There was nothing in sight. I looked eagerly round the sea, but it was all thickness and foam and headlong motion. We went aft to the compass to observe if there had happened any shift in the wind, and what the trend of the barque was, and also to note the condition of the wheel, which could only have been told in the darkness by groping. The helm was perfectly sound, and the lashings held bravely. I could observe now that the wheel was a small one, formed of brass, also that it worked the rudder by means of a screw, and it was this purchase or leverage, I suppose, that had made me find the barque easy to steer while she was scudding. The gale was blowing fair out of the north-east, and the vessel's trend, therefore, was on a dead south-west course, with the help of a mountainous sea besides, to drive her away from the land, beam on. I cried to Helga that I thought our drift would certainly not be less than four, and perhaps five, miles in the hour. She watched the sea for a little, and then nodded to me; but it was scarcely likely that she could conjecture the rate of progress amid so furious a commotion of waters, with the great seas boiling to the bulwark rail, and rushing away to leeward in huge round backs of freckled green.
She was evidently too weary to talk, rendered too languid by the bitter cares and sleepless hours of the long night to exert her voice so as to be audible in that thunder of wind which came flashing over the side in guns and bursts of hurricane power; and to the few sentences I uttered, or rather shouted, she responded by nods and shakes of the head as it might be. There was a flag locker under the gratings abaft the wheel, and she opened the box, took out a small Danish ensign, bent it on to the peak-signal halliards, and between us we ran it half-mast high, and there it stood, hard and firm as a painted board, a white cross on red ground, and the red of it made it resemble a tongue of fire against the soot of the sky. This done, we returned to the main-deck, and Helga sounded the pump. She went to work with all the expertness of a seasoned salt, carefully dried the rod and chalked it, and then waited until the roll of the barque brought her to a level keel before dropping it. I watched her with astonishment and admiration. It would until now have seemed impossible to me that any mortal woman should have had in her the makings of so nimble and practised a sailor as I found her to be, with nothing, either, of the tenderness of girlhood lost in her, in speech, in countenance, in looks, spite of her boy's clothes. She examined the rod, and eyed me with a grave countenance.
'Does the water gain?' said I.
'There are two more inches of it,' she answered, 'than the depth I found in the hold last night when I first sounded. We ought to free her somewhat.'
'I am willing,' I exclaimed; 'but are you equal to such labour? A couple of hours should not make a very grave difference.'
'No, no!' she interrupted, with a vehemence that put her air of weariness to flight. 'A couple of hours would be too long to wait,' saying which she grasped the brake and we went to work as before.
No one who has not had to labour in this way can conceive the fatigue of it. There is no sort of shipboard work that more quickly exhausts. It grieved me to the soul that my associate in this toil should be a girl, with the natural weakness of her sex accentuated by what she had suffered and was still suffering; but her spirited gaze forbade remonstrance. She seemed scarcely able to stand when utter weariness forced her at last to let go of the brake. Nevertheless, she compelled her feeble hands again to drop the rod down the well. We had reduced the water to the height at which we had left it before, and, with a faint smile of congratulation, she made a movement towards the deck-house; but her gait was so staggering, there was such a character of blindness, too, in her posture as she started to walk, that I grasped her arm and, indeed, half carried her into the house.
She sat and rested herself for a few minutes, but appeared unable to speak. I watched her anxiously, with something of indignation that her father, who professed to love her so dearly, should not come between her and her devotion, and insist upon her resting. Presently she rose and walked to his cabin, telling me with her looks to follow her.
Captain Nielsen, was veritably corpse-like in aspect viewed by the cold gray iron light sifting through the little windows out of the spray-shrouded air. The unnatural brightness of his eyes painfully defined the attenuation of his face, and the sickly, parchment-like complexion of his skin. He extended his hand, but could hardly find time to deliver a greeting, so violent was his hurry to receive his daughter's report. He shook his head when he heard that his topgallant-mast and jibbooms were wrecked, and passionately exclaimed in Danish, on his daughter telling him of the increase of water in the hold.
'She must be taking it in from below,' he then cried in English. 'She has strained herself. Should this continue, what is to be done? She will need to be constantly pumped—and ah, my God! you are but two.'
'Yes, Captain,' cried I, incensed that he should appear to have no thoughts but for his ship; 'but if you do not insist upon your daughter taking some rest there will be but one, long before this gale has blown itself out.'
'Oh, my dear, it is so!' he exclaimed, looking at her on a sudden with impassioned concern. 'Mr. Tregarthen is right. You will sink under your efforts. Your dear heart will break. Rest now—rest, my beloved child! I command you to rest! You must go below: you must lie in your own cabin. This good gentleman is about—he will sit with me and go forth and report. TheAninetends herself, and there is nothing in human skill to help her outside what she can herself do.'
'But we must not starve, father,' she answered: 'let us first breakfast, as best we can, and then I will go below.'
She left the cabin and promptly returned, bringing with her the remains of the cold meat we had supped off, some biscuit, and a bottle of red wine. Her father drank a little of the wine and ate a morsel of biscuit; indeed, food seemed to excite a loathing in him. I saw that Helga eyed him piteously, but she did not press him to eat: it might be that she had experience of his stubbornness. She said, in a soft aside, to me: 'His appetite is leaving him, and how can I tempt him without the means of cooking? Does not he look very ill this morning?'
'It is worry, added to rheumatic pains,' said I: 'we must get him ashore as soon as possible, where he can be nursed in comfort.'
But though these words flowed readily, out of my sympathy with the poor, brave, suffering girl, they were assuredly not in correspondence with my secret feelings. It was not only I was certain that Captain Nielsen lay in his cot a dying man; the roaring of the wind, the beating of the sea against the barque, the wild extravagant leapings and divings, the perception that water was draining into the hold, and that there were but two of us—and one of those two a girl—to work the pumps, made a mockery to my heart of my reference to the Captain getting ashore and being nursed there.
We sat in that slanting and leaping interior with plates on our knees. The girl feigned to eat; her head drooped with weariness, yet I noticed that she would force a cheerful note into the replies she made to her father's ceaseless feverish questions. When we had ended our meal, she left us to go below to her cabin; but before leaving she asked me, with eyes full of tender pleading, to keep her father's heart up, to make the best of such reports as I might have to give him after going out to take a look round; and she told me that he would need his physic at such and such a time, and so lingered, dwelling upon him and glancing at him; and then she went out in a hurry with one hand upon her breast, yet not so swiftly but that I could see her eyes were swimming.
'There is a barometer in the cabin,' said Captain Nielsen; 'will you tell me how the mercury stands?'
The glass was fixed to the bulkhead outside. I returned and gave him the reading.
''Tis a little rise!' he cried, with his unnaturally bright eyes eagerly fastened upon me.
I would not tell him that it was not so—that the mercury, indeed, stood at the level I had observed on the preceding day in my glass in the lifeboat house.
'Fierce weather of this sort,' said I, 'soon exhausts itself.'
He continued to stare at me, but now with an air of musing that somewhat softened the painful brilliant intentness of his regard.
'I pray God,' said he, 'that this weather may speedily enable us to obtain help, for I fear that if I am not treated I shall get very low, perhaps die. I am ill—yet what is my malady? This rheumatism is a sudden seizure. I could walk when at Cuxhaven.'
In as cheerful a voice as I could assume, I begged him to consider that his mind might have much to do with those bodily sensations which made him feel ill.
