I fell asleep quickly and my slumber was sweet, for it was one long dream of Tom. Earnest and full of passion at times had been our talk whilst we stood together at the wheel, and the imaginations of my slumber were richly coloured. At four Will awoke me, and I rose with the promptitude of a sailor, and had relieved Mr. Bates at the wheel before Tom came out of his berth. It was very dark. My cousin, instead of going immediately to his bed, went up the steps to the top of the house; he stayed two or three minutes, then putting his head over that we who stood below might hear him, for Tom had now arrived, he cried out: ‘I guess I was right; now I’m sure of it. Captain Butler, there’s a sail dead in our wake, and she seems to be overhauling us hand over fist.’
Tom and the mate ran up; presently Will looked over and called down: ‘Marian, starboard—d’ye understand me?’ I answered by immediately putting the helm over.
‘Steady!’ shouted Tom. I whirled the little wheel back and kept the brig’s head straight at about two points off the course we had been pursuing.
‘Take the wheel, Johnstone,’ Tom cried, ‘and keep your ears open, my lad.’
I surrendered the spokes to my cousin and mounted the steps with eagerness and expectation; I had caught a note of excitement in my sweetheart’s voice. The shift of helm had brought the wind almost directly over the stern of the brig; I looked along the white line of her wake, thinking to see the ship at the extremity of it, but, beholding nothing, I asked Mr. Bates where the sail was. He pointed over the lee quarter, and there to be sure hung a big dim cloud of canvas.
The moon was low and without power; the stars had grown wan since midnight, as though to the approach of dawn or as if to a gathering of windy thickness; the ship astern was visible by a kind of light of her own in her canvas—she showed as an iceberg might by night, or a tall snow-covered hill. I stood near Tom, the mate joined us, and we watched the white shadow growing out of the gloom.
Our change, of course, so postured the stranger that in a manner of speaking she was crossing our stern, so that she’d pass on our weather quarter close to.
‘I believe it’s she—I believe it’s she!’ Tom muttered, speaking to himself.
Nothing was said for some time. The foam broke from under our counter in a trail of light like the glittering scar left by a meteor in the sky. We were washing through it at seven knots, and the great dim cloud of canvas astern at eleven or twelve. She had now shaped herself into a clear outline against the thin stars, and I could see the white water boiling at her forefoot.
‘Captain Butler,’ exclaimed the mate, in a voice of agitation, ‘that’s the Childe Harold!’
‘Yes! She’s the convict ship,’ said Tom, catching me by the hand. ‘Do you see that her main-royal lies furled? Whither away? Whither away?’ cried he, looking at the ship.
‘Fore and maintopmast stu’n’sails!’ exclaimed Mr. Bates. His voice quivered, now he recognised the ship he was first officer of but a little while gone.
She loomed up upon our quarter in a thunderous heap of pallid flying shadow, and the low red western moon and the lean stars and the throb of black waters, flashful with foam, ridging southwards, were the fittest setting the night could have contrived for her; and that deep spirit of desolation which in the dark hours of the ocean morning spreads out of the gloomy distance was present and abounding. She showed no light, but the foam which broke in masses from her bows and fled along her sides swift as smoke touched the fabric of the noble ship’s hull with its own radiance, and we viewed her as though by moonlight.
She was about a quarter of a mile distant when she swept past us. All that way off I heard the drum-like roll of the wind in the high white spaces of her canvas, and the sullen, continuous roar of the water she parted. And all the time she hung to windward, drawing ahead and opening out the squares of her sails till their hollows, blackening upon us, showed like a growing thunderstorm upon the sea-line, but with never a wink of light from cabin window or binnacle-stand. Tom and the mate commented upon her; my sweetheart in a rapid, fierce voice; Bates sulkily.
Tom said: ‘The devil’s in command there, and he has stocked her forecastle with a troop of devils.’
‘They’ll be no worse than their shipmates,’ said the mate.
‘How they’re driving her! Our escape has woke them up! There’s fear and there’s meaning, too, in that press. Where are they bound to, and who’s to carry them there? Are they lying drenched and drugged and damned again as last night, thick as poisoned rats one atop of another? Oh, the beasts!’
‘I guess what’s happened,’ said the mate, in a gloomy voice. ‘That chap with a cast eye, who put the scheme of the Pacific Islands into their heads, has taken charge of the ship. There’s a sailor’s hand in that spread of cloths. Butler, they’ll know where they started, from what you told them; that cast-eyed rogue’ll heave the log and plump foul of what’s nearest and split. Lord, what a beautiful ship to run away with! And they’ll lose her, they’ll lose her!’
‘They’re steering straight for Tristan d’Acunha,’ said I.
