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NEW BOOKS AT EVERY LIBRARY.


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LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY.




HEART OF OAK

VOL. I.




PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON




HEART OF OAK

A THREE-STRANDED YARN

BY

W. CLARK RUSSELL

AUTHOR OF
'THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR' 'THE PHANTOM DEATH'
'THE CONVICT SHIP' ETC.

[Illustration: Decoration]

IN THREE VOLUMES--VOL. I.


LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1895




CONTENTS

OF

THE FIRST VOLUME

CHAPTER                               PAGE
   I. MISS OTWAY OPENS THE STORY         1

  II. MARIE'S SWEETHEART                16

 III. THE 'LADY EMMA'                   30

  IV. MARIE BEGINS HER VOYAGE           57

   V. THE HIDDEN LIFE OF THE SHIP       85

  VI. A STRANGE MAN ON BOARD           112

 VII. A RACE AND A ROLLER              136

VIII. A HURRICANE                      161

  IX. DISMASTED                        190

   X. THE JURY-MAST                    212




HEART OF OAK




CHAPTER I

MISS OTWAY OPENS THE STORY


I date the opening of this narrative, February 24, 1860.

I was in the drawing-room of my father's house on the afternoon of that
day, awaiting the arrival of Captain Burke, of the ship 'Lady Emma,'
and his wife, Mary Burke, who had nursed me and brought me up, and
indeed been as a mother to me after my own mother's death in 1854; but
she had left us to marry Captain Edward Burke, and had already made two
voyages round the world with him, and was presently going a third.

My father sat beside the fire reading a newspaper. His name was Sir
Mortimer Otway; he was fourth baronet and a colonel; had seen service
in India, though he had long left the army to settle down upon his
little seaside estate. He was a man of small fortune. Having said this,
I need not trouble you with more of his family history.

I was his only surviving child, and my name is Marie; I have no other
Christian name than that; it was my mother's. My age was twenty and my
health delicate, so much so that Captain and Mrs. Burke were coming
from London expressly to talk over a scheme of my going round the world
in their ship for the benefit of my appetite and spirits and voice, and
perhaps for my lungs, though to be sure _they_ were still sound at that
date.

Ours was a fine house, about a hundred years old; it stood within a
stone's throw of the brink of the cliff; walls and hedges encompassed
some seventy or eighty acres of land, pleasantly wooded in places, and
there was a charming scene of garden on either hand the carriage drive.
I stood at the window with my eyes fastened upon the sea, which went in
a slope of grey steel to the dark sky of the horizon, where here and
there some roaming mass of vapour was hoary with snow. It was blowing
a fresh breeze, and the throb of the ocean was cold with the ice-like
glances of the whipped foam. Presently it thickened overhead, and snow
fell in a squall of wind that darkened the early afternoon into evening
with smoking lines of flying flakes. The sea faded as the reflection
of a star in troubled water. My father put down his newspaper and came
to the window. He was a tall man, bald, high-coloured; his eyes were
large and black, soft in expression, and steady in gaze; his beard
and moustache were of an iron grey, he was sixty years old, yet still
preserved the soldier's trick of carrying his figure to the full height
of his stature.

'At what hour do you say they're to be here?'

'At three.'

He glanced at his watch, then out of the window.

'That doesn't look like a scene where a delicate girl's going to get
strong!'

'No,' I answered with a shiver.

'But a crown piece on a chart will often cover the area of worse
weather than this, and for leagues beyond all shall be glorious
sunshine and blue water.'

'It's hard to realise,' said I, straining my eyes through the snow for
a sight of the sea.

'Well,' he exclaimed, turning his back upon the window, 'Bradshaw is
an able man; his instances of people whom a sea voyage has cured are
remarkable, and weigh with me. Living by the seaside is not like going
a voyage. It's the hundred climates which make the medicine. Then the
sights and sounds of the ocean are tonical. Are sailors ever ill at
sea? Yes, because they carry their sickness on board with them, or they
decay by bad usage, or perish by poisonous cargoes. The sea kills no
man--save by drowning.'

He took a turn about the room, and I stared through the window at the
flying blankness.

'Steam is more certain,' he went on, thinking aloud. 'You can time
yourself by steam. But then for health it doesn't give you all you
want. At least we can't make it fit in your case. It would be otherwise
if I had the means or was able to accompany you, or if I could put
you in charge of some sober, trustworthy old hand. Steam must signify
several changes to give you the time at sea that Bradshaw prescribes.
It's out of the question. No; Mrs. Burke's scheme is the practicable
one, and I shall feel easy when I think of you as watched over by your
old nurse. But I have several questions to ask. When are they coming?
Have they missed their train?'

About five minutes after this they were shown in.

Mrs. Burke, my old nurse, was a homely, plain, soft-hearted woman, a
little less than forty years of age at this time. She was stout, and
pale, though she was now a traveller, with large, short-sighted blue
eyes, a flat face, and a number of chins. She was dressed as you would
wish a homely skipper's wife to be: in a neat bonnet with a heavy
Shetland veil wrapped around it; a stout mantle, and a gown of thick
warm stuff. She sank a little curtsey to my father, who eagerly stepped
forward and cordially greeted his old servant; in an instant I had my
arms round her neck. You will believe I loved her when I tell you she
had come to my mother's service when I was a month old, and had been
my nurse and maid, and looked after me as a second mother down to the
time when she left us to be married.

Her husband stood smiling behind her. He was short, an Irishman: he
looked the completest sailor you can imagine--that is, a merchant
sailor. He was richly coloured by the sun, and his small, sharp, merry,
liquid blue eyes gleamed and trembled and sparkled in their sockets
like a pair of stars in some reflected hectic of sunset in the eastern
sky. Everything about him told of heartiness and good humour: there
was something arch in the very curl of his little slip of whiskers. A
set of fine white teeth lighted up his face like a smile of kindness
whenever he parted his lips. He was dressed in the blue cloth coat
and velvet collar, the figured waist-coat and bell-shaped trousers,
of the merchant service in those days, and over all he wore a great
pilot-cloth coat, whose tails fell nearly to his heels; inside of
which, as inside a sentry box, he stood up on slightly curved, easily
yielding legs, a model of a clean, wholesome, hearty British skipper.