'It may be so, it may be so,' he exclaimed, with a sad smile of faltering hope. 'I wish to live. I am not an old man. It will be hard if my time is to come soon. It is Helga—it is Helga,' he muttered, pressing his brow with his thin hand. I was about to speak. 'How wearisome,' he broke out, 'is this ceaseless tossing! I ran away to sea; it was my own doing. I had my childish dreams—strange and beautiful fancies of foreign countries—and I ran away;' he went on in a rambling manner like one thinking aloud. 'And yet I love the old ocean, though it is serving me cruelly now. It has fed me—it has held me to its breast—and my nourishment and life have come from it.' He started, and, bringing his eyes away from the upper deck on which they had been fixed while he spoke, he cried, 'Sir, you are a stranger to me, but you are an Englishman of heroic heart, and you will forgive me. Should I die, and should God be pleased to spare you and my child, will you protect her until she has safely returned to her friends at Kolding? She will be alone in any part of the world until she is there, and if I am assured that she will have the generous compassion of your heart with her, a guardian to take my place until she reaches Kolding, it will make me easy in my ending, let the stroke come when it will.'
'I came to this ship to save your lives,' I answered. 'I hope to be an instrument yet of helping to save them. Trust me to do your bidding, if it were only for my admiration of your daughter's heroic qualities. But do not speak of dying, Captain Nielsen——'
He interrupted me. 'There is my dear friend Pastor Blicker of Kolding, and there is Pastor Jansen of Skandrup. They are good and gentle Christian men, who will receive Helga, and stand by her and soothe her and counsel her as to my little property—ah, my little property!' he cried. 'If this vessel founders, what have I?'
'Pray,' said I, with the idea of quietly coaxing his mind into a more cheerful mood, 'what is so seriously wrong with you, Captain, that you should lie there gloomily foreboding your death? Such rheumatism as yours is not very quick to kill.'
'I was long dangerously ill of a fever in the West Indies,' he answered, 'and it left a vital organ weak. The mischief is here, I fear,' said he, touching his right side above his hip. 'I felt very ill at Cuxhaven; but this voyage was to be made; I am too poor a man to suffer my health to forfeit the money that is to be got by it. Hark! what was that?'
He leaned his head over the cot, straining his hearing with a nervous fluttering of his emaciated fingers. It was miserable to see how white the skin of his sunken cheeks showed against the whiteness of the canvas of his cot.
'I heard nothing,' I answered.
'It was the noise of a blow,' he exclaimed. 'Pray go and see if anything is wrong,' he added, speaking out of his habit of giving orders, and with a peremptoriness that forced a smile from me as I went to the door.
I made my way through the house on to the deck, and looked about me, but it was the same scene to stare at and hearken to that I had viewed before: the same thunder and shriek of wind, the same clouding of the forward part of the barque in foam, the same miserable dismal picture of water flashing from bulwark to bulwark, of high green frothing seas towering past the line of the rail as the vessel swung in a smother of seething yeast into the trough.
I caught sight of a long hencoop abaft the structure in which the sailors had lived, with the red gleam of a cockscomb betwixt a couple of the bars, and guessing that the wretched inmates must, by this time, be in sore need of food and water, I very cautiously made my way to the coop, holding on by something at every step. The coop was, indeed, full of poultry, but all lay drowned.
I returned to the deck-house and mounted on top of it, where I should be able to obtain a good view of as much of the ocean as was exposed, and where also I should be out of the wet which, on the main deck, rolled with weight enough at times to sweep a man off his legs. The roof of the house, if I may so term it, was above the rail, and the whole fury of the gale swept across it. I never could have guessed at the hurricane-force of the wind while standing on the deck beneath. It was impossible to face it; if I glanced but one instant to windward my eyes seemed to be blown into my head.
I had not gained that elevation above a minute when I heard a sharp rattling aloft, and, looking upwards, I perceived that the main royal had blown loose. For the space of a breath or two it made the rattling noise that had called my attention to it, then the whole bladder-like body of it was swept in a flash away from the yard, and nothing remained but a whip or two streaming straight out like white hair from the spar. A moment later the maintopgallantsail, that had been, no doubt, hastily and badly furled, was blown out of the gaskets. I thought to see it go as the royal had, but while I watched, waiting for the flight of the rags of it down into the leeward gloom of the sky, the mast snapped off at the cap at the instant of the sail bursting and disappearing like a gush of mist, and down fell the whole mass of hamper to a little below the stay, under which it madly swung, held by its gear.
This disaster, comparatively trifling as it was, gave the whole fabric a most melancholy, wrecked look. It affected me in a manner I should not have thought possible in one who knew so much about the sea and shipwreck as I. It impressed me as an omen of approaching dissolution. 'What, in God's name, can save us?' I remember thinking, as I brought my eyes away from the two broken masts, swinging and spearing high up under the smoke-coloured, compacted, apparently stirless heaps of vapour stretching from sea-line to sea-line. 'What put together by mortal hands can go on resisting this ceaseless, tremendous beating?' and as I thus thought the vessel, with a wild sweep of her bow, smote a giant surge rushing laterally at her, and a whole green sea broke roaring over the forecastle, making every timber in her tremble with a volcanic thrill, and entirely submerging the forepart in white waters, out of which she soared with a score of cataracts flying in smoke from her sides.
I looked for the flag that Helga and I had half-masted a little while before; it had as utterly disappeared from betwixt its toggles as though the bunting had been ripped up and down by a knife. As I was in the act of dragging myself along to the ladder to go below, I spied a sort of smudge oozing out of the iron-hued thickness past the head of a great sea whose arching peak was like a snow-clad hill. I crouched down to steady myself, and presently what I had at first thought to be some dark shadow of cloud upon the near horizon grew into the proportions of a large ship, running dead before the gale under a narrow band of main-topsail.
She was heading to pass under our stern, and rapidly drew out, and in a few minutes I had her clear—clean and bright as a new painting against the background of shadow, along whose dingy, misty base the ocean line was washing in flickering green heights. She was a large steam frigate, clearly a foreigner, for I do not know that our country had a ship of the kind afloat at the time. She had a white band broken by ports, and the black and gleaming defences of her bulwarks were crowned with stowed hammocks. Her topgallant-masts were housed, and the large cross-trees and huge black tops and wide spread of shrouds gave her a wonderfully heavy, massive ship-of-war look aloft. The band of close-reefed main-topsail had the glare of foam as it swung majestically from one sea-line to the other, slowly swaying across the dark and stooping heaven with a noble and solemn rhythm of movement. I never could have imagined a sight to more wholly fascinate my gaze. Always crouching low, I watched her under the shelter of my hands locked upon my brow. I beheld nothing living aboard of her. She came along as though informed by some spirit and government of her own. As her great stem sank to the figure-head, there arose a magnificent boiling, a mountainous cloud of froth on either bow of her, and the roar of those riven seas seemed to add a deeper tone of thunder to the gale. All was taut aboard—every rope like a ruled line—different, indeed, from our torn and wrecked and trailing appearance on high! She swept past within a quarter of a mile of us, and what pen could convey the incredible power suggested by that great fabric as her stern lifted to the curl of the enormous Atlantic surge, and the whole ship rushed forward on the hurling froth of the sea with an electric velocity that brought the very heart into one's throat.
