There were six or seven men, as well as I could make out, clustered in the fore-rigging. I believed I could see others in the mizzen-shrouds. This being my notion, my consuming anxiety was to drop the boat down on the quarter as quickly as possible, for it was not only that the Twins were within a cable's range astern, with the fury of the foam there making a kind of shining upon the water that might have passed for moonlight: such was the volume and height of the sea roaring betwixt the labouring ship and our boat, that at every toss of the little fabric, at every ponderous lean down of the great groaning black hull towering over us, we stood to be staved.
The fellows in the fore-ringing seemed to be stupefied. We all of us yelled, 'Jump, jump! Watch as she rises, and jump for God's sake!' meanwhile keeping a turn of the cable so as to hold the boat abreast of them. It seemed an eternity before they understood, and yet a minute had not passed since we dropped down, when a cry broke from them, and first one jumped, and then another, and then the rest of them sprang, and there they were lying in a huddle in the bottom of the boat, one or two of them groaning dreadfully, as though from broken limbs, or worse injuries still, all of them motionless as they lay when they jumped, like folk nearly dead of terror and cold and pain.
'Veer out now, my lads! veer out!' I cried; 'handsomely, that we may get smartly under the mizzen-shrouds.'
'There's nobody there, sir,' roared one of my men.
No! I looked and found it had been an illusion of my sight, due to the flame of the flare that was burning fiercely on the main-deck.
'Are you all here?' I cried, addressing the dusky huddle of men at the bottom of the boat.
Something was said, but the gale deafened me, and I could catch no meaning, no syllables indeed, in the answer.
'They'll all be here, sir,' shouted one of my crew; 'the port-davits are empty, and some'll have left in the boat.'
A great sea swung us up at that instant flush with the level of the bulwark-rails, with a heel of the barque that disclosed her decks bare to the bright fires of the signal.
'They must be all here!' I cried; 'but look well. Is there one among you who can catch any signs of a living man on board?'
They waited for the next upheaval of sea; then rose a shout: 'They're all here, sir, you'll find.'
'Heave ahead then, my lads!' by which I meant that they should haul upon the cable to drag the boat clear of the dreadful crushing, shearing chop of the overhanging bows of the barque.
At that instant a head showed over the rail a little abaft the fore-shrouds, and the clear, piercing voice of a boy cried, with as good an English accent as I myself have, 'My father is ill and helpless in the cabin. Do not leave us!'
'No, no, we'll not leave you,' I instantly shouted in return, sending my voice fair to the lad from the height of a sea that pretty well brought his and my head on a level. 'How many are there of you?'
'Two,' was the answer.
I had to wait for the boat to slide up to the summit of the next surge ere I could call out again. The black yawns betwixt us and the barque might have passed for valleys looked at from a hillside, so horribly hollow and deep were they; they were pale and yet dusky too, with sheets of foam; a soul-confounding noise of thunderous washing and seething rose up from them. When we were in one of those hollows the great mass of the dark fabric of the barque seemed to tower fifty feet above us, and we lay becalmed, hanging, while you might have counted five, in absolute stagnation, with the yell of the wind sweeping over our heads as though we were in the heart of a pit.
'Cannot your father help himselfat all?' I bawled to the boy.
'He cannot stir; he must be lifted!' he answered in a shriek, for his high, clear, piercing cry thus sounded.
'By Heaven, then, lads,' I bawled to my men, 'there's no time to be lost! We must bundle the poor fellow over somehow, and help the lad. Nothing will have been done if we leave them behind us. Watch your chance and follow me, three of you!'
At the instant of saying this I made a spring from off the height of the gratings on which I stood, and got into the fore-chains, the boat then being on the level of that platform; and as actively as a cat, for few young fellows had nimbler limbs, I scrambled over the bulwark on to the deck, just in time to escape a huge fold of rushing water that foamed sheer through the chains with a spite and weight that must instantly have settled my business for me.
I was in the act of running along the deck to where the lad stood—that is to say, a little forward of the gangway, not doubting that the others of my crew whom I had called upon were following with as much alertness as I had exhibited, when I felt a shock as of a thump pass through the barque.
'She has struck!' thought I.
But hardly was I sensible of this tremor through the vessel, when there arose a wild and dreadful cry from alongside—heavenly God! how am I to describe that shocking noise of human distress? I fled to the rail and looked over; it was all boiling water under me, with just a sight of the black line of the gunwale or of the keel of the lifeboat; but there was such a raging of foam, such a thickness of seething yeast smoking into the hurricane as though some volcanic eruption had happened right under the barque, filling the air with steam, that there was nothing whatever to be seen saving just that dark glance of keel or gunwale, as I have said, which, however, vanished as I looked in the depth of the hissing spumy smother. I knew by this that the lifeboat must have been staved and filled by a sudden fling of her against the massive sides of the barque; for she was a self-righting craft, and, though she might have thrown every soul in her out as she rolled over, yet she would have rose buoyant again, emptying herself as she leapt to the surge, and there she would have been alongside, without a living creature in her if you will, but a good boat, and riding stoutly to her cable. But she had been stove, and now she was gone!
The blazing tar-barrel on the main-deck enabled me to see my way to rush aft. I cried to the lad as I sped: 'The boat is staved; all hands of her are overboard and drowning! Heave ropes' ends over the side! fling life-buoys!' And thus shouting, scarcely knowing, indeed, what I called out, so confounded was I, so shocked, so horrified, so heartbroken, I may say, by the suddenness and the fearfulness of this disaster, I reached the quarter of the barque and overhung it; but I could see nothing. The cloudy boiling rose and fell, and with every mighty drop of the great square counter of the barque, the sea swept in a roar from either hand of her with a cataractal fury that would rush whatever was afloat in it dozens of fathoms distant at everyscend. Here and therenowI believe I could distinguish some small black object, but the nearer pallid waters dimmed into a blackness at a little distance, and, if those dark points which I observed were the heads of swimmers, then such was the headlong race of the surge they were swept into the throbbing dusk ere I could make sure of them.
I stood as one paralyzed from head to foot. My inability to be of the least service to my poor comrades and the unhappy Danes caused me to feel as though the very heart in me had ceased to beat. The young fellow came to my side.
'What is to be done?' he cried.
'Nothing!' I answered in a passion of grief. 'What can be done? God grant that many of them will reach the shore! The hurl of the sea is landwards, and their life-belts will float them. But your people are doomed.'
'And so are we!' he exclaimed shrilly, yet without perceptible terror, with nothing worse than wild excitement in his accents. 'There are rocks directly under our stern. Are you a sailor?'
'No!'
'O, du gode Gud! what is to be done?' cried the lad.
I cast my eyes despairingly around. The tar-barrel was still burning bravely upon the deck, defying the ceaseless sweeping of spray from over the bows; the windy unearthly light tinctured the ship with its sickly sallow hue to the height of her lower yards, and the whole ghastly body of her was to be seen as she rolled and plunged under a sky that was the blacker for the light of the distress-flare, and upon a sea whose vast spreads of creaming brows would again and again come charging along to the very height of the bulwark rail.
