I remember thinking, as I turned from the rail and made with the ice in my hand towards the companion, that one of the hardest parts of this terrible experience for the poor girl below, though she would have to be dumb on the subject, was the prospect of being locked up with me—alone with a young man, a sailor, who was a stranger without existence to her a few days ago; to be locked up, I say, it might be for months, with a threat even of years in the run of time, with a person whose character and history she knew nothing about, whose calling sunk him far below her socially. This ran in my head with the swiftness of thought whilst I was going below, and after I was in the cabin going about the business of boiling coffee for a meal.
How could I make her mind easy, on the score, I mean, of our association, so that something at least of the weight of our distressful tragic situation should be lifted off her poor young heart? But the answer my good sense gave me was the answer it had before returned, namely, she could only find me out by time, though to be sure I might shorten the period of her fear of me by a behaviour that could leave her in no doubt of my resolution to act as a man.
I can't express how deeply I pitied her, how my very soul was moved to its depths by the sight of her as she sat in her loneliness and helplessness, a trueborn lady, gentle and fair, watching me, with her white face turning after me, as I moved; sitting upon that desperate slope of deck with the red glow of the fire upon her, herself a shapeless bulk of furs and coverings in the lamplight that was growing dim.
When I drew to the stove she questioned me afresh upon our situation, and begged me to conduct her on deck. I answered presently, when she had broken her fast. She said:
'Only think how it would be with me if I were alone.'
I stopped in what I was about, and looking at her a little steadily, but with a smile, I said:
'I'm glad my presence is welcome to you. It will be owing to no fault of mine if it's not always so whilst we're together.'
A grateful look freshened her face with an expression of life that was like colour and a smile.
'Think of me alone here!' she said in a low voice. 'I should have gone mad days ago. It never could have come to my knowing that this hull had stranded amongst the ice. I should have destroyed myself in my craziness.'
'You have gone through too much,' said I, 'to miss of being rescued. You'll be saved and so shall I, and for no other reason, I dare say, than because I'm with you. I have some hope that this hulk will take a more comfortable posture. Did you hear a roar like an explosion just now astern?'
'Yes. Was it the ice?'
'Ay. But should it trim us, I hope it will not send us afloat.'
She listened whilst I told her of the huge berg that lay linked to the island by the beach of ice on which the hull rested. Then I talked as cheerfully as I could of making this interior a tight, dry, warm room for her whilst we lay waiting for that help which was bound in some shape of whaler or sealer to come along. She shuddered and looked around her with a face of sudden imploring grief; but I went on, speaking as heartily as I could.
'We'll make this cabin dry and warm,' said I. 'I'll get that water to leeward there baled out. I'll rout the carpet up on deck and see what the breeze will do for the brine in it. They've managed very well over and over again up in the Arctic latitudes for months and months with meaner accommodation and a poorer hold. I'll stock this cabin that things may be handy. There's plenty of oil aboard I hope. There'll be coal to last us in the forepeak; we shall be helped out of this before it's all used up.'
'How long,' she asked, 'are we likely to remain here?'
'It was a saying of Nelson that at sea everything is possible and nothing improbable. It's certain these islands are visited. My intention is, Miss Otway, since we're here, so to provide for ourselves that we may be alive when help comes. Do you see that?'
'Oh yes.'
'Don't be scared, then, because I talk of provisioning and securing ourselves as though we were to be locked up for years.'
Whilst I talked I was at work getting breakfast. The angle of the deck was an abomination and a terrible hindrance, but I made no further trouble of it than my laboured motions expressed. Yet beyond the boiling of the kettle there was nothing to be done in the way of cooking owing to the slant of the stove. The discomfort was incredible. It was like being in a ship poised on her beam ends on the edge of a sea, magically arrested in her downward rush, and hanging fixed, as though capsizing.
All was as hushed in the interior as though we were in harbour. The seethe coming from the flashes of silent swell, whenever the dark green folds, blindly sweeping, tore themselves against some edge of ice, was too faint to invade us: the noise of the sea was shut out by the heights of ice astern, and no echo of the booming of the gale sweeping over the frozen summits penetrated. But for the insufferable posture of the hull my heart might have beaten with some sort of restfulness and even gratitude; for, dreadful as our situation was, it lacked the terrors of the past days and nights; we were at least safe for the time being, whilst in any hour gone by we might have been crushed to pieces; we had a right to look forward with some hope, because we were plentifully supplied with food; the hull was a stout shelter, and I could not conceive, unless there happened some convulsion of ice, that the swell of the bay, however enraged by storm, could hurt us; it might thump and thrust us high, further out of its reach—that was all—and trim the vessel by so doing into a habitable structure.