Of course I had met him before. I had attended his marriage, and was
never so dull but that the recollection of his face on that occasion
would make me smile, and often laugh aloud. He had also with his wife
spent a day with us after the return of his ship from the first voyage
they had made together. My father shook him cordially by the hand. He
then led him into the library, whilst I took Mrs. Burke upstairs.

We could have found a thousand things to say to each other; there were
memories of sixteen years of my life common to us both. I could have
told her of my engagement and shown her my sweetheart's picture; but I
was anxious to hear Captain Burke on the subject of my proposed voyage,
and so after ten minutes we went downstairs, where we found my father
and the captain seated before a glowing fire, already deep in talk.

The captain jumped up when I entered, my father placed a chair for Mrs.
Burke, who curtseyed her thanks, and the four of us sat.

'Well, now, Mrs. Burke,' said my father, addressing her very earnestly,
'your husband's ship is your suggestion, you know. You've sailed round
the world in her and you can tell me more about the sea than your
husband knows'--the captain gave a loud, nervous laugh--'as to the
suitability of such a ship and such a voyage as you recommend to Miss
Otway.'

'I am sure, Sir Mortimer,' answered Mrs. Burke, 'that it'll do her
all the good, and more than all the good, that the doctors promise.
I should love to have her with me.' She turned to look at me
affectionately. 'Since you can't accompany her, sir, I'd not like to
think of her at sea, and me without the power of caring for her. No
steamer could be safer than the "Lady Emma."' The captain uttered a
nervous laugh of good-humoured derision of steamers. 'If you will
trust my dear young lady to me, I'll warrant you, Sir Mortimer,
there's not the most splendid steamship afloat that shall make her a
comfortabler home than my husband's vessel.'

'I have some knowledge of the sea, Captain Burke,' said my father. 'I
have made the voyage to India. What is the tonnage of the "Lady Emma"?'

'Six hundred, sir.'

'That's a small ship. The "Hindostan" was fourteen hundred tons.'

'You don't want stilts aboard of six hundred tons to look over the head
of the biggest sea that can run,' answered the captain.

'She sails beautifully and is a sweet-looking ship,' said my old nurse.

'When do you start?' asked my father.

'I hope to get away by the end of next month, sir.'

'Your little ships, I understand, which are not passenger vessels,
often sail very deeply loaded and are unsafe in that way,' said my
father.

'There can be nothing wrong with a man's freeboard, sir, when his cargo
is what mine's going to be next trip: stout, brandy, whisky, samples of
tinned goods, a lot of theatre scenery, builder's stuff like as doors
and window frames, patent fuel and oil-cake.'

'Gracious, what a mixture!' cried his wife.

'What I suppose is termed a general cargo?' said my father; 'not the
best of cargoes in case of fire.'

'What cargo is good when it comes to that, sir?' asked Captain Burke,
smiling. 'We must never think of risks at sea any more than we do
ashore. To my fancy there's more peril in a railway journey from here
to London than in a voyage from the Thames round the world.'

'Miss Otway must be under somebody's care, Sir Mortimer,' said Mrs.
Burke.

'How do you think she looks?'

'Not as she'll look when I bring her back to you, sir.'

'It's astonishing what a lot of colouring matter there is for the blood
in sea air,' said Captain Burke. 'When I was first going to sea I was
as pale as a baker; or, as my old father used to say, as a nun's lips
with kissing of beads; afterwards----' he paused with an arch look at
his wife. 'And the colour isn't always that of rum either,' he added.

'Where does the ship first sail to, nurse?' said I.

'Tell my young lady, Edward,' she answered.

'We're bound to Valparaiso, and that's by way of Cape Horn,' said
the captain. 'We there discharge, fill afresh, and thence to Sydney,
New South Wales, thence to Algoa Bay, and so home--a beautiful round
voyage.'

'Right round the world, and so many lovely lands to view besides!'
exclaimed Mrs. Burke, looking at me; 'always in one ship, too, in one
home, Sir Mortimer, with me to see to her. Oh, I shall love to have
her!'

My father looked out of the window at the wild whirl of snow that had
thickened till it was all flying whiteness through the glass, with
the coming and going of the thunder of a squall in the chimney, and a
subdued note of the snarling of surf, and said, 'Cape Horn will be a
cold passage for Miss Otway.'

'It's more bracing than cold,' said Captain Burke. 'People that talk
of Cape Horn and the ice there don't know, I reckon, that parrots and
humming birds are to be met with in Strait le Maire. I was shipmate
with a man who's been picking fuchsias in such another snowfall as this
down on the coast of Patagonia.'

'Miss Marie, you should see an iceberg; it's a beautiful sight when
lighted up by the sun,' said my nurse.

'Beautifuller when under the moon and lying becalmed like a floating
city of marble, and nothing breaking the quiet save the breathing of
grampuses,' exclaimed the captain.

In this strain we continued to talk for some time. My father better
understood than I did that my very life might depend upon my going a
voyage, and spending many months among the climates of the ocean. All
the doctors he had consulted about me were agreed in this, and the last
and the most eminent, whose opinion we had taken, had advised it with
such gravity and emphasis as determined him upon making at once the
best arrangements practicable, seeing that he was unable to accompany
me for several reasons; one, and a sufficient, being his dislike of the
sea when on it. Our long talk ended in his proposing to return with
Captain Burke to London to view the 'Lady Emma,' which was lying in
the East India Docks, and my old nurse consented to stop with me until
he returned, so that we could chat about the voyage and think over the
many little things which might be necessary to render my trip as happy
and comfortable as foresight could contrive. The one drawback that kept
my father hesitating throughout this meeting with Captain Burke and
his wife was this: the 'Lady Emma' would not carry a surgeon. But that
question, they decided, would be left until he had seen the ship, and
satisfied himself that she would make me such a sea-home as he could
with an easy heart send me away in.




CHAPTER II

MARIE'S SWEETHEART


My father went to London next day with Captain Burke. I denied myself
to callers, and until my father came back remained alone with my old
nurse, once or twice taking a ramble along the seashore when the sun
shone; but my health was bad, and I had as little taste for walking as
for company.

