True Tilda Part 40

"I s.h.i.+pped for a stoker," said Bill.

"But what'll it cost?"

"I don't want ter speak boas'ful, after the tone you took with me this mornin'"--Bill spoke with scarcely dissembled pride--"but that's where the cleverness comes in. You see, there ain't no skipper to 'er-- leastways not till ter-morrow. The old man's taken train an' off to Bristol, to attend a revival meetin', or something o' the sort--bein'

turned pious since 'is wife died, w'ich is about eighteen months ago.

I got that from the mate, when 'e s.h.i.+pped me. The mate's in charge; with the engineer an' two 'ands. The engineer--'e's a Scotchman--'as as much whisky inside 'im already as a man can 'old an' keep 'is legs; an'

the 'ole gang'll be goin' ash.o.r.e again to-night--all but the mate.

The mate 'as to keep moderate sober an' lock 'er out on first 'igh water ter-morrow for Kingroad, where she'll pick up the old man; and as natcher'lly 'e'll want _somebody_ sober down in the engine-room, 'e's got to rely on me. So now you see."

"I think I see," said Tilda slowly. "We're to s.h.i.+p as stowaways."

"You may call it so, though the word don't 'ardly seem to fit. I've 'eard tell of stowaways, but never as I remember of a pair as 'ad the use of the captain's cabin, and 'im a widower with an extry bunk still fitted for the deceased. O' course we'll 'ave to smuggle yer away somewheres before the old man comes aboard. But the mate'll do that easy. 'E promised me."

"Bill, you _are_ an angel!"

It was, after all, absurdly easy, as Bill had promised; and the easier by help of the river-fog, which by nine o'clock--the hour agreed upon-- had gathered to a thick grey consistency. If the dock were policed at this hour, no police, save by the veriest accident, could have detected the children crouching with 'Dolph behind a breastwork of paraffin-casks, and waiting for Bill's signal--the first two or three bars of _The Blue Bells of Scotland_ whistled thrice over.

The signal came. The gang-plank was out, ready for the crew's return; and at the head of it Bill met the fugitives, with a caution to tread softly when they reached the deck. The mate was nowhere to be seen.

Bill whispered that he was in his own cabin "holding off the drink,"

whatever that might mean.

He conducted them to the after-companion, where, repeating his caution, he stepped in front of the children and led the way down a narrow twisting staircase. At the foot of it he pushed open a door, and they gazed into a neat apartment, panelled with mirrors and bird's-eye maple.

A swing-lamp shone down upon a white-covered table; and upon the table were bread and cheese and biscuits, with a jug of water and gla.s.ses.

Alongside the table ran two bunks, half-curtained, clean, cosy and inviting.

"Say what yer like," said Tilda half an hour later as, having selected their bunks, the children composed themselves to sleep, "but Bill 'as the 'ead of the two."

"Which two?" asked the boy, not quite ingenuously.

"As if I didn' know yer was comparin' 'im with Sam Bossom all day! W'y, I seen it in yer face!" Getting no answer, she went on after a pause, "Sam 'd never a' thought o' this, not if 'e'd lived to be a 'undred."

"All the same, I like Sam better," said the boy sleepily.

They slept soundly after their wanderings. The crew returned shortly before half-past eleven, and tumbled aboard "happy and glorious"--so Bill afterwards described their condition, in the language of the National Anthem. But the racket was mainly for'ard, and did not awake the children. After this, silence descended on the _Evan Evans_, and lasted for five long hours. Still they slept; and the voice of the mate, when a little before dawn he started cursing and calling to the men to tumble up, was a voice heard in dreams and without alarm.

It was, as a matter of fact, scarcely more operative in the forecastle than in the cabin. But Bill in the intervals of slumber had visited the furnaces, and kept up a good head of steam; and in the chill of dawn he and the mate cast off warps and (with the pilot) worked the steamer out through the s.h.i.+p lock, practically unaided. The mate, when not in liquor, was a first-cla.s.s seaman; and Bill, left alone between the furnaces and the engines, perspired in all the glory of his true vocation.

The noise of hooting, loud and protracted, awoke Tilda at last, and she raised herself in her bunk to stare at the apparition of Bill in the cabin doorway--a terrifying apparition, too, black with coal-dust and s.h.i.+ning with sweat.

"Wot's 'appened?"

For one moment her sleepy brain confused him with the diabolical noise overhead.

"Nothin'," he answered, "'cept that you must tumble out quick, you two.