In the midst of this pause on my part, and while every instinct of self-preservation in me was blindly flinging itself, so to speak, against the black and horrible situation that imprisoned me, and while I was hopelessly endeavouring to consider what was to be done to save the young fellow alongside of me from destruction—for, as to his father, it was impossible to extend my sympathies at such a moment to one whom I had not seen, who did not appeal to me, as it were, in form and voice for succour—I say, in the midst of this pause of hopeless deliberation, the roar of the hurricane ceased on a sudden. Nothing more, I was sure, was signified by this than a lull, to be followed by some fierce chop round, or by the continuance of the westerly tempest with a bitterer spite in the renewed rush of it. The lull may have lasted ten or fifteen seconds. In that time I do not know that there was a breath of air to be felt outside the violent eddyings and draughts occasioned by the sickening motions of the barque. I looked up at the sky, and spied the leanest phantom of a star that glimmered for the space of a single swing of a pendulum, and then vanished behind a rushing roll of vapour of a midnight hue, winging with incredible velocityfromthe land.
So insupportable was the movement of the deck that I was forced to support myself by a belaying-pin, or I must have been thrown. My companion clung to a similar pin close beside me. The thunder of running and colliding waters rose into that magical hush of tempest; I could hear the booming of the surf as far as Hurricane Point and the caldron-like noises of the waters round about the rocks astern of us.
'Has the storm ceased?' cried my companion. 'Oh, beloved father, we may be spared yet!' he added, extending his disengaged hand towards the deck-house, as he apostrophized the helpless man who lay there.
Amazed as I was by this instant cessation of the gale, I could yet find mind enough to be struck by my companion's manner, by his words, and now, I may say, by his voice also. I was about to address him; but, as my lips parted, there was a vivid flash of lightning that threw out the whole scene of bay, cliff, foreshore, and town, with the line of the horizon seawards, in a dazzle of violet; a crash of thunder followed; but, before its ear-splitting reverberation had ceased, the echoes of it were drowned in the bellowing of the gale coming directly off the land.
What is there in words to express the fury of this outfly? It met the heave of the landward-running seas, and swept them into smoke, and the air grew as white and thick with spume as though a heavy snowstorm were blowing horizontally along. It took the barque and swung her; her labouring was so prodigious as she was thrust by this fresh hurricane broadside round to the surge, that I imagined every second she would founder under my feet. I felt a shock: my companion cried, 'One of the cables has parted!' A moment later I felt the same indescribable tremble running through the planks on which we stood.
'Is that the other cable gone, do you think?' I shouted.
'There is a lead-line over the side,' he cried; 'it will tell us if we are adrift.'
I followed him to near the mizzen rigging; neither of us durst let go with one hand until we had a grip of something else with the other; it wasnownot only the weight of the wind that would have laid us prone and pinned us to the deck—a pyramidal sea had sprung up as though by enchantment, and each apex as it soared about the bows and sides was blown inboards in very avalanches of water, which with each violent roll of the vessel poured in a solid body to the rail, one side or the other, again and again, to the height of our waist.
My companion extended his hand over the bulwarks, and cried out: 'Here is the lead-line. It stretches towards the bows. Oh, sir, we are adrift! we are blowing out to sea!'
I put my hand over and grasped the line, and instantly knew by the angle of it that the lad was right. By no other means would he have been able to get at the truth. The weight of lead, by resting on the bottom, immediately told if the barque was dragging. All around was white water; the blackness of the night drooped to the very spit of the brine; not a light was to be perceived, not the vaguest outline of the cliff; and the whole scene of darkness was the more bewildering for the throb of the near yeast upon the eyesight.
'Is your binnacle-light burning?' I cried.
The lad answered, 'Yes.'
'Then,' I shouted, 'we must find out the quarter the gale has shifted into and get her stern on to it, and clear Hurricane Point, if Almighty God will permit. There may be safety in the open; there is none here.'
With the utmost labour and distress we made our way aft. The flare had been extinguished by the heavy falls of water, and it was worse than walking blindfolded. The binnacle-light was burning—this was, indeed, to be expected. The barque was plunging directly head to wind, and a glance at the card enabled me to know that the gale was blowing almost due east, having shifted, as these cyclonic ragings often do, right into the quarter opposite whence it had come.
'We must endeavour to get her before it,' I cried; 'but I am no sailor. There may come another shift, and we ought to clear the land while the hurricane holds as it does. What is to be done?'
'Will she pay off if the helm is put hard over?' he answered. 'Let us try it!'
He seized the spokes on one side; I put my shoulder to the wheel on the other, and thus we jammed and secured the helm into the posture called by sailors 'hard a-starboard.' She fell off, indeed—into the trough, and there she lay, amid such a diabolical play of water, such lashings of seas on both sides, as it is not in mortal pen to portray!
Had we been in the open ocean, a better attitude than the barque herself had taken up we could not have wished for. She was, indeed, 'hove-to,' as the sea-expression is, giving something of her bow to the wind, and was in that posture which the shipmaster will put his vessel into in such a tempest as was now blowing. But, unhappily, the land was on either hand of us, and though our drift might be straight out to sea, I could not be sure that it was. The tide would be making to the west and north; the coils and pyramids and leapings of surge had also a sort of yearning and leaning towards north-west, as if in sympathy with the tide; the deadly terrace of Hurricane Point lay that way; and so the leaving of the barque in the trough of the sea might come, indeed, to cost us our lives, which had only just been spared by the shift in the storm of wind.
'She does not answer the helm,' I cried to my young companion.
'Her head will pay off,' he answered, 'if we can manage to hoist a fragment of sail forward. Itmustbe done, sir. Will you help me?'
'God knows I will do anything!' I cried. 'Show me what is to be done. We must save our lives if we can. There may be a chance out on the ocean for us.'
Without another word he went forward, and I followed him. We had to pause often to preserve ourselves from being floated off our feet. The flood, which washed white betwixt the rails, lifted the rigging off the pins, and sent the ropes snaking about the decks, and our movements were as much hampered as though we fought our way through a jungle. The foam all about us, outside and inboards, put a wild, cold glimmer into the air, which enabled us to distinguish outlines. In fact, at moments the whole shape of the barque, from her bulwarks to some distance up her masts, would show like a sketch in ink upon white paper as she leaned off the slant of the sea and painted her figure upon the hill of froth thundering away from her on the lee-side.
My companion paused for a moment or two under the shelter of the caboose or galley, to tell me what he meant to do. We then crawled on to the forecastle, and he bade me hold by a rope which he put into my hand, and await his return. I watched him creep into the 'eyes' of the vessel and get upon the bowsprit, but after that I lost sight of him, for the seas smoked so fiercely all about the ship's head—to every plunge of her bows there rose so shrouding a thickness of foam—that the air was a fog of crystals where the lad was, and had he gone overboard he could not have vanished more utterly from my sight. Indeed, I could not tell whether he was gone or not, and a feeling of horror possessed me when I thought of being left alone in the vessel with a sick and useless man lying somewhere aft, and with the rage and darkness of the dreadful storm around me, the chance of striking upon Hurricane Point, and no better hope at the best than what was to be got out of thinking of the midnight breast of the storming Atlantic.
After a few minutes there was the noise of the rattling of canvas resembling a volley of small shot fired off the bows. The figure of the lad came from the bowsprit out of a burst of spray that soared in steam into the wind.
'Only a fragment must be hoisted!' he exclaimed with his mouth at my ear. 'Pull with me!'
I put my weight upon the rope, and together we rose a few feet of the sail upon the stay—it was the foretopmast staysail, as I afterwards discovered.
'Enough!' cried my companion in his clear, penetrating voice; 'if it will but hold till the vessel pays off, all will be well. We dare not ask for more.'
