen had committed suicide, driven thereto bythe suspicions that we had formed of him; and, indeed, though I tried toconsole Lancelot as well as I could, it did look very like it, and Imust confess that I felt a little guilty. For though I still thoughtthat the grounds upon which I had formed my suspicions of the man werereasonable grounds, and justified all my apprehensions, still I couldnot resist an uncomfortable feeling that perhaps, after all, I mighthave misjudged the man, and that in any case I was the instrument--theunwitting instrument, but still the instrument none the less--of sendinga fellow-creature before his Maker with the stigma of self-slaughterupon his soul. So certainly Lancelot and I passed a very unhappy night,what there was left of it; and when the dawn came we scanned the seaanxiously in the faint hope that we might see something of the missingman. But, though the sea was far quieter than it had been for manyhours, there was no trace of any floating body upon it, and it becameonly too clear to our minds that, for some cause or other, CornelysJensen had indeed killed himself. I could only imagine that the man wasreally crazed, although we did not dream of such a thing, and that theperils and privations through which we had passed, and against which heseemed to bear such a bold front, had in fact completed the unhinging ofhis wits, and that my accusations, acting upon a weakened mind, haddriven him in his frenzy to destroy himself. To be quite candid, thoughI was sufficiently sorry for the man, I was still dogged enough in myown opinion of his character as to think that, if it was the will ofProvidence that he should so perish, at all events the Royal Christopherwas no loser by his loss.