She was a mere smudge again—this time to leeward—in a few minutes. I could only stare at her. Our flag had blown away, I was without power to signal, and, even if I had been able to communicate our condition of distress, what help could she have offered? What could she have done for us in such a sea as was now running? Yet the mere sight of her had heartened me. She made me feel that help could never be wanting in an ocean so ploughed by keels as the Atlantic.
I crawled down on to the quarter-deck, and returned to the Captain's cabin. The poor man at once fell with feverish eagerness to questioning me. I told him honestly that the maintopgallant-mast had carried away while I was on deck, but that there was nothing else wrong that I could distinguish; that the barque was still making a noble fight, though there were times when the seas broke very fiercely and dangerously over the forecastle.
He wagged his head with a gesture of distress, crying: 'So it is! so it is! One spar after another, and thus may we go to pieces!'
I told him of the great steam frigate that had passed, but to this piece of news he listened with a vacant look, and apparently could think of nothing but his spars. He asked in a childish, fretful way how long Helga had been below, and I answered him stoutly, 'Not nearly long enough for sleep.'
'Ay,' cried he, 'but the barque needs to be pumped, sir.'
'Your daughter will work the better for rest,' said I; and then looking at my watch, I found it was time to give him his physic.
He exclaimed, looking at the wineglass, 'There is no virtue in this stuff! The sufferer can make but one use of it.' And, still preserving a manner of curious childishness, he emptied the contents of the glass over the edge of his cot on to the deck, and, as he swung, lay watching the mess of it on the floor with a smile. I guessed that expostulation would be fruitless, and, indeed, having but very little faith myself in any sort of physic, I secretly applauded his behaviour.
I sat down upon the locker, and leaning my back against the bulkhead, endeavoured, by conversation, to bring a cheerful look to his countenance; but his mood of depression was not to be conquered. At times he would ramble a little, quote passages from Danish plays in his native tongue, then pause with his head on one side, as though waiting for me to applaud what he forgot I did not understand.
'How fine is this from "Palnatoke"!' he would cry, or, 'Hark to this from that noble performance "Hacon Yarl"! Ah, it is England alone can match Oehlenschläger.'
I could only watch him mutely. Then he would break away to bewail his spars again, and to cry out that Helga would be left penniless, would be a poor beggar-girl, if his ship foundered.
'But is not theAnineinsured?' said I.
'Yes,' he answered; 'but not by me. I was obliged to borrow money upon her, and she is insured by the man who lent me the money.'
'But you have an interest in the cargo, Captain Nielsen?'
'Ay,' cried he, 'and that I insured; but what will it be worth to my poor little Helga?' And he hid his face in his hands and rocked himself.
However, he presently grew somewhat composed, and certainly more rational, and after awhile I found myself talking about Tintrenale, my home and associations, my lifeboat excursions, and the like; and then we conversed upon the course that was to be adopted should the weather moderate and find us still afloat. 'We should be able to do nothing,' he said, 'without assistance from a passing ship,' in the sense of obtaining a few sailors to work the barque; or a steamer might come along that would be willing to give us a tow.
'The Land's End cannot be far off,' said he.
'No,' said I, 'not if this gale means to drop to-day. But it will be far enough off if it is to go on blowing.'
He inquired what I made the drift to be, and then calculated that the English coast would now be bearing about east-north-east, sixty miles distant. 'Let the wind chop round,' cried he, with a gleam in his sunken eye, 'and you and Helga would have theAninein the Channel before midnight.'
We continued to talk in this strain, and he seemed to forget the wretchedness of our situation; then suddenly he called out to know the time, abruptly breaking away from what he was saying.
'Hard upon eleven o'clock,' said I.
'This will not do!' he cried. 'The barque, as we talk, is filling under our feet. The well should be sounded. Helga must be called. I beseech you to call Helga,' he repeated nervously, smiting the side of his cot with his clenched hand. 'Ah, God!' he added, 'that I should be without the power to move!'
'I will sound the well,' said I. 'Should I find an increase, I will arouse your daughter.'
'Go, I beg of you!' he cried, in high notes. 'The barque seems sodden to me. She does not lift and fall as she did.'
I guessed this to be imagination; but the mere fancy of such a thing being true frightened me also, and I hastily went out. I dried the rod and chalked it as Helga had, and, watching my chance, dropped it, and found five inches of water above the level our last spell at the pump had left in the hold. I was greatly startled, and to make sure that my first cast was right, I sounded a second time, and sure enough the rod showed five inches, as before. I hastened with the news to the Captain.
'I knew it! I feared it!' he cried, his voice shrill with a very ecstasy of hurry, anxiety, and sense of helplessness that worked in him. 'Call Helga!—lose not an instant—run, I beg you will run!'
'But run where?' cried I. 'Where does the girl sleep?'
'Go down the hatchway in the deck-house,' he shouted in shrill accents, as though bent upon putting into this moment the whole of his remaining slender stock of vitality. 'There are four cabins under this deck. Hers is the aftermost one on the starboard side. Don't delay! If she does not instantly answer, enter and arouse her.' And as I sped from the cabin I heard him crying that he knew by the motions of the ship she was filling rapidly, and that she would go down on a sudden like lead.
It was a black, square trap of hatchway into which I looked a moment before putting my legs over. There was a short flight of almost perpendicular steps conducting to the lower deck. On my descending I found the place so dark that I was forced to halt till my eyes should grow used to the obscurity. There was a disagreeable smell of cargo down here, and such a heart-shaking uproar of straining timbers, of creaking bulkheads, of the thumps of seas, and the muffled, yearning roar of the giant waters sweeping under the vessel, that for a little while I stood as one utterly bewildered.
Soon, however, I managed to distinguish outlines, and, with outstretched hands and wary legs, made my way to the cabin Captain Nielsen had indicated, and beat upon the door. There was no response. I beat again, listening, scarcely thinking, perhaps, that the girl would require a voice as keen as a boatswain's pipe to thread the soul-confounding and brain-muddling clamour in this after-deck of the storm-beaten barque. 'He bade me enter,' thought I, 'and enter I must if the girl is to be aroused;' and I turned the handle of the door and walked in.
Helga lay, attired as she had left the deck, in an upper bunk, through the porthole of which the daylight, bright with the foam, came and went upon her face as the vessel at one moment buried the thick glass of the scuttle in the green blindness of the sea, and then lifted it weeping and gleaming into the air. Her head was pillowed on her arm; her hair in the weak light showed as though touched by a dull beam of the sun. Her eyes were sealed—their long lashes put a delicate shading under them; her white face wore a sweet expression of happy serenity, and I could believe that some glad vision was present to her. Her lips were parted in the expression of a smile.
There was a feeling in me as of profanity in this intrusion, and of wrongdoing in the obligation forced upon me of waking her from a peaceful, pleasant, all-important repose to face the bitter hardships and necessities of that time of tempest. But for my single pair of arms the pump was too much, and she must be aroused. I lightly put my hand upon hers, and her smile was instantly more defined, as though my action were coincident with some phase of her dream. I pressed her hand; she sighed deeply, looked at me, and instantly sat up with a little frown of confusion.
'Your father begged me to enter and arouse you,' said I. 'I was unable to make you hear by knocking. I have sounded the well, and there is an increase of five inches.'
'Ah!' she exclaimed, and sprang lightly out of her bunk.
In silence and with amazing despatch, seeing that a few seconds before she was in a deep sleep, she put on her sea-helmet, whipped a handkerchief round her neck, and was leading the way to the hatch on buoyant feet.