‘Aye, straight as a fly crawls up a pane of window!’ exclaimed Tom. ‘She’ll make no Tristan. They’ll head off for the Horn, and continue their navigation with a chart they can’t read and a dirty forefinger.’
‘If Barney Abram but knew we were in this brig!’ I exclaimed.
Tom left the top of the deck-house and let go the maintopsail halliards. The big sail bellied out from the yard on the cap, losing its driving power, and in a few moments the brig’s pace sensibly diminished.
‘Let her get out of sight,’ said he, returning. ‘There’s no horizon wide enough to divide us. Why, Bates, think of daylight coming along and a stark calm falling, and yonder ship of devils, with Nick at the helm and Barney at the prow, lying stagnant within an easy boat-row!’
‘Here’s a wind to blow her clear of us, sir,’ said the mate.
They continued to talk; I, with my eyes fastened upon the fading shadow, sank into deep thought. Was that ship out there the vessel Tom and I and Will had boarded in the East India Docks? Was she the craft into whose black-hole under the forecastle I had crept, when all was silent in her prison ’tweendecks, while she lay at rest alongside the Warrior hulk? Was she the theatre of the tragedy of the convicts’ uprisal, of their nightmare carousals? Was it yonder shadow fast blending with the gloom upon the waters, whose fabric had re-echoed the obscene songs, the blasphemous jokes, the insane yells of the self-freed felons?
No more for a time than a wonderful horrible dream did it all seem to me as I stood looking—a frightful vision from which I must awaken and find myself in my bed at home, starting up to grieve and yearn for Tom as of old, and saying to myself: This dream came to me by thinking, before I fell asleep, of what his life would be on board the convict ship and how I was to make sure of joining him in the country he was transported to.
The shadow vanished. It was the last we ever saw of the convict ship. It was the fittest of all disappearances for her. The folds of the morning darkness swallowed her up as though she had been thundered at headlong speed into the blackness of death’s dominions, whose obscurity was thickened yet by the vapours of the inextinguishable fires.
I started, sighed, and passed my arm through Tom’s.
At about eight o’clock this morning there was a lull in the wind; it then shifted suddenly into the south-east, blowing small at first, but freshening afterwards until it had settled into the steady pouring of the trade gale. I held the wheel while the three braced the yards forward, and soon the little brig was humming along on what sailors call a taut bowline with her fore and main royals set, and as fair a prospect of fine weather to windward as ever the noble commercial breeze of the South Atlantic painted in clouds and dyes of clear pure blue.
This same morning, after breakfast, I still steering the little ship, Tom and the others overhauled the vessel afresh. They lifted the main-hatch and took a look below. They entered the lazarette, searched the fore-peak, closely again examined the crew’s sleeping-quarters. They met with everything essential in the equipment of a small brig—suits of sails, carpenter’s tools, boatswain’s stores in plenty. Indeed, Tom said she was the best found craft of her sort he had ever seen.
He found a brace of pistols and ammunition for them in the captain’s cabin. There were no other small-arms on board.
When the brig had been trimmed for the trade-wind, they went to work to chock and secure the Childe Harold’s quarter-boat in the place where the brig’s long-boat had stood; afterward, Will mixed a pot of paint and painted out the name ‘Childe Harold, London,’ in the stern of the boat. Mr. Bates then carefully gauged the stock of fresh water and found a handsome supply, sweet and good.
And now, till we made the island of Tristan d’Acunha, there befell nothing worthy to detain you. We found no difficulty in managing the brig. Larger ships than the Old Stormy had been handled and safely worked across the wildest and widest breasts of ocean in the world by crews at least as small as ours. My share consisted in cooking, preparing the cabin table for meals, steering when my watch came round and when Tom was weary of standing at the wheel or wished to get upon the deck-house top to look about.
Both Will and Bates fell very quiet. They read Tom’s resolution in his face and they heard it in his voice, and they came into his scheme of touching at Tristan as though they themselves had been escaped convicts eager to hide.
Many a long talk did I have with Tom over his project, and I know that I never breathed a syllable in opposition to his wishes. Particularly do I recall a conversation we held one night in the first watch; he steered, and I, who was tired, sat on a chair close beside him. The trade-wind sang shrill betwixt our leaning masts; regularly as the beat of a clock the brig heeled to the slant of the windward surge and bowed her lee side till the froth spat and snored along the very line of her bulwark-rail.
‘No, Tom,’ said I, answering him; ‘don’t call it banishment. Banishment for me must be where you are not.’
‘I’ve tried, for your sake,’ said he, ‘to think of another and a better plan, but Tristan in my mind for ever stands steadily best and first. Let Bates and Will believe we mean to settle there. Our imprisonment shall be just as short or long as we choose.’
‘We can leave when we please?’
‘Whalers are constantly calling at the island; they fish in many seas, and they’ll give us a wide choice of retreats.’
