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The Water Devil
by
“I haven’t said anything about Miss Minturn, but she and her father, who was an elderly English gentleman and an invalid, who had never left his berth since we took him up at Singapore, were our only passengers, except, of course, myself. She was a beautiful girl, with soft blue eyes and golden hair, and a little pale from constantly staying below to nurse her father.
“Of course I had had little or nothing to say to her, for her father was a good deal of a swell and I was only a marine; but now she saw me standing there by myself, and she came right up to me. ‘Can you tell me, sir,’ she said, ‘if anything else has happened? They are making a great din in the engine-room. I have been looking out of our port, and the vessel seems to me to be stationary.’ She stopped at that, and waited to hear what I had to say, but I assure you I would have liked to have had her go on talking for half an hour. Her voice was rich and sweet, like that of so many Englishwomen, although, I am happy to say, a great many of my countrywomen have just as good voices; and when I meet any of them for the first time, I generally give them the credit of talking in soft and musical notes, even though I have not had the pleasure of hearing them speak.”
“Look here,” said the blacksmith, “can’t you skip the girl and get back to the Devil?”
“No,” said the marine, “I couldn’t do that. The two are mixed together, so to speak, so that I have to tell you of both of them.”
“You don’t mean to say,” exclaimed Mrs. Fryker, speaking for the first time, and by no means in soft and musical tones, “that he swallowed her?”
“I’ll go on with the story,” said the marine; “that’s the best way, and everything will come up in its place. Now, of course, I wasn’t going to tell this charming young woman, with a sick father, anything about the Water-devil, though what reason to give her for our standing still here I couldn’t imagine; but of course I had to speak, and I said, ‘Don’t be alarmed, miss, we have met with an unavoidable detention; that sort of thing often happens in navigation. I can’t explain it to you, but you see the ship is perfectly safe and sound, and she is merely under sail instead of having her engines going.’
“‘I understood about that,’ said she, ‘and father and I were both perfectly satisfied; for he said that if we had a good breeze we would not be long in reaching Calcutta; but we seem to have a breeze, and yet we don’t go.’ ‘You’ll notice,’ said I, ‘that the sails are not all set, and for some reason the wind does not serve. When the engines are mended, we shall probably go spinning along.’ She looked as if she was trying to appear satisfied. ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said. ‘I hope we may shortly proceed on our way, but in the meantime I shall not say anything to my father about this detention. I think he has not noticed it.’ ‘That would be very wise,’ I replied, and as she turned toward the companionway I was wild to say to her that it would be a lot better for her to stay on deck, and get some good fresh air, instead of cooping herself up in that close cabin; but I didn’t know her well enough for that.”
“Now that you are through with the girl,” said the blacksmith, “what did the Devil do?”
“I haven’t got to him yet,” said the marine, “but after Miss Minturn went below I began to think of him, and the more I thought of him, the less I liked him. I think the chief officer must have told the men below about the Water-devil, for pretty soon the whole kit and boodle of them left their work and came on deck, skipper and all. They told me they had given up the engine as a bad job, and I thought to myself that most likely they were all too nervous to rightly know what they were about. The captain threw out the log again, but it floated alongside like a cork on a fishing-line, and at this he turned pale and walked away from the ship’s side, forgetting to pull it in again.