LITMIR.BIZ

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a prophetic opinion was ventured concerning the consequences of such reckless risks. To all this Wilder turned a deaf or an insensible ear. Firm in his own secret purpose, he would have braved a greater hazard to accomplish his object. But a distinct though smothered shriek, from the stern of the vessel, reminded him of the fears of others. Turning quickly on his heel, he approached the still trembling Gertrude and her governess, who had both been, throughout the whole of those long and tedious hours, inobtrusive but deeply interested, observers of his smallest movements.

      “The vessel bore that shock so well, I have great reliance on her powers,” he said in a soothing voice, but with words that were intended to lull her into a blind security. “With a firm ship, a thorough seaman is never at a loss!”

      “Mr Wilder,” returned the governess, “I have seen much of this terrible element on which you live. It is therefore vain to think of deceiving me I know that you are urging the ship beyond what is usual. Have you sufficient motive for this hardihood?”

      “Madam,—I have!”

      “And is it, like so many of your motives, to continue locked for ever in your own breast? or may we, who are equal participators in its consequences, claim to share equally in the reason?”

      “Since you know so much of the profession,” returned the young man, slightly laughing, but in tones that were rendered perhaps more alarming by the sounds produced in the unnatural effort, “you need not be told, that, in order to get a ship to windward, it is necessary to spread her canvas.”

      “You can, at least, answer one of my questions more directly: Is this wind sufficiently favourable to pass the dangerous shoals of the Hatteras?”

      “I doubt it.”

      “Then, why not go to the place whence we came?”

      “Will you consent to return?” demanded the youth, with the swiftness of thought.

      “I would go to my father,” said Gertrude, with a rapidity so nearly resembling his own, that the ardent girl appeared to want breath to utter the little she said.

      “And I am willing, Mr Wilder, to abandon the ship entirely,” calmly resumed the governess. “I require no explanation of all your mysterious warnings; restore us to our friends in Newport, and no further questions shall ever be asked.”

      “It might be done!” muttered our adventurer; “it might be done!—A few busy hours would do it, with this wind.—Mr Earing!”—

      The mate was instantly at his elbow. Wilder pointed to the dim object to leeward; and, handing him the glass, desired that he would take another view. Each looked, in his turn, long and closely.

      “He shows no more sail!” said the Commander impatiently, when his own prolonged gaze was ended.

      “Not a cloth, sir. But what matters it, to such a craft, how much canvas is spread, or how the wind blows?”

      “Earing, I think there is too much southing in this breeze; and there is more brewing in yonder streak of dusky clouds on our beam. Let the ship fall off a couple of points, or more, and take the strain off the spars, by a pull upon the weather braces.”

      The simple-minded mate heard the order with an astonishment he did not care to conceal. There needed no explanation, to teach his experienced faculties that the effect would be to go over the same track they had just passed, and that it was, in substance abandoning the objects of the voyage. He presumed to defer his compliance, in order to remonstrate.

      “I hope there is no offence for an elderly seaman, like myself, Captain Wilder, in venturing an opinion on the weather,” he said. “When the pocket of the owner is interested, my judgment approves of going about, for I have no taste for land that the wind blows on, instead of off. But, by easing the ship with a reef or two, she would be jogging sea ward; and all we gain would be clear gain; because it is so much off the Hatteras. Besides, who can say that to-morrow, or the next day, we sha’n’t have, a puff out of America, here at north-west?”

      “A couple of points fall off, and a pull upon your weather braces,” said Wilder, with startling quickness.

      It would have exceeded the peaceful and submissive temperament of the honest Earing, to have delayed any longer. The orders were given to the inferiors; and, as a matter of course, they were obeyed—though ill-suppressed and portentous sounds of discontent at the undetermined, and seemingly unreasonable changes in their officer’s mind might been heard issuing from the mouths of Nighthead, and other veterans of the crew.

      But to all these symptoms of disaffection Wilder remained, as before, utterly indifferent. If he heard them at all, he either disdained to yield them any notice, or, guided by a temporizing policy, he chose to appear unconscious of their import. In the mean time, the vessel, like a bird whose wing had wearied with struggling against the tempest, and which inclines from the gale to dart along an easier course, glided swiftly away, quartering the crests of the waves, or sinking gracefully into their troughs, as she yielded to the force of a wind that was now made to be favourable. The sea rolled on, in a direction that was no longer adverse to her course; and, as she receded from the breeze, the quantity of sail she had spread was no longer found trying to her powers of endurance. Still she had, in the opinion of all her crew, quite enough canvas exposed to a night of such a portentous aspect. But not so, in the judgment of the stranger who was charged with the guidance of her destinies. In a voice that still admonished his inferiors of the danger of disobedience he commanded several broad sheets of studding-sails to be set, in quick succession. Urged by these new impulses, the ship went careering over the waves; leaving a train of foam, in her track, that rivalled, in its volume and brightness, the tumbling summit of the largest swell.

      When sail after sail had been set, until even Wilder was obliged to confess to himself that the “Royal Caroline,” staunch as she was, would bear no more, our adventurer began to pace the deck again, and to cast his eyes about him, in order to watch the fruits of his new experiment. The change in the course of the Bristol trader had made a corresponding change in the apparent direction of the stranger who yet floated in the horizon like a diminutive and misty shadow. Still the unerring compass told the watchful mariner, that she continued to maintain the same relative position as when first seen. No effort, on the part of Wilder, could apparently alter her bearing an inch. Another hour soon passed away, during which, as the log told him, the “Caroline” had rolled through more than three leagues of water, and still there lay the stranger in the west, as though it were merely a lessened shadow of herself, cast by the “Caroline” upon the distant and dusky clouds. An alteration in his course exposed a broader surface of his canvas to the eyes of the spectators, but in nothing else was there any visible change. If his sails had been materially increased, the distance and the obscurity prevented even the understanding Earing from detecting it. Perhaps the excited mind of the worthy mate was too much disposed to believe in the miraculous powers possessed by his unaccountable neighbour, to admit of the full exercise of his experienced faculties on the occasion; but even Wilder, who vexed his sight, in often-repeated examinations, was obliged to confess to himself, that the stranger seemed to glide, across the waste of waters, more like a body floating in the air, than a ship resorting to the ordinary expedients of mariners.

      Mrs Wyllys and her charge had, by this time, retired to their cabin; the former secretly felicitating herself on the prospect of soon quitting a vessel that had commenced its voyage under such sinister circumstances as to have deranged the equilibrium of even her well-governed and highly-disciplined mind. Gertrude was left in ignorance of the change. To her uninstructed eye, all appeared the same on the wilderness of the ocean; Wilder having it in his power to alter the direction of his vessel as often as he pleased, without his fairer and more youthful passenger being any the wiser for the same.

      Not so, however, with the intelligent Commander of the “Caroline” himself. To him there was neither obscurity nor doubt, in the midst of his midnight path. His eye had long been familiar with every star that rose from out the waving bed of the sea, to set in another dark and ragged outline of the element; nor was there a blast, that swept across the ocean, that his burning cheek could not tell from what quarter of the heavens it poured out its power. He

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