He secured the rope we had dragged upon to a pin, and I followed him aft, finding leisure even in that time of distress and horror to wonder at the coolness, the intrepidity of soul, that was expressed in his clear unfaltering speech, in the keen judgment and instant resolution of a lad whose age, as I might gather from his voice, could scarcely exceed fifteen or sixteen years. Between us we seized the wheel afresh, one on either side of it, and waited. But we were not to be kept long in suspense. Indeed, even before we had grasped the helm, the barque was paying off. The rag of canvas held nobly, and to the impulse of it the big bows of the vessel rounded away from the gale, and in a few minutes she was dead before it, pitching furiously, with the sea snapping and foaming to her taffrail and quarters.
But the thickness of her yards, with the canvas rolled up on them, the thickness of the masts, too, the spread of the tops, the complicated gear of shroud, backstay, and running rigging—all offered resistance enough to the dark and living gale that was bellowing right over the stern to put something of the speed of an arrow into the keel of the fabric. Through it she madly raced, with pallid clouds blowing about her bows, and white peaks hissing along her sides, and a wake of snow under her counter heaving to half the height of the mizzenmast with the hurl of the seas, and a ceaseless blowing of froth over our heads as the lad and I stood together grasping the wheel, steering the vessel into the darkness of the great Atlantic Ocean, with our eyes upon the compass-card, whose illuminated disc showed the course on which we were being flashed forwards by the storm to be a trifle south of west.
For full twenty minutes the lad and I clung to the helm without exchanging a word. The speed of the driven vessel rendered her motion comparatively easy, after the intolerable lurching and rolling and plunging of her as she lay at anchor or in the trough. She was swept onwards with such velocity that I had little or no fear of her taking in the seas over her stern, and she steered well, with but little wildness in the swerving of her bows, as was to be seen by the comparative regularity of the oscillation of the compass-card.
This running before the tempest, of course, diminished the volume and power of it, so far, I mean, as our own sensations were concerned; but the sight of the sea, as much of it at least as was visible, coupled with the thunder of the wind up aloft in the sky, and the prodigious crying and shrieking and shrilling of it in the rigging, was warrant enough that were we to heave the barque to we should find the hurricane harder now than it had been at any other time since it first came on to blow. Yet our racing before it, as I have said, seemed somewhat to lull it, and we could converse without having to cry out, though for twenty minutes we stood mute as statues waiting and watching.
At last my companion said to me: 'Have we passed that point which you spoke of, do you think?'
'Oh yes,' I answered. 'It would not be above two miles distant from the point where we broke adrift. Our speed cannot have been less than eight or nine knots. I should say Hurricane Point is a full mile away down on the quarter there.'
'I fear that we shall find the sea,' said he, 'grow terribly heavy as we advance.'
'Yes,' said I; 'but what is to be done? There is nothing for it but to advance. Suppose such another shift of wind as has just happened—what then? We should have a line of deadly shore right under our lee. No, we must hold on as we are.'
'There are but two of us!' cried he: 'my father cannot count. What are we to do? We cannot work this big ship!'
'The weather may break,' said I; 'it is surely too fierce to last. What can we hope for but to be rescued or assisted by some passing vessel? Is this ship stanch?'
'Yes; she is a strong ship,' he replied. 'She is about six years old. My father is her owner. I wish I could go to him,' he added; 'he will be dying to learn what has happened and what is being done, and it is past the time for his medicine, and he will be wanting his supper!'
I tried to catch a view of him as he spoke these words, but the haze of the binnacle-lamp did not reach to his face, and it was as black as the face of the sky itself out of that sheen. What he had said had a girlish note in it that I could not reconcile with his dress, with his seafaring alertness, with his spirited behaviour, his nimble crawling out upon the bowsprit, and his perception of what was to be done, under conditions which might well have clouded the wits of the oldest and most audacious sailor.
'Pray go and see your father,' said I. 'I believe I can keep this helm amidships without help.' And, indeed, if I could not have steered the barque alone, I do not know that such assistance as he could offer would have suffered me to control her. He seemed but a slender lad—so far, at least, as I had been able to judge from the view I got when the flare was burning—very quick, but without such strength as I should have looked for in a young seaman, as I could tell whenever the wheel had to be put up or down.
He let go the spokes, and stood apart for a minute or two, as though to judge whether I could manage without him; then said he, 'I will return quickly,' and with that he took a step and vanished in the blackness forward of the binnacle-stand.
My mind dwelt for a moment upon him, upon the clearness and purity of his voice, upon a something in his speech which I could not define, and which puzzled me; upon his words, which were as good English as one could hope to hear at home, albeit there was a certain sharpness and incisiveness—perhaps I might say a little of harshness—in his accentuation that might suggest him a foreigner to an English ear, though, as I then supposed, it was more likely than not this quality arose from the excitement and dismay and distress which worked in him as in me.
But he speedily ceased to engage my thoughts. What could I dwell upon but the situation in which I found myself—the spectacle of the black outline of barque painting herself upon the volumes of white water she hove up around her as she rushed forward pitching bows under, her rigging echoing with unearthly cries, as if the dark waving mass of spar and gear aloft were crowded with tormented souls wailing and howling and shrieking dismally? I recalled my mother's dream; I believed I was acting in some dreadful nightmare of my own slumbers; all had happened so suddenly—so much of emotion, of wild excitement, of agitation, and, I may say, horror, had been packed into the slender space of time between the capsizal of the lifeboat and this rushing out of the bay, that, now I had a little leisure to bend my mind to contemplation of the reality, I could not believe in it as an actual thing. I was dazed; my hearing was stunned by the ceaseless roar of wind and seas. TheJanetstove and sunk! All my lion-hearted men drowned, perhaps! The poor Danes, for whom they had forfeited their lives, long ago corpses! Would not this break my mother's heart? Would there be a survivor to tell her that when I was last seen I was aboard the barque? Once again I figured the little parlour I had quitted but a few hours since—I pictured my mother sitting by the fire, waiting and listening—the long night, the bitter anguish of suspense!—it was lucky for me that the obligation of having to watch and steer the vessel served as a constant intrusion upon my mind at this time, for could I have been able to sit down and surrender myself wholly to my mood, God best knows how it must have gone with me.
The lad was about ten minutes absent. I found him alongside the wheel without having witnessed his approach. He came out of the darkness as a spirit might shape itself, and I did not know that he was near me until he spoke.
'My father says that our safety lies in heading into the open sea, to obtain what you call a wide offing,' said he.
'What does he advise?' I asked.
'"We must continue to run," he says,' answered the lad, meaning byrunthat we should keep the barque before the wind. '"When the coast is far astern we must endeavour to heave to." So he counsels. I told him we are but two. He answered, "It may be done."'
'I wish he were able to leave his cabin and take charge,' said I. 'What is his complaint?'
'He was seized, shortly after leaving Cuxhaven, with rheumatism in the knees,' he answered; 'he cannot stand—cannot, indeed, stir either leg.'
'Why did he not get himself conveyed ashore for treatment?'
'He hoped to get better. We were to call at Swansea before proceeding to Porto Allegre, and if he had found himself still ill when he arrived there, it was his intention to procure another captain for theAnine, and remain at Swansea with me until he was able to return home.'
'Who had charge of the barque when she brought up in the bay?' I inquired, finding a sort of relief in asking these questions, and, indeed, in having somebody to converse with, for even my ten minutes of loneliness at the helm of that pitching and foaming vessel had depressed me to the very core of my soul.
'The carpenter, who acted as second mate.'
'Yes, I recollect some of our boatmen brought the news. Your chief mate broke his leg and was sent ashore. But did your father consent to theAninedropping anchor in so perilous a bay as ours—perilous, I mean, considering the weather at the time?'