On gaining the deck I discovered that the wrecked appearance of the ship aloft had been greatly heightened during my absence below by the foretopsail having been blown into rags. It was a single sail, and the few long strips of it which remained blowing out horizontally from the yards, stiff as crowbars, gave an indescribable character of forlornness to the fabric. Helga glanced aloft, and immediately perceived that the maintopgallant-mast had been wrecked, but said nothing, and in a minute the pair of us were hard at work.
I let go the brake only when my companion was too exhausted to continue; but now, on sounding the well, we found that our labours had not decreased the water to the same extent as heretofore. It was impossible, however, to converse out of shelter; moreover, a fresh danger attended exposure on deck, for, in addition to the wild sweeping of green seas forward, to the indescribably violent motions of the barque, which threatened to break our heads or our limbs for us, to fling us bruised and senseless against the bulwarks if we relaxed for a moment our hold of what was next us—in addition to this, I say, there was now the deadly menace of the topgallant-mast, with its weight of yards, fiercely swinging and beating right over our heads, and poised there by the slender filaments of its rigging, which might part and let the whole mass fall at any moment.
We entered the deck-house, and paused for a little while in its comparative silence and stagnation to exchange a few words.
'The water is gaining upon the ship, Mr. Tregarthen,' said Helga.
'I fear so,' I answered.
'If it should increase beyond the control of the pumps, what is to be done?' she asked. 'We are without boats.'
'Whatcanbe done?' cried I. 'We shall have to make some desperate thrust for life—contrive something out of the hencoop—spare booms—whatever is to be found.'
'What chance—what chance have we in such a sea as this?' she exclaimed, clasping her hands and looking up at me with eyes large with emotion, though I found nothing of fear in the shining of them or in the working of her pale face.
I had no answer to make. Indeed, it put a sort of feeling into the blood like madness itself even totalkof a raft, with the sound in our ears of the sea that was raging outside.
'And then there is my father,' she continued, 'helpless—unable to move—how is he to be rescued? I would lose my life to save his. But what is to be done if this gale continues?'
'His experience should be of use to us,' said I. 'Let us go and talk with him.'
She opened the door of the berth, halted, stared a minute, then turned to me with her forefinger upon her lip. I peered, and found the poor man fast asleep. I believed at first that he was dead, so still he lay, so easy was his countenance, so white too; but after watching a moment, I spied his breast rising and falling. Helga drew close and stood viewing him. A strange and moving sight was that swinging cot—the revelation of the deathlike head within, the swaying boyish figure of the daughter gazing with eyes of love, pity, distress at the sleeping, haggard face, as it came and went.
She sat down beside me. 'I shall lose him soon,' said she. 'But what is killing him? He was white and poorly yesterday; but not ill as he is now.'
It would have been idle to attempt any sort of encouragement. The truth was as plain to her as to me. I could find nothing better to say than that the gale might cease suddenly, that a large steam-frigate had passed us a little while before, that some vessel was sure to heave into sight when the weather moderated, and that meanwhile our efforts must be directed to keeping the vessel afloat. I could not again talk of the raft; it was enough to feel the sickening tossing of the ship under us to render the thought ofthatremedy for our state horrible and hopeless.
The time slowly passed. It was drawing on to one o'clock. I went on deck to examine the helm and to judge of the weather; then sounded the well, but found no material increase of water. The barque, however, was rolling so furiously that it was almost impossible to get a correct cast. Before re-entering the house, I sent a look round from the shelter of the weather-bulwark, to observe what materials were to be obtained for a raft should the weather suffer us to launch such a thing, and the barque founder spite of our toil. There was a number of spare booms securely lashed on top of the seamen's deck-house and galley, and these, with the hencoop and hatch-covers, and the little casks or scuttle-butts out of which the men drank would provide us with what we needed. But the contemplation of death itself was not so dreadful to me as the prospect which this fancy of a raft opened. I hung crouching under the lee of the tall bulwark, gnawing my lip as thought after thought arose in me, and digging my finger-nails into the palms of my hands. The suddenness of it all! The being this time yesterday safe ashore, without the dimmest imagination of what was to come—the anguish of my poor old mother—the perishing, as I did not doubt, of my brave comrades of the lifeboat—then, this vessel slowly taking in water, dying as it were by inches, and as doomed as though Hell's curse were upon her, unless the gale should cease and help come!
I could not bear it. I started to my feet with a sense of madness upon me, with a wild and dreadful desire in me to show mercy to myself by plunging and by silencing the delirious fancies of my brain in the wide sweep of seething waters that rushed from the very line of the rail of the barque as she leaned to her beam-ends in the thunderous trough of that instant. It was a sort of hysteria that did not last; yet might I have found temptation and time in the swift passage of it to have destroyed myself, but for God's hand upon me, as I choose to believe, and to be ever thankful for.
How passed the rest of this the first day of my wild and dangerous adventure, of Helga's and my first day of suffering, peril, and romantic experience, I cannot clearly recall. A few impressions only survive. I remember returning to the deck-house and finding the captain still sleeping. I remember conversing with Helga, who looked me very earnestly in the face when I entered, and who, by some indefinable influence of voice and eye, coaxed me into speaking of my fit of horror on deck. I remember that she left me to obtain some food, which, it seems, was kept in one of the cabins below, and that she returned with a tin of preserved meat, a little glass jar of jam, a tin of biscuits, and a bottle of red wine like to what we had before drunk—a very pleasant, well-flavoured claret; that all the while we ate, her father slept, which made her happy, as she said he needed rest, not having closed his eyes for three nights and days, though it was wonderful to me that he should have fallen asleep in such a mood of excitement and of consternation as I had left him in; but as to his slumbering amid that uproar of straining timbers and flying waters, it is enough to say that he was a seaman.
I also recollect that throughout the remainder of the day we worked the pump at every two hours or thereabouts; but the water was unmistakably gaining upon the barque, and to keep her free would have needed the incessant plying of the pumps—both pumps at once—by gangs of fellows who could relieve one another and rest between. Helga told me that her father had given orders for a windmill pump to be rigged, Scandinavian fashion, but that there had been some delay, so the barque sailed without it. I said that no windmill pump would have stood up half an hour in such a gale of wind as was blowing; but all the same, I bitterly lamented that there was nothing of the sort aboard, for these windmill arrangements keep the pumps going by the revolution of their sails, and such a thing must have proved inexpressibly valuable when the weather should moderate, so as to allow us to erect it.
The Captain slept far into the afternoon, but I could not observe when he awoke that he was the better for his long spell of rest. I entered his cabin fresh from a look round on deck, and found him just awake, with his eyes fixed upon his daughter, who sat slumbering upon the locker, with her back against the cabin-wall and her pale face bowed upon her breast. He immediately attacked me with questions, delivered in notes so high, penetrating, and feverish with hurry and alarm that they awoke Helga. We had to tell him the truth—I mean, that the water was gaining, but slowly, so that it must conquer us if the gale continued, yet we might still hope to find a chance of our lives by keeping the pump going. He broke into many passionate exclamations of distress and grief, and then was silent, with the air of one who abandons hope.
'There are but two, and one of them a girl,' I heard him say, lifting his eyes to the deck above as he spoke.
The night was a dreadful time to look forward to. While there was daylight, while one could see, one's spirits seemed to retain a little buoyancy; but, speaking for myself, I dreaded the effect upon my mind of a second interminable time of blackness, filled with the horrors of the groaning and howling gale, of the dizzy motion of the tormented fabric, of the heart-subduing noises of waters pouring in thunder and beating in volcanic shocks against and over the struggling vessel.