I suffered from a sort of spiritlessness and a dull indifference to
things. My health was the cause of my low-heartedness: but there were
many reasons now why I should feel wretched. It was not the merely
leaving my father and my home for a twelvemonth and longer, to wander
about the ocean in a ship in search of colour for my cheeks and light
for my eyes and strength for my voice; but for my health I should have
been married in the previous October; and now my marriage must be put
off till the sea had made me strong, and I was to be sundered from the
man I loved for months and months.

My betrothal had happened whilst my old nurse Burke was away; it was
therefore news to her, and she listened to all about it with eager,
affectionate attention. I told her that my sweetheart was Mr. Archibald
Moore, the son of a private banker in the City of London. I had met
him at a ball in the neighbourhood, and within a month of that we were
engaged. He was the sweetest, dearest, handsomest--I found I did not
want words when it came to my praising him and speaking of my love.

She said: 'Does he often come to see you, Miss Marie?'

'Often. Every week. He is occupied with his father in the bank, and can
only spare from Saturday to Monday.'

'Will he be here next Saturday?'

'I hope so.'

'Dear heart! Oh, Miss Marie, I have a thought: will not his father
spare him to sail with us, so that you can be together?'

I shook my head.

'But why not?'

'Father would not hear of it.'

She reflected and exclaimed, 'And Sir Mortimer would be quite right.
To be sure it would not do. Is it not a pity that we have to live for
our neighbours? Neighbours have broken folks' hearts, as well as their
fortunes. Why shouldn't you two be together on board my husband's ship?
But the neighbour says No, and people have to live for him. Drat the
prying, squinting starer into one's windows! he forces us to dress out
a better table than our purses can afford, and to give balls when we
ought to be cutting down the weekly bills. But he don't like the sea,
my dear. There are no neighbours at sea. Unfortunately the wretch
stops ashore; people have to come back, and so he has 'em again!'

Mrs. Burke made much of Mr. Moore's portrait. She had never seen a
handsomer gentleman. What was his age? I answered 'Thirty.' 'All the
sense,' said she, 'that a man's likely to have he'll have got between
thirty and forty. It'll comfort you, Miss Marie, to remember that Mr.
Moore's thirty when you're away. He's old enough to know what he's
about: he's made up his mind; there'll be no swerving.'

This was a sort of gabble to please me. She knew my nature, and when
and how to say just the sort of thing to set my spirits dancing. In
truth the part of my proposed banishment hardest to bear was the fear
that a long absence would cool the heart of the man I loved.

On Friday Mrs. Burke left us to rejoin her husband, whose home was in
Stepney, and on that day my father returned. He was in good spirits.
He had seen the 'Lady Emma' and thought her a fine ship. She was
classed high, and was yacht-like as a model. Mr. Moore had accompanied
him and Captain Burke to the docks, and was wonderfully pleased with
the vessel and her accommodation.

'We've got over the difficulty of a doctor,' said my father.

'How?' I answered.

'Burke has consented to engage one. I told him if he would carry a
surgeon, by which I mean feed and accommodate him in the ship, I would
bear the other charges. He has a month before him, and may find a man
who wants a change of air and who'll give his services for a cabin
and food. Or, which is more likely, he'll meet with some intelligent
young gentleman who wants to try his 'prentice hand on sailors before
starting in practice ashore. Doctors find sailors useful as subjects;
they can experiment on them without professional anxiety as to the
result.'

Now that it was as good as settled I was to sail in the 'Lady Emma,'
I looked forward to meeting Mr. Moore next day with dread and misery.
I was going away alone. All the risks of the sea lay before me. I was
low and poor in health. Who could be sure that the ocean would do for
me all that the doctors had promised? Who was to say it would let me
return alive? I might never meet my love again. When I said good-bye to
the man who by this time should have been my husband, it might be for
ever, and the thought made the prospect of meeting him next day almost
insupportable.

He found me alone in the drawing-room. The servant admitted him and
closed the door. I stood up very white and crying; he took me in his
arms and kissed me, led me to a chair and sat beside me, holding my
hand and nursing it, and looking into my face for a little while,
scarcely able to speak. How shall I describe him, whose love for me,
as you shall presently read, was such as to make my love for him,
when I think of him as he sat beside me that day, as I follow him in
memory afterwards, too deep for human expression? He was tall, fair,
eyes of a dark blue, deep but gentle, and easily impassioned. He wore
a large yellow moustache, and was as perfectly the model of an English
gentleman in appearance as Captain Burke was a merchant skipper.

He began immediately on the subject of my voyage.

'It's hard we should be parted; but I like your little ship, Marie.
I've not met your old nurse, but I judge from what your father tells me
you could not be in better and safer hands. Captain Burke seems a fine
fellow--a thorough, practical seaman. I wish I could accompany you.'

'Oh, Archie, I shall be so long alone!'

'Ay, but you're to get well, dearest. I've thought the scheme over
thoroughly. If there's nothing for it but a voyage as the doctors
insist, your father's plans, your old nurse's suggestion, could not
be bettered. Who would look after you on board a big steamer? There
is nobody to accompany you--no relative, nobody we know, no party of
people I can hear of to entrust you to--making, I mean, such a voyage
as the doctors advise. I should be distracted when you were gone in
thinking of you as alone on a steamship at sea, with not a soul to take
the least interest in you saving the captain; and captains, I believe,
do not very much love these obligations. Civility, of course, everybody
expects, but a big ship to look after is a big business to attend to.'

'It will be a terribly long voyage.'

'To Valparaiso, and then to Sydney and Algoa Bay, and home. About
fourteen months. So Burke calculates it. A long time, Marie; but if it
is to make you strong, it will not be too long.'

