CHAPTER VII A RACE AND A ROLLER
Mrs. Burke talked with me in my cabin for some time. She wondered that her husband could be so credulous as to believe in ghosts, and said she had never before suspected he was superstitious. She kissed me and said good-night, and went away thinking, I dare say, she had left me fairly cheerful; and so indeed I was while she was with me, but when she was gone, and I lay alone in the darkness, I felt very uneasy. The cabin porthole was high above the low bunk in which I rested; I could not see the stars in it, but the noise of waters fretted by a gentle catspaw of wind came through very clearly, along with a dim sifting of moonshine that ruled the gloom in a spectral spoke of light which was like dreaming to see; it was a dismal, sobbing, moaning noise of waters whilst it lasted, and made me think of the dead men deep down in the sea, and of the apparition that had moved upon the forecastle, and vanished seemingly as smoke goes out, till I was too afraid to sleep.
The last bells I heard stealing faintly through the calm were eight—four o'clock in the morning.
However, I was at the breakfast table at the usual hour; Captain Burke and his wife and the doctor came below from the deck and seated themselves. Presently I said:
'Are we making good way, Captain Burke?'
'Noble way. We've taken a fine royal breeze right abeam. It's hit our heels to a hair.'
I looked at him as he spoke, and observed a certain dulness in his countenance. The arch expression was gone out of his eyes, and if they seemed merry it was through their blue glitter, not their spirit. It may have been his face which made me ask:
'Was anything more seen of the ghost during the night?'
'No, miss,' he answered abruptly.
'It was no ghost, Miss Marie,' exclaimed my old nurse. 'Why, as Mr. Owen justly says, you can't have no better ingredients for a spectre than moonshine and the moving shadows of rigging.'
'For such a noodle as the fellow that saw the thing,' said the doctor, with a half-glance of interest and speculation at the captain.
'You're not going to get correct likenesses of living people out of moonshine and shadow,' said the captain.
'Why, yes, out of light and shade merely, captain,' said Mr. Owen. 'What else would you do work with in pencil or crayon?'
'I wonder you can be so silly, Edward,' said Mrs. Burke.
I looked at her inquiringly, perceiving that something lay behind this: on which she said, 'The man who saw the ghost has frightened Edward by saying he thought it was the captain at first, the face was so like.'
The captain sipped at a big breakfast cup to conceal his expression, and subdue, as I thought, some temper excited by his wife's remark. He then said, quietly smiling, but with no light of merriment upon him, 'I went forward last night after you were turned in, Miss Otway, to take a look round. I called to the fellow the ghost appeared to, and asked him to describe the thing to me; he did so, and said it had my face. My wife thinks I am frightened. You don't believe that, I hope? You'd not feel safe in a ship commanded by a skipper who's to be scared by a seaman's yarn.'
'Just a little bit of forecastle malice, depend upon it,' said the doctor. 'We'll have the truth of it yet. Perhaps they hope to justify their charges against your beef by dreaming terrific waking nightmares, and seeing precisely the sort of thing that an unsavoury harness cask would be fruitful of.'
'You'll have the other man saying now that the thing he saw was like you,' said Mrs. Burke.
'He's said it,' exclaimed the captain, with an emphatic nod at her.
Mr. Owen lay back in his chair with a loud laugh; an ill-timed explosion and forced withal, for you easily saw that the mood of the captain was then a distemper, which needed the medicine of a little skilful sympathy. But the subject was dropped after the doctor's laugh, and Captain Burke, turning to me, talked in a gentle voice of the letter I had sent home, and calculated the distance the brig had sailed since we spoke her, and chatted to entertain me and perhaps to brisken up his own spirits.
When I went on deck I beheld one of the most spacious splendid scenes of morning our ship had ever sprang through. It was blowing fresh, but the seas ran steadily in defined hard blue ridges, smoking as they came at us right abeam. The rolling of the ship was so regular as to be scarcely noticeable. It was all cream and yeast to leeward; I had never seen before alongside such a bubbling, throbbing spread of white spume, winking, seething, crackling like burning brushwood, sweeping off in steam whenever the heel of the ship hurled the blast under the foot of the mainsail sheer into it over the rail. The clouds hung in vast terraces to windward, with bodies of vapour blowing up to the zenith out of the silk-white heaps, then scudding westward to mass themselves low down in a coast of cloud, that looked, with its breaks and tints, like a rich land dimly seen in mist.
It was this cloud scenery, with its steady whirl of vapour between, that made the morning show as wide again as it was. Mr. Owen, seeing me alone looking at the water, joined me.
'It is difficult to feel superstitious on such a morning as this,' said he.
'If the stranger comes again I hope it will be in daylight,' I answered. 'The thing seems to have affected the captain's spirits.'
'But not yours, I hope.'
'I don't believe in ghosts,' said I, 'but I have faith in portents and presentiments and premonitions.'
He looked grave, and answered so had he, and was about to tell me something, then checked himself; I think his imagination was with his dead then, and that he could have told me of having received some warning of the loss that was to befall him.
'I am sorry,' said he, with a glance at the captain, who was on the weather side of the deck talking with his wife, 'that the sailor should have told Captain Burke the apparition was like him. These reports, if there's good faith in them, catch hold of a man's spirits. The captain's worried. We must avoid the subject in his presence.'
'I should not like to be told that I had appeared to a person,' said I.
'I don't know,' he exclaimed, 'whether sailors are more superstitious than others; they're thought to be so. They can plead good reasons. Last night, for example, was fuller of the mysterious and the spirit-like than any churchyard scene, however crumbling the church tower, however red the colour than of the moon with a streak of black cloud, like crape, above it. The superstitions of the sea are extraordinary, and some of them beautiful. The Ancient Mariner was a poet.'
'He talks like one in the poem,' said I, smiling.
'Coleridge went to the old sea chronicles for his ideas and imagery,' he exclaimed. 'Shelvocke gave him the albatross, and he found his painted ocean, and the shining and burning, wriggling things in it, in Richard Hawkins. We can never see again as the old saw. They came with the eyes of children and everything was marvellous. But many of the old superstitions linger.'
'Is there any particular superstition connected with apparitions at sea?'
'I am not well read in that subject,' he answered, laughing. 'Most of the apparitions I have heard about concern the coming on and ending of storms—mercurial spirits, spectres of the barometer. The old Jacks swore that the Virgin frequently appeared in the height of a gale; they had but to vow a taper and down dropped the wind. There was always a gale in the wake of the "Flying Dutchman."'
'There's nothing but weather for apparitions to predict at sea,' said I.