'He was at the mercy of the man Damm—the carpenter, I mean,' he answered. 'The crew had refused to keep the sea: they said a tempest was coming, and that shelter must be sought before the wind came, and the carpenter steered the barque for the first haven he fell in with, which happened to be your bay. Our crew were not good men; they were grumbling much, as your English word is, from the hour of our leaving Cuxhaven.'
'But surely,' said I, 'the poor fellows who sprang out of the fore-rigging could not have formed the whole of the crew of a ship of this burthen.'
'No,' he answered; 'the carpenter and five men got away in one of the boats when they found that the barque was dragging her anchors. They lowered one boat, which filled and was knocked to pieces, and the wreck of it, I dare say, is still swinging at the tackles. They lowered the other boat and went away in her.'
'Did they reach the shore?'
'I do not know,' said he.
'They must have been a bad lot,' said I—'those who escaped in the boat and those who hung in the shrouds, to leave your helpless father to his fate.'
'Oh! a bad lot, a wicked lot!' he cried. 'They were not Danes,' he added. 'Danish sailors would not have acted as those men did.'
'Are you a Dane?' I asked.
'My father is,' he answered. 'I am as much English as Danish. My mother was an Englishwoman.'
'I should have believed you wholly English,' said I. 'Are you a sailor?'
He answered, 'No.' I was about to speak, when he exclaimed: 'I am a girl!'
Secretly for some time I had supposed this, and yet I was hardly less astonished than had I been without previous suspicion.
'Agirl!' I cried, sending my sight groping over her figure; but to no purpose. She was absolutely indistinguishable saving her arms, which were dimly touched by the haze of the binnacle-light as they lay upon the spokes of the wheel.
'It is my whim to dress as a boy on board ship!' she exclaimed, with no stammer of embarrassment that I could catch in her clear delivery, that penetrated to my ear without loss of a syllable through the heavy storming of the gale, flashing with the fury of a whirlwind off the brows of the seas which rushed at us, as the barque's counter soared into the whole weight and eye of the tempest.
So far had we conversed; but at this moment a great surge took the barque and swung her up in so long, so dizzy, and sickening an upheaval, followed by so wild a fall into the frothing hollow at its base, that speech was silenced in me, and I could think of nothing else but the mountainous billows now running. Indeed, as my companion had predicted, the farther we drew out from the land the heavier we found the sea. The play of the ocean, indeed, out here, was rendered fierce beyond words by the dual character of the tempest; for the seas which had been set racing out of the west had not yet been conquered by the violence of the new gale and by the hurl of the liquid hills out of the east; and the barque was now labouring in the same sort of pyramidal sea as had run in the bay, saving that here the whole power of the great Atlantic was in each billow, and the fight between the contending waters was as a combat of mighty giants.
The decks were full of water; at frequent intervals the brow of the sea rushing past us, swift as was our own speed upon its careering back, would arch over the rail and tumble aboard in a heavy fall of water, and the smoke of it would rise from the planks as though the barque were on fire, and make the blackness forward of the mainmast hoary. I sought in vain for the least break in the dark ceiling of the sky. Will the vessel be able to keep afloat? I was now all the time asking myself. Is it possible for any structure put together by human hands to outlive such a night of fury as this? As I have said, I was no sailor, yet my 'longshore training gave me very readily to know that the best, if not the only, chance for our lives was to get the barque hove-to, and leave her to breast the seas and live the weather out as she could with her helm lashed, and, perhaps some bit of tarpaulin in the weather-rigging, to keep her head up. But this, that was to be easily wished, was inexpressibly perilous to attempt or achieve, for, in bringing the vessel to, it was as likely as not we should founder out of hand. A single sea might be enough to do our business; and, failing that, there was the almost certain prospect of the decks being swept, of every erection from the taffrail to the bows being carried away, ourselves included; of a score of leaks being started by a single blow, and, even if the girl and I managed to hold on, of the barque foundering under our feet.
Thus we rushed onward, very literally indeed scudding under bare poles, as it is called; and for a long while we had neither of us a word to exchange, so present was calamity, so near was death, so dreadful were the thunderous sounds of the night, so engrossing our business of keeping the flying fabric dead before the seas.
I pulled out my watch and held it hastily to the binnacle-lamp, and found the hour exactly one. The girl asked me the time. This was the first word that had passed between us for a long while. I replied, and she said in a voice that indicated extraordinary spirit, but that nevertheless sounded languishingly after her earlier utterance: 'Now that it is past midnight, the gale may break; surely such fierce weather cannot last for many hours!'
'I wish you would go,' said I, 'and get some refreshment for yourself, and lie down for awhile. I believe I can manage single-handed to keep the vessel before it.'
'If I lie down, it would not be to sleep,' she answered; 'but if you think I can be spared from the wheel for a few minutes, I will obtain some refreshment for us both, and I should also like to see how my father does.'
I answered that if the helm was to prove too heavy for me, her help might hardly save me from being obliged to let go.
'Do not believe this,' she exclaimed, 'because you now know that I am a girl!'
'I have had no heart to express wonderment as yet,' said I, 'otherwise my astonishment and admiration would reassure you, if you suppose I doubt your strength and capacity now that I know you to be a girl. A little refreshment will help us both,' and I was going to advise her to seize the opportunity to attire herself in dry clothes, for I was in oilskins, whereas, so far as I was able to gather, her dress was a pea-jacket and a cloth cap; and I knew that again and again she had been soaked to the skin, and that the wind pouring on her would be chilling her to her very heart. But even amid such a time as this I was sensible of a diffidence in naming what was in my mind, and held my peace.
She left the wheel, and I stood steering the barque single-handed, with my eyes fixed upon the illuminated compass-card, while I noticed that the course the vessel was taking, which always held her dead before the gale, was now above a point, nay, perhaps two points, to the southward of west, whence it was clear the hurricane was veering northwardly.
Whether it was because this small shift in the wind still found the colliding seas travelling east and west, or that some heavy surge sweeping its volume along the starboard bow caused the barque to 'yaw' widely, as it is termed, and so brought a great weight of billow against the rudder: be the cause what it will, while my eye was rooted upon the card, the stern of the vessel was on a sudden run up with the velocity of a balloon from whose car all the ballast has been thrown, the spokes were wrenched from my hand as they revolved like the driving-wheel of a locomotive in full career, and I was sent spinning against the bulwark, from which I dropped upon my knees and so rolled over, stunned.
For all I could tell I might have lain five minutes or five hours without my senses. I believe I was brought to by the washing over me of the water that lay in that lee-part of the deck into which I had been shot. I sat erect, but for a long while was unable to collect my mind, so bewildered were my brains by the fall, and so confounded besides by the uproar round about. I then made out the figure, as I took it, of the girl standing at the wheel, and got on my legs, and after feeling over myself, so to speak, to make sure that all my bones were sound, I staggered, or rather clawed my way up to the wheel; for the barque seemed now to me to be upon her beam-ends, and rolling with dreadful wildness, and there were times when the foaming waters rushed inboards over the rail which she submerged to leeward.
The girl cried out when she spied me. I had to draw close, indeed, to be seen; it was as black down where I was thrown, as the inside of the vessel's hold. She cried out, I say, uttering some Danish exclamation, and then exclaimed:
'I feared you were lost; I feared that you had been thrown overboard; I ought not to have left you alone at the wheel. Tell me if you are hurt?'
'No; I am uninjured,' I replied. 'But what has become of the ship? I am only just recovered from my swoon.'
'Oh!' she cried, 'she has taken up the very situation you wished for. She has hove herself to. She came broadside to the sea after you were flung from the wheel. We are mercifully watched over. We dared not of ourselves have brought her to the wind.'