‘Yet I wish Corporal Glass didn’t know you.’
‘Why? By knowing me he’ll the more readily believe in my story. What have I to dread? Suppose news reaches the island of the seizure of the Childe Harold, would Glass and the few simple families of the place imagine me a convict? Not surely in the face of the story I must relate, Marian.’
‘When the news gets home they may send men-of-war to search for the convict ship.’
‘My dear, I am a sailor first of all; put it thus: The Childe Harold will be fallen in with; no need to search for her in that case. Or she may founder. Never imagine that of so great a company every soul will perish; she has boats, but a single survivor would suffice to acquaint them at home with her fate. And how must the yarn run as regards myself? The convict who took command got away in a boat. What became of him? Let them find out.’
He cried out vehemently after he had said this, ‘Oh, my own, that I should be forced to hide! But it has come to it. You are with me and of me, Marian; but what sort of future lies before you?’
I arose and kissed him, and, with my arm about his neck, held my cheek pressed to his. He calmed down quickly, and I got him to talk to me about the island. He told me that when the British troops landed in 1816, the only person on Tristan was an Italian. He was in possession of a large sum of money; but they never succeeded in finding out who he was, how he came by the money, or what had become of his companions. Tom said that the idea of seeking a refuge in that island had occurred to him in the time when the convicts were planning the seizure of the ship. His long chat with Corporal Glass on the occasion of his visit a few years before occurred to him, and he remembered many things that he had seen and heard, such as the little group of cottages situated on the tabled tongue of land, the scanty stock of domestic furniture and utensils, the abundance of English farm-produce, bread, bacon, eggs, butter, milk, poultry, and the like. For groceries and clothes, he said, the families depended on a passing emigrant ship or American whaler. They used no money. Ships were glad to exchange what the islanders wanted for potatoes and such fresh provisions as the island yielded. This is what I can recollect of what Tom told me of that island.
The days passed quickly; the work of the brig kept our hands full, and when, of an evening, I looked back on the hours, I’d marvel at the swiftness of their flight. The south-east trades failed us; we then took a strong wind out of the west, which drove us along with the speed of steam. There was small doubt now of our making the island within the fortnight, computing from the day when we fell in with the brig. At long intervals a sail hove into view, but we never sighted anything within speaking distance, nor would Tom have had anything to say to a ship, though she had come close enough to be within hail of the voice.
It was Sunday morning. I was aroused by Will, who beat upon my cabin-door. He asked me if I was awake. I answered, ‘You may hear me.’
‘Then,’ said he, ‘step out and take a look at the island Butler’s to make you queen of, for I’ll be hanged if the heap of cinder isn’t right over the bows.’
I clothed myself in a breathless hurry, and, coming out, found Mr. Bates at the wheel and Will on the bulwarks, looking ahead, and Tom on the deck-house roof, pointing the brig’s telescope at the sea. The morning was bright and silent. A light north-easterly wind held the canvas hushed. Long lines of swell were flowing out of the south-east. For leagues northward and eastward the sea was full of the light of the sun.
I looked directly ahead, and instantly beheld a large, dim, violet cloud upon the horizon.
‘Is that Tristan d’Acunha, Tom?’
‘Yes!’ he exclaimed, turning quickly. ‘That’s our island, Marian.’
‘A noble hiding-place!’ I cried.
Indeed, that point of shadowy land lying upon the mighty face of the deep was such a revelation of loneliness that, when you viewed it and thought of the measureless leagues of ocean stretching from it west to the South Pacific, east to the Australian meridians, you thought that here only in this prodigious liquid waste was earth’s deepest, wildest, most awful secret of solitude to be learned and solved.
Tom’s eyes were upon me. He brought his face close and whispered, ‘They’ll never think of us as being there.’
‘It’s as lonely as a star.’
‘We’ll be getting a better view presently. I hope there’s nothing lying off. If there is, I’ll push on and heave-to behind the horizon till I think it’s gone.’
‘Is there a harbour, Tom?’
‘Oh, no,’ he replied, with a shake of his head and a faint smile. ‘No other harbour than a two-mile offing. That heap is about eight thousand feet tall. You see but a little of it. The mass from midway’ll be wrapped up in a cloud. The inshore wind strikes and rebounds in offshore gales. I’ll not leave the brig. They’ll put off, and if they’ll lend me two or three hands to work us, then, after I’ve introduced Glass to you, if he’s well enough to board us—and spun my yarn to him with you as the only listener’—and here he glanced at Will, who still overhung the rail, looking ahead—‘we’ll proceed.’