'That wet-faced ghost of last night,' said he, 'reminds me of Lord Byron's tale of a certain captain; his brother, who was in India, entered his cabin in mid-ocean, and lay down in his bunk; when the captain awoke he found his blankets wet through.'
'Perhaps he forgot to close his cabin window,' said I.
'Anyhow,' said Mr. Owen, 'Captain Kidd afterwards discovered that his brother was drowned at that exact hour of the night.'
'This is not nice talk for such a morning as this,' said I, chilled by a sudden return of the uneasy superstitious feeling.
'There's a fine sight coming along yonder,' cried out Captain Burke just then, and he pointed over the weather bow with the telescope he had been looking through.
I crossed the deck and saw two large stars of light on the sea-line almost directly ahead. Even whilst I gazed they sensibly enlarged. The sun at this time was hanging on the left of them, and his light was on the water between, flashing every headlong ridge into silver, and silvering the sea-smoke till it flew down the wind with the gleam of a silken veil; and beyond this rushing splendour of silver sea, softened here and there by the shadows of the sailing clouds, hung those two glowing stars, steady as though they were fixed in the heavens.
Captain Burke let fall the glass from his eye and said to Mr. Owen, 'An ocean race.'
'Yachts?' said the doctor.
'Bless me no. Clippers rushing it for a wager. If this was the other end of the year they'd probably prove tea-ships. It should be a fine sight,' he cried, anticipation and spirit working his face into something of its old merry, eager look.
We were ourselves sailing fast, and the two ships were coming along faster perhaps by two or three miles in the hour than we were going; in a magically short time they were two defined shapes upon the bow about a quarter of a mile apart, black spots under brilliant clouds showing like shapes of white flame through the windy blue dazzle trembling into the atmosphere they were coming through. The sailors dropped their several tasks to look; the surly mate stared with a fixed devouring leer; all hands I guessed understood what they were to see; the cook stepped from the galley to the rail. In less than half an hour from the moment of our sighting them they were abreast, and when they were right abeam this one hid the other, so completely were they neck and neck.
By this time our own ship's number was flying at our peak, and now as they came abreast, each having told us by a thin tongue of flag that our colours had been spelt out, they hoisted their own names.
'An Aberdeen clipper and a Blackwall liner,' said Captain Burke, reading out of a signal book. 'Both from an Australian port. A very pretty race indeed. But it's the spirit of Souchong that puts life into that sort of thing.'
Yet spite of that I thought the show as gallant as anything old ocean ever submitted, if it were not a scene of old line-of-battle ships in a gale of wind. They opened into six spires of delicate shadow and snowlike whiteness; they leaned their full and starlike breasts to us, the lustrous canvas tapering to an apex of cloth that was a very puff of sail, wan as some web of cloud near the afternoon moon. Every stitch that would draw was heaped upon them; they had the wind right abeam; to windward they were clothed with studding-sails; betwixt the masts some becalmed wing of fore and aft canvas would swing in and out idly like the pinion of a wounded bird. The sight was a marvellous hurry of shadows, and flashing lights, and steady shining of rounded canvas; and under the bows of each a glass-clear sea arching, flashed into a very snow-storm, and broke aft as far as the gangway.
They passed like clouds, silent and stately, and I continued to watch them till they were glowing astern, dwindling and dimming, but, as Captain Burke declared, neck and neck yet even when they had sunk their courses, and nothing above the clews of their topsails were 'dipping' upon the horizon.
It was not many days after this that we crossed the equator. A pleasant sailing wind blew us over the line and failed us not till we had reached almost within the Polar verge of the south-east trade wind, into which Captain Burke and the mate sneaked the ship by careful and unwearied attention to every faintest breathing that tarnished the surface of the long, blue equatorial heave. Then one morning, coming on deck, I found a strong wind humming like a concert of organs off the port bow, and the vessel with her yards fore and aft, breaking through a quick spitting sea, and clouds passing like dust over our mast-heads. This was the first of the south-east trade wind.
'It's all right with us now, Miss Otway,' said Captain Burke as he shook me by the hand. 'We're making a straight course for the Horn, and we shall be putting her nose off for the great South Sea presently.'
But even though he spoke lightly, and seemed very well satisfied to have taken the trade gale in its strength so young, there was the same suggestion of spiritlessness in his manner that had been more or less visible in him now ever since the sailor had told him he had seen his apparition. Though the ghost had not again appeared; though Mr. Owen, with the hope, no doubt, of settling the captain's spirits, had got the seaman to admit that he might have been mistaken, that he was leaning against the forecastle rail in a sort of doze perhaps when he started and saw the thing, which, he avowed, might very well have been an illusion of shadow and moonlight upon his sleepy vision—it was all one; a weight of dejection had come upon the captain's mind, and ever since the night of superstition he had ceased to be that merry, arch, humorous Irishman who had called upon my father, and made us laugh almost in the very anguish of my leave-taking. This was so noticeable in him whilst he talked to me about the south-east trade wind, and going for Cape Horn in a bee-line, and our first sunny port—full of quaint costumes and pleasant fruit and queer merry-makings—just round the corner, that on returning to the cabin sometime afterwards and finding Mrs. Burke there sewing, I sat down beside her and talked about him.
'What should there be in this thing, nurse, to dispirit your husband after all these days, now that the man has as good as sworn that he was mistaken?'
'Why, my dear, he is an Irishman, and they are a superstitious people.'
'The crew no longer trouble themselves about that ghost.'
'I don't think they do. The boatswain,' said she, laughing, 'told my husband a man had said that as the ghost appeared with a wet face it must have been Old Stormy.'
'Who's Old Stormy?' said I.
'Oh,' she answered, still laughing, 'there is a well-known windlass song called "Old Stormy, he is dead and gone!"'
'Old Stormy wouldn't be like Captain Burke,' said I.
'And that should satisfy him,' she answered. 'I doubt that he's quite the thing. These roasting latitudes use the liver cruelly. Then again there's the anxiety of command. The tone of the mind gets lowered by worry, which a man takes as a matter of routine, and doesn't heed though it's working in him all the same. It'll wear off, I dare say, when the weather gets cold.'
She talked placidly, going on with her work with a comfortable, smiling face. She had married too late in life to take anxious views of her husband. It's the young wife that frets, I think. Not that Mrs. Burke would not have shown herself deeply anxious had her husband been ailing in his health; it was his fancies she took no notice of, a smile was good enough for them.