In this wise we talked; then, there being two hours of daylight left,
I put on my hat and jacket and, taking my lover's arm, went with
him slowly down the great gap in the cliffs to the seashore. It was
sheltered down here. The yellow sunshine lay upon the brown sand, and
flashed in the lifting lengths of seaweed writhing amidst the surf,
and had a sense of April warmth, though it was a keen wind that then
blew--a northerly wind, strong, with a hurry of white clouds like
endless flocks of sheep, scampering southwards. The sands made a noble
promenade, surf-furrowed and hard as wood; the breakers tumbled close
beside us with a loud roar of thunder, and exquisite was the picture of
the trending cliffs, snowclad, gleaming with a delicate moonlike light
in the pale airy blue distance. All sights and sounds of sky and sea
appealed to me now with a meaning I had never before found in them. I
would stop my lover as we walked, to observe the swift and beautiful
miracle of the moulding of a breaker as it arched out of the troubled
brine, soaring, into a snowstorm, arching headlong to the sands with
the foam flying from its rushing peak like white feathers streaming
from a dazzling line of helmets; and once or twice as we talked, I
would pause to mark the flight of the gulls stemming the wind aslant in
curves of beauty, or sailing seawards on level, tremorless wings, and
flinging a salt ocean song with their short raw cries through the harsh
bass and storming accompaniment of the surf.

'If the breeze does not make me strong here, why should the sea make me
strong elsewhere?' I said.

'It is the change. I have heard of desperate cases made well by travel.'

'It is hard! To think that my health should force me to that!' I
exclaimed, pointing to a little vessel that had rounded out of a point
two miles distant, and was lifting the white seas to the level of her
bows as she sank and soared before the fresh wind, every sail glowing
like a star, her rigging gleaming like golden wire, her decks sparkling
when she inclined them towards us, as though the glass and brass about
her were rubies and diamonds. 'I wonder if she will ever return,
Archie?'

'Why not? Cheer up, dearest.'

We watched her till she had shrunk into a little square of dim orange,
with the freckled green running in hardening ridges southwards, where
the shadow of the early February evening was deepening like smoke,
making the ocean distance past the sail look as wide again to the
imagination as the truth was. I shuddered and involuntarily pressed my
lover's arm.

'The wind is too cold for you,' he said, and we slowly returned home
up through the great split in the cliff amongst whose hollows and
shoulders the roar of the surf was echoed back in quick, sudden,
intermittent notes like the sound of guns at sea.

From this date until I sailed my time was wholly occupied in preparing
for the voyage. I went to London with my father to shop; Mrs. Burke
accompanied us, and half our purchases were owing to her advice.
Fortunately for her, as the wife of a sailor who was able to take
her to sea with him, she was childless, and could afford to give me
much of her time. They reckoned I was to be away fourteen months, but
Captain Burke advised us, having regard to the character of the voyage,
especially to the passage from Valparaiso to Sydney, to stock for a
round trip of eighteen months: this he thought would provide for a
good margin. Clothes for all the climates, from the roasting calms of
the line down to the frost-black gales of the Horn, were purchased;
many delicacies were laid in--a hundred elegant trifles of wine
and condiments, of sweetmeats and potted stuffs, to supplement the
captain's plain table or to find me a relish for some hungry howling
hour when the galley fire should be washed out. Mr. Moore wrote that he
frequently visited the ship, and that he and Mrs. Burke between them
were making my cabin as comfortable as my old nurse's foresight and
experience could manage.

So went by this wretched time of waiting and of preparation.

About a fortnight before the ship sailed my father received a letter
from Captain Burke, telling him that he had engaged a surgeon. His name
was Owen. His age he said was about forty-three; he was a widower.
The loss of his wife and two daughters three years before this period
had broken him down; he was unable to practise; had travelled in the
hopes of distracting his mind, but his means were slender and he was
unable to be long away or go far; yet when he endeavoured to resume
work he found himself unequal to his professional calls. He thereupon
sold his practice and had lived for some months in retirement upon a
trifling income. Having seen Captain Burke's advertisement he offered
his services in exchange for a free voyage. The captain described him
as a gentlemanly man, his credentials excellent, and his experience
considerable.




CHAPTER III

THE 'LADY EMMA'


On the morning of a day for ever memorable to me as the date of my
departure from my home--namely, March 31, 1860--my father and I went to
London, there to stay till April 2, when it was arranged that I should
go on board the ship at Gravesend. My grief worked like a passion in
me; yet I was quiet; my resolution to be calm whitened my cheeks, but
again and again my eyes brimmed in spite of my efforts.

Oh, I so feared this going away alone! Even though I was to be in the
company of my faithful, dear Mrs. Burke, my very heart so shrank up
in me at the idea of saying farewell to my lover, with the chance of
never seeing him more, that sometimes when I said my prayers I would
ask God to make me too ill to leave home.

It was a melancholy grey day when I drove with my father to the
station; the east wind sang like the surf in the naked, iron-hard
boughs, and the sea streamed in lines of snow into the black desolate
distance, unbroken by a gleam of sail, save, as we turned the corner
which gave me a view of the ocean, I caught sight of a lonely black and
red carcass of a steamer staggering along, tall and naked as though
plucked, with a hill of foam under her counter; the melancholy and
desolation of the day was in her, and no picture of shipwreck could
have made that scene of waters sadder.

I had bidden good-bye to all I knew during the week: there were no more
farewells to be said. We entered the train, and when we ran out of the
station I felt that my long voyage had truly commenced. I'll not linger
over my brief stay in London. Mr. Moore was constantly with me: indeed
we were seldom apart during those two days of my waiting to join the
ship at Gravesend. His father and sister called to say good-bye; I was
too poorly and low-spirited to visit them. In truth I never once left
the hotel until I drove with my father and Mr. Moore to the station to
take the train to Gravesend.

Before embarking, however, I made the acquaintance of Mr. Owen, the
surgeon of the ship. He had occasion to be in the West End of London,
and Mrs. Burke asked him to call. I viewed him with considerable
curiosity, for it was not only he was to be my medical adviser--I could
not but reflect that I was to be locked up in a small ship with this
man for very many months, with no other change of society than Captain
and Mrs. Burke. I was pleasantly disappointed in him. I had figured
a yellow, long-faced, melancholy man, with a countenance ploughed by
frequent secret weeping, and furrowed by pitiful memories and night
thoughts black as Dr. Young's. Instead there entered the room briskly,
with a sideways bow cleverly executed whilst in motion, the right arm
advanced, a short, plump figure of a man in a coat cut in something
of a clerical style, short legs, and a face that would have been
reasonably full but for its long aquiline nose, and contraction of
lineaments due to a big bush of hair standing out stiff in minute curls
over either ear. Otherwise he was bald.