Well, there came round the hour of nine o'clock by my watch. Long before, after returning from a spirit-breaking spell of toil at the pump, we had lighted the deck-house and binnacle lamps, had eaten our third meal that day to answer for tea or supper, and at Helga's entreaty I had lain down upon the deck-house locker to sleep for an hour or so if I could, while she went to watch by her father and to keep an eye upon the ship by an occasional visit to the deck.
We had arranged that she should awaken me at nine, that we should then apply ourselves afresh to the pump, that she should afterwards take my place upon the locker till eleven, I, meanwhile, seeing to her father and to the barque, and that we should thus proceed in these alternations throughout the night. It was now nine o'clock. I awoke, and was looking at my watch when Helga entered from the deck. She came up to me and took my hands, and cried:
'Mr. Tregarthen, there are some stars in the sky. I believe the gale is breaking!'
Only those who have undergone the like of such experiences as these I am endeavouring to relate can conceive of the rapture, the new life, her words raised in me.
'I praise God for your good news!' I cried, and made a step to the barometer to observe its indications.
The rise of the mercury was a quarter of an inch, and this had happened since a little after seven. Yet, being something of a student of the barometer in my little way, I could have heartily wished the rise much more gradual. It might betoken nothing more than a drier quality of gale, with nothing of the old fierceness wanting. But then, to be sure, it might promise a shift, so that we stood a chance of being blown homewards, which would signify an opportunity of preservation that must needs grow greater as we approached the English Channel.
I went with Helga on deck, and instantly saw the stars shining to windward betwixt the edges of clouds which were flying across our mastheads with the velocity of smoke. The heaven of vapour that had hung black and brooding over the ocean for two days was broken up; where the sky showed it was pure, and the stars shone in it with a frosty brilliance. The atmosphere had wonderfully cleared; the froth glanced keenly upon the hurling shadows of the seas, and I believed I could follow the clamorous mountainous breast of the ocean to the very throb of the horizon, over which the clouds were pouring in loose masses, scattering scud-like as they soared, but all so plentiful that the heavens were thick with the flying wings.
But there was no sobering of the wind. It blew with its old dreadful violence, and the half-smothered barque climbed and plunged and rolled amid clouds of spray in a manner to make the eyes reel after a minute of watching her. Yet the mere sight of the stars served as a sup of cordial to us. We strove at the pump, and then Helga lay down; and in this manner the hours passed till about four o'clock in the morning, when there happened a sensible decrease in the wind. At dawn it was still blowing hard, but long before this, had we had sailors, we should have been able to expose canvas, and start the barque upon her course.
I stood on top of the deck-house watching the dawn break. The bleak gray stole over the frothing sea and turned ashen the curve of every running surge. To windward the ocean-line went twisting like a corkscrew upon the sky and seemed to boil and wash along it as though it were the base of some smoking wall. There was nothing in sight. I searched every quarter with a passionate intensity, but there was nothing to be seen. But now the sea had greatly moderated, and, though the deck still sobbed with wet, it was only at long intervals that the foam flew forwards. The barque looked fearfully wrecked, stranded and sodden. All her rigging was slack, the decks were encumbered with the ends of ropes, the weather side of the mainsail had blown loose and was fluttering in rags, though to leeward the canvas lay furled.
I went on to the quarter deck and sounded the well. Practice had rendered me expert, and the cast, I did not doubt, gave me the true depth, and I felt all the blood in me rush to my heart when I beheld such an indication of increase as was the same as hearing one's funeral knell rung, or of a verdict of death pronounced upon one.
I entered the deck-house with my mind resolved, and seated myself at the table over against where Helga lay sleeping upon the locker, to consider a little before arousing her. She showed very wan, almost haggard, by the morning light; her parted lips were pale, and she wore a restless expression even in her sleep. It might be that my eyes being fixed upon her face aroused her; she suddenly looked at me, and then sat up. Just then a gleam of misty sunshine swept the little windows.
'The bad weather is gone!' she cried.
'It is still too bad for us, though,' said I.
'Does the wind blow from the land?' she asked.
'Ay! and freshly too.'
She was now able to perceive the meaning in my face, and asked me anxiously if anything new had happened to alarm me. I answered by giving her the depth of water I had found in the hold. She clasped her hands and started to her feet, but sat again on my making a little gesture.
'Miss Nielsen,' said I, 'the barque is taking in water very much faster than we shall be able to pump it out. We may go on plying the pump, but the labour can only end in breaking our hearts and wasting precious time that might be employed to some purpose. We must look the truth in the face, and make up our minds to let the vessel go, and to do our best, with God's help, to preserve our lives.'
'What?' she asked in a low voice, that indicated awe rather than fear, and I noticed the little twitch and spasm of her mouth swiftly vanish in an expression of resolution.
'We must go to work,' said I, 'and construct a raft, then get everything in readiness to sway it overboard. The weather may enable us to do this. I pray so. It is our only hope, should nothing to help us come along.'
'But my father?'
'We shall have to get him out of his cabin on to the raft.'
'But how? But how?' she cried with an air of wildness. 'He cannot move!'
'If we are to be saved, he must be saved, at all events,' said I. 'What, then, can be done but to lower him in his cot, as he lies, on to the deck and so drag him to the gangway and sling him on to the raft by a tackle?'
'Yes,' she said, 'that can be done. It will have to be done.' She reflected, with her hands tightly locked upon her brow. 'How long do you think,' she asked, 'will theAnineremain afloat if we leave the pumps untouched?'
'Your father will know,' said I. 'Let us go to him.'
Captain Nielsen sat erect in his cot munching a biscuit.
'Ha!' he cried as we entered. 'We are to have pleasant weather. There was some sunshine upon that port just now. What says the barometer, Mr. Tregarthen?' then contracting his brows while he peered at his daughter as though he had not obtained a view of her before, he exclaimed, 'What is the matter, Helga? What have you come to tell me?'
'Father,' she answered, sinking her head a little and so looking at him through her eyelashes, 'Mr. Tregarthen believes, and I cannot doubt it, for there is the sounding-rod to tell the story, that water is fast entering theAnine, and that we must lose no time to prepare to leave her.'
'What!' he almost shrieked, letting fall his biscuit and grasping the edge of the cot with his emaciated hands, and turning his body to us from the waist, leaving his legs in their former posture as though he were paralyzed from the hip down. 'TheAninesinking? prepare to leave her? Why, you have neglected the pump, then!'
'No, Captain, no,' I answered. 'Our toil has been as regular as we have had strength for. Already your daughter has done too much; look at her!' I cried, pointing to the girl. 'Judge with your father's eye how much longer she is capable of holding out!'
'The pump must be manned!' he exclaimed, in such another shrieking note as he had before delivered. 'TheAninemust not sink; she is all I have in the world. My child will be left to starve! Oh, she has strength enough. Helga, the gentleman does not know your strength and courage! And you, sir,—you, Mr. Tregarthen—Ach! God! You will not let your courage fail you—you who came here on a holy and beautiful errand—no, no! you will not let your courage fail you, now that the wind is ceasing and the sun has broken forth, and the worst is past?'
Helga looked at me.
