The Windy Hill/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
THE GHOST SHIP
CICELY HALLOWELL sighed deeply as she pushed away the heap of papers before her and brushed back the hair from her aching forehead. She was weary of her task and the room was growing dark and cold. She was beginning, moreover, to be uneasily conscious that the two men at the far end of the long table had forgotten her presence behind the pile of great ledgers and were talking of things that she was not meant to hear.
Half an hour earlier her brother Alan had rushed in to see whether she were not ready for their afternoon ride and had been disappointedly impatient when she shook her head.
"It is a glorious day, so cold and the roads so deep in snow. The horses are like wild things, and will give us a famous gallop up the valley. Oh, do come, Cicely."
But no, she must stay in the big gloomy countinghouse, to finish the letters that she had promised to copy for her father, while Alan had flung off, saying over his shoulder, as he departed to take his ride alone:
"It is very wrong to miss fun and adventure by toiling and moiling here. Think how the sea will look and how the blasts will be blowing over our Windy Hill!"
The place seemed very cheerless and empty after he had gone. The long windows gave little light on that gray winter afternoon, and the big fireplace with its glowing logs was at the far end of the room. There were shadows already on the shelves of heavy ledgers lining the walls, and on the rows of ship's models all up and down the sides of the big countingroom. Those lines of dusty volumes held records that Alan was forever reading, tales of wonderful voyages, of spices and gold dust and jewels brought home from the Orient, of famines in far lands broken by the coming of American grain ships, of profits reckoned in ducats and doubloons and Spanish pieces of eight. Cicely was fond of drawing and loved, far more than copying dull letters, to make sketches of those miniature vessels in the glass cases that stood for the Hallowell ships that had scoured the oceans of the world. They had been wrecked on coral reefs in hot, distant seas, they had lain becalmed with priceless cargoes in pirate-infested waters, their crews were as skillful with the long guns as they were at handling the sails, their captains were as at home in Shanghai or Calcutta as they were in the streets of the little seaport town where they had been born. Cicely could remember when the big countingroom had been crowded with clerks and had hummed like a beehive with the myriad activities of the Hallowell trade. It was a dull and empty place now, and the fleet of Hallowell ships was scattered, some lying at anchor, some dismantled and sold, some fallen into the hands of the enemy. For this was the third year of that struggle with England that the histories were to call the War of 1812.
Cicely, for all her thirteen years, looked very small, sitting there at the end of the long table, in her "sprigged" high-waisted gown, her feet in their strapped slippers perched on the rung of the high office stool. She had just taken up her pen to begin writing again when the voices of the two men by the fire rose so suddenly that she dropped it, startled. Her father's tone fell almost immediately to strained quiet, but Martin Hallowell, his partner, went on with angry insistence. She knew him to be hot-headed and impetuous, but she had never heard such words from him before.
With a quick, eager motion that was the embodiment of impatient greed, Martin was running his finger down the columns of the ledger before him.
"There is no ship like a privateer, and no privateer like the Huntress," he was saying. "Send her on one more voyage and we shall be rich men."
There was an ugly tremor in his voice, that quavered and broke in spite of his attempts to keep it calm.
"I do not care to be one of those who gathers riches from a war," returned Reuben Hallowell, Cicely's father. There was something in the dry calm of his answer that seemed to stir Martin to uncontrollable anger.
"It is like you, Reuben Hallowell," he said, "to be willing to ruin my plans by your foolish scruples just when a real prize is within reach. But I vow you shall not do it. You shall be a wealthy man in spite of yourself, and let me remind you that, two years ago, before we built the Huntress, you were a precious poor one."
The Hallowell partners were not brothers, but cousins, with Cicely's father much the older of the two. They had inherited the business from their fathers, for such an ill-assorted pair would never have been joined together from choice. Many of their discussions ended in stormy words, but never before had Martin's dark face showed such white-hot, quivering rage as when he arose now, gathered up his papers, and went away to his own room, closing the door smartly behind him. Cicely got up also and went down the long countingroom to where her father sat by the fire.