These were my thoughts as I put some breakfast on the deck for my companion. It was impossible for her to help herself. I had to place the fiddles on the deck to save the food from slipping from her hand. I talked with so much confidence that, when she had made a light meal, I heard something like a note of her spirit in her voice, and saw a little light of kindling hope in her eyes. Presently she begged me to take her on deck, on which I helped her to stand, and, catching hold of her arm, conducted her to the companion steps.
She ascended painfully. I stepped out on deck and brought her to my side; and then, emerging, she looked around. Never can I forget that poor young lady's face as she gazed at the savage, desolate, frozen scene, realising the significance of it slowly. She shrank, she cowered in the companion way; she shuddered violently, whilst her hand, with a wandering gesture, came to my arm. I see her now in memory turning her white face towards the towering mass astern, then looking at the dumb blankness of the ice cliffs ahead, with the bows of the beam-ended hulk rising to them as though upon a lift of sea.
'Is this it? Is this it?' she whispered.
She stared straight up at the flying gloom, blacking off the ghastly white edge of the iceberg in shadows of a ragged, smoke-like stuff; she strained her eyes at the little space of sea showing in angry, dark, flashing ridges past the huge ice projection that made the bay, shutting out from our sight all the rest of the ocean too. Then, turning to me, she tried to speak, swayed, with an effort to cover her face, and fainted.
No news of Marie reached us after we received a letter by a brig called the 'Queen of the Night' which had spoken the 'Lady Emma' in the North Atlantic. She had sent us a sort of diary or journal: it was meant for her father and me: she wrote in spirits which, the entries showed, were gaining in brightness, and there was no doubt that her health had greatly improved. Some of her descriptions were very fine: she seemed to have thrown herself into the very life of the voyage and wrote of the sails, rigging, discipline and manœuvres of the vessel with the easy familiarity of an old sailor.
We gathered that she was perfectly happy with Captain and Mrs. Burke, and of Mr. Owen she spoke with gratitude for his attention and sympathy.
I was told, however, by one or two seagoing acquaintances not to wonder if we did not hear again from Marie until the ship arrived at her first port, Valparaiso. A vessel might be ninety days upon the ocean and yet not 'speak' another. A friend spoke of an Indiaman that, in the whole voyage from Bombay to the Thames—not allowing, of course, for the ships seen on touching at Capetown—had sighted nothing but the topmast canvas of a vessel whose hull was sunk out of sight below the horizon.
I was living in rooms out of Bond Street. One morning in 1860, it was October 2, and Marie had then been absent from England six months, during which, after the arrival of the Liverpool brig, we had received no news whatever either of her or the 'Lady Emma.' I say, on October 2, whilst at breakfast, I picked up a morning newspaper and began to turn it about. After reading for some time my eye lighted upon a paragraph headed, 'Loss of the ship "Lady Emma."' I trembled and felt sick; I wanted courage to read the paragraph, though the paper was shuddering in my hands, and my eyes were upon the news, yet before reading I caught myself reasoning; it is another 'Lady Emma'—it cannot be Marie's ship—there may be ten or twenty 'Lady Emmas' afloat—and then I read.
The paragraph—I have not preserved it—was to this effect:
The barque 'Planter,' being to the eastwards of Cape Horn, fell in with a ship's long-boat full of men. The captain took the unfortunate people on board, but some were found to be lifeless, having been frozen to death during the night. Their story was, they were the boatswain (Wall) and survivors of the ship 'Lady Emma,' Burke, master, that sailed from the Thames bound to Valparaiso on April 2. She had been driven to the southward and eastward by heavy weather, and when she was in about fifty-nine degrees south latitude, she was totally dismasted by a sudden hurricane. After fruitless efforts to erect a jury-mast, the crew abandoned her in the long-boat. With them went the ship's doctor (Owen). The master refused to quit the ship, and remained aboard with his wife and a young lady passenger. Very shortly after the long-boat had been met with, one of the crew of the 'Planter' fell overboard. A boat was lowered in charge of the chief mate, Mr. Ralph Selby, but before she could reach the man a sea capsized her, and the mate and the three men who were in her were drowned. Within a week of picking up the survivors of the 'Lady Emma's' crew, the 'Planter' transferred them to a vessel bound to Monte Video, where they were forwarded by H.B.M. Consul by steamer to this country, arriving yesterday at the West India Docks. Mr. Owen died before the arrival of the vessel at Monte Video, and was buried at sea. It is supposed that the 'Lady Emma' foundered prior to the rescue of her crew, as Captain Parry of the 'Planter,' which is a barque of four hundred and sixty tons, cruised at great risk amongst the ice in the neighbourhood of the spot where the hull was supposed to be lying without seeing anything of her.