'Captain Nielsen,' said I, 'if there were a dozen of us we might hope to keep your ship long enough afloat to give us a chance of being rescued; but not twelve, not fifty men could save her for you. The tempest has made a sieve of her, and what we have now to do is to construct a raft while we have time and opportunity, and to be ceaseless in our prayer that the weather may suffer us to launch it and to exist upon it until we are succoured.'
He gazed at me with a burning eye, and breathed as though he must presently suffocate.
'Oh, but for a few hours' use of my limbs!' he cried, lifting his trembling hands. 'I would show you both how the will can be made to master the body's weakness. Must I lie here without power?' and as he said these words he grasped again the edge of his cot, and writhed so that I was almost prepared to see him heave himself out; but the agony of the wrench was too much; his face grew whiter still, he groaned low, and lay back, with his brow glistening with sweat-drops.
'Father!' cried Helga, 'bear with us! Indeed it is as Mr. Tregarthen says. I feared it last night, and this morning has made me sure. We must not think of the ship, but of ourselves, and of you, father dear—of you, my poor, dear father!' She broke off with a sob.
I waited until he had recovered a little from the torment he had caused himself, and then gently, but with a manner that let him know I was resolved, began to reason with him. He lay apparently listening apathetically; but his nostrils, wide with breathing, and the hurried motions of his breast were warrant enough of the state of his mind. While I addressed him Helga went out, and presently returned with the sounding-rod, dark with the wet fresh from the well. He turned his feverish eyes upon it, but merely shook his head and lightly wrung his hands.
'Father, you see it for yourself!' she cried.
'Miss Nielsen,' said I, 'we are wasting precious minutes. Will your father tell you what depth of water his ship must take in to founder?'
He, poor fellow, made no response, but continued to stare at the rod in her hand as though his intelligence on a sudden was all abroad.
'Shall we go to work?' said I. She looked at her father wistfully. 'Come,' I exclaimed, 'weknowwe are right. We must make an effort to save ourselves. Are not our lives our first consideration?'
'I stepped to the door; as I put my hand to it, Captain Nielsen cried: 'If you do not save the ship, how will you save yourselves?'
'We must at once put some sort of raft together,' said I, halting.
'A raft! in this sea!' he clasped his hands and uttered a low mocking laugh that was more shocking in him than the maddest explosion of temper could have shown.
I could no longer linger to hear his objections. Helga might be very dear to him, but his ship stood first in his mind, and I had no idea of breaking my heart at the pump and then of being drowned after all. My hope was indeed a forlorn one, but it was a hope for all that; whereas I knew that the ship would give us no chance whatever. Besides, our making ready for the worst would not signify that we should abandon the vessel until her settling forced us over the side. And was the gentle, heroic Helga to perish without a struggle on my part, because her father clung with a sick man's craziness—which in health he might be quick to denounce—to this poor tempest-strained barque that was all he had in the world?
I went out and on to the deck, and was standing thinking a minute of the raft and how we should set about it, when Helga joined me.
'He is too ill to be reasonable,' she exclaimed.
'Yes,' said I, 'but we will save him and ourselves too, if we can. Let us lose no more time. Do you observe that the wind has sensibly decreased even while we have been talking in your father's cabin? The sky has opened more yet to windward, and the seas are running with much less weight.'
As I spoke the sun flashed into a rift in the vapour sweeping down the eastern heaven, and the glance of the foam to the splendour, and the sudden brightening of the cloud-shadowed sea into blue, animated me like some new-born hope, and was almost as invigorating to my spirits as though my eyes had fallen upon the gleam of a sail heading our way.
I should but weary you to relate, step by step, how we went to work to construct a raft. The motion of the deck was still very violent, but it found us now as seasoned as though we had kept the sea for years; and, indeed, the movement was becoming mere child's-play after the tossing of the night. A long hour of getting such booms as we wanted off the sailors' house on to the deck, and of collecting other materials for our needs, was not, by a very great deal, so exhausting as ten minutes at the pump. We broke off a little after nine o'clock to get some food, and to enable Helga to see to her father; and now the cast we took with the sounding-rod advised us, with most bitter significance of indication, that, even though my companion and I had strength to hold to the pump for a whole watch—I mean for four hours at a spell—the water would surely, if but a little more slowly, vanquish us in the end. Indeed, there was no longer question that the vessel had, in some parts of her, been seriously strained; and though I held my peace, my sincere conviction was that, unless some miracle arrested the ingress of the water, she would not be afloat at five o'clock that day.
By one we had completed the raft, and it lay against the main hatch, ready to be swayed over the side and launched. I had some small knowledge of boat-building, having acquired what I knew from a small yard down past the lifeboat-house at Tintrenale, where boats were built, and where I had killed many an hour, pipe in mouth, watching and asking questions, and even lending a hand; and in constructing this raft I found my slender boat-building experiences very useful. First we made a frame of four stout studdingsail booms, which we securely lashed to four empty casks, two of which lay handy to our use, while of the other two, one we found in the galley, half full of slush, and the other in the cabin below where the provisions were stored. We decked the frame with booms, of which there was a number, as I have previously said, stacked on top of the sailors' deck-house, and to this we securely lashed planking, to which we attached some hatch-covers, binding the whole with turn upon turn of rope. To improve our chance of being seen, I provided for setting up a topgallant-studdingsail boom as a mast, at the head of which we should be able to show a colour. I also took care to hedge the sides with a little bulwark of life-lines lest the raft should be swept. There were many interstices in this fabric fit for holding a stock of provisions and water.
I had no fear of its not floating high, nor of its not holding together: but it would be impossible to express the heaviness of heart with which I laboured at this thing. The raft had always been the most dreadful nightmare of the sea to my imagination. The stories of the sufferings it had been the theatre of were present to my mind as I worked, and again and again they would cause me to break off and send a despairing look round; but never a sail showed; the blankness was that of the heavens.
We had half-masted a second Danish ensign after coming out from breaking our fast, and one needed but to look at the breezy rippling of its large folds to know that the wind was rapidly becoming scant. By one o'clock, indeed, it was blowing no more than a pleasant air of wind, still out of the north-east. The stormy, smoke-like clouds of the morning were gone, and the sky was now mottled by little heaps of prismatic vapour that sailed slowly under a high delicate shading of cloud, widely broken, and showing much clear liquid blue, and suffering the sun to shine very steadily. There was a long swell rolling out of the north-east; but the brows were so wide apart that there was no violence whatever in the swaying of the barque upon it. The wind crisped these swinging folds of water, and the surface of the ocean scintillated with lines of small seas feathering, with merry curlings, into foam. But it was fine-weather water, and the barometer had risen greatly, and I could now believe that there was nothing more in the rapidity of its indications than a promise of a pleasant day and of light winds.
I could have done nothing without Helga. Her activity, her intelligence, her spirit, were amazing, not indeed only because she was a girl, but because she was a girl who had undergone a day and two frightful nights of peril and distress, who had slept but little, whose labours at the pump might have exhausted a seasoned sailor. She seemed to know exactly what to do, was wise in every suggestion, and I could never glance at her face without finding the sweetness of it rendered noble by the heroism of the heart that showed in her firm mouth, her composed countenance, and steadfast, determined gaze.
At times we would break off to sound the well, and never without finding a fresh nimbleness coming into our hands and feet, a wilder desire of hurry penetrating our spirits from the assurance of the rod. Steadily, inch by inch, the water was gaining, and already at this hour of one o'clock it was almost easy to guess the depth of it by the sluggishness of the vessel's rolling, by the drowning character of her languid recovery from the slant of the swell. I felt tolerably confident, however, that she would keep afloat for some hours yet, and God knows we could not have too much time granted to us, for there was much to be done; the raft to be launched and provisioned; and the hardest part was yet to come, I mean the bringing of the sick captain from his cabin and hoisting him over the side.