"I heard what you and Cousin Martin were saying," she told him hesitatingly, "I am afraid you did not remember that I was there. But it does not matter, for I did not understand what Cousin Martin was so angry about."
"There is no reason why you should not understand," her father replied, rather slowly and wearily, she thought, "although sometimes I am not certain that I understand these troubled times myself. Across the seas the Emperor Napoleon, a long-nosed, short-bodied man of infinite genius for setting the world by the ears, has been warring with England for the last ten years and more. He and the British, with their blockades and embargoes and Orders in Council have long been striving to ruin each other, yet have achieved their greatest success in ruining a peaceable old gentleman in America who relies on his ships to bring him a livelihood. To oppress neutral shipping leads in the end to war, although I vow that often Congress must have felt that it should toss up a penny to determine whether the declaration should be against France or England. Some stubborn British minister, however, decided to countenance the stealing of sailors from our ships to fill up the scanty crews of their own navy, and a stubborn British nation felt that it must back him, so in the end the war was with England."
"And have we not won many glorious victories?" asked Cicely.
"Ay, there have been victories; out of her fleet of seven hundred and thirty sail, England has lost a handful to us and we have shown how small our navy is and how great is its spirit. There have been passages of arms on land, also, of which we do not love to talk. And we have sent out our privateer vessels, armed ships that prey upon England's commerce, yet do not belong to our navy. They have done great things, have cut deep into England's overseas trade, and have brought home many a valuable prize to fill the pockets of their owners. Such a vessel is our Huntress, built at your Cousin Martin's instigation and launched at the moment when our fortunes were at their lowest ebb. Since we had not sufficient funds to equip her, nearly every one in this town put money into her, from John Harwood the minister down to Jack Marvin who digs our garden. It was a patriotic venture and a risky one, but she has brought home great profits in prize money and our own share has reëstablished the firm of Hallowell. Your Cousin Martin says that one more voyage will bring us not only profit, but real wealth. But I say," he struck his hand suddenly upon the table, "I say that there shall not be another."
"Why?" The question was startled from Cicely by his sudden vehemence, yet it was not from him that she was to receive the answer. The door opened to admit Martin Hallowell, who had come back, apparently, for a last word.
"You say," he began at once, "that the Huntress needs refitting and cannot be made seaworthy in less than a month?"
His partner nodded.
"I say that she shall sail in a week," declared Martin.
"And I say no," cried Reuben Hallowell.
"You say, too, that the war is nearly over, that the Peace Commission is sitting at Ghent, and that rumors are coming home that they are near to an agreement. That is your excuse for wishing to keep our privateers at home. You are a foolish and an overscrupulous man, Reuben Hallowell, for I say that such a reason makes all the more haste for her to be gone. We should reap what profit we can while there is yet time." He leaned forward, his dark, eager face close to theirs, all caution forgotten in the intensity of his purpose. "Once at sea the Huntress is beyond reach of tidings or orders. If she should take her last and richest prizes a little after peace has been declared, who will ever know it?"
He was silent and stood staring at them with unwavering, defiant eyes. Cicely could hear her sharply drawn breath as she waited for her father to answer.
"We are partners no longer, Martin Hallowell," he said. "We were not born to work together and it is clear that we have come to the parting of the ways. To-morrow we will make division of our holdings, for I tell you plainly that I will have no more to do with you and your dishonest schemes."
"It shall be as you say," Martin agreed, quick to press home an advantage. "And since it was I who urged the building and launching of the Huntress, it is only proper that she should fall to my share. She shall sail this day week, as I have told you. And you, my dear cousin, for your effort to stop her, shall soon be a most regretful man."
He went out, this time closing the door very gently behind him. The echoes of his vague threat seemed to hang in the great room long after he was gone.
"What—what can he do?" questioned Cicely.
Her father, with a visible effort, answered cheerfully, "An angry man loves to threaten, but we have naught to fear from him. And now," he gathered the big ledger under his arm, "I must work for a little in the countingroom and then we will go home."