I sat as one paralysed, read the account through again, scarcely even then believing that the ship was the same that my betrothed had sailed in. Next, thrusting the newspaper into my pocket, I jumped up, ran into the street, and, jumping into a cab, bade the man drive me to Messrs. Butcher and Hobbs, at such and such a number in the Minories. It was about a quarter to ten o'clock.
Butcher and Hobbs were the owners of the 'Lady Emma'—of her and a little fleet of smaller vessels. I had been introduced by Captain Burke to Mr. Hobbs, and now it came to me as I was driven fast, with my brain in a whirl, half mad with consternation, grief, the hundred emotions which must needs throng upon so abrupt a disclosure of dreadful news as this I had just read—it came to me, I say, that Mr. Hobbs in my presence had very earnestly advised Captain Burke to insure some goods he was taking out as a speculation of his own; and I recollected the captain replying, with an arch, laughing air, full of strong confidence, that insurance would only render him indifferent: he had no fear as to the safety of the ship. If he insured and she was lost, it would be said he sank or stranded her.
On my arrival in the Minories I entered an old-fashioned, grimy office, in which sat a tall, stoutly-built seaman with immense whiskers, both hands on his knees; he stared idly, as though waiting. I went to a desk, and asked for Mr. Butcher or Mr. Hobbs. The clerk may have recollected me; he instantly rose, entered an inner office, and returning, begged me to step in.
Mr. Hobbs was alone: a large fat man, yellow-haired and bearded, with staring, watery eyes. As I entered he stood up, with an air of deep dejection, and extending his hand, bowed over it, looking down, exclaiming:
'I know the business that has brought you here, sir. It is terrible—it is shocking! But——' He then stood erect, and shrugged his shoulders, with a roll of his eyes upwards.
'The report in the paper is true, then?' said I.
'I grieve to say it is,' he replied.
I so trembled with grief I could scarcely speak to the man.
'Are we to entertain no hope whatever?' I said, leaning upon the table for support. He placed a chair; I sank into it and proceeded: 'Surely we need not certainly conclude the dismasted ship sunk after the long-boat left her merely because——' and here, forgetting the names, I brought out the newspaper to refer to—' the "Planter" failed to find her after a few hours' search in, perhaps, thick weather, and amongst the ice, which may have been numerous?'
'Oh, of course,' he exclaimed, 'we must not abandon hope. As you justly put it, the "Planter's" search counts for little, considering how brief it was, and the state of the weather. I'll not pretend I have much hope myself, but the sea provides many chances. Again and again you hear of rates rising, till no further risk is taken; then the ship is posted, her end made sure of, and one fine morning she's signalled off some Channel station, blowing leisurely along with the loss of her foretop-mast and her bottom beach-like with weed. I don't despair, sir; yet I must honestly own my hope is not strong.' He paused, then said, 'I believe one of the crew of the "Lady Emma's" in the front office.' He walked to the door and looked out. 'Would you like to see him? He was the boatswain of the ship. His name is Wall.'
I eagerly begged him to bring him in. He called, and the big sailor I had noticed entered. I immediately recollected that Marie, in the fragment of journal she had sent us, had described and praised him for his civility and his qualities as a seaman. He stood before us, cap in hand, his back slightly arched by years of stooping and hauling and curling of his body over yards and booms; his weather-coloured face was hard as leather, and rugged and knotted with muscle; one of those seafaring faces, impenetrable to the chisel of ocean experience which fifty tragedies of the deep would no more mark than the human anguish in shipwreck alters the face of the rock which stares through the salt smoke down upon the scene.
'This gentleman,' said Mr. Hobbs, 'is Mr. Archibald Moore. The young lady passenger aboard the "Lady Emma" was——' he dropped his head and was silent.
I gazed at the seaman with consuming interest; he had been among the last—he might have been the last—who had seen, who had spoken to Marie.
'You'll not tell me,' said I, in a broken voice, 'there's no hope for the three you left behind you?'