My father was extremely polite to him. He stayed an hour and partook
of some slight refreshment. He stared at me very earnestly, felt my
pulse, considered me generally with polite professional attention, and,
after he had put certain questions, said to my father with significant
gravity:

'You may console yourself, sir, for the temporary loss of your
daughter; I do not scruple to say that in sending her on this voyage
you will be saving her life. I believe I can recognise her case, and
strongly share the opinion of those who prescribe a long residence on
board ship upon the ocean.'

My father's face lighted up: nothing I believe could have heartened him
more at the moment than this assurance. Mr. Moore took Mr. Owen by the
hand and said:

'We shall be trusting her to you, sir; she is very dear to me. We
should be man and wife but for her health.'

'All that my anxious attention can give her she shall have,' said Mr.
Owen, bowing over my lover's hand.

Yet he did not stay his hour without letting us see, poor fellow, that
in the depths of his heart he was a grieving man. He said nothing; no
reference was made to his affliction: but in certain pauses the pain of
memory would enter his face like a shadow, and sometimes he would sigh
tremulously as one in sorrow sighs in sleep, scarcely knowing you saw,
that he did so.

When he was gone, my father said to Mr. Moore that his spirits felt as
light again now that he had seen what sort of man it was who would have
charge of my health.

'Taking all sides of it,' he said, 'I don't think we could have
done better. Marie goes with an old nurse who loves her as her own
child; Mr. Owen seems a kind-hearted, experienced, practical man. I
hope he understands that our appreciation of his kindness will not
be restricted to bare thanks on the return of the vessel. The more
I see of Burke, the better I like him. He is an honest, experienced
seaman from crown to heel, and in saying that I am allowing him all
the virtues. No; the arrangements are wholly to my satisfaction and my
mind is at rest. It will be like a long yachting trip for Marie: she
will have a fine ship under her, and all the seclusion and comfort of
a yacht combined with the safety of ample tonnage. I am satisfied. It
was a cruel difficulty; we have had to meet it; it is well met, and
now, Marie, there is nothing to do but wait. Have patience. The months
will swiftly roll by--then you will return to us, a healthy, fine young
woman, full of life and colour and vigour, instead of----' His voice
broke off in a sob and he turned his head away. I ran to him and he
held me.

On April 2 we went down to Gravesend. Mr. Moore accompanied us. Captain
Burke had telegraphed that the 'Lady Emma' was lying off that town and
would tow to sea in the afternoon of the 2nd. We arrived at Gravesend
at about twelve o'clock and drove to a hotel. All my luggage had been
sent on board the ship in the docks. Mrs. Burke waited for us in a room
overlooking the river; here she had ordered luncheon to be served. She
seemed hearty and happy: kissed me, and curtseyed to my father and Mr.
Moore, and taking me to the window said:

'There she is, Miss Marie. There's your ocean home. What do you think
of her as a picture?'

She pointed to a vessel that was straining at a buoy almost immediately
opposite. A tug was lying near her. It was a young April day; the
sunshine thin and pale, the blue of the heavens soft and dim, with a
number of swelling bodies of clouds, humped and bronzed, sailing with
the majesty of line-of-battle ships into the south-west. A brisk wind
blew and the river was full of life. The grey water twinkled and was
flashed in places into a clearness and beauty of bluish crystal by the
brushing of the breeze. The eye was filled and puzzled for some moments
by the abounding tints and motion. A large steamer with her line of
bulwarks palpitating with heads of emigrants was slowly passing down;
another with frosted funnel and drainings of red rust on her side, as
though she still bled from the scratches of a recent vicious fight
outside, was warily passing up: beside her was a large, full-rigged
ship towing to London, and the sluggish passage of the masts, yards,
and rigging of the two vessels, the steamer sliding past the other,
combined with the sudden turning of a little schooner close by, all her
canvas shaking, and with the heeling figure of a brig, her dark breasts
of patched canvas swelling for the flat shores opposite, a spout of
white water at her forefoot, and a short-lived vein of river-froth at
her rudder; _then_, close in, two barges heaped with cargo, blowing
along stiff as flag-poles under brown wings of sail; these with vessels
at both extremities of the Reach, coming and going, interlacing the
perspective of their rigging into a complication of colours and
wirelike outlines, for ever shifting: all this wonderful changing life,
I say, adding to it the trembling of the stream of river, the pouring
of smoke, the pulling and shivering of flags, put a giddiness into the
scene, and for some moments I stared idly, with Mrs. Burke beside me
pointing to the 'Lady Emma.'

My eye then went to the ship, and rested upon as pretty a little
fabric as probably ever floated upon the water of the Thames. I may
venture upon a description of her and speak critically: indeed I must
presuppose some knowledge of the sea in you, otherwise I shall be at
a loss; for as you shall presently discover I was long enough upon
the ocean, under circumstances of distress scarcely paralleled in the
records, to learn by heart the language of the deep, how to speak of
ships and tell of sailors' doings, and I cannot but name the things of
the sea in the language in which the mariner talks of them.

The 'Lady Emma' was a full-rigged ship, between six hundred and seven
hundred tons in burthen; she was a wooden ship--iron sailing vessels
were few in those days; she was painted black; but though loaded for
the voyage she sat lightly upon the water, and a hand's-breadth of new
metal sheathing burned along her water-line like a gilding of sunlight
the length of her. Her lower masts were white, her upper masts a bright
yellow; her yards were very square, or as a landsman would call them
wide: the most inexperienced eye might guess that when clothed in sail
she would spread wings as of an albatross in power, breadth, and beauty
for a meteoric flight over the long blue heave.

'How do you like her, Miss Marie?' said Mrs. Burke.

'She is a pretty ship, I think,' I answered.

'She is a beauty,' said the good woman; 'she outsails everything.'

'She has a fine commanding lift about the bows,' said Mr. Moore,
passing his arm through mine. 'Captain Burke tells me she has done as
much as three hundred and twelve miles in the twenty-four hours.'

'So she has, sir,' said Mrs. Burke.

'I wish she'd maintain that rate of sailing all the time Marie is
aboard,' said my father.

'Oh, Sir Mortimer, this going will seem but as of yesterday's happening
when yonder ship's out there again, returned, and your dear girl's in
your arms, strong, fine, and hearty, rich in voice, and bright-eyed as
she used to be when a baby. These voyages seem long to take, and when
they're ended it's like counting how many fingers you have to remember
them, so easy and quick it all went.'