Cicely, left alone, went back to fetch her letters and stopped for a moment at one of the long windows to look down upon the harbor where the Huntress dipped and swayed at anchor, a stately, beautiful thing that seemed to quiver with life as she rocked in the choppy seas, her shimmering reflection, beginning to be colored by the sunset, rocking and dancing with her.
"Oh, I must draw it," cried Cicely, catching up a sheet of fresh paper. "If only the light holds and the ship does not swing round with the tide!"
The minutes passed while she worked eagerly, but finally was forced to lay down her pencil, unable to see more in the dusk. The door flew open and some one came in with the impulsive rush that belonged only to her brother Alan.
"What, Cicely, still here and trying to draw in the dark? Let me see what you have done," he exclaimed. He lit a candle and examined the paper. "I vow, that is good. Oh, Cicely, that Huntress is a wonderful ship!"
For some reason there was a cold clutch at Cicely's heart.
"Yes?" she answered faintly.
"I have just had such a talk with Cousin Martin," the boy went on excitedly. "I did not quite understand the way of it, but he said that he and my father were to divide, and that the Huntress was to be his own, entire. He wants me to go with her on her next voyage. He says the war is not nearly done and that there will be many months of fighting and prize-taking still. He thinks a great fellow of sixteen like me should have been a ship's officer long ago, and I think so, too. What a good fellow Cousin Martin is!"
Alan admired his elder cousin greatly, Cicely well knew, and he had, indeed, a touch of the same excitable, headstrong nature. She could well understand how Martin Hallowell had dazzled the boy with tales of what he would see and do. Had there been such a plan in her cousin's mind when he first uttered his threat against her father? Or had it only flashed upon him as he met Alan running up the stairs, eager, vigorous, and ready for any adventure?
"It is all arranged," declared Alan, "except just to tell my father."
"No, no," she cried wildly, but he did not even listen.
"I will go in and speak to him now," he said. She could not even cry out as the door closed behind him.
Alan had his father's stern and steady pride, but there were differences of temperament that led to frequent clashes of will between them. Reuben Hallowell loved both his motherless children, but he understood his son less well than his daughter. What would be the result of that interview, Cicely wondered, sitting quaking beside the candle that burned so lonely in the gloom. Would her father know how to be firm and patient, how to undo the harm that Martin Hallowell had wrought? It seemed, as she sat there, shivering, that she could not endure the suspense.
She had not long to wait. The door banged open and Alan stood for a moment on the threshold.
"My father forbids my sailing on the Huntress. I have told him I should go in spite of him," he said.
He walked away along the corridor and down the stone steps, his feet quicker and lighter than Martin Hallowell's but his footsteps sounding, in some vague, terrible way, like his cousin's as he strode out and down the stairs.
Her father came in a moment later.
"You should have been at home long since this, my child," was all he said, and they went out together, without further talk of the matter, into the sharp air of the snowy night.
At the corner of the steep, narrow street, Cicely caught sight of Martin Hallowell talking to a man whom she recognized as an old seaman who had sailed for years upon the Hallowell ships. Something Martin had said must have angered the sailor, for he was talking loudly, regardless of who might hear.
"No," the old man was saying, "there's not every one in the world will do your bidding, though you may think so. You can defy the old one and talk over the young one to go your way, but there's one man will not sail on any ship of yours and that's Ben Barton. I'll starve ashore first."
Cicely's quick ear caught his words as she and her father passed by on the other side of the snow-muffled street. It did not seem that Reuben Hallowell had heard.
One day passed, two, three, four days, and Cicely's one thought was that the Huntress was to sail in seven. Workmen were swarming all over her like bees, hammering, calking, and painting, yet it was plain that they could not do in a week what needed a month to finish. Alan was at the wharf all day, holding frequent conferences with his cousin. Reuben Hallowell went to and fro among the townspeople, urging them to say that the ship in which they were part owners must abide at home. But either because they were less sure of peace than he, or because their eyes were blinded by past good fortune and hopes of future gain, they would not listen. Between father and son no words were passed, since each was waiting for the other's stubborn pride to give way.