All my senses were now active in me once more, and I could judge for myself. It was as the girl had said. The barque had fallen into the trough, and had taken up a position for herself, and was shouldering the heavy western surge with her bow, coming to and falling off in rhythmic sweep. Clouds of froth repeatedly broke over her forecastle; but she seemed while I then watched her to rise buoyant to each black curl of billow as it took her amidships.
'Will you help me to lash the helm?' cried the girl. 'It is all that theAninewill need, I am sure. She will be able to fight the storm alone if we can secure the wheel.'
Between us, we drove the helm 'hard a-lee,' to use the sea term—for which, indeed, it is impossible to find an equivalent, though I trust to be as sparing in this language as the obligation of explanation will permit—and then, by means of ropes wound round the spokes, so bound the wheel as to cripple all play in it.
'Will she lie up to the wind, do you think,' said I, 'without some square of canvas abaft here to keep her head to it?'
'I have been watching her. I believe she will do very well,' the girl answered. 'I feared that that little head of sail we hoisted in the bay would blow her bows round, and, by this not happening, I suppose that sail is in rags. One would not have heard it split in such a thunder of wind as this.'
'Have you seen your father?'
'Yes. I was talking to him when you were thrown from the wheel. I knew what had happened by the behaviour of the vessel. I ran out, and feared you were lost.'
'What does he counsel?'
'It is still his wish that we should go on putting plenty of sea betwixt us and the land. But do you notice that the gale has gone somewhat into the north? He will be glad to hear it, now that we are no longer scudding. Our drift should put us well clear of the Land's End, and, indeed, I dare say now we are being thrust away at several miles in the hour from the coast. He is very anxious to know if theAninehas taken in water, and wishes me to sound the well. I fear I shall not be able to do this alone.'
'Why should you?' cried I. 'You shall do nothing alone! I cannot credit that you are a girl! Such spirit—such courage—such knowledge of a calling the very last in the wide world that women are likely to understand! Pray let me ask your name?'
'Helga Nielsen,' she answered. 'My father is Peter Nielsen—Captain Peter Nielsen,' she repeated. 'And your name?'
'Hugh Tregarthen,' said I.
'It is sad that you should be here,' said she, 'brought away from your home, suffering all this hardship and peril! You came to save our lives. God will bless you, sir. I pray that the good God may protect and restore you to those you love.'
Spite of the roar of the wind, and the ceaseless crashing and seething sound of the smiting and colliding seas, I could catch the falter of emotion in her voice as she pronounced these words; but then, as you will suppose, we were close together, standing shoulder to shoulder against the binnacle, while we exchanged these sentences.
'There is refreshment in the cabin,' said she, after a pause of a moment or two. 'You need support. This has been a severe night of work for you, sir, from the hour of your putting off to us in the lifeboat.'
I found myself smiling at the motherly tenderness conveyed in the tone of her voice. I longed to have a clear view of her, for it was still like talking in a pitch-dark room; the binnacle-lamp needed trimming, its light was feeble, and the sky lay horribly black over the ocean, that was raging, ghastly with pallid glances of sheets of foam under it.
'Let us first sound the well, if possible,' said I, 'for our lives' sake we ought to find out what is happening below!'
By this time we had watched and waited long enough to satisfy ourselves that the barque would do as well as we dared hope with her helm lashed; and it also happened, very fortunately, that her yards were in the right trim for the posture in which she lay, having been pointed to the wind—the fore-yards on one tack, the main-yards on the other—when the gale came on to blow in the bay, and the braces had not since been touched. I walked with the girl to the entrance of the deck-house, the door of which faced forwards. She entered the structure and, while I waited outside, lighted a bull's-eye lamp, with which she rejoined me, and together we went forward to another house built abaft of the galley. This had been the place in which the crew slept. The carpenter's chest was here, and also the sounding-rod. We then went to the pumps, and while I held the lamp she dropped the rod down the sounding-pipe, drew it up and brought it to the light and examined it, and named the depth of water there was in the hold. I do not recollect the figure, but I remember that, though it was significant, there was nothing greatly to alarm us in it, seeing how heavily and how frequently the barque had been flooded with the seas, and how much of the water might have made its way from above.
I recount this little passage in a few lines, yet it forms one of the most sharp-cut of the memories of my adventure. The picture is before me as I write. I see the pair of us as we come to a dead stand, grasping each other for support, while the vessel rolls madly over on the slope of some huge hurtling sea. I see the bright glare from the bull's-eye lamp in the girl's hand, dancing like a will-o'-the-wisp upon the black flood betwixt the rails washing with the slant of the decks to our knees; I see her dropping the rod down the tube, coolly examining it, declaring its indication, while, to the flash of the lamplight, I catch an instant's glimpse of her face, shining out white—large-eyed, as it seemed to me—upon the blackness rushing in thunder athwart the deck.
She led the way into the deck-house. There was a small lantern wildly swinging at a central beam—my companion had lighted it when she procured the bull's-eye lamp—it diffused a good lustre, and I could see very plainly. It was just a plain, ordinary, shipboard interior, with three little windows of a side, a short table, lockers on either hand, and a sleeping-berth, or cabin, designed for the captain's use, aft; the companion-hatch, which led to the deck below, was betwixt the after-end of the cabin and the bulkhead of the berth, but the rapid glance I threw around speedily settled, as you may suppose, into a look—a long look—full of curiosity, surprise, and admiration, at the girl.
She stood before me dressed as a sailor lad, in a suit of pilot cloth and a red silk handkerchief round her throat; but her first act on entering was to remove her cloth cap, that was streaming wet, and throw it down upon the table; and thus she stood with her eyes fixed on me, as mine were on her, each of us surveying the other. Her hair was cut short, and was rough and plentiful, without remains of any sort of fashion in the wearing of it—nay, indeed, it was unparted. It was very fair hair, and as pale as amber in the lamplight. Her eyebrows were of a darker colour, and very perfectly arched, as though pencilled. It was impossible to guess the hue of her eyes by that light: they seemed of a very dark blue, such as might prove violet in the sunshine, soft and liquid, and of an expression, even in that hour of peril, of the horror of tempest, of the prospect of death, indeed, that might make one readily suppose her of a nature both sweet and merry. There was no sign of exposure to the weather upon her face; she was white with the paleness of fatigue and emotion. Her cheeks were plump, her mouth small, the under-lip a little pouted, and her teeth pearl-like and very regular. Even by the light in which I now surveyed her, I never for a moment could have mistaken her for a lad. There was nothing in her garb to neutralize for an instant the suggestions of her sex.
'I will take you to my father,' said she; 'but you must first eat and drink.'
I could not have told how exhausted I was until I sank down upon a locker and rested my arms upon the table. I was too wearied to ask the questions that I should have put to her at another time, and could do no more than watch her, with a sort of dull wonder at her nimbleness, and the spirit and resolution of her movements as she lifted the lid of the locker and produced a case-bottle of Hollands, some cold meat, and a tin of white biscuits.
'We have no bread,' said she, smiling; 'we obtained some loaves off the Isle of Wight, but the last was eaten yesterday.'
She took a tumbler from a rack and mixed a draught of the Hollands with some water which she got from a filter fixed to a stanchion, and extended the glass.
'Pray let me follow you!' said I. She shook her head. 'Yes!' I cried; 'God knows you should need some such tonic more than I!'
I induced her to drink, and then took the glass and emptied it. A second dram warmed and heartened me. I was without appetite, but was willing to eat for the sake of such strength as might come from a meal. The girl made herself a sandwich of biscuit and meat, and we fell to. And so we sat facing each other, eating, staring at each other; the pair of us all the while hearkening with all our ears to the roaring noises outside, to the straining sounds within the ship, and feeling—I speak of myself—with every nerve tense as a fiddlestring, the desperate slants and falls and uprisals of the deck or platform upon which our feet rested.