At one o'clock we broke off again to refresh ourselves with food and drink, and Helga saw to her father. For my part I would not enter his berth. I dreaded his expostulations and reproaches, and, indeed, I may say that I shrank from even the sight of him, so grievous were his white face and dying manner—so depressing to me, who could not look at the raft and then turn my eyes upon the ocean without guessing that I was as fully a dying man as he, and that, when the sun set this night, it might go down for ever upon us.
There was but one way of getting the raft over, and that was by the winch and a tackle at the mainyard-arm. Helga said she would take the tackle aloft, but I ran my eye over her boy-clad figure with a smile, and said 'No.' She was, indeed, a better sailor than I, but it would be strange indeed if I was unable to secure a block to a yardarm. We braced in the mainyard until the arm of it was fair over the gangway, and I then took the tackle aloft and attached the block by the tail of it.
I lay over the yard for a minute or two while I looked round; but the sea brimmed unbroken towards the sky, and I descended again and again shuddering without control over myself, as I gazed at the little fabric of the raft and contrasted it with the size of the ship that was slowly foundering, and then with the great sea upon whose surface it would presently be afloat—the only object, perhaps, under the eye of heaven for leagues and leagues!
Our business now was to get the raft over the side. I should have to fatigue and perhaps perplex you with technicalities exactly to explain our management of it. Enough if I say that, by hooking on the lower block of the tackle to ropes which formed slings for the raft, and by taking the hauling part to the winch, we very easily swayed the structure clear of the bulwark-rail—for you must know that the winch, with its arrangements of handles, cogs, and pawls, is a piece of shipboard mechanism with which a couple of persons may do as much as a dozen might be able to achieve using their arms only.
When the raft was high enough Helga stood by the winch ready to slacken away on my giving the word of command; while I went to a line which held the fabric over the deck. This line I eased off until the raft had swung fairly over the water, and then called to Helga to slacken away, and the raft sank, and in a minute or two was water-borne, riding upon the swell alongside, and buoyed by the casks even higher above the surface than I had dared hope.
'Now, Miss Nielsen!' cried I.
'Oh! pray call me Helga,' she broke in; 'it is my name: it is short! I seem to answer to it more readily, and in this time, this dreadful time, I could wish to have it, and none other!'
'Then, Helga,' said I, even in such a moment as this feeling my heart warm to the brave, good, gentle little creature as I pronounced the word, 'we must provision the raft without delay. Our essential needs will be fresh water and biscuit. What more have you in your provision-room below?'
'Come with me!' said she, and we ran into the deck-house and descended the hatch, leaving the raft securely floating alongside, not only in the grip of the yardarm tackle, which the swaying of the vessel had fully overhauled, but in the hold of the line with which we had slacked the structure over the rail.
It was still dark enough below; but when we opened the door of the berth in which, as I have told you, the cabin provisions were stowed, we found the sunshine upon the scuttle or porthole, and the apartment lay clear in the light. In about twenty minutes, and after some three or four journeys, we had conveyed on deck as much provisions as might serve to keep three persons for about a month: cans of meat, some hams, several tins of biscuit, cheese, and other matters, which I need not catalogue. But we had started the fresh water in the scuttle-butts that they might be emptied to serve as floats for the raft, and now we had to find a cask or receptacle for drinking-water, and to fill it, too, from the stock in the hold. Here I should have been at a loss but for Helga, who knew where the barque's fresh water was stowed. Again we entered the cabin or provision-room, and returned with some jars whose contents we emptied—vinegar, I believe it was, but the hurry my mind was then in rendered it weak in its reception of small impressions; these we filled with fresh water from a tank conveniently stowed in the main hatchway, and as I filled them Helga carried them on deck.
While we were below at this work I bade her listen.
'Yes, I hear it!' she cried: 'it is the water in the hold.'
With every sickly lean of the barque you could hear the water inside of her seething among the cargo as it cascaded now to port and now to starboard.
'Helga, she cannot live long,' said I. 'I believe, but for the hissing of the water, we should hear it bubbling into her.'
I handed her up the last of the jars, and grasped the coaming of the hatch to clamber on to the deck, for the cargo came high. As I did this, something seemed to touch and claw me upon the back, and a huge black rat of the size of a kitten leapt from my shoulder on to the deck and vanished in a breath. Helga screamed, and indeed, for the moment, my own nerves were not a little shaken, for I distinctly felt the wire-like whisker of the horrible creature brush my cheek as it sprang from my shoulder.
'If there be truth in the proverb,' said I, 'we need no surer hint of what is coming than the behaviour of that rat.'
The girl shuddered, and gazed, with eyes bright with alarm, into the hold, recoiling as she did so. I believe the prospect of drifting about on a raft was less terrible to her than the idea of a second rat leaping upon one or the other of us.
It was necessary that we should have everything in readiness before we carried poor Captain Nielsen out of his cabin. I unshipped the gangway, and watching an opportunity as the swell lifted the raft against the side of the barque stooping to it, I sprang; but I could not have imagined the weight and volume of the swell until I had gained the frail platform. Indeed, one could feel that the wrath kindled by the tempest still lived in the deep bosom of the ocean. It was like a stern, revengeful breathing; but the wind was light, and the water but delicately brushed, and it was easy to foresee that if no more wind blew the swell would have greatly flattened down by sunset. Yet the manner in which the hull and the raft came together terrified me with a notion of our contrivance going to pieces. I called to Helga, as she threw to me or handed the several parcels and articles we had collected upon the deck, that there was not a moment of time to waste—that we must get her father on to the raft without delay; and then, when I had hastily stowed the last of the things, I sprang aboard again, and was going straight to the Captain's berth, when I suddenly stopped, and exclaimed: 'First, how is he to be removed?'
She eyed me piteously. Perhaps her seamanship did not reach tothatheight; or maybe her fear that we should cause her father pain impaired her perception of what was to be done.
'Let me think, now,' said I. 'It is certain that he must be lowered to the deck as he lies in his cot. Does he swing by hooks? I did not observe.'
'Yes,' she answered, 'what you would call the clews come together to a point as in a hammock, and spread at the foot and head.'
'Then there must be iron eyes in the upper deck,' cried I, 'to receive the hooks. Now, see here! we shall have to get a sling at each end of the cot, attach a line to it, the ends of which we will pass through the eyes, and when this is done we will cut away the clews, and so lower him. Yes, that will do,' said I. 'I have it,' and, looking about me for such a thickness of rope as I needed, I overhauled some fathoms, passed my knife through the length, and together we hastened to the Captain's berth.
'What is it now?' he asked, in a feeble voice, as we entered.
'Everything is ready, Captain Nielsen,' said I, 'there is no time to lose. The cargo is washing about in the hold, and the ship has not another hour of life left in her.'
'What is it that you want?' said he, looking dully at the coil of rope I held in my hand.
'Father, we are here to carry you to the raft.'
'To the raft!' he exclaimed, with an air of bewilderment, and then he added, while I noticed a little colour of temper enter his cheeks. 'I have nothing to do with your raft. It was in your power to save the poorAnine. If she is to founder, I will go down with her.'