It chanced that on this same day there occurred an incident that had nearly verified the judgment of any man who should have accepted the visit of the apparition as a menace. After loitering at the dinner-table in chat, I put on my hat and jacket and followed the captain and Mr. Owen on deck. It was blowing very fresh, and though the sun still nearly centred the heavens we were sailing under, the weight of the blast put an edge into the feel of it. But it was a glorious, invigorating, cordial draught; and I stood for awhile with my hand upon the companion-hood, deeply breathing, and relishing to the inmost pulses of my being that shouting musical tide of liberal gale, blue and salt, yet sweet as sugar when it came charged with the damp of the spray.
The brown scud was flying off the working ridges on the horizon, and the ship was bowed to her channels, charging the sea-flashes, with the forecastle reeling in the frequent thickness of foam flying athwart. She was carrying all she had of plain sail and clearly more than she needed, for I had not been five minutes on deck when the captain ordered the three royals to be clewed up and furled, and other sail to be taken in.
I continued standing at the hatch watching two men on the main royal yard stow the sail there. It was a giddy sight to my girlish eye. Indeed I had always found something wonderful in the agility and fearlessness of the crew when they sprang aloft, and slided out upon the yards, and struggled with the canvas that soared in huge bladders from their grasp. I gazed up at the two fellows and tried to figure the image our ship would make viewed from that height, and whilst I was picturing a narrow streak of hull rushing headlong with a wild play of dazzle on either hand of her, and all aslant to her trucks, with yard-arms pointing skywards and stirless canvas thrilling like a thousand drums out of the violet hollows, I was startled by a loud cry directly overhead: and looking up I spied a man in the mizzen-top, leaning off with one hand upon a shroud, and pointing eagerly to leewards with the other, whilst he cried:
'There's a whole coast of water a-coming along.'
I directed my eyes at the lee line of the sea, where I saw, nearly at the distance of the horizon, but clearly coming along at a prodigious rate directly against the wind and rushing surge, a wall of water: it was rounding its pouring volume high above the level of the sea, and the vast bulk of it, stretching north and south, blazed with the flashing of the sunlight upon the savage leaps and shattering recoils of the surge it was rolling up against. Mrs. Burke, losing her wits at the sight, shrieked out:
'Oh, Edward, it will drown us!'
Scarcely had she said this when her husband, who had taken but one glance to leeward, roared out:
'Hard up, hard up with the helm! Aft to the weather-braces. Square away fore and aft! Lively, my lads, for Jesus' sake! If it takes us abeam it'll sink the ship!'
He yelled the words and they rang through the vessel. The sailors fled to the braces: their practised ears heard in the captain's cry the note that signifies at sea life or death, though some probably did not know what the danger was. The gallant little ship answered her helm like a racing yacht, and seethed aslant down the wind in a semicircle, bowing the hawse-pipes into the billow breaking under her, and slowly righting as she brought her stern to the breeze, till she was looking at the long on-coming, cliff-like length of brine, with erect spars, rolling never and bowing only as she swept to that wonderful heap of sea.
It might have been hurling towards us at forty miles an hour, when we are going ten, and in a few heart-beats our bows were lifting to it.
'Hold on, all hands!' roared the captain from the wheel, which he was grasping conjointly with the helmsman.
'Hold tightly,' screamed Mrs. Burke to me as we stood together in the companion.
Mr. Owen flung himself on his knees behind the mizzen-mast. Green, the mate, stood at the mizzen-rigging grasping a belaying-pin. It was as though an electric storm was volleying in one continuous roar of cloud battery overhead. The ship seemed to be thrown keel out of water forward. I glanced astern at the instant that her bows took the first of the slant of that mighty heave of sea, and the line of her taffrail was depressed, like the edge of a spoon afloat in a cup, in the crackling whiteness there, with Captain Burke and the helmsman low down, pale and motionless. The sails throughout came in to the mast with a single clap. In a breath or two we were on the rounded top of that vast rolling lift of water that was roaring along either extremity of it to the horizon; the wind was full of the thunder of the shock and the snap of strong seas staggering on the under run; in that breathless moment of our being poised atop the whole weight of the wind was upon the ship; through the roar of the roller ran the bugling in the rigging, and the low, deep humming of the canvas as it strained with the blast.
Then like an arrow down rushed the vessel. Oh, that was a frightful moment! So steep was the slant that the water poured in tons over her bows as she went. I turned sick. I thought she would take the valley in a dive and strike clean through under the next sea, never again to rise. Fortunately the run of the mighty roller left the water smooth in its wake. The bows sprang buoyant, the whole ship seemed to leap with a sort of shudder of rejoicing throughout her.
'Trim sail the watch,' shouted the captain, letting go the helm and coming forward. 'Mr. Green, bring the ship to her course again. A desperately close shave. Had it come from the wind'ard, or taken us abeam to leeward, or found us a strake or two deeper——'
There was no need for him to finish the sentence. He came to the companion-way.
'An ocean hurdle,' said he, still very pale, and watching the wheel as the man revolved the spokes to bring the ship to.
'What was it, Edward?' cried his wife.
'A roller,' said he. 'I hope there may not be another.' He looked to leeward. 'One of those volcanic jokes or hurricane survivals which try periodically to swamp Ascension and St. Helena. Help Miss Otway below, Mary, and give her a little drop of wine, and take a nip yourself.'
CHAPTER VIII A HURRICANE
Our voyage, after this incident of the roller down to below the latitude of Cape Horn, was uneventful. I had looked with dread to the cold of that stormy and desolate part of the world; but when we arrived, having struck a parallel, indeed, beyond which the captain informed us we were not to push much further, I found the ocean climate by no mean insupportable.
My wardrobe had been a liberal equipment. I had furs, wraps and the like in plenty, and all very warm; then again my health had wonderfully improved, and this helped me to find the cold a lesser evil than I had feared. Throughout the days a fire glowed in the cabin. And yet it was towards the close of June when we were nearly as far south as the captain intended to go, and June is mid-winter in that part of the world, with but four or five hours of light only in the day, and the sun a little scarlet ball whose arc of flight might scarcely frame an iceberg.
All this while the captain remained the changed man I have before attempted to express him. I did not observe that his despondency increased upon him. He was as one who lives with some fixed belief in his head, who, depressing his bearing and manner to a level, leaves himself there, never sinking, but never rising either. For the rest it had been as it still was, a monotonous routine of bells and meals, reading, chatting, playing at games in the cabin; sometimes we had spoken a ship; once we had floated quietly into a school of whales which made the cold black deep lying under the large stars of the south as beautiful as any dream of poet with the silver willowy curves of light they blew to the moon.
In this time I found no opportunity to send a second letter home.
