A High Wind in Jamaica - Richard Hughes [41]
However, Captain Jonsen was nothing if not a crafty man; and during the afternoon he gave orders for a spare spar to be towed behind as I have described. The result was that the schooner lost ground rapidly: and when night fell they were at least a couple of miles further from the brig than they had been at dawn. When night fell, of course, they hauled the spar on board and prepared for the last act. They followed the brig by compass through the hours of darkness, without catching sight of her. When morning came, all hands crowded expectantly at the rail.
But the brig was vanished. The sea was as bare as an egg.
If they were lost before, now they were double-lost. Jonsen did not know where he might be within two hundred miles; and being no sextant-man, but an incurable dead-reckoner, he had no means of finding out. This did not worry him very greatly, however, because sooner or later one of two things might happen: he might catch sight of some bit of land he recognized, or he might capture some vessel better informed than himself. Meanwhile, since he had no particular destination, one bit of sea was much the same to him as another.
The piece he was wandering in, however, was evidently out of the main track of shipping; for days went by, and weeks, without his coming even so near to effecting a capture as he had been in the case of the brig.
But Captain Jonsen was not sorry to be out of the public eye for a while. Before he had left Santa Lucia, news had reached him of the _Clorinda_ putting into Havana; and of the fantastic tale Marpole was telling. The "twelve masked gun-ports" had amused him hugely, since he was altogether without artillery: but when he heard Marpole accused him of murdering the children--Marpole, that least reputable of skunks--his anger had broken out in one of its sudden explosions. For it was unthinkable-- during those first few days--that he would ever touch a hair of their heads, or even speak a cross word to them. They were still a sort of holy novelty then: it was not till their shyness had worn off that he had begun to regret so whole-heartedly the failure of his attempt to leave them behind with the Chief Magistrate's wife.
6
THE WEEKS PASSED in aimless wandering. For the children, the lapse of time acquired once more the texture of a dream: things ceased happening: every inch of the schooner was now as familiar to them as the _Clorinda_ had been, or Ferndale: they settled down quietly to grow, as they had done at Ferndale, and as they would have done, had there been time, on the _Clorinda_.
And then an event did occur, to Emily, of considerable importance. She suddenly realized who she was.
There is little reason that one can see why it should not have happened to her five years earlier, or even five later; and none, why it should have come that particular afternoon.
She had been playing houses in a nook right in the bows, behind the windlass (on which she had hung a devil's-claw as a door-knocker); and tiring of it was walking rather aimlessly aft, thinking vaguely about some bees and a fairy queen, when it suddenly flashed into her mind that she was _she_.
She stopped dead, and began looking over all of her person which came within the range of eyes. She could not see much, except a fore-shortened view of the front of her frock, and her hands when she lifted them for inspection: but it was enough for her to form a rough idea of the little body she suddenly realized to be hers.
She began to laugh, rather mockingly. "Well!" she thought, in effect: "Fancy _you_, of all people, going and getting caught like this!--You can't get out of it now, not for a very long time: you'll have to go through with being a child, and growing up, and getting old, before you'll be quit of this