Lunch was served and we seated ourselves, but my throat was dry and
I could swallow nothing but a little wine. My father and Mr. Moore
pretended to eat; suddenly looking up I met my sweetheart's gaze: a
look of inexpressible tenderness and distress entered his face, and
starting from his seat he went to the window, and kept his back to us
for a few minutes. Mrs. Burke went to him and whispered in his ear; I
perfectly understood that she begged him to bear up for my sake: indeed
it needed but for my father and my lover to give way, for me to break
down utterly, with a menace of consequent prostration that must put an
end to this scheme of a voyage on the very threshold of it.

We left the hotel at two o'clock and walked slowly to the pier. I was
closely veiled. I could not have borne the inquisitive stare of the
people as we passed. Whilst we waited for a boat, I watched a mother
saying good-bye to her son, a bright-haired boy of fourteen in the
uniform of a merchant midshipman. She was in deep mourning, a widow,
and I had but to look at her pale face to know that the boy was her
child. The lad struggled with his feelings; his determination to be
manly and not to be seen to cry by the people standing round about nor
to go on board his ship with red eyes doubtless helped him. He broke
away from her with a sort of sharp sobbing laugh, crying, 'Back again
in a year, mother, back again in a year,' and left her. She stood as
though turned to stone. When in the boat he flourished his cap to her;
she watched him like a statue with the most dreadful expression of
grief the imagination could paint. Never shall I forget the motionless
figure of that widow mother and the grief in her face, and the look in
her tearless eyes.

'There's plenty of sorrow in this world,' said Mrs. Burke, as the four
of us seated ourselves in the boat, 'and there's no place where more
grief's to be seen than here, owing to the leave-takings and the coming
back of ships with news.'

'Master of a ship fell dead yesterday just as he was a-stepping
ashore,' said the waterman who was rowing us. 'Bad job for his large
family.'

'You'll take care to have a letter ready before the ship is out of the
Channel, Marie,' said my father. 'Mrs. Burke, your husband will give
Miss Otway every opportunity of sending letters home?'

'I'll see to it, Sir Mortimer.'

We drew alongside the ship. Captain Burke and Mr. Owen stood at the
gangway to receive us. When I went up the ladder, supported by my
father, Captain Burke with his hat off extended his hand, saying:

'Miss Otway, welcome on board the "Lady Emma." She has received my
whisper. She knows her errand and what's expected of her. She'll keep
time, Sir Mortimer; and the magic that'll happen betwixt the months
whilst our jibboom is pointing to as many courses as the compass has
marks is going to transform this delicate, pale young lady into the
heartiest, rosiest lass that ever stepped over a ship's side.'

'I pray so, I pray so,' exclaimed my father.

'Captain Burke is not too sanguine,' exclaimed Mr. Owen with a smile.

'When do you start?' asked Mr. Moore.

'Soon after three, sir, I hope,' answered Captain Burke.

I ran my eye over the ship. The scene had that sort of morbid interest
to me which the architecture and furniture of a prison cell takes for
one who is to pass many months in it. I beheld a long white deck,
extending from the taffrail into the bows, with several structures
breaking the wide lustrous continuity: one forward was the galley,
the ship's kitchen; this side of it was a large boat with sheep
bleating inside her; whilst underneath was a sty-full of pigs, flanked
by hen-coops whose bars throbbed with the ceaseless protrusion and
withdrawal of the flapping combs of cocks and the heads of hens. Near
us was a great square hatch, covered over with a tarpaulin, and farther
aft, as the proper expression is, was a big glazed frame for the
admission of light into the cabin; some distance past it a sort of box,
curved to the aspect of a hood, called the companion-way, conducted you
below. At the end of the ship was the wheel, like a circle of flame
with the brasswork of it flashing to the sun, and immediately in front
stood the compass box or binnacle, glittering like the wheel, and
trembling to its height upon the white planks like a short pillar of
fire.

A number of sailors hung about the forecastle, and a man leaned in the
little door of the galley in a red shirt, bare to the elbows, eying us,
with a pair of fat, dough-like, tattooed arms crossed upon his breast,
a picture of stupid, sulky curiosity.

We stayed for a few minutes talking in the gangway; Mrs. Burke then
asked me to step below and see my cabin, and I went down the steps
followed by the rest, and entered the ship's little plain state-room.

I stopped at the foot of the ladder and drew my breath with difficulty.
What was it? An extraordinary sensation of icy chill had passed through
me. It was over in an instant, but it was as though the hand of death
itself had clutched my heart. Was it a presentiment working so potently
as to affect me physically? Was it some subtle motion of the nerves
influenced by the sight of the interior, and by the strange shipboard
smells in it which there was no virtue in the hanging pots of flowers
to sweeten? I said nothing. My father halted to the arrest of my hand,
supposing I wished to look about me, and yet, oh, merciful God! when I
date myself back to that hour, and think of me as entering that cabin
for the first time, and then of what happened afterwards, I cannot for
an instant question--nay, with fear and awe I devoutly believe--that
the heart-moving sensation of chill which came and went in the beat of
a pulse was a breath off the pinion of my angel of fate or destiny,
stirring in the thick-ribbed blackness of the future at sight of my
first entrance into the scene of my distress. Do not think me fanciful
nor high strained in expression or imagination. My meaning will be
clear to you.

The Burkes had done their best to make this state cabin comfortable
to the eye. Shelves full of books were secured to the ship's wall: a
couple of globes of gold and silver fish hung under the skylight, where
too were some rows of flowers hanging in pots. A couple of tall glasses
were affixed to the cabin walls, and the lamp was handsome and of
bright metal. A new carpet was stretched over the deck, and the table
was covered with a cloth, so that the interior looked like a little
parlour or living-room ashore. I also observed a stove in the fore end
of the cabin; it looked new, as though fitted for this particular
voyage.

'Dear Miss Marie, let me show you your bedroom,' said Mrs. Burke.

A narrow corridor went out of this living room in the direction of the
stern; on either hand were cabins, four of a side. Mrs. Burke threw
open a door on the port or left hand side, and we entered a large
berth. Two had been knocked into one for my use.