I cannot remember our latitude on this day I am to write about. I understood that, for reasons my memory will not suffer me to explain, we had made more southing than was necessary, whilst we were further to the east—half-way indeed, to Georgia Island,—than the captain and mate cared to talk about. The weather had been sulky all the morning; large snow clouds in soft dyes of darkness upon the stooping, corrugated, leaden sky, floated sullenly athwart our mast-heads, but without any squally outfly of wind so far, though often the snow fell thickly. A large westerly swell was running, and the ship bowed heavily upon it, finding nothing to steady her in the small beam breeze that blew bitter as ice straight out of the south.
I remained in the cabin all the morning, reading beside the fire. Whilst we were at dinner, the mate, shaggy in thick pilot cloth and a great fur cap between whose ear-covers his face lay small as though withered by the cold into a mere leer of eye and a purple nose jewelled with a little icicle, came half-way down the companion ladder.
'There's a big island jumped out of a snowfall on the lee bow,' he exclaimed. 'The lady'll like to see it p'raps,' having said which he instantly returned on deck.
Strangely enough, though we had measured many leagues of ocean often for months and months studded with bergs, we had down to this hour sighted nothing of the sort. I had longed to see an iceberg before all other sights of the deep, and at once wrapped myself up, and went on deck with the captain. On stepping to the lee side, there on the bow about two miles off we beheld a vast iceberg like a mighty cathedral in alabaster shaping itself out of a soft vapoury shadow! As each feature of the mass stole out it showed with an ivory-like clearness against the hoary soot of the snow-cloud past it; the swell of the sea washed the base in a large surf. The water was lead coloured as the sky; its heavings were slow and stubborn, and each volume rolled along as though it were of oil or quicksilver. Some lovely snow-white petrels darted swallow-like athwart our sluggish wake. I cannot express how their beauty deepened, to the imagination, the sky-wide loneliness of this scene of ocean with its ice-island there, material as rock, dissoluble as the smallest of the flakes falling upon it—a mere dream of substance—a pageant of the deep as illusive as the tapestries of the clouds.
Many shadows of snow hung round the sea. It was like entering a vast arena funereal with draperies.
'What does that iceberg remind you of?' said Mr. Owen, approaching us with Mrs. Burke.
'Of a cathedral,' said I.
'Exactly,' he exclaimed. 'Winchester and Canterbury combined, with a hint from Strasburg in that corner to the right yonder, where its opening is clear of the snow.'
'A pretty little fairy toy to thump up against on a black howling night,' said Captain Burke, with an uneasy look round at the weather.
'This is as strange a day as ever I saw,' said Mrs. Burke.
'How long could people live on such an iceberg as that?' said I.
'Give 'em wreckage for huts and food and fuel, and they should live long enough to be taken off,' answered the captain.
'Ha!' exclaimed Mr. Owen, pensively regarding the majestic bulk, 'fancy finding one's self alone on such an island as that! An ice Crusoe!'
'I've known three whalers taken off a piece of ice four or five days before the lump they floated on would have melted under their feet,' said the captain.
Mr. Owen viewed him with a smile. The captain abruptly left us, and standing at the wheel directed his eyes earnestly round the sea and up at the sky. Mrs. Burke said:
'My husband's uneasy. I hope we are not going to have any very bad weather.'
'Miss Otway,' said Mr. Owen, 'do you know, those birds are the souls of dead ballet-girls? Observe the exquisite time and grace of their measures and curvings, as though they held their white skirts out and revolved to unheard music.'
Here Captain Burke called out sharply:
'Get the main-topgallant sail furled and all three topsails single-reefed.'
In a few minutes the ship was clamorous with singing men and busy with running figures; a pale ray of sunshine glanced just then at no great height above the horizon and flashed up our ice-glazed rigging and flamed in the spears of ice at the catheads: it touched the iceberg and the cathedral-like phantasy that was now abeam whitened out into a glaring brilliance which flung a sheen of its own round about it; the sky hung pale above and on its left, but to the right of it snow was falling thickly. In a few minutes the whole mass vanished, a deeper gloom closed in upon the sea, and the swell ran with an increased weight.
It was an 'all hands' job as sailors call it, and while the watches were on the topsail yards, the captain bawled out 'two reefs,' and when some hands went on to the mizzen topsail yard he cried out to them to close-reef the sail, which, before the men came down, was clewed up and furled. Even whilst I remained on deck a sort of vapourish thickness had gathered round the horizon, as though the several draperies of snow-cloud had compacted into a huge circular wall, blotting out everything a mile off, whilst overhead the sooty stuff, like scud held in suspense, floated low down till the sweep of the dog vane at the royal mast-head seemed to rend it.
It began to snow in large soft flakes. I went down the companion steps, and Mrs. Burke and Mr. Owen followed me. I heard Mr. Owen say softly, as though he would not have me overhear,
'I wish the mercury had not sunk so low.'
'I shall be glad to get out of this sea into the north, where the sun is,' answered Mrs. Burke.
It was after two, and the cabin lamp was alight. I removed my wraps and took a chair close by the stove. The motion of the ship was large, and sweeping upon the swell. You could judge of its character by watching the oscillation of the lamp. Presently Mrs. Burke came from her cabin and sat beside me.
'We are going to have heavy weather, I fear,' said I.
'Oh, well, this is a brave little ship,' she answered. 'We are a long way from home down here, but she's carried us safely so far.'
'She has truly, nurse. I cannot wonder that sailors should feel towards ships they have long lived in almost as towards the women they love. A ship is alive. I can think of her as with passions and feelings. I've seen the "Lady Emma" erect her spars and look at a sea as a horse cocks its ears at a gate—I once heard Mr. Green talking to her, and I laughed to find myself thinking she understood him.'
'What did he say?'
'"Go it, old bucket"—I forget what more,' said I.
'If it were not for Mr. Moore,' said she, looking at me with affectionate eyes, 'I would stake all that my husband owns in this ship that you ended in marrying a sailor.'
I quietly shook my head.
'Well, the sea has used you handsomely, anyway,' said she. 'I dare say Sir Mortimer is at this minute wondering where you are. How he and Mr. Moore will have pored over the map of the world, to be sure. But little can they guess where you are this very day. This is the terrible Horn your father was so afraid of for your sake. It's not so cold, is it? And yet we are further south than it is customary for ships to venture. What would Sir Mortimer think of such a sight as you saw to-day—that great iceberg, I mean? Fancy such an object floating just opposite your house. What a fortune for the boatmen!'
Just then I heard a shouting on deck; it came dulled through the planks, yet I caught a sharp, fierce note of instant need in it. A minute later the ship leaned down to an outfly of wind that seemed of hurricane force. I heard the thunder of the storm, and saw the lee cabin windows drowned in the green brine, whilst the weather ports winked like blinded eyes with the sudden lashing of foam. My chair gave way, and with a shock I fell with it and rolled down the deck, and for some moments lay helpless, astonished, terrified to the last degree, but unhurt.