'No, sir, I'll not tell you that,' answered the man in deep tones, which trembled upon the ear with the power of their volume. 'I've said all along that if the ice only lets the hull keep afloat, there was nothen to prevent her being fallen in with. She wasn't so far south,' continued he, looking at Mr. Hobbs, 'as to be out of the way of half a dozen chances a week if the weather opened out the sea, and gave a view of her as she lay flat, with but twelve foot of foremast standing.'
'Why were they left behind?' I cried. 'Why were they left to wash about in a dismasted hulk amongst ice, to perish horribly after days of suffering perhaps?' and I beat the table with my fist.
'Mr. Moore, the capt'n refused to quit,' said the seaman, speaking calmly in his deep voice, and viewing me with an air of respectful pity. 'My mates'll tell you I entreated of him and the ladies to enter the boat, likewise did Mr. Owen, the doctor. We wasn't listened to. The captain was all for waiting for something to come alongside, and take the hulk in tow. He was for jury-rigging her—on a twelve-foot stump of foremast!' said he, slowly regarding Mr. Hobbs. 'The consarn blew over the bows. What in that way was going to stand down there?'
'You should have used force,' I said.
'With the capt'n?' he exclaimed, with a slow, astonished shake of his head.
'Had you got the captain into the boat, the ladies would have followed.'
'Neither 'ud have been alive next morning. The young one would have froze to death in a few hours. You should have heard the strongest amongst us groaning with the cold when we lost sight of the craft we were making for, and when the night drawed down, and we were for the hull, all hands of us mad for the shelter of her and the warmth of our blankets and the hot drinks to be got. I tell ye, sir,' he added, calmly and respectfully, 'that the captain knew more about it than we did, and was right to keep the ladies aboard; for if they was to die, better comfortably in a warm cabin than in an open boat with spray sheeting over them at every plunge.'
'What was the situation of the hull when the crew abandoned her?' I asked.
Mr. Hobbs pulled open a drawer, and read aloud a copy of an entry in the log-book of the 'Planter' in which the meeting with the long-boat was minuted. The situation as there stated was Latitude 58° 45´ S., Longitude 45° 10´ W. This copy of the logbook entry had been handed by Captain Parry of the 'Planter' to the master of the ship to whom the crew had been transferred.
A yellow glazed map of the world hung in the office over the mantelpiece. My eye went to it, and I made a step, saying to the boatswain Wall:
'Show me to the place. What land lies nearest to it? What is the usual track of ships passing Cape Horn?'
He hung back, evidently ignorant of maps and of latitude and longitude. Mr. Hobbs, picking up a ruler, approached the mantelpiece, and, peering close at the dingy map, presently put the end of the ruler upon a part of it and said:
'This, as nearly as possible, will be the place where the crew abandoned the hull.'
'Is that land there?'
Mr. Hobbs slanted his head to read, and exclaimed; 'Ay; in this little group we have—my sight is not what it was—ah! the South Orkneys. These to the left—' with straining sight and some difficulty he spelt out 'South Shetlands.'
'What sort of islands are they?' I asked.
'About the most desolate, froze-up, oninhabited rocks on that side of the world,' answered Wall. 'There's nothen to be thought of along o' them.'
'Why?' I asked.
'Because going ashore there would be like hittin' ice. In the swell that's always a-running, the hull 'ud go to pieces with the first blow, like a loosed faggot. Their one chance,' he added, in a voice of deep conviction, 'lies in their being fallen in with and taken off. That may have happened. If so, it'll be a question of waiting.'
'If so,' cried Mr. Hobbs, with a raised manner of cheerfulness that was scarcely sincere I thought, 'Captain Burke will bear in mind the suspense and anxiety you and the young lady's father are suffering, and exert his experience as an old seaman to promptly communicate, so that, let us trust, if there be good news in store, we'll get it quickly.'
'Suppose the hull should have been thrown upon an iceberg,' I exclaimed, addressing Wall, 'must she inevitably go to pieces?'
'That 'ud depend upon how she took the ice,' he answered.
'If she stranded and lay dry—such things have happened—could the three live in her?'
'Yes, sights more comfortably than if she was afloat.'
'For how long?'
'She was freighted,' said Mr. Hobbs, 'with an abundance of the necessaries of life.'
'How long could a vessel remain on the ice in a habitable state?'
'Years,' answered Wall, 'if she's let alone. Give her a snug berth clear of the wash of the sea and tumbling blocks, and what's to hurt her?'