We're off Avonmouth, an' the whistle's goin' for the old man."

They tumbled out and redded up the place in a hurry, folding away the rugs and linen--which Bill, with his grimed fingers, did not dare to touch--and stowing them as he directed. A damp fog permeated the cabin.

Even the engine-room (Bill reported) was full of it, and how the mate had brought her along through it and picked up Avonmouth was a marvel.

"Single-'anded too, as you may say. 'E's a world's wonder, that man."

The children too thought it marvellous when they reached the deck and gazed about them. They could spy no sh.o.r.e, not so much as a blur to indicate it, but were wrapped wholly in a grey fog; and down over the steamer's tall sides (for she was returning light after delivering a cargo of Welsh coal) they stared upon nothing but muddy water crawling beneath the fog.

They heard the mate's voice calling from the bridge, and the fog seemed to remove both bridge and voice to an immeasurable height above them.

It was just possible to descry the length of the s.h.i.+p, and they saw two figures bestir themselves forward. A voice answered, "Aye, aye, sir!"

but thickly and as if m.u.f.fled by cotton wool. One of the two men came running, halted amids.h.i.+ps, lifted out a panel of the bulwarks, set in a slide between two white-painted stanchions, and let down an accommodation ladder.

"_Evan Evans_, ahoy!" came a voice from the fog.

"Ahoy, sir!" sang out the mate's voice high overhead, and between two blasts of the whistle, and just at this moment a speck--a small blur-- hove out of the grey on the port side. It was the skipper arriving in a sh.o.r.e boat.

The children dodged behind a deck-house as he came up the ladder--a thin little man habited much like a Nonconformist minister, and wearing--of all amazing head-gear--a top-hat, the brim of which shed moisture in a steady trickle. A grey plaid shawl swathed his shoulders, and the fringe of this dripped too, as he gained the deck and stepped briskly aft, without so much as a word to the men standing at the head of the ladder, to whom after a minute the mate called down.

"Sam Lloyd!"

"Aye, aye, sir!"

"What did 'e say?"

"Nothin', sir."

Apparently the children were not alone in finding this singular, for after another minute the mate descended from the bridge, walked aft, and followed his chief down the companion. He stayed below for close on a quarter of an hour, the steamer all this while moving dead slow, with just a lazy turn now and then of her propeller. When he returned it was with a bottle in his hand and a second bottle under his arm.

"Cracked as a drum," he announced to the seaman Lloyd on his way back to the bridge. "Says 'e's 'ad a revelation."

"A wot?"

"A revelation. Says 'e 'eard a voice from 'eaven las' night, tellin'

'im as Faith was dead in these times; that if a man only 'ad faith 'e could let everything else rip . . . and," concluded the mate heavily, resting his unoccupied hand on the ladder, "'e's down below tryin' it."

The seaman did not answer. The mate ascended again, and vanished in the fog. After a pause a bell tinkled deep down in the bowels of the s.h.i.+p.

Her propeller began to churn the water, very slowly at first, then with gathering speed, and the _Evan Evans_ forged ahead, shouldering her way deeper and deeper into the fog.

It had certainly grown denser. There was not the slightest reason for the children to hide. No one came near them; they could see nothing but the wet and dirty deck, the cook's galley close by (in which, as it happened, the cook lay in drunken slumber) and a boat swinging on davits close above their heads, between them and the limitless grey. Bill had disappeared some time before the skipper came aboard and was busy, no doubt, in the engine-room. In the shrouded bows one of the crew was working a fog-horn at irregular intervals, and for a while every blast was answered by a hoot from the steam-whistle above the bridge.

This lasted three hours or more. Then, though the fog-horn continued spasmodically, the whistle fell unaccountably silent. The children scarcely noted this; they were occupied with staring into the fog.

Of a sudden the bridge awoke to life again, and now with the bell.

_Ting . . . ting, ting, ting--ting--ting, ting, ting_ then _ting, ting_ again.

The fog-horn stopped as though to listen. By and by, as from minute to minute the bridge continued this eccentric performance, even the children became aware that something was amiss.

Abruptly the ringing ceased, ceased just as a tall man--it was the Scotch engineer--emerged from somewhere below and stood steadying himself by the rail of the ladder.

"What the deevil?" he demanded angrily, staring aloft. "What the deev--"

Here he collapsed on the lowest step. (A Glasgow man must be drunk indeed before he loses his legs.)