Mrs. Burke clung to a stanchion, and I feared, whilst I watched her stout form swinging off it, to see her let go, lest she should flash down upon me and break my neck or maim me for life with her weight. I could not imagine what was happening save that a sudden hurricane had struck the ship and thrown her on her beam ends. She lay as though capsized, with a horrible roaring, pounding thunderous noise of water on the weather side of her, and frightful sounds in her hold, threaded with dim notes of rending, as though sails were flogging in rags, or masts going over the sides.
I managed to get on my knees, and in that posture remained a minute like one on the roof of a house. Such was the slant of the deck I could no more have crawled up it to where Mrs. Burke hung by a stanchion than up a wall. This awful sensation of the ship being upset was dreadfully increased and made a sickness of for the very soul itself to faint under, by her motions in the vast hollow swell which the hurricane was tearing into shreds. Whenever a pause of the beating sea left a weather cabin window weeping, yet clear to that extent, I could judge it was about black as midnight outside. The globe of the lamp had swung hard against the deck, and rarely came from it even with a windward roll. All in a moment the ship lurched over yet, till you would have thought she was turning keel up, and this motion was accompanied by such a thump of the sea, such a shattering inleaping of tons of water, it was as though a huge gun or a whole broadside of pieces had been fired on board of us.
And again through the roaring blow of water I caught the muffled noise of the rending of wood. I shrieked out in that moment of agonising suspense, 'We are sinking!' and indeed so blinding was the eclipse of the window glass that I did truly believe we were going down and were even then below the surface.
Mrs. Burke was unable to make any reply. She was almost black in the face with the anguish of supporting her weight and with horror and fear. In a few moments the strength of her arms gave out; but by relaxing her grip she doubtless saved her neck; her grasp loosened and she slided her embrace down the stanchion to the deck, and then let go and swept silent and helpless as a length of timber down to close beside me; her feet struck the cabin wall hard, and she lay a minute without motion as though the breath had been shocked out of her. She then grasped my hand and cried out:
'Oh, what can have happened? Are we amongst the ice? Did you hear a noise as if our masts had been splintered?'
I shrieked back—I put it thus strongly, for you cannot imagine the uproar in that cabin, what with the grinding of the ship and the freight, the creaking of a hundred strong fastenings, the cannonading of flying tons of brine against the lifted exposed weather side of the vessel—I say I shrieked back:
'Let us try to get on deck. It is horrible to drown down here.'
'Don't talk like that. What can have happened? Is Edward safe? What has become of the ship? Oh, the suddenness of it! Are we amongst the ice?'
Thus the poor woman raved. She was silenced by a roar of water like a crash of thunder close overhead; a sea of giant bulk had swept the quarter-deck, and in a breath a cataract, sparkling in the lamp light, rushed smoking down the companion, and before we could deliver a scream we were up to our waists.
The water must have been of an icy coldness, but I felt it not—at least in that way; it was no colder than the summer ripples which I would paddle in when a child. Terror had rendered me insensible to pain.
'Cannot we drag ourselves out of it before more comes, or we shall be drowned?' screamed poor Mrs. Burke.
Then it was that the ship began to right. She righted slowly at first, then came to a level keel with a sickening jerk and a wild leap of her whole frame that sent the water in the cabin speeding and roaring white as milk.
A door opened and Mr. Owen stumbled out.
'Oh, my God!' he cried. 'What has happened? I have been unable to release myself. My berth is half-full of water.'
And then he came splashing over to where Mrs. Burke and I stood with an arm writhed about the stanchion. But oh, the soul-lifting sense of relief that came into one with the feel of that level deck and the rise and fall, hard and furious as the tossing was!
'What has happened?' cried Mr. Owen.
'Hark!' was Mrs. Burke's answer, in so shrill a note, that it pierced the ear like a whistle. We heard the voices of men on deck. A few moments later the figure of Captain Burke appeared in the companion-way. He looked down and cried out:
'Are you all right below there?'
'Edward, come to us. What has happened?' shrieked Mrs. Burke.
'How much water have you taken in down here?' he cried, and descended to the bottom of the steps, where he stood looking round him like a man bereft of his mind.
'What is it, Edward?' screamed his wife. 'Tell us. We are half dead with fright and nearly drowned.'
'The ship's a sheer hulk—totally dismasted,' he cried, in a raving way, still looking round and around and around.
'Oh, oh,' wailed the poor woman, and the doctor, grey as ashes, floundered through the rushing flood upon the cabin floor towards the captain.
'Not yet, sir, not yet, sir,' roared Captain Burke, holding him off with both hands out. 'See to the ladies. Let them shift their clothes. This water will drain off quickly. Give them brandy and take some. Mary,' he shouted, 'the ship's alive, but if she's to remain so I must see to her,' saying which he went up the steps, closing the companion-way behind him.
Mr. Owen splashed and staggered after him. He ran up the companion steps bawling, 'Don't lock us up down here,' and tried the doors, but was unable to open them.
'Why has he shut us up?' I cried wildly, for this imprisonment was the most dreadful passage of all; I felt as if I should suffocate.
'He's afraid of more water pouring down and considers we're safer here than on deck. He'll not leave us to drown. He'll not forget we're here,' exclaimed Mrs. Burke.
'He may be swept overboard, and the others will forget us.'
'Come to your cabin and change your boots and dress. No more water is coming in, you see. What is that noise? Hark! Oh, it is the clanging of the pumps. How fearfully sudden! But it is always so at sea. Oh, my poor husband! Come, Miss Marie, come and change, or this will be giving you your death,' and grasping me by the arm the dear, poor, good creature led me towards my cabin.
As we stepped, moving very slowly with frequent abrupt halts and mutual clingings, for the jump of the dismantled hull from hollow to peak, her helpless beamwise lurch from summit to valley, were a brain-sickness in sensation, Mr. Owen came out of the pantry holding a bottle of brandy and a glass. He bid me take a small glassful. I told him no, and Mrs. Burke said it was no time to think of drinking. It might be that we should be called upon very soon to save our lives, and every one would want the best of his wits.
'The captain recommended a draught of the spirit, and so do I,' said Mr. Owen, reeling in the doorway with the motion of the ship and submitting a figure which I must have laughed at, at a time less appalling, with his short legs set apart, their shape defined by the soaked small clothes which hung like loose plaster upon them, his bushy mass of minute curls over either ear seeming to enlarge like the puff from the mouth of a cannon even as the eye rested upon them, a bottle in one hand, a wineglass in the other, and his face as pale as tallow.