'This is bigger than anything I could have secured for you on board a
steamer,' said my father.

My old nurse's eyes were upon me whilst I gazed around. They had
made as elegant a little bedroom of the place as could possibly be
manufactured on board a plain, homely sailing ship. Every convenience
was here, and the furniture was handsome. They had put pink silk
curtains to my bunk which was single--that is, the upper shelf was
removed so that I should have the upper deck clear above me when I
pillowed my head. They had prettily decorated with drapery a large oval
glass nailed to the bulkhead: this mirror caught the light trembling
off the river, and brimming through the porthole and filled the
interior with a radiance of its own as though it had been a lamp. The
carpet was thick and rich; the armchair low and soft. A writing table
stood in the corner, and on it was a lovely bouquet; the berth was rich
with the smell of those delicious flowers; the atmosphere sweet as a
breeze in a garden of roses. It was my lover's gift, sent on board the
ship just before she left the docks, but I did not know this until
after I had said good-bye to him.

'It is as comfortable as your bedroom at home, Marie,' said my father.

'I find your thoughtful heart everywhere here, nurse,' said I.

'We have all done our best, and our best shall go on being done,' she
answered, smiling, and meeting my father's gaze she dropped him one of
her little old-world curtseys.

'I don't think you'll find anything missing, sir,' said Captain Burke,
'from Mr. Owen's medicine chest down to the smallest case of goodies in
the lazarette.'

'My daughter is in kind hands. I am satisfied,' said my father, and he
came to me and put his arm round my neck.

Captain Burke, saying he was needed on deck, went out. Mrs. Burke and
Mr. Owen followed; my father stepped into the state-room that I might
be alone with my lover.

He caught me quickly to his heart and kissed me again and again with
a passion of grief and love. We had exchanged our vows before, over
and over. We could but kiss and whisper hopes of a sweet meeting, of a
lasting reunion by-and-by. It was like a parting between a young bride
and bridegroom, but with a dreadful significance going into it out of
my health and out of the thought of the perils of the sea. Indeed, a
sadness as of death itself was in that parting, and I know Archie felt
that, as I did, when he released me and stood a moment looking into my
white face.

When we went into the cabin I found my father earnestly conversing with
Mrs. Burke. He was asking questions about my luggage and effects, and
impressing certain things upon her memory. A few minutes later Captain
Burke came down the companion-steps, and, halting before he reached the
bottom, exclaimed:

'Sir Mortimer, I'm sorry to say the tug'll be laying hold of us now
almost immediately.'

My father started, looked at me with something frantic in the
expression of his face, then crying 'Well, if the time has come----'
and took me in his arms. Then with tears standing in his eyes, and
gazing upwards, he asked God to bless and to protect me, and to
restore me, his only child, in safety and in health to him; and now
speechless with grief, mutely looking a farewell to Mrs. Burke, who
herself was weeping, he went on deck, followed by Mr. Moore, whose
leave-taking here had been no more than a single kiss pressed upon my
forehead as I stood beside the table after my father had released me.

When they were gone I sank into a chair; Mrs. Burke looked with wet
eyes through a cabin window. She was right to let my grief have its
way. After a little I heard the voices of men chorusing on deck;
overhead people regularly tramped to and fro. Mr. Owen came into the
cabin and said:

'Pray, Miss Otway, let me conduct you above. The air will refresh you,
and the picture of the river is striking and full of life.'

'Come, dear Miss Marie, with me,' said Mrs. Burke, and I put my arm
through hers and went on deck.

I stood still on discovering that our voyage was begun. Our ship had
been moored to a buoy; there had been no anchor to weigh, no wild
music of seamen nor hoarse quarter-deck commands to give the news of
departure to those under deck; the little tug had quietly manoeuvred
for our tow-rope, and now the ship's bows were pointing down the river,
her keen stem shearing through the froth of the paddle-wheels ahead,
with some sailors heave-hoing as they dragged upon the ropes which
hoisted certain staysails and jibs; the old town of Gravesend was
sliding away upon the quarter. I strained my eyes in vain for a sight
of the boat in which my father and Mr. Moore might have been making for
the shore. Well perhaps that I could not distinguish her. I think it
would have broken my heart then to have seen them, thus, for the last
time, making their way ashore for that home I was leaving for months,
and perhaps for ever!

'We have started, nurse!' I exclaimed.

'Yes, dear,' she answered. 'Do not make haste to cease crying. Let
nature work by degrees in her own fashion. I shall soon see my dear
girl looking proudly with health, and oh, the joy of your meeting with
your father and Mr. Moore, and my happiness when I see them staring at
you, scarce knowing you for your beauty and brightness!'

The water blazed with sunshine, the merry twinkling of it by the fresh
April wind made the whole Reach a path of dazzling light. Twenty
vessels of all sorts were about us: some leaned with rounded canvas
soft as sifted snow, with yellow streaks of metal glancing wet to the
light out of the brackish foam, that wanted the shrillness and spit of
the froth of the brine; some lifted bare skeleton scaffolds of spars
and yards as they towed past; some were no bigger than a Yarmouth
smack, and some were great steamers and deep and lofty ships from or
for the Antipodes. But whatever you looked at was beautiful with the
hues of the afternoon, the backing of the green land, the inspiration
of the sea, the spirit of ocean liberty wide as the horizon that is
boundless, and high as the air through which the clouds blew.




CHAPTER IV

MARIE BEGINS HER VOYAGE


This was the first voyage I had ever made. I was born in England, and
was left at school when my mother went round the Cape to India on
the second visit my father paid to that country. I had never in my
life crossed a wider breast of water than the English Channel between
Folkestone and Boulogne. Everything here, then, you will suppose was
wonderfully new to me; infinitely stranger indeed than had the ship
been a steamer whose funnel and masts have commonly but little in them
to bewilder the landgoing eye.