On the fifth day Cicely had gone out to ride, on a clear, snowy afternoon, with the white world shining before her and with the highway iron-hard under the horses' feet. She missed Alan sorely, for this was their favorite road, up the valley to the west of the town, as far as the round bare hill with the single oak tree that they liked to call theirs. The servant with her had dropped behind, and she was just turning her horse into the bypath leading to the hill when she saw a sturdy figure coming down the slope. The brown face, tattooed hands, and the small bundle of possessions done up in a blue handkerchief could only be a sailor's, a sailor who proved to be Ben Barton.
"I'm going to the next seaport to find another berth, since I've refused to sail on the Huntress," he explained in answer to her questions. "Mr. Martin has had to get a new skipper and a new crew, for none of the old hands would sail when they heard it was against your father's wishes. There was a bark came in from Delaware to be laid up for repairs, with mostly Swedes aboard, and they have manned the Huntress from her. The ship is to sail on Friday at midnight, with the turning tide, but she goes without Ben Barton."
He dropped his voice and came nearer.
"I will tell you this—though I should not," he said. "There's some one to join at the last minute, who will get into a boat waiting at the wharf in the dark, some one you love, miss, who ought to be stopping ashore with the rest of us. You should find some way to keep him back."
"Oh, if I only could!" she cried.
"There's only you can do it," he answered. "Hallowell blood can only be ruled by Hallowell blood, as we say on Hallowell ships. Well, I'll be going on again. I had climbed the path, there, to take one more look at the harbor, where you can see it between the hills. Maybe your father will find a place for me when his vessels go to sea for trade again, and I'll never forget him nor you, Miss Cicely. Do you remember how you and your brother once hid under the wharf, and called out from that echoing place as though you were lost souls out of the sea? There was one honest old sailorman that nearly lost his wits for terror, since we seafaring folk have no love for ghosts. Mark my words, there will no good come to the Huntress from setting sail of a Friday. For that alone I would stay ashore though there's other things to hold me, too."
He strode away down the snowy road, leaving Cicely, smiling at first at the recollection of that game that had so frightened him when she and her brother had played at ghosts, then grave in a moment when she thought how soon that brother was to be gone. On Friday, the day after to-morrow, he would sail unless she could stop him. But how could she?
The next day she made the desperate effort of appealing to her father, but quite in vain. Reuben Hallowell would not believe either that the Huntress would sail or that his son would go with her.
"And if Alan wishes to cut himself off from his own people forever, let him," he said finally, unable to endure the thought that any one should dare to defy his will. Friday came, the shadows of Friday night stole through the big house, yet nothing had been done.
Cicely sat by the fire in her chintz-hung bedroom, leaning back against the flowered cushion of the big armchair, gazing into the flames. In the next room she could hear vague sounds of Alan's preparations, feet going to and fro, a door opening and closing, a pair of heavy boots dropped upon the floor. The night was dark outside, with a blustering wind and occasional flurries of snow that struck sharply against the window.
It was ten o'clock. The sounds had ceased as though Alan had finished making ready and was waiting, perhaps sitting silent in the dark, perhaps lying down for an hour or two of sleep before the fateful hour of the high tide. Cicely heard her father, below, barring the door, putting out the candles, making ready for a night that would surely bring him no sleep. Presently he passed her door, glanced inside, and came in to stand for a minute beside her fire. How worn he had grown to look just within the space of this last week! He said scarcely a word; it was as though his unhappiness merely craved company and shrank from the knowledge of what the night might bring.
At last he said, "You should be in bed. Good night, my dear."
As he went out he turned to look back at her with a glance of haggard, helpless misery. It was as though he said:
"My pride has bound and stifled me. I cannot speak a word to stop him, but won't you, can't you, persuade him, somehow, not to go?"
Very carefully and without a sound, Cicely rose and went to her closet, to take down her warm fur cloak. She had realized, in the moment of seeing her father's pleading look, that she had a plan, one that had been in her mind ever since the day that she had talked with Ben Barton. What she had really lacked was courage to put it into execution. Yet now, as she drew the cloak about her and pulled down her hood, her hands did not even tremble, nor did her determination falter. The house was absolutely still as she stole noiselessly down the stairs and slipped out of the door.