Mrs. Burke made no answer, and we gained our cabin.
The stout door and high coaming had kept the interior fairly dry. I changed, but though I immediately felt the comfort of the dry thick clothing I cannot recollect that I shivered, that I even felt cold, so completely was all physical sensibility in this dreadful time dominated by my horror and surprise and my fright lest the ship should go down with us whilst we were locked up below. Mrs. Burke left me, to shift some of her own clothes.
I stood at the cabin porthole, holding on by a stanchion that served as a bed-post, and looked out. The thick glass was so blind with the ceaseless wash of the roaring sea-flashes that I could distinguish nothing save dissolving, shifting, shapeless bulks of dim white, vague as snow-clad mountains beheld in starless gloom. But their thunder was without, close beside; and their strength was in the hurl of the ship. Indeed a vast dangerous sea had been set running almost as swiftly as the hurricane had burst upon us, and running athwart was the huge swell filled with the might of the greatest stretch of ocean in the world.
In about half an hour Mrs. Burke came to me. The cabin lamp continued to burn brightly, but the fire in the stove had been extinguished by the water. She made me put on a pair of india-rubber shoes, for though the brine had drained off the cabin floor, the thick carpet squelched under the tread like wet sand which leaves a pool in your foot-print. The keen edge of this swamp of brine was in the atmosphere, raw and weedy and death cold; it was like entering a ship's hold under sea.
Mrs. Burke got me to the table, and procured some stout and cold chicken, and compelled me to eat, herself setting an example. She struggled with her spirits, and sought to talk a little cheerfully.
'We are still alive, you see,' she said. 'The "Lady Emma" is one of the strongest ships ever built. I am no longer frightened. I can feel the life in a ship as a sailor does, and this vessel is jumping so briskly that I am certain she is not taking in any water. My husband, besides, is a thorough seaman. He knows exactly what to do, and what is best will be done.' Then turning her head, she exclaimed, 'Where is Mr. Owen?'
She got up and opened the pantry door; afterwards knocked upon the door of his berth. The noises were so many and distracting I could not hear if he answered. She opened the door and exclaimed:
'Won't you come and eat a little supper with us?'
'No, thank 'ee,' he answered, in a thickish voice.
Mrs. Burke stared at him awhile, then closed the door and returned to me.
The motions of the ship were so violent that we found it hard to keep our seats.
The food was flung over the fiddles into our laps. Every recovery had the abruptness of the flight of a missile; the water roared about the cabin windows, and again and again as the hull sank or soared, the thunder of the sea swept through her as though she had split.
The companion hatch was opened, and Captain Burke descended. He was cased in oilskins, and one whole side of him was white with frozen snow. He came to the table and sat down.
'Now will you tell us what has happened, Edward?' exclaimed his wife, and she crooked her brows with a straining of her large short-sighted eyes, shining with fear, to catch the expression on his face as it showed and shifted in a sort of hysteric agility with the leap of the shadows under the lamp.
'All three masts are gone by the board.'
'What's to be done, then?'
'Eh? Done?' he cried, white in the face, his eyes keen and hot with irritability, pulling off his sou'-wester and striking it upon the table with a blow that dislodged a moulded helmet of snow hard as plaster, 'we want daylight first. You don't realise here what it's like on deck. It's a frightful night.' He checked himself with a look at me and added, 'But we'll have the old jade out of it though it should come to warping her with the Horn for a kedge. We'll put ye safe ashore, miss. By God, then, but Sir Mortimer shan't know you for plumpness and bloom!'
He forced a smile that had more the look of a snarl than a grin with the teeth he disclosed, his eyes taking no part in it. His wife caught a bottle from the swing-tray as it swept to her outstretched hand and mixed a tumbler of drink. He swallowed it, and then picked up a leg of fowl and a piece of white biscuit, and whilst he alternately bit from either hand he talked to his wife thus:
'The first outfly was a squall of hurricane force, and it pinned her right down in the trough. I thought she was gone. The men could only hold on. The boatswain at last managed to scramble forward, where he got hold of an axe. He brought it aft, and others taking heart on hearing him sing out, got into the main chains, and with hatchets and knives went to work at the lanyards. The mast went, and with it the other two. It was like the melting of a shadow aloft, with a crash along the starboard length of her that's made matchwood of the bulwarks, I allow, and in a minute spars and rigging were over the side.'
'Is the ship sound?'
'Oh yes, she's tight enough. We've lost Green and four men.'
'Oh, Edward, don't say it! Mr. Green—four men! How did it happen?'
'How does anything happen at sea on a black night aboard a dismantled ship with hills of ink and foam rolling over her? How it happened ask of God who did it. They're not aboard.'
He talked with jerking movements of the head, snapping his speech at her, and his blue eyes were on fire. A look of fear of him gave a new colour to the expression of horror and consternation in his wife's face. I sat white and speechless, listening to him and to the booming artillery of the sea, entering with ceaseless secret terror into the motions of the ship, all so violent, so extravagantly wild at times that I would say to myself, 'Now she is gone!'
'Where are the crew?' asked Mrs. Burke.
'Forward in their quarters. There's nothing to keep a look-out for except daylight. The wreck's gone clear. The wheel's lashed, and whatever comes must come. Is this the meaning of Old Stormy's visit, miss?' said he to me with another of his desperate forced grins. 'My apparition, you know, with a wet face! At sea omens are omens; the fired part is, you never can tell what form the mischief means to take so that you can provide against it.'
His wife hid her face.
'None of that!' he roared. 'There must be no breaking down in spirit here. Miss Otway's to be returned safe and sound to her father. There's no virtue in snivelling to help that, with all three masts gone and the night like a wolf's throat, and ice islands close aboard. Where's Owen?'
I said that he was in his cabin. He got up, opened the door, and looked at him. There was no lamp in the doctor's berth, but the sheen of the cabin light lay upon the interior. The captain entered the cabin, but if he spoke I did not hear him. He returned and said:
'He is drunk! I will have a little talk with him by and by. I put you two into his care and he gets drunk!'
He drew on his sou'wester and stood up, holding by a stanchion.
'Are you going on deck, Edward?' asked his wife.
'Certainly I am.'
'You'll be swept overboard.'
'Not I. I'll rout out a couple of the men and we'll have this carpet up. Pah! how the salt water stinks! They shall light ye a fire too. Boil some coffee, Mary. You shall have what you want. I doubt but the galley's stove. The longboat's safe, but the quarter boats are gone. She wants steadying—she wants steadying;' and making a step or two he sprang up the companion ladder and was gone.
