CHAPTER IX
SHADOWS IN THE MOONLIGHT
“Daddy’s a long time coming,” said Dick all of a sudden.
They were seated on the baulks of timber that cumbered the deck of thebrig on either side of the caboose. An ideal perch. The sun was settingover Australia way, in a sea that seemed like a sea of boiling gold.Some mystery of mirage caused the water to heave and tremble as iftroubled by fervent heat.
“Ay, is he,” said Mr Button “but it’s better late than never. Nowdon’t be thinkin’ of him, for that won’t bring him. Look at the sungoin’ into the wather, and don’t be spakin’ a word, now, but listen andyou’ll hear it hiss.”
The children gazed and listened, Paddy also. All three were mute as thegreat blazing shield touched the water that leapt to meet it.
You _could_ hear the water hiss—if you had imagination enough. Oncehaving touched the water, the sun went down behind it, as swiftly as aman in a hurry going down a ladder. As he vanished a ghostly and goldentwilight spread over the sea, a light exquisite but immensely forlorn.Then the sea became a violet shadow, the west darkened as if to aclosing door, and the stars rushed over the sky.
“Mr Button,” said Emmeline, nodding towards the sun as he vanished,“where’s over there?”
“The west,” replied he, staring at the sunset. “Chainy and Injee andall away beyant.”
“Where’s the sun gone to now, Paddy?” asked Dick.
“He’s gone chasin’ the moon, an’ she’s skedadlin’ wid her dress brailedup for all she’s worth; she’ll be along up in a minit. He’s alwaysafther her, but he’s never caught her yet.”
“What would he do to her if he caught her?” asked Emmeline.
“Faith, an’ maybe he’d fetch her a skelp—an’ well she’d desarve it.”
“Why’d she deserve it?” asked Dick, who was in one of his questioningmoods.
“Because she’s always delutherin’ people an’ leadin’ thim asthray.Girls or men, she moidhers thim all once she gets the comeither onthem; same as she did Buck M’Cann.”
“Who’s he?”
“Buck M’Cann? Faith, he was the village ijit where I used to live inthe ould days.”
“What’s that?”
“Hould your whisht, an’ don’t be axin’ questions. He was always wantin’the moon, though he was twinty an’ six feet four. He’d a gob on himthat hung open like a rat-trap with a broken spring, and he was as thinas a barber’s pole, you could a’ tied a reef knot in the middle of ’um;and whin the moon was full there was no houldin’ him.” Mr Button gazedat the reflection of the sunset on the water for a moment as ifrecalling some form from the past, and then proceeded. “He’d sit on thegrass starin’ at her, an’ thin he’d start to chase her over the hills,and they’d find him at last, maybe a day or two later, lost in themountains, grazin’ on berries, an’ as green as a cabbidge from thehunger an’ the cowld, till it got so bad at long last they had tohobble him.”
“I’ve seen a donkey hobbled,” cried Dick.
“Thin you’ve seen the twin brother of Buck M’Cann. Well, one night meelder brother Tim was sittin’ over the fire, smokin’ his dudeen an’thinkin’ of his sins, when in comes Buck with the hobbles on him.
“‘Tim,’ says he, ‘I’ve got her at last!’
“‘Got who?’ says Tim.
“‘The moon,’ says he.
“‘Got her where?’ says Tim.
“‘In a bucket down by the pond,’ says t’other, ‘safe an’ sound an’ nota scratch on her; you come and look,’ says he. So Tim follows him, hehobblin’, and they goes to the pond side, and there, sure enough, stooda tin bucket full of wather, an’ on the wather the refliction of themoon.
“‘I dridged her out of the pond,’ whispers Buck. ‘Aisy now,’ says he,‘an’ I’ll dribble the water out gently,’ says he, ‘an’ we’ll catch heralive at the bottom of it like a trout.’ So he drains the wather outgently of the bucket till it was near all gone, an’ then he looks intothe bucket expectin’ to find the moon flounderin’ in the bottom of itlike a flat fish.
“‘She’s gone, bad ’cess to her!’ says he.
“‘Try again,’ says me brother, and Buck fills the bucket again, andthere was the moon sure enough when the water came to stand still.
“‘Go on,’ says me brother. ‘Drain out the wather, but go gentle, orshe’ll give yiz the slip again.’
“‘Wan minit,’ says Buck, ‘I’ve got an idea,’ says he; ‘she won’t giveme the slip this time,’ says he. ‘You wait for me,’ says he; and off hehobbles to his old mother’s cabin a stone’s-throw away, and back hecomes with a sieve.
“‘You hold the sieve,’ says Buck, ‘and I’ll drain the water into it; ifshe ’scapes from the bucket we’ll have her in the sieve.’ And he poursthe wather out of the bucket as gentle as if it was crame out of a jug.When all the wather was out he turns the bucket bottom up, and shook it.