I did not ask where to; we had talked the thing over and over again, and the four of us were agreed that nothing could be settled till we were off the island and saw how affairs stood there. It was just possible that a missionary parson had settled in Tristan since Tom’s visit; in that case we could be made man and wife out of hand and so spared a new voyage in search of a church. Then, again, nothing could be decided until we knew that the islanders would lend us two or three of themselves to help work the brig.
The wind scanted as the day advanced, and we were further hindered by a heavy, long-drawn swell off the port bow. There was no chance of our reaching the island before dark within communicating distance. At sunset the huge mass of towering rock was about two leagues away, and even then a most wonderful sublime sight. Bodies of orange-coloured mist clung to the mountain, whose snow-crowned peak, piercing the sun-touched vapour, gleamed in a soft rose in the delicate evening blue. We saw no vessel under the island or upon the sea-line. The lofty land swiftly darkened into the liquid dusk when the sun sank, and over it, where it stood invisible, hung the stars of the Southern Cross.
The cabin barometer promised fair weather; the brig flapped onward through the darkness, bowing deeply to the swell; but somewhere between eight and nine, Tom considering we should need the offing we then had, the three backed the yards on the main, and the vessel was brought to a stand. The lighter sails were clewed up and furled, and the mainsail snugged by its gear.
Whilst Tom and the others were aloft and I was at the wheel, I heard a strange hissing noise close to. It was like a locomotive blowing off steam. The rolling of the brig depressed the bulwarks and gave me a sight of the sea, and I spied, at the distance of a pistol-shot, the great black body of a whale, with a jet of water, bright with phosphorus, sparkling plume-shaped out of it. Tom from aloft called down to me to look, but the monster sank almost immediately, and if it reappeared I neither heard nor saw it.
This trifling incident somehow wonderfully accentuated the vastness and solitude of the ocean to the mood that was then upon me. I strained my eyes in the direction where I guessed the island to be and pictured myself upon it, gazing upon the dark plain of the deep, sensible that, saving two adjacent rocks, no land was to be come at for hundreds and hundreds of leagues. The shadow of the mighty ocean mountain was upon my spirits, not in a depressing or a despondent weight, but with an influence that subdued and awed me. I thought of that part of London in which I had dwelt, the streets filled with the noise of people in motion, the lighted shops, the ceaseless rattle of wheels, the docks complicated as a giant cobweb with rigging and masts pointing in silence into the gloomy river sky, the flash of lanterns on the water, the starry lines of lamps on either bankside, of my house at Stepney; and I beheld my father and mother again with my mind’s eye, and Mr. Stanford’s strange, sickly child; my unloved dead sister; I thought of my aunt’s cheerful house near the Tower, the pleasant, hospitable rooms above the offices, the piano at which I had sung, the supper-table round which we had gathered; and then I searched the dark distance for the shadow whereon I was to dwell, and said to myself, if there should be a clergyman there, by this time to-morrow I may be Tom’s wife.
I shivered and pressed my head. A sense of the unreality of my existence came upon me; it was a sort of madness whilst it lasted.
Tom had descended the rigging and came to my side, and, unable to control myself, I threw my arms round his neck and burst into tears.
He held me to him and called to Will, who had just sprung from the bulwarks, to take the helm, and led me into the deck-house and seated me.
‘What is it, Marian?’
He eyed me anxiously, his face almost stern with gloomy apprehension as he asked the question.
‘We have gone through so much, Tom, and the end is at hand. Let me cry;’ and I hid my face and wept again.
He held his peace till I looked at him, and then said, ‘Marian, it’s not too late.’
‘What is not too late?’
‘Bates and Will will take care that you reach home safely.’
‘Oh, Tom, it’s not in your heart. You don’t mean it.’
‘Marian, my love for you makes me feel a villain for permitting you to have your way. Why did you cry?’
‘Because I was afraid.’
‘Afraid! Oh, yes! Such a home even for a year, even for a month, might terrify a stouter heart than yours into more than tears.’
‘I was afraid because I thought to myself, standing alone just now and recalling the past and looking into the darkness where the island lies, all this must be a dream—I shall awaken from it and find Tom a prisoner and away from me, and my heart aching for him.’
He viewed me with impassioned earnestness; his face lighted up; he smiled with one of those looks which brought him before me in the days of his glowing, manly beauty, when I had first met him, when calamity was still afar and all was well.
‘Dearest!’ he said, and coming to me he tenderly rested my head upon his shoulder; and thus we sat with our hearts too full for speech.
The brig being hove to, the helm needed but little or no attention. The wheel was secured, and the vessel lay in the hollow of the large, wide swell, rolling as regularly as the breast rises and falls in sleep. It was decided that the three should divide the watches, one keeping a look-out at a time and the others lying near, handy to arouse. Tom told me to rest throughout the night, and I obeyed him; but my rest was very broken, and when I slumbered I dreamed strangely.