CHAPTER IX DISMASTED
Captain Burke's manner of going persuaded me his mind was unhinged. He had talked with excitement, shouted at his wife, his eyes had been full of fire, and still it did not seem that he had fully grasped the whole dreadful meaning of the disaster.
After he had been gone a little while two men came into the cabin with fuel for the stove. One had a bloodstained bandage round his forehead under his sou'wester. The snow fell in pieces of white crust from the oilskins of the seamen as they reeled with their hands full to the stove. In the instant of their descent the sweep of the black gale followed, and filled the atmosphere with darting needles of stinging cold.
'Is any water coming into the ship?' cried Mrs. Burke.
'No, mum. The well's just been sounded. She's right enough in the hull,' answered the man with a bandage round his head.
'Aren't the decks being swept?'
'Now and again a spray,' answered the same man. 'She's a-jumping of it drily enough. She'll not hurt as she lies providing there's nothen knocking about to run foul of.'
'Is your head badly hurt?'
'Just a little bit of a cut. Nothen to take notice of, thankee,' answered the man, and he knelt down and lighted the fire, the other looking on and around him with a gleaming gaze of curiosity.
The lighting of that fire was a marvellous piece of rich deep colour as I see it now, though I had no thoughts that way, I assure you, as I sat watching the kneeling figure on that frightful night. He was in black oilskins bright with snow; the other in yellow, snowclad likewise, and as the kindling shavings spat out their yellow flames, the two men showed more like some wild startling imagination of a poet done into a grotesque glowing canvas, than a commonplace detail of shipboard life; their faces sharpened and shrank, grinned and grew grim with twenty shadowy expressions, their roaming seeking eyes burned like rubies under the pent-houses of their sea-helmets; add the convulsive motions of the dismasted hull, the ceaseless roar of seas pouring in mountains, the dizzy flight, the sickening fall, the wild play of the lamp, the deep, almost human groanings of the fabric with blows of the surge, like bolts from the sky, shocking to her heart in sounds of rending.
I hoped Mrs. Burke would ask questions of these men as to the safety of the vessel, what would be done, our chances for our lives, and the like, seeing that they were able seamen, mariners of experience with memories perhaps of such things as this too; but she was the captain's wife; so I held my peace and watched the men, clasping myself close in the furs I sat in.
Scarcely was the fire alight when again the cabin was made bitterly raw by an icy-shriek out of the blackness, and three men, one of them the steward, all clad in oilskins and hardly recognisable, descended. A couple bore some galley things, a coffee pot, a saucepan, a gridiron, some drinking mugs, and such matters. One of them said, 'By the captain's orders, ladies,' and put the utensils on the deck near the stove. Another exclaimed, 'We've been told to stop here. We can't get a fire to burn in the galley. The fok'sle's cruel cold.'
'Where's the cook?' said Mrs. Burke.
'Overboard, along with the mate and three others,' said one of the men.
Mrs. Burke tossed her hands and after a pause said:
'I'd cook a meal for you with pleasure, men, but I cannot bear this motion—I cannot stand. Steward, fetch a ham from the pantry; there's coffee there and biscuits. Get what's needed for a plentiful supper. Four overboard! How many are left?'
'Nine foremast hands, counting the bo'sun,' exclaimed the seaman with the blood-stained bandage, looking round from the stove.
Just then the rest of the seamen came below, a shaggy, snow-bleached huddle, the gale following in a howl, with the captain's voice in the frost-keen sling of it, shouting, 'Give them all they want to eat. Let them have plenty of hot coffee, and top the meal off with a dram of rum apiece.'
The companion doors were then closed, but in such wise as to be easily opened from within. After that moment's roar of ocean and volley of iron blast, the comparative calm in this interior seemed like peace itself.
'Isn't the captain coming down?' said Mrs. Burke in a voice something wild with anxiety.
'Presently, mum,' answered the boatswain, swaying easily from leg to leg, his huge form thickened out by an immensely stout pea-coat; he pulled his sou'-wester off as a mark of respect, and the snow on the hatch of it flew to the deck compact, and lay there like a white wreath on a grave.
'He'll be frozen,' cried Mrs. Burke.
'He's a-watching of an ice-mountain out over the bows,' said a man.
I clasped my hands, and felt the blood forsake my heart on hearing this. One of the men observed me, and in a voice that went through the straining noises, like the sound of the sawing of wood, cried:
'There's no call to frighten the ladies, Jim. That there block ain't agoing to hurt us, anyhow.'
They then settled who should cook; a man undertook the job; the steward cut the ham into rashers, and after a little the place was full of the smell of frying. They had their orders, and went to work. You would not have guessed from their behaviour that we were a dismasted hull, low down past the Horn, ice near us, ourselves rolling helpless on a mountainous sea, a hurricane blowing, often blind with snow, our situation so frightful that every next lurch, every next drive, might carry us headlong out of hand. They fried the bacon, they boiled plenty of coffee, they overhauled the pantry, and got out biscuit and jam and such things; but all very quietly; I saw respect in their behaviour; yet what I best remember was their easy, unconcerned way of going about this business of getting supper. Whilst one cooked and others prepared the table, others again rolled the wet carpet off the deck and stowed it away in a corner.
All this while poor Mrs. Burke kept straining her weak eyes at the companion way. At last she jumped up and shrieked out:
'Why doesn't the captain come down? He'll be frozen to death or washed overboard. Which of you'll go and tell him to come to me?'
The boatswain instantly went. He was absent five minutes, then returned followed by the captain, who merely saying in a voice I should not have known but for seeing him, 'Get on with your supper, my lads, get on with your supper. 'Tis a bad job,' came to the stove and stood before it warming his hands.
His wife began to reason with him in a crying appealing voice for remaining on deck: he looked at her and shook his head. She saw something in his face that arrested her speech, and when I glanced at the poor man I was thankful she ceased to worry him. He stood on wide straddled legs at the stove with his hands behind him, and the snow draining into a pool at each heel, watching the men eating and drinking.
I never should have imagined any ocean interior could make such a picture as this. The wonder came into it out of the contrast betwixt the rough coarse forecastle hands gathered around the table, with the sparkle of silver plate in their fists, and the comparative elegance of the state-room in which they sat, with its few looking-glasses and other odds and ends of decoration as before described; and always present was the overwhelming thought of the vessel's loneliness. I could not indeed then figure her in her wretched state, but with imagination's eye I saw the pale sweep of the decks glimmering with snow, the deserted wheel: with each heave and fall I figured the climb and plunge of the desolate mutilated craft upon the huge seas, black and roaring as thunder, with a hanging, steadfast faintness out upon the bow whenever the snow squall slackened and gave a view of a mile of the flashing froth breaking in sullen glares between the iceberg and the ship.
