The Red Rover & Other Sea Adventures – 3 Novels in One Volume. Джеймс Фенимор Купер
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of garish foam which served only to make the chilling waste more dreary and imposing.
“We see nothing,” said Gertrude, when Wilder again stopped in his walk, and once more gazed, as before, on the seeming void.
“Look!” he answered, directing their eyes with his finger: “Is there nothing there?”
“Nothing.”
“You look into the sea. Here, just where the heavens and the waters meet; along that streak of misty light, into which the waves are tossing themselves, like little hillocks on the land. There; now ‘tis smooth again, and my eyes did not deceive me. By heavens, it is a ship!”
“Sail, ho!” shouted a voice, from out atop, which sounded in the ears of our adventurer like the croaking of some sinister spirit, sweeping across the deep.
“Whereaway?” was the stern demand.
“Here on our lee-quarter, sir,” returned the seaman at the top of his voice. “I make her out a ship close-hauled; but, for an hour past, she has looked more like mist than a vessel.”
“Ay, he is right,” muttered Wilder; “and yet ‘tis a strange thing that a ship should be just there.”
“And why stranger than that we are here?”
“Why!” said the young man, regarding Mrs Wyllys, who had put this question, with a perfectly unconscious eye. “I say, ‘tis strange she should be there. I would she were steering northward.”
“But you give no reason. Are we always to have warnings from you,” she continued, with a smile, “without reasons? Do you deem us so utterly unworthy of a reason? or do you think us incapable of thought on a subject connected with the sea? You have failed to make the essay, and are too quick to decide. Try us this once. We may possibly deceive your expectations.”
Wilder laughed faintly, and bowed, as if he recollected himself. Still he entered into no explanation; but again turned his gaze on the quarter of the ocean where the strange sail was said to be. The females followed his example, but ever with the same want of success. As Gertrude expressed her disappointment aloud, the soft tones of the complainant found their way to the ears of our adventurer.
“You see the streak of dim light,” he said, again pointing across the waste. “The clouds have lifted a little there, but the spray of the sea is floating between us and the opening. Her spars look like the delicate work of a spider, against the sky, and yet you see there are all the proportions, with the three masts, of a noble ship.”
Aided by these minute directions, Gertrude at length caught a glimpse of the faint object, and soon succeeded in giving the true direction to the look of her governess also. Nothing was visible but the dim outline, not unaptly described by Wilder himself assembling a spider’s web.
“It must be a ship!” said Mrs Wyllys; “but at a vast distance.”
“Hum! Would it were farther. I could wish that vessel any where but there.”
“And why not there? Have you reason to dread an enemy has been waiting for us in this particular spot?”
“No: Still I like not her position. Would to God the were going north!”
“It is some vessel from the port of New York steering to his Majesty’s islands in the Caribbean sea.”
“Not so,” said Wilder, shaking his head; “no vessel, from under the heights of Never-sink, could gain that offing with a wind like this!”
“It is then some ship going into the same place, or perhaps bound for one of the bays of the Middle Colonies!”
“Her road would be too plain to be mistaken. See; the stranger is close upon a wind.”
“It may be a trader, or a cruiser coming from one of the places I have named.”
“Neither. The wind has had too much northing, the last two days, for that.”
“It is a vessel that we have overtaken, and which has come out of the waters of Long Island Sound.”
“That, indeed, may we yet hope,” muttered Wilder in a smothered voice.
The governess, who had put the foregoing questions in order to extract from the Commander of the “Caroline” the information he so pertinaciously withheld, had now exhausted all her own knowledge on the subject, and was compelled to await his further pleasure in the matter, or resort to the less equivocal means of direct interrogation. But the busy state of Wilder’s thoughts left her no immediate opportunity to pursue the subject. He soon summoned the officer of the watch to his councils, and they consulted together, apart, for many minutes. The hardy, but far from quick witted, seaman who tilled the second station in the ship saw nothing so remarkable in the appearance of a strange sail, in the precise spot where the dim and nearly aerial image of the unknown vessel was still visible; nor did he hesitate to pronounce her some honest trader bent, like themselves, on her purpose of lawful commerce. It would seem that his Commander thought otherwise, as will appear by the short dialogue that passed between them.
“Is it not extraordinary that she should be just there?” demanded Wilder, after they had, each in turn, made a closer examination of the faint object, by the aid of an excellent night-glass.
“She would be better off, here,” returned the literal seaman, who only had an eye for the nautical situation of the stranger; “and we should be none the worse for being a dozen leagues more to the eastward, ourselves. If the wind holds here at east-by-south-half-south we shall have need of all that offing. I got jammed once between Hatteras and the Gulf”—
“But, do you not perceive that she is where no vessel could or ought to be, unless she has run exactly the same course with ourselves?” interrupted Wilder. “Nothing, from any harbour south of New York, could have such northing, as the wind has been; while nothing, from the Colony of York would stand on this tack, if bound east; or would be here, if going southward.”
The plain-going ideas of the honest mate were open to a reasoning which the reader may find a little obscure: for his mind contained a sort of chart of the ocean, to which he could at any time refer, with a proper discrimination between the various winds, and all the different points of the compass. When properly directed, he was not slow to see, as a mariner, the probable justice of his young Commander’s inferences; and then wonder, in its turn began to take possession of his more obtuse faculties.
“It is downright unnatural, truly, that the fellow should be there!” he replied, shaking his head, but meaning no more than that it was entirely out of the order of nautical propriety; “I see the philosophy of what you say, Captain Wilder; and little do I know how to explain it. It is a ship, to a mortal certainty!”
“Of that there is no doubt. But a ship most strangely placed!”
“I doubled the Good-Hope in the year ‘46,” continued the other, “and saw a vessel lying, as it might be, here, on our weather-bow—which is just opposite to this fellow, since he is on our lee-quarter—but there I saw a ship standing for an hour across our fore-foot, and yet, though we set the azimuth, not a degree did he budge, starboard or larboard, during all that time, which, as it was heavy weather, was, to say the least, something out of the common order.”
“It was remarkable!” returned Wilder, with an air so vacant, as to prove that he rather communed with himself than attended to his companion.
“There are mariners who say that the flying Dutchman cruises off that Cape, and that he often gets on the weather side of a stranger, and bears down upon him, like a ship about to lay him aboard. Many is the King’s cruiser, as they say, that has turned her hands up from a sweet sleep, when the look-outs have seen a double decker coming down in the night, with ports up, and batteries lighted but then this can’t be any such craft as the Dutchman, since she is, at the most, no more than a large sloop of war, if a cruiser at all.”
“No, no,” said Wilder, “this can never be the Dutchman.”
“Yon