There was refreshment, however, to every sense, beyond language to express, in the shelter which this deck-house provided after our long term of exposure to the pouring of the raging gale, into which was put the further weight of volumes of spray, that swept to the face like leaden hail, and carried the shriek of the shot of musketry as it slung past the ear. It was calm in this deck-house; the deafening sounds without came somewhat muffled here; but the furious motion of the vessel was startlingly illustrated by the play of the hanging lantern, and the swing of the illuminated globe was made the wilder and more wonderful by the calm of the atmosphere in which it oscillated.
'I do not think the sea is breaking over the ship,' said the girl, gazing at me in a posture of listening. 'It is hard to tell. I feel no tremble as of the falls of water on the deck.'
'She is battling bravely,' said I; 'but what now would I give for even a couple of those men of yours who jumped into the lifeboat! It is our being so few—two of us only, and you a woman—that makes our situation so hard.'
'I have not the strength of a man,' said she with a smile, and fastening her soft eyes on my face; 'but you will find I have the heart of one. Will you come now and see my father?'
I at once rose and followed her. She knocked upon a little door where the bulkhead partitioned off the inner cabin, and then entered, bidding me follow her.
A cot swung from the upper deck, and in it sat a man almost upright, his back supported by bolsters and pillows; a bracket lamp burnt steadily over a table, upon which lay a book or two, a chart, a few nautical instruments, and the like. There was no convenience for dressing, and I guessed that this had been a sort of chart-room which the captain had chosen to occupy that he might be easily and without delay within hail or reach of the deck.
He was a striking-looking man, with coal-black hair, parted on one side, lying very flat upon his head, and curling down upon his back. He wore a long goat beard and moustaches, and was somewhat grim with several days' growth of whisker upon his cheeks; his brows were thickly thatched, his forehead low, his eyes very dark, small, and penetrating. He was of a deathlike whiteness, and showed, to my fancy, as a man whose days were numbered. That his disease was something more than rheumatism there was no need to look at him twice to make sure of. His daughter addressed him in the Danish tongue, then, recollecting herself, with a half-glance at me of apology, she exclaimed:
'Father, this is Mr. Hugh Tregarthen, the noble gentleman who commanded the lifeboat, who risked his life to save ours, and I pray that God of His love for brave spirits may restore him in safety to those who are dear to him.'
Captain Nielsen, with a face contracted into a look of pain by emotion, extended his hand in silence over the edge of his cot. I grasped it in silence too. It was ice cold. He gazed for awhile, without speech, into my eyes, and I thought to see him shed tears; then, putting his hand upon mine in a caressing gesture, and letting it go—for the swing of the cot would not permit him to retain that posture of holding my hand for above a moment or two, he exclaimed in a low but quite audible voice: 'I ask the good and gracious Lord of heaven and earth to bless you, forhersake—for my Helga's sake—and in the name of those who have perished, but whom you would have saved!'
'Captain Nielsen,' said I, greatly moved by his manner and looks, 'would it had pleased Heaven that I should have been of solid use to you and your men! I grieve to find you in this helpless state. I hope you do not suffer?'
'While I rest I am without pain,' he answered, and I now observed that though his accent had a distinctly Scandinavian harshness, such as was softened in his daughter's speech by the clearness—I may say, by the melody—of her tones, his English was as purely pronounced as hers. 'But if I move,' he continued, 'I am in agony. I cannot stand; my legs are as idle and as helpless as though paralyzed. But now tell me of theAnine, Helga,' he cried, with a look of pathetic eager yearning entering his face as he addressed her. 'Have you sounded the well?'
'Yes, father.'
'What water, my child?' She told him. 'Ha!' he exclaimed, with a sudden fretfulness; 'the pump should be manned without delay; but who is there to work it?'
'We two will, very shortly,' she exclaimed, turning to me: 'we require a little breathing time. Mr. Tregarthen and I,' said she, still talking with her soft appealing eyes upon me, 'have strength, or, at all events, courage enough to give us strength; and he will help me in whatever we may think needful to save theAnineand our lives.'
'Indeed, yes!' said I.
'Pray sit, both of you,' cried Captain Nielsen; 'pray rest. Helga, have you seen to the gentleman's comfort? Has he had any refreshment?'
She answered him, and seated herself upon a little locker, inviting me with a look to sit beside her, for there was no other accommodation in that cabin than the locker.
'I wish I could persuade your daughter to take some rest,' said I. 'Her clothes, too, are soaked through!'
'It is salt water,' said Captain Nielsen; 'it will not harm her. She is very used to salt water, sir;' and then he addressed his daughter in Danish. The resemblance of some words he used to our English made me suppose he spoke about her resting.
'The pumps must be worked,' said she, looking at me; 'we must keep the barque afloat first of all, Mr. Tregarthen. How trifling is want of sleep, how insignificant the discomfort of damp clothes, at such a time as this!'
She opened her jacket and drew a silver watch from her pocket, and then took a bottle of medicine and a wineglass from a small circular tray swinging by thin chains near the cot, and gave her father a dose. He began now to question us, occasionally in his hurry and eagerness speaking in the Danish language. He asked about the masts—if they were sound, if any sails had been split, if theAninehad met with any injury apart from the loss of her two boats, of which he had evidently been informed by his daughter. A flush of temper came into his white cheeks when he talked of his men. He called the carpenter Damm a villain, said that had he had his way the barque never would have brought up in that bay, that Damm had carried her there, as he now believed, as much out of spite as out of recklessness, hoping no doubt that theAninewould go ashore, but of course taking it for granted that the crew would be rescued. He shook his fist as he pronounced the carpenter's name, and then groaned aloud with anguish to some movement of his limbs brought about by his agitation. He lay quiet a little and grew calm, and talked, with his thin fingers on his breast. He informed me that theAninewas his ship, that he had spent some hundreds of pounds in equipping her for this voyage, that he had some risk in the cargo, and that, in a word, all that he was worth in the wide world was in this fabric, now heavily and often madly labouring, unwatched, amid the blackness of the night of hurricane.
'Your daughter and I must endeavour to preserve her for you,' said I.
'May the blessed God grant it!' he cried. 'And how good and heroic are you to speak thus!' said he, looking at me. 'Surely your great Nelson was right when he called us Danes the brothers of the English. Brothers in affection may our countries ever be! We have given you a sweet Princess—that is a debt it will tax your people's generosity to repay.' The smile that lighted up his face as he spoke made me see a resemblance in him to his daughter. It was like throwing a light upon a picture. He was now looking at her with an expression full of tenderness and concern.
'Mr.—Mr.——' he began.
'Tregarthen,' said his daughter.
'Ay, Mr. Tregarthen,' he continued, 'will wonder that a girl should be clad as you are, Helga. Were you ever in Denmark, sir?'
'Never,' I replied.
'You will not suppose, I hope,' said he, with another soft, engaging smile that was pathetic also with the meaning it took from his white face, 'that Helga's attire is the costume of Danish ladies?'
'Oh no,' said I. 'I see how it is. Indeed, Miss Nielsen explained. The dress is a whim. And then it is a very convenient shipboard dress. But she should not be suffered to do the rough work of a sailor. Will you believe, Captain Nielsen, that she went out upon the bowsprit, and cut adrift or loosed the staysail there when your barque was on her beam-ends in the trough of the sea?'