Mr. Hobbs was staring at me earnestly. 'I could wish to persuade you,' he exclaimed, with a melancholy inclination of his head, 'to discard the notion of the hull finding a berth in an iceberg. Our hope must take a practical form. Let us, then, believe that the wreck has been encountered by one of the many whalers and other vessels which frequent those seas, and that Captain Burke and his companions are at this present moment safe.'
I turned to Wall and plied him with questions. What was the condition of the hull? What had been the state of Miss Otway's health? Did he believe, by recalling her looks when he last saw her, that she had the strength to outlive the horrors, trials, suspense, suffering, of even one week of a dismasted hull, rolling about amidst the ice in dangerous, desolate seas?—the wildest in the world and in their mid-winter? Was Captain Burke, singlehanded, aboard the wreck, as a man, capable of doing anything to help them into safety? If not, why had he stuck to the ship? What madman's nightmare of imagination could have induced him to remain with two women aboard a vessel he could do nothing with?
I almost raved my questions at the man, so wild grew my heart with grief whilst I listened to his plain answers, full of an old practical seaman's good sense, though several times he repeated that the captain was right to keep his wife and Miss Otway aboard, as they never could have survived the first night in the long-boat.
He increased my distress by hinting somewhat doubtfully that Captain Burke had fallen a little weak in his mind during the voyage; he spoke of an apparition that had been seen to walk on the ship's forecastle; it had been clothed in the likeness of the captain, and ever after he had ceased to be quite the same man.
'Can you imagine,' I cried, rounding upon Mr. Hobbs, 'that the loss of the ship is owing to Captain Burke having gone mad?'
'You wouldn't say so?' he answered, looking at Wall.
'No, sir,' answered the seaman, 'there was no madness in that job of dismasting, if it wasn't in the weather.'
'But,' I exclaimed, picking up the ruler Mr. Hobbs had used, and laying the end of it upon the map, 'what was the captain's motive in carrying this vessel so far south? See where the Horn is? What, in God's name, was he doing so high?'
'He was blowed there,' answered the man.
'I understand,' said Mr. Hobbs, 'that a succession of hard northerly gales settled the vessel to the southward and eastward, considerably out of the usual course.'
'The "Planter" was also blowed south,' said Wall.
I continued to question with impassioned anxiety, eagerness, and grief, till I found I was likely to become an intruder in the office, on which, asking the boatswain Wall for his address, and ascertaining that he did not mean to look about him for another berth at present, I shook hands with Mr. Hobbs, and walked to my place of business in the City—a private bank near Gracechurch Street.
Sir Mortimer Otway was at this time at Paris on a visit to some friends. I had heard from him two days before, and understood that he would return on the fourth or fifth. His health was not good. Of late he had become very anxious about his daughter. He thought it was time, after six months, that he should receive news of her, or that the 'Lady Emma' should be reported. This being so, I resolved not to write, but to wait until his return, when I would tell him of the wreck of the ship, if, indeed, the account of it did not reach him through other hands, or the newspapers in Paris.
For my own part I was so shocked, so stunned, there was something so terrible to my imagination in the character of this wreck, in every circumstance of it, having regard to the loneliness of the three, the wild and stormy breast of waters where the hull had been left plunging helpless by her crew, that I could not hold up my head. I could not speak. I sat in a sort of stupor. My father reasoned with me; he pointed out that the hull was afloat, a stout, seaworthy vessel when the crew left her; that being dismasted she was less likely to beat against the ice than were she moving through the water under sail; that a vessel had been seen and pursued by the crew; that where one was there must be others; and so on, and so on.
I heard him and that was all.
I cannot tell how great was my love for Marie. I felt that I had acted as a wretch, betrayed the darling of my heart to her destruction, in sanctioning her father's scheme of sending her away alone—and she must be alone if she was without me—on a long voyage in a comparatively small sailing ship. The fancy of her in that rolling, dismasted hull was a dreadful oppression to my imagination and worked in me like madness itself. I had seen the ship, and so the figure of her as she tumbled dismasted amidst the heavy seas far south of Cape Horn was easy to paint. To think of my Marie, that delicate, fragile, timid girl, imprisoned in such a hulk, enduring hours and perhaps days of anguish in poignant suspense and heartbreaking expectation of death, all alone as she was, countless leagues away from me, from her father, with no other companion than her old nurse, who, let her devotion be what it might, must surely fail her at such a time.
My mind felt crazed. I could not lift my head nor speak.
END OF THE SECOND VOLUME
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