For a girl who had almost never been allowed upon the street alone, the wintry night should have been full of terrors, but to Cicely they meant nothing. As she ran down the steep High Street with the gale blustering behind her, she saw things that she had never believed existed—a burly waterman quarreling with his wife behind a dirty lighted window, the open door of a tavern showing a candle-lit room with a crowd of shouting sailors drinking within, a furtive black shadow that skulked into an alleyway and remained there, silent and hidden, as she passed.
She reached the wharves at last, where the wind was stronger and where the waves slapped and dashed against the barnacled piles, throwing their spray against the windows of the locked warehouses. Even now she did not hesitate. She ran, a gray, flitting form, across the open space at the head of the wharf and disappeared.
There was a wait of a few minutes, then came the dip of oars through the dark and the sound of men's voices talking above the high wind. Martin Hallowell was coming ashore in the boat that was to carry Alan away. Beyond them, the lights of the Huntress showed where she was getting up sail. Martin made the landing with some difficulty, climbed the ladder to the wharf, and stood bracing himself against the heavy wind.
"We are a little early," he said. "Hold fast there with the boat hook. He will be here in a"
His voice was drowned by a strange sound, an unearthly wailing that seemed to rise from the water beneath, but which filled the air until there was no saying from what direction it came. It lifted and dropped, hung sobbing and echoing above the water, then died away.
"Holy St. Anthony help us!" cried the nearest sailor. "It is the soul of some poor drowned creature caught among the weeds."
"Give way," roared the man at the rudder, and with one accord the oars dropped into the water.
"Stop, wait! It—it is nothing, you fools," cried Martin Hallowell, but his own voice quavered with terror, and carried little reassurance to the frightened men.
The boat hung doubtfully a ship's length from the pier, the oars dipping to hold it into the wind, the men hesitating, ashamed of their terror yet fearing to come closer. Again the cry broke forth, resounding again and again, mingling in terrible, ghostly fashion with the splashing and gurgling of the water. The boat shot away into the dark, just as Alan came running down the wharf, shouting to them to come back. The sailors, however, bent to their oars, unheeding; the lantern in the stern dipped and jerked as they rowed away, and the light finally went out of sight as the boat drew alongside the Huntress. It was just possible to make out the big ship as she weighed anchor and, rolling and plunging, moved slowly out into the tideway.
"She's gone—without me!" cried Alan. "Oh, they might have come back, the cowards!"
"Did you hear that—that terrible sound?" asked Martin Hallowell. In a second's pause between the breaking of two waves, it was possible to hear his teeth chatter.
"Terrible!" cried Alan in disgust. "That was only my sister Cicely, hiding under the wharf. It was a game we once played to frighten Ben Barton. Come out," he ordered sternly, kneeling down and thrusting an arm into the dark space to help her.
Out Cicely came, wet and shivering, with her hair streaked with mud and her hands scratched and cut by the sharp barnacles. Her face showed white in the dark as she looked up appealingly at her brother, but he turned from her without a sign. Before she could follow him, Martin Hallowell had seized her by the arm.
"You?" he cried. "You?"
He shook her until she was dizzy, until the dark, windy world spun before her eyes, he cried out at her with a terrible voice and with words that she only half understood. All the rage stored up within him during his bitter struggle to get his ship under way, all the baffled hopes of his small-spirited revenge, all the shame for his recent terror broke forth into blind fury against the girl who had stood in his way.
"I will teach you," he shouted, grasping her arm tighter until she winced with pain, "I will show you that you can't"
His words were cut short by a stinging blow across the mouth from which he staggered back, dropping Cicely's arm and staring in gaping astonishment at his assailant.
"That is my sister," said Alan, very stiff and quiet and suddenly very like his father. "Whatever she has done you are not to touch her. She has ruined my chance of sailing with the Huntress, but at least she has shown me what—what you are, Martin Hallowell."