He nodded with emphasis, and said, 'That is nothing. Helga has been to sea with me now for six years running. It is her delight to dress herself in boy's clothes—ay, and to go aloft and do the work of a seaman. It has hardened and spoilt her hands, but it has left her face fair to see. She is a good girl; she loves her poor father; she is motherless, Mr. Tregarthen. Were my dear wife alive, Helga would not be here. She is my only child;' and he made as if to extend his arms to her, but immediately crossed his hands, again addressing her in Danish as though he blessed her.
I could perceive the spirit in her struggling with the weakness that this talk induced. She conquered her emotions with a glance at me that was one almost of pride, as though she would bid me observe that she was mistress of herself, and said, changing the subject, but not abruptly, 'Father, do you think the vessel can struggle on without being watched or helped from the deck?'
'What can be done?' he cried. 'The helm is securely lashed hard a-lee?' She nodded. 'What can be done?' he repeated. 'Your standing at the wheel would be of no use. What is the trim of the yards?'
'They lie as they were braced up in the bay,' she responded.
'I have been in ships,' said he, 'that always managed best when left alone in hard weather of this kind. There was the oldDannebrog,' he went on, with his eyes seeming to glisten to some sudden stir of happy memory in him. 'Twice when I was in her—once in the Baltic, once in the South Atlantic—we met with gales: well, perhaps not such a gale as this; but it blew very fiercely, Mr. Tregarthen. The captain, my old friend Sorensen, knew her as he knew his wife. He pointed the yards, lashed the helm, sent the crew below and waited, smoking his pipe in the cabin, till the weather broke. She climbed the seas dryly, and no whale could have made better weather of it. A ship has an intelligence of her own. It is the spirit of the sea that comes into her, as into the birds or fish of the ocean. Observe how long a vessel will wash about after her crew have abandoned her. They might have sunk her had they stayed, not understanding her. Much must be left to chance at sea, Helga. No; there is nothing to be done. Damm reported the hatch-covers on and everything secure while in the bay. It is so still, of course. Yet it will ease my mind to know she is a little freed of the water in her.'
'I am ready!' cried I. 'Is the pump too heavy for my arms alone? I cannot bear to think of your daughter toiling upon that wet and howling deck.'
'She will not spare herself, though you should wish it,' said her father. 'What is the hour, my dear?'
She looked at her watch. 'Twenty minutes after two.'
'A weary long time yet to wait for the dawn!' said he. 'And it is Sunday morning—a day of rest for all the world save for the mariner. But it is God's own day, and when next Sabbath comes round we may be worshipping Him ashore, and thanking Him for our preservation.'
As he pronounced these words, Helga, as I will henceforth call her, giving me a glance of invitation, quitted the berth, and I followed her into the cabin, as I may term the interior of the deck-house. She picked up the bull's-eye lamp and trimmed the mesh of it, and, arming herself with the sounding-rod, stepped on to the deck. I watched her movements with astonishment and admiration. I should have believed that I possessed fairly good sea-legs, even for a wilder play of plank than this which was now tossing us; nevertheless, I never dared let go with my hands, and there were moments when the upheaval was so swift, the fall so sickening, that my brain reeled again, and to have saved my life I could not have stirred the distance of a pace until the sensation had passed. But excepting an occasional pause, an infrequent grasp at what was next to her during some unusually heavy roll, Helga moved with almost the same sort of ease that must have been visible in her on a level floor. Her figure, indeed, seemed to float; it swayed to the rolling of the deck as a flame hovers upright upon the candle you sharply sway under it.
After the comparative calm of the shelter I stepped from, the uproar of the gale sounded as though it were blowing as hard again as at the time of our quitting the deck. The noise of the rushing and roaring waters was deafening; as the vessel brought her masts to windward, the screaming and whistling aloft are not to be imagined. The wind was clouded with spray, the decks sobbed furiously with wet, and it was still as pitch black as ever it had been at any hour of the night. Helga threw the light of the bull's-eye upon the pump-brake or handle, and we then fell to work. At intervals we could contrive to hear each other speak—that is to say, in some momentary lull, when the barque was in the heart of a valley ere she rose to the next thunderous acclivity, yelling in her rigging with the voice of a wounded giantess. For how long we stuck to that dismal clanking job I cannot remember. The water gushed copiously as we plied the handle, and the foam was all about our feet as though we stood in a half-fathom's depth of surf. I was amazed by the endurance and pluck of the girl, and, indeed, I found half my strength in her courage. Had I been alone I am persuaded I should have given up. The blow of the wheel that had dashed me into unconsciousness, coming on top of my previous labours, not to speak of that exhaustion of mind which follows upon such distress of heart as my situation and the memory of my foundered boat and the possible loss of all her people had occasioned in me, must have proved too much but for the example and influence, the inspiriting presence of this little Danish lioness, Helga.
In one of those intervals I have spoken of she cried out, 'We have done enough—for the present;' and so saying she let go of the pump-handle and asked me to hold the lamp while she dropped the rod. I had supposed our efforts insignificant, and was surprised to learn that we had sunk the water by some inches. We returned to the deck-house, but scarcely had I entered it when I was seized with exhaustion so prostrating that I fell, rather than seated myself, upon the locker and hid my face in my arms upon the table till the sudden darkness should have passed from my eyes. When, presently, I looked up, I found Helga at my side with a glass of spirits in her hand. There was a wonderful anxiety and compassion in her gaze.
'Drink this!' said she. 'The work has been too hard for you. It is my fault—I am sorry—I am sorry.'
I swallowed the draught, and was the better for it.
'This weakness,' said I, 'must come from the blow I got on deck. I have kept you from your father. He will want your report,' and I stood up.
She gave me her arm, and but for that support I believe I should not have been able to make my way to the captain's berth, so weak did I feel in the limbs, so paralyzing to my condition of prostration was the violent motion of the deck.
Captain Nielsen looked eagerly at us over the edge of his cot. Helga would not release me until I was seated on the locker.
'Mr. Tregarthen's strength has been overtaxed, father,' said she.
'Poor man! poor man!' he cried. 'God will bless him. He has suffered much for us.'
'It must be a weakness, following my having been stunned,' said I, ashamed of myself that I should be in need of a girl's pity at such a time—the pity of a girl, too, who was sharing my labours and danger.
'What have you to tell me, Helga?' exclaimed the captain.
She answered him in Danish, and they exchanged some sentences in that tongue.
'She is a tight ship,' cried the captain, addressing me: 'it is good news,' he went on, his white countenance lighted up with an expression of exultation, 'to hear that you two should be able to control the water in the hold. Does the weather seem to moderate?'
'No,' said I; 'it blows as hard as ever it did.'
'Does the sea break aboard?'
'There is plenty of water washing about,' said I, 'but the vessel seems to be making a brave fight.'
'When daylight comes, Helga,' said he, 'you will hoist a distress colour at the mizzen-peak. If the peak be wrecked or the halliards gone, the flag must be seized to the mizzen shrouds.'
'I will see to all that, father,' she answered; 'and now, Mr. Tregarthen, you will take some rest.'
I could not bear the idea of sleeping while she remained up; yet though neither of us could be of the least use on deck, our both resting at once was not to be thought of, if it was only for the sake of the comfort that was to be got out of knowing that there was somebody awake and on watch.
'I will gladly rest,' said I, 'on condition that you now lie down and sleep for two or three hours.'
She answered no; she was less tired than I; she had not undergone what I had suffered in the lifeboat. She begged me to take some repose.
'It is my selfishness that entreats you,' said she: 'if you break down, what are my father and I to do?'