'Eat hearty, lads,' said the captain, 'eat hearty. There's nothing to be done with the ship till the dawn gives us a sight of her. Four of ye gone....' He gave a sort of gasp, and stared a moment or two at his wife, and then said to the boatswain, 'Wall, would she have righted, think you, if the masts had stood?'
The boatswain swallowed the contents of his mouth, and said emphatically, 'No, sir. That second bust-down must ha' done for her.'
A growl of assent ran round the table.
'Well,' said the captain, 'we all know what's to be done. We've to stick her northwards anyhow. Something may come along to give us a tow. Failing that, there's enough of foremast standing for a jury rig. The machinery of the helm's sound. We've to blow to the nor'rards, I say, edging that way for the crowded track.'
The men said nothing. I seemed to find something ominous in their silence. At the same time it rejoiced me to observe that the captain talked collectedly, as though he had rallied his wits, and had clear ideas and intentions.
When the men had supped and cleared the table, they made as though to go. The captain told them to occupy the cabin for the night. They looked grateful at this, and then around them, as though considering where they should lie. Their awkward grins, queer swaying postures, backs curved, arms up and down, and fingers curled, their bearing, glances, and manners, which expressed but little reference to our lamentable and awful situation, gave me, I own, a sort of heart. They looked as though, but for the captain and us women, and the quarter-deck restraint of the cabin, they'd have gathered about the stove, and roared out hearty songs, drowning the fury without with hurricane lungs of music, and spun yarns, and smoked their pipes with as much thoughtless gaiety as they carried to their diversions ashore.
The captain begged me to go to my cabin, and turn in and lie warm.
'Will you go to bed at all to-night?' his wife asked him.
'No,' he answered.
'I suppose you mean to do all the looking out yourself, and end in being found a frozen corpse, while Jack here is to sit by the stove?' said she in a low voice, but audible to him and me, glancing round her at the men.
He peered at her with a scowl, and answered, 'I'm nearly crazy. Say nothing if I'm not to go raving mad.'
'May I not stop here?' said I.
'What, with these men, miss?'
'I like the company of sailors. The sight of these seamen keeps up my spirits.'
'My poor, dear Marie!' cried my nurse, putting the back of her hand against my cheek. 'You can't sit here. Your father would not thank us for throwing you into such company.'
'How can you talk so at such a time?' I exclaimed. 'I dread to be alone in my cabin. Where is this ship being hurled to? If she should be flung against an iceberg——'
'If that,' cried he, abruptly, and with temper, 'then as lief be in your cabin as here, as here as on the deck.'
Then, softening his voice, he said some reassuring things—I forget them—I was crying with my face averted, that the men should not see me. Mrs. Burke took my arm, and we entered my berth. She called to the steward to light the lamp, and named some refreshments which he presently brought, but it was too bitterly cold to talk; nay, our voices here, right aft as my berth was, were almost inaudible for the thunderous wash of the sea along the slant of the side, with a lift of it, when the toppling, helpless hull tumbled my cabin window to the foam, that must again and again have soared high above the line of her bulwark rails.
I would not undress, but after I had drunk some wine, I got into my bunk, where Mrs. Burke made a heap of me with bedclothes and furs; then, kissing me and promising to look in from time to time, she dimmed the lamp and went.
I afterwards passed many terrible nights in this ship, but none worse than this—perhaps because it was the first of them. The noises of the sea and straining fabric drowned all sounds in the state-cabin. I could not hear if the men talked, nor tell what they were doing. I terrified myself by imagining that they would get at the spirits and make themselves drunk. Then there was always the haunting horror of ice near us. At any moment I might feel a rending shock of collision. I was sailor enough to know that if our ship was thrown against such a berg as we had sighted that day, nay, even against a piece of ice of her own bulk, she would be shivered into staves, and all before we could put up one prayer to God. And often did I pray that night, and with plenty of fervour of tongue, I don't doubt, but with little heart, I fear; I was too frightened to realise the meaning of the words I used. Twice Mrs. Burke visited me and said all was right; the sailors had been on deck to pump the ship out; the hull was dry and buoyant, and the gale abating. This news she gave me on her second visit. There was a vast deal of snow in the wind, and the blackness was so thickened by it there was no power in the rushing sea-flares to make a light for the eye beyond a pistol shot; but the captain believed, she said, there was no ice nearer to us than the cathedral island we had seen that afternoon.
Nature, however, was worn out at last and I fell asleep, and when I awoke it was daylight, by which I guessed it was not much earlier than noon; I looked through the porthole, a large lead-coloured, confused swell was running, but it was unwrinkled and frothless. The motions of the ship were extraordinarily wild and agitated; she was flung into twenty postures in a minute. When I got out of my bunk I found it impossible to stand without holding on. The water in the wash-stand was a solid block of ice, but the cold did not seem so piercing, nor of an edge so saw-like as I had found it yesterday. I contrived to wrap myself up, and went out and saw Mrs. Burke sitting alone near the stove. She sprang to help me, and said that a few minutes earlier she had looked in, and left on finding me asleep. A pot of coffee was beside the stove, and a breakfast of cold ham, tinned meat and other things on the table.
'Where are the crew?' I asked.
'On deck,' she answered, 'endeavouring to rig up a mast.'
'Is the captain hopeful?'
'He means to stick to the ship,' she answered. 'Some of the men talk as if there was nothing to be done with her, and spoke of going away in the long boat.'
'Is the vessel utterly dismasted?'
'She is in a terrible plight. But make a good breakfast, dear. It is quiet weather in spite of this horrible rolling. The hull is sound, and we are sure to be fallen in with by some vessel that will help us.'
As she spoke Mr. Owen came out of his cabin. His face was the pale shadow of the countenance he had brought on board. He blinked his eyes, and they were bloodshot; his very hair seemed to have been toned by emotion into a sort of ashen colour. He made a slight bow, and sat down at the table without speaking. Evidently he had breakfasted. Also, no doubt, he had previously met Mrs. Burke. I judged by his behaviour that the captain had talked to him; it was a mixture of sulkiness and dislike.
He had been kind and attentive to me on many occasions during the voyage, and, full of fear and other crowding passions as I myself was, I yet felt sorry for him. I bade him good morning and asked him if he had been on deck. On this he rose, and clawing his way round the table, so as to get near to me, he said:—
'I owe you an apology for my conduct last night. My indiscretion was not so much the result of cowardice as the state of my health. Much less than I took in the hope of obtaining a little warmth and spirit must have overcome me. I trust I have your forgiveness.'