“‘Ran dan the thing!’ he cries, ‘she’s gone again;’ an’ wid that heflings the bucket into the pond, and the sieve afther the bucket, whenup comes his old mother hobbling on her stick.
“‘Where’s me bucket?’ says she.
“‘In the pond,’ say Buck.
“‘And me sieve?’ says she.
“‘Gone afther the bucket.’
“‘I’ll give yiz a bucketin’!’ says she; and she up with the stick andlanded him a skelp, an’ driv him roarin’ and hobblin’ before her, andlocked him up in the cabin, an’ kep’ him on bread an’ wather for a waketo get the moon out of his head; but she might have saved her thruble,for that day month in it was agin—— There she comes!”
The moon, argent and splendid, was breaking from the water. She wasfull, and her light was powerful almost as the light of day. Theshadows of the children and the queer shadow of Mr Button were cast onthe wall of the caboose hard and black as silhouettes.
“Look at our shadows!” cried Dick, taking off his broad-brimmed strawhat and waving it.
Emmeline held up her doll to see _its_ shadow, and Mr Button held up hispipe.
“Come now,” said he, putting the pipe back in his mouth, and making torise, “and shadda off to bed; it’s time you were aslape, the both ofyou.”
Dick began to yowl.
“_I_ don’t want to go to bed; I aint tired, Paddy—les’s stay a littlelonger.”
“Not a minit,” said the other, with all the decision of a nurse; “not aminit afther me pipe’s out!”
“Fill it again,” said Dick.
Mr Button made no reply. The pipe gurgled as he puffed at it—a kind ofdeath-rattle speaking of almost immediate extinction.
“Mr Button!” said Emmeline. She was holding her nose in the air andsniffing; seated to windward of the smoker, and out of thepigtail-poisoned air, her delicate sense of smell perceived somethinglost to the others.
“What is it, acushla?”
“I smell something.”
“What d’ye say you smell?”
“Something nice.”
“What’s it like?” asked Dick, sniffing hard. “_I_ don’t smell anything.”
Emmeline sniffed again to make sure.
“Flowers,” said she.
The breeze, which had shifted several points since midday, was bearingwith it a faint, faint odour: a perfume of vanilla and spice so faintas to be imperceptible to all but the most acute olfactory sense.
“Flowers!” said the old sailor, tapping the ashes out of his pipeagainst the heel of his boot. “And where’d you get flowers in middle ofthe say? It’s dhramin’ you are. Come now—to bed wid yiz!”
“Fill it again,” wailed Dick, referring to the pipe.
“It’s a spankin’ I’ll give you,” replied his guardian, lifting him downfrom the timber baulks, and then assisting Emmeline, “in two ticks ifyou don’t behave. Come along, Em’line.”
He started aft, a small hand in each of his, Dick bellowing.
As they passed the ship’s bell, Dick stre
tched towards the belaying pinthat was still lying on the deck, seized it, and hit the bell a mightybang. It was the last pleasure to be snatched before sleep, and hesnatched it.
Paddy had made up beds for himself and his charges in the deck-house;he had cleared the stuff off the table, broken open the windows to getthe musty smell away, and placed the mattresses from the captain andmate’s cabins on the floor.
When the children were in bed and asleep, he went to the starboardrail, and, leaning on it, looked over the moonlit sea. He was thinkingof ships as his wandering eye roved over the sea spaces, littledreaming of the message that the perfumed breeze was bearing him. Themessage that had been received and dimly understood by Emmeline. Thenhe leaned with his back to the rail and his hands in his pockets. Hewas not thinking now, he was ruminating.
The basis of the Irish character as exemplified by Paddy Button is aprofound laziness mixed with a profound melancholy. Yet Paddy, in hisleft-handed way, was as hard a worker as any man on board ship; and asfor melancholy, he was the life and soul of the fo’cs’le. Yet therethey were, the laziness and the melancholy, only waiting to be tapped.
As he stood with his hands thrust deep in his pockets, longshorefashion, counting the dowels in the planking of the deck by themoonlight, he was reviewing the “old days.” The tale of Buck M’Cann hadrecalled them, and across all the salt seas he could see the moonlighton the Connemara mountains, and hear the sea-gulls crying on thethunderous beach where each wave has behind it three thousand miles ofsea.
Suddenly Mr Button came back from the mountains of Connemara to findhimself on the deck of the _Shenandoah_; and he instantly becamepossessed by fears. Beyond the white deserted deck, barred by theshadows of the standing rigging, he could see the door of the caboose.Suppose he should suddenly see a head pop out—or, worse, a shadowy formgo in?
He turned to the deck-house, where the children were sound asleep, andwhere, in a few minutes, he, too, was sound asleep beside them, whilstall night long the brig rocked to the gentle swell of the Pacific, andthe breeze blew, bringing with it the perfume of flowers.