'True,' I exclaimed, 'but the three of us would be worse off still ifyouwere to break down.'
However, as I saw that she was very much in earnest, while her father also joined her in entreating me to rest, I consented on her agreeing first to remove her soaking clothes, for it was miserable to see her shivering from time to time and looking as though she had just been dragged over the side, and yet bravely disregarding the discomfort, smiling as often as she addressed me and conversing with her father with a face of serenity, plainly striving to soothe and reassure him by an air of cheerful confidence.
She left the cabin, and Captain Nielsen talked of her at once: told me that her mother was an Englishwoman; that he was married in London, in which city he had lived from time to time; that Helga had received a part of her education at New-castle-on-Tyne, where his wife's family then lived, though they were now scattered, or perhaps dead, only one member to his knowledge still residing at Newcastle. He took Helga to sea with him, he said, after his wife died, that he might have her under his eye, and such was her love for the sea, such her intelligent interest in everything which concerned a ship, that she could do as much with a vessel as he himself, and had often, at her own request, taken charge for a watch, during which she had shortened canvas and put the craft about as though, in short, she had been skipper. The poor man seemed to forget his miserable situation while he spoke of Helga. His heart was full of her; his eyes swam with tears while he cried, 'It is not that I fear death for myself, nor for myself do I dread the loss of my ship, which would signify beggary for me and my child. It is for her—for my little Helga. We have friends at Kolding, where I was born, and at Bjert, Vonsild, Skandrup, and at other places. But who will help the orphan? My friends are not rich—they could do little, no matter how generous their will. I pray God, for my child's sake, that we may be preserved—ay, and for your sake—I should have said that,' he added, feebly smiling, though his face was one of distress.
He was beginning to question me about my home, and I was telling him that my mother was living, and that she and I were alone in the world, and that I feared she would think me drowned, and grieve till her heart broke, for she was an old lady, and I was her only son, as Helga was his only daughter, when the girl entered, and I broke off. She had changed her attire, but her clothes were still those of a lad. I had thought to see her come in dressed as a woman, and she so interpreted the look I fastened upon her, for she at once said, without the least air of confusion, as though, indeed, she were sensible of nothing in her apparel that demanded an excuse from her: 'I must preserve my sailor's garb until the fine weather comes. How should I be able to move about the decks in a gown?'
'Helga,' cried her father, 'Mr. Tregarthen is the only son of his mother, and she awaits his return.'
Instantly entered an expression of beautiful compassion into her soft eyes. Her gaze fell, and she remained for a few moments silent; the lamplight shone upon her tumbled hair, and I am without words to make you see the sweet sorrowful expression of her pale face as she stood close against the door, silent, and looking down.
'I have kept my word, Mr. Tregarthen,' said she presently. 'Now you will keep yours and rest yourself. There is my father's cabin below.'
I interrupted her: 'No; if you please, I will lie down upon one of the lockers in the deck-house.'
'It will make a hard bed,' said she.
'Not too hard for me,' said I.
'Well, you shall lie down upon one of those lockers, and you shall be comfortable too;' and, saying this, she went out again, and shortly afterwards returned with some rugs and a bolster. These she placed upon the lee locker, and a minute or two later I had shaken the poor captain by the hand, and had stretched myself upon the rugs, where I lay listening to the thunder of the gale and following the wild motions of the barque, and thinking of what had happened since the lifeboat summons had rung me into this black, and frothing, and roaring night from my snug fireside.
It was not long, however, before I fell asleep. I had undergone some lifeboat experiences in my time, but never before was nature so exhausted in me. The roaring of the gale, the cannonading of the deck-house by incessant heavy showerings of water, the extravagant motions of the plunging and rolling vessel, might have been a mother's lullaby sung by the side of a gently-rocked cradle, so deep was the slumber these sounds of thunder left unvexed.
I awoke from a dreamless, deathlike sleep, and opened my eyes against the light of the cold stone-gray dawn, and my mind instantly coming to me, I sprang up from the locker, pausing to guess at the weather from the movement and the sound. It was still blowing a whole gale of wind, and I was unable to stand without grasping the table for support. The deck-house door was shut, and the planks within were dry, though I could hear the water gushing and pouring in the alleys betwixt the deck-house and the bulwarks. I thought to take a view of the weather through one of the windows, but the glass was everywhere blind with wet.
At this moment the door of the captain's berth was opened, and Helga stepped out. She immediately approached me with both hands extended in the most cordial manner imaginable.
'You have slept well,' she cried; 'I bent over you three or four times. You are the better for the rest, I am sure.'
'I am, indeed!' said I. 'And you?'
'Oh, I shall sleep by-and-by. What shall we do for hot water? It is impossible to light the galley fire; yet how grateful would be a cup of hot tea or coffee!'
'Have you been on deck,' said I, 'while I slept?'
'Oh yes, in and out,' she answered. 'All is well so far—I mean, theAninegoes on making a brave fight. The dawn has not long broken. I have not yet seen the ship by daylight. We must sound the well, Mr. Tregarthen, before we break our fast—my fear is there,' she added, pointing to the deck, by which she signified the hold.
There was but little of her face to be seen. She was wearing an indiarubber cap shaped like a sou'-wester, the brim of which came low, while the flannel ear-flaps almost smothered her cheeks. I could now see, however, that her eyes were of a dark blue, with a spirit of life and even of vivacity in them that expressed a wonderful triumph of heart over the languor of frame indicated by the droop of the eyelids. A little of her short hair of pale gold showed under the hinder thatch of the sou'-wester; her face was blanched. But I could not look at the pretty mouth, the pearl-like teeth, the soft blue eyes, the delicately figured nostril, without guessing that in the hour of bloom this girl would show as bonnily as the fairest lass of cream and roses that ever hailed from Denmark.
We stepped on to the deck—into the thunder of the gale and the flying clouds of spray. I still wore my oilskins, and was as dry in them as at the hour of leaving home. I felt the comfort, I assure you, of my high sea-boots as I stood upon that deck, holding on a minute to the house-front, with the water coming in a little rage of froth to my legs and washing to leeward with thescendof the barque with the force of a river overflowing a dam.
Our first glance was aloft. The foretopgallant-mast was broken off at the head of the topmast and hung with its two yards supported by its gear, but giving a strange wrecked look to the whole of the fabric up there as it swung to the headlong movements of the hull, making the spars, down to the solid foot of the foremast, tremble with the spearing blows it dealt. The jibbooms were also gone, and this, no doubt, had happened through the carrying away of the topgallant-mast; otherwise all was right up above, assuming, to be sure, that nothing was sprung. But the wild, soaked, desolate—the almost mutilated—look, indeed, of the barque! How am I to communicate the impression produced by the soaked dark lines of sailcloth rolled upon the yards, the ends of rope blowing out like the pennant of a man-of-war, the arched and gleaming gear, the decks dusky with incessant drenchings and emitting sullen flashes as the dark flood upon them rolled from side to side! The running rigging lay all about, working like serpents in the wash of the water; from time to time a sea would strike the bow and burst on high in steam-like volumes which glanced ghastly against the leaden sky that overhung us in strata of scowling vapour, dark as thunder in places, yet seemingly motionless. A furious Atlantic sea was running; it came along in hills of frothing green which shaped themselves out of a near horizon thick with storms of spume. But there was the regularity of the unfathomed ocean in the run of the surge, mountainous as it was; and the barque, with her lashed helm, not a rag showing save a tatter or two of the fore-topmast-staysail whose head we had exposed on the previous night, soared and sank, with her port bow to the sea, with the regularity of the tick of a clock.