So saying, he folded his arms upon his bosom in a posture of resolution, viewing me with all the severity his sickness would suffer his eyes to express. Nevertheless, there was a sort of silliness in the whole manner of him which might have persuaded the most heedless observer that the poor fellow was rapidly growing less and less responsible for his behaviour. Had he been a powerful man, or, indeed, possessed the use of his extremities, I should have dreaded what is termed a 'scene.' As it was, nothing remained but to treat him as a child, to tackle him with all tenderness, but as swiftly as possible, and to get him over the side.
There was a dreadful expression of distress in Helga's face when she looked at him; but her glances at me were very full of assurance that she was of my mind, and that she would approve and be with me in sympathy in whatever I resolved to do. Whipping out my knife, I cut lengths off the rope I held to make slings of. I carried one of these slings to the cot and passed it over the end. The Captain extended his hand, and attempted to thrust me aside. The childlike weakness of that trembling push would, in a time of less wretchedness and peril than this, have unnerved me with pity.
'Bear with me! Be yourself, Captain! Show yourself the true Danish sailor that you are at heart—for Helga's sake!' I exclaimed.
He covered his eyes and sobbed.
I secured the slings to the cot, and, until we lowered him to the deck, he held his face hidden in his hands. I rove two lengths of line through the iron eyes at which the cot slung, in the manner I had described to Helga, and when the weight of the cot was on these lines, we belayed one end, holding by the other. I then passed my knife through the clews, as it would be called, or thin lines which supported the cot, and, going to the rope I had belayed, bade Helga lower her end as I lowered mine, and the cot descended safely to the deck. The girl then came round to the head of the cot, and together we dragged it out of the house on to the deck.
Saving a little wrench when we hauled the cot over the coaming of the deck-house door, the poor man was put to no pain. It was merciful indeed that he should have lain ill in the deck-house, for had he occupied a cabin below I cannot imagine how we should have got him out on to the deck without killing him with the anguish which we should have been forced by our efforts to cause him.
When we had got him to the gangway I sprang on to the raft and caught hold of the block that dangled at the extremity of the yardarm tackle. With this I returned to the barque, and, just as we had got the raft over, so did we sway the poor Captain on to her. I got on to the raft to receive him as Helga lowered the cot. He descended gently, and on my crying, 'Let go!' she swiftly released the line, and the tackle overhauled itself to the roll of the vessel.
I remember exclaiming 'Thank God!' when this job was ended, and I had unhooked the block, as though the worst was over; and indeed, in the mere business of abandoning the barque, the worst had ended with the bestowal of the sick and helpless Captain on the raft. But what was now to begin? My 'Thank God!' seemed to sound like a piece of irony in my heart when I looked from the deep, wet, gleaming side of the leaning hull, waving her wrecked spars in the reddening light of the sun—when I looked from her, I say, to seawards, where the flowing lines of the lifting and falling swell were running bald and foamless into the south-west sky.
Helga came to the gangway and called to know if all were well with her father.
'All is well,' I answered. 'Come now, Helga! There is nothing to detain us. We shall be wise to cast adrift from the barque. She is very much down by the head, and the next dip may be her last.'
'A few minutes cannot signify,' she cried. 'There are one or two things I should like to bring with me. I wish to possess them, if we are preserved.'
'Make haste, then!' I called. She disappeared, and I turned to the Captain. He looked up at me out of his cot with eyes in which all the feverish fire of the morning was quenched.
'Is Helga remaining in the barque?' he asked listlessly.
'God forbid!' cried I. 'She will be with us in a minute or two.'
'It is a cruel desertion,' said he. 'PoorAnine! You were to have been kept afloat!'
It was idle to reason with him. He was clothed as I had found him when I had first seen him—in a waistcoat and serge coat, and a shawl round his neck; but he was without a hat—a thing to be overlooked at such a time as this—and the lower part of him was protected only by the blankets he lay under. There was still time to supply his requirements. I had noticed his wideawake and a long cloak hanging in his berth, and I immediately sprang on board, rushed aft, procured them and returned. Helga was still below. I put the hat on the Captain's head and clasped the cloak over his shoulders, fretting over the girl's absence, for every minute was communicating a deadlier significance to the languid, sickly, dying motions of the fast-drowning hull.
I think about ten minutes had passed since she left the barque's side to go to her cabin, when, bringing my eyes away from the sea, into whose eastern quarter I had been gazing with some wild hope or fancy in me of a sail down there—though it proved no more than a feather-tip of cloud—I saw Helga in the gangway. I say Helga, but for some moments I did not know her. I started and stared as if she had been a ghost. Instead of the boyish figure to which my sight was already used, there stood in the aperture betwixt the bulwarks, which we call the gangway, a girl who looked at least half a head taller than the Helga who had been my associate. I might have guessed at once that this appearance of stature in her was due to her gown, but, as I did not suspect that she had gone to change her dress, her suggestion of increased height completed the astonishment and perplexity with which I regarded her. She stood on the leaning and swaying side of the barque, as perfect a figure of a maiden as mortal eyes could wish to rest on. Her dress was of a dark-blue serge that clung to her: she also wore a cloth jacket, thinly edged about the neck and where it buttoned with fur, and upon her head was a turban-shaped hat of sealskin, the dark glossy shade of which brightened her short hair into a complexion of the palest gold. She held a parcel in her hand, and called to me to take it from her. I did so, and cried:
'You will not be able to jump from the gangway. Get into the fore-chains, and I will endeavour to haul the raft up to you.'
But even as I spoke she grasped her dress, and disclosed her little feet, and with a bound gained the raft as it rose with the swell, yielding on her knees as she struck the platform with the grace that nothing but the teaching of old ocean could have communicated to her limbs.
'Thank God you are here!' I cried, catching her by the hand. 'I was growing uneasy—in another minute I should have sought you.'
She faintly smiled, and then turned eagerly to her father.
'I have my mother's portrait,' said she, pointing to the parcel, 'and her Bible. I would not bring away more. If we are to perish, they will go with us.'
He looked at her with a lack-lustre eye, and in a low voice addressed a few words to her in Danish. She answered in that tongue, glancing down at her dress, and then at me, and added, in English, 'It was time, father. The hard work is over. I may be a girl now;' and looking along the sea she sighed bitterly.
Her father brought his knitted hands together to his brow, and never could I have imagined the like of the look of mental anguish that was on his face as he did this. But what I am here narrating did not occupy above a minute or two. Indeed, a longer delay than this was not to have been suffered if we desired the raft to hold together. I let go the line that held the little structure to the barque, and getting the small studdingsail boom over—that is, the boom we had shipped to serve as a signal-mast—I thrust with it, and, Helga helping me, we got the raft clear of the side of the vessel. The leewardly swell on which we rode did the rest for us and not a little rejoiced was I to find our miserable fabric gradually increasing its distance from theAnine; for if the barque foundered with us close alongside, we stood to be swamped in the vortex, the raft scattered, and ourselves left to drown.
It now wanted about twenty minutes to sundown. A weak air still blew, but the few clouds that still lived in the heavens floated overhead apparently motionless; yet the swell continued large, to our sensations at least, upon that flat structure, and the slope of the platform rapidly grew so distressing and fatiguing to our limbs, that we were glad to sit and obtain what refreshment we could from a short rest.
Among the things we had brought with us was the bull's-eye lamp, together with a can of oil, a parcel of meshes, and some lucifer-matches. I said to Helga:
'We should step, or set up, our mast before it grows dark.'