With his arm about Cicely, Alan went down the pier, while Martin, confounded and silenced, stood staring after them. The two said nothing as they climbed the High Street, although much must have been passing in the boy's mind. As he pushed open their own door and came into the dusky hallway he spoke for the first time.
"Can you wait here by the fire a minute, Cicely? I am going up first to—to tell my father what a fool I have been."
The weeks of winter passed, news came that peace had been signed on Christmas Eve, one after another the ships of war came straggling home. Some had taken prizes, all had been harried by the winter storms—and none brought news of the Huntress. One Carolina vessel that put in for repairs told of picking up a crew adrift in boats and of setting them aboard a ship bound for Chesapeake Bay and the coast of Delaware.
"They were most of them Swedes," the sailors told Alan, "and they were not very willing to talk of the ship they had lost, but it might have been the Huntress."
Reuben Hallowell was straining all his resources to send his idle ships to sea and to reëstablish the trade of peace. Yet when he urged his fellow townsmen to strive to gain the commerce America had lost, lest it be gone forever, they still hung back.
"We must know first where we stand," they said. "There is hope still that we have not lost the Huntress and that she will come to port with fortune for us all."
A stormy February passed and there came at last a gusty day of March. It was a Sunday, with the air clean after a shower, and with all the townspeople moving down the High Street from their churches at the hour of noon. There had been a tempest of wind and rain, but it had cleared leaving the waters still gray but with the sky turning to blue. Cicely was among the first, walking with her father and brother, and had stopped, as they came to their own door, to glance down at the harbor laid out in a circle of moving blue water below them.
"Oh, look, look!" she cried suddenly.
A ship was sailing slowly up the bay, a stately ship that dipped a little and rose again as she came, but held her course steady for the wharves. Her sails shone white in the fitful sun, the lines of her hull showed dark against the gray water, the tracery of her rigging and even the colors of her flag were distinct against the sky, and yet—she did not seem like any ship they had ever seen before. Cicely having drawn that vessel, line for line, masts, hull, ropes, and spars, knew that this was the Huntress, yet what was so strange about her? Why was she so steady in those changing gusts of wind, what was there that made her sails so shining and transparent, like the texture of a cloud?
The girl was aware that, among the crowd that had gathered to watch the strange vision, Martin Hallowell was pushing to the front, gazing with all his eyes. Ben Barton, too, who had come back the week before, to ask for a place on Reuben Hallowell's ships, was pressing close to Alan's elbow.
"The wind's dead off shore and here she comes straight in," she heard the old sailor mutter. "Not even the Huntress could sail like that. And yet it is the Huntress right enough."
The vessel came nearer and nearer, then of a sudden stopped, quivered, as though struck by a violent adverse wind. Her main topsail blew out suddenly and went streaming forth in the gale, a jib split to ribbons before their eyes, and spar after spar was carried away. She careened, as though before a hurricane, her foremast came down with a soundless smother of sail and wreckage. Further and further she tilted, and then suddenly she had vanished and there was nothing left but the March sunshine and the tossing, empty bay.
The crowd stood breathless, waiting for some one to speak. It was only Ben Barton who was able to find his voice.
"I've heard of such things before," he said. "The wise skippers all say it is a mirage, but the wiser sailormen say it is a message from another world. She's gone, our Huntress is, and there's no wind under heaven will ever blow her home again."
Martin Hallowell had swung on his heel and was walking away down the street facing the fact, finally, that his venture was at an end. A tall man with dangling watch seals edged up to Cicely's father.
"I am satisfied at last, Reuben Hallowell, that our ship is lost," he said. "We did wrong to wait for war to make our fortunes, and it is high time that we went back to the lesser risks and the smaller gains of peace. Will you let me join in lading your next vessel? You are the only man among us who has known when a war ends and peace begins."
"I'm thinking there will be some tall ships sailing out of this port soon," said Ben Barton, speaking low to Cicily and Alan. "It will be on a better craft than the Huntress even that your brother will be officer before long. What seas we'll cruise, he and I, and what treasures we'll bring back to you, Miss Cicely. I'd go with the son of Reuben Hallowell to the ends of the earth—if only he never asks me to put to sea of a Friday!"