Hundreds of times had I watched ships passing over the blue or grey
waters which our house overlooked; but they were as clouds to me,
indeterminable though beautiful decorations of the deep: I knew nothing
of their inner life, of one's sensations on board, what the sailors
in them did. I looked up now and beheld three masts towering into a
delicate fineness to the altitude of their own starry trucks, with
yards across, rigging complex as the meshes of a web, white triangular
sails between. A sailor stood at the wheel, floating off from it with
the easy, careless posture of the sea, his knotted hands gripping the
spokes of the gleaming circle. A stout-faced man in the tall hat of the
London streets, his neck swathed in a red shawl, walked up and down the
deck near the cabin skylight. Mrs. Burke told me he was the pilot. She
pointed to a man who was standing on the forecastle as though keeping a
look-out on the tug, and said that he was Mr. Green, the first mate of
the ship: indeed the only mate. The boatswain, she informed me, who was
not a certificated officer, would take charge of her husband's watch
when the ship was at sea.

She talked thus to distract my mind. I asked her what she meant by her
'husband's watch,' thinking she meant the timekeeper in his pocket.

'Why,' she said, 'every ship's crew is divided into two companies
or watches, called port and starboard; the starboard watch is the
captain's and the other the mate's. Let us walk a little. Already you
are looking better, positively.'

Here Mr. Owen joined us.

'I declare, doctor,' exclaimed Mrs. Burke, 'that Miss Otway has already
got a little colour in her cheeks, more even since we left Gravesend
than, I warrant, Sir Mortimer has seen in her the last twelvemonth
gone. If she means to begin to look well so soon, how will it be with
her, sir, when this ship's bowsprit is pointing the other way and we
shall be all ready to go ashore?'

Mr. Owen, in a soft felt hat, an academic bush of hair under either
side of it, like the cauliflower wig of olden days, and a warm, heavy
black cloak, might have passed for a clergyman. He asked permission to
stroll the deck with us, and pointed out objects ashore and upon the
water with an intelligence that proved him the possessor of a talent
for colour.

Once he broke off in what he was saying to look at the land; he sighed
deeply, yet, forcing a smile, said to Mrs. Burke:

'That parting should never be a sad one which promises a happy meeting,
at the cost of no more than patience.'

'Truly indeed not,' said Mrs. Burke cheerily.

'It is the meeting! it is the meeting! promise _that_, and what is
the leave-taking?' he exclaimed, and was all on a sudden too moved to
speak: he faintly bowed, and went to the ship's side and looked at the
shore.

We did not long remain on deck. I found the wind cold, my head
slightly ached; I was weary with the exhaustion which follows upon
fretting. Mrs. Burke went with me to my cabin, and we spent a long
while in talking, recalling old memories, and most of the time she was
cheerfully busy in seeing that my things were in their place and that I
wanted for nothing.

The night had drawn down dark over the ship when we passed from my
berth into the state cabin. It was about seven o'clock. Supper was
ready. The table was bright with damask and silver and flowers; under
the skylight the large globe lamp glowed steadily, and filled the
interior with the soft radiance of sperm oil. I heard some men singing
out on deck and the noise of ropes flung down upon the planks. The
sound was strange and put a sort of wildness into this interior,
despite its fifty civilising details of furniture.

A young sandy-haired youth, long and lank, in a camlet jacket, stood at
the foot of the companion-steps, and swung a bell with evident delight
in the noise he made. Mr. Owen started up from a locker in the corner
of the cabin on seeing us, and exclaimed:

'There is a brave wind blowing. Captain Burke hopes to be off Deal by
midnight.'

'That will be famous work,' said Mrs. Burke. 'But this is a clipper
ship.'

'Are we sailing?' said I.

'Yes. Some canvas is spread. But the tug still has hold of us,'
responded Mr. Owen.

I felt no movement in the ship. She was going along with the seething
steadiness of a sleigh. Just then Captain Burke came below. His
composed, cheerful face, peak-bearded with red hair and arch, merry
Irish eyes, seemed to bring a new atmosphere of light into the place.
He addressed some friendly sympathetic question to me; we then seated
ourselves, I on the captain's right, and Mr. Owen at the foot of the
table.

It was my first meal at sea, if indeed the ship could then be called at
sea, and memorable to me for that reason. I had tasted no food since
breakfast, and now tried to eat, but less from appetite than from the
desire to please my old nurse. My chat with her before supper had
determined me to fight with my grief, to regard the voyage as a long
holiday yachting excursion, which should be happy if I accepted it as
a twelvemonth's diversion that was to end in making me a new woman,
and in fitting me to become a wife. It was this last point that Mrs.
Burke had insisted upon, and, like a good many ideas which are obvious
and commonplace when uttered, it took my fancy, lighted up my views as
though it had been a sort of revelation, and whilst I sat at supper I
was so composed that more than once I caught Mr. Owen dart a glance of
surprise at me when I answered or put a question.

'The sea is very smooth here, Edward,' said Mrs. Burke.

'There's no sea yet,' he answered. 'It's river so far. We're towing
through what's called the Warp, near the Nore, whose light ye should be
able to see, Miss Otway,' said he, getting up and ducking and bobbing
to command the whole compass of a cabin window.

'I wonder the ship doesn't run the tug down,' said Mr. Owen.

The captain looked at me with his merry eyes and chuckled.

'Ay, we're a match for the old slapper even with nothing on us but fore
and aft canvas and two topsails,' said he. 'I wish Sir Mortimer was
with us. Here's a voyage to thread a heart through the strands of his
years. I don't know that ever I met a gentleman I took a greater fancy
to, unless it's Mr. Moore,' and he gave me a bow, whilst I smiled,
feeling a faint glow in my cheeks.

'There'll be a full moon at eight,' said Mr. Owen.

'So there will, sir, thank God,' answered Captain Burke. 'We sailors
can never have too much light. No, not even in our wives' eyes,' said
he, with an askant arch look at Mrs. Burke.

And now he began to talk. Though without the brogue in his tongue, he
had the fluency and humour of his country. He was full of stories of
adventure and experience; scarce a sea he had not navigated in his day.
His wife watched me eagerly, and if ever I smiled her face lighted up
and her kind eyes shone. All his efforts were directed to cheer me.
Observing Mr. Owen smelling at an egg he exclaimed:

'What's that you've got?'

'Something laid too soon, captain.'

'Doctor,' said the captain, 'I know a sailor who made an experiment:
he put a number of French eggs under a sitting rooster, and what d'ye
think was hatched? Cocks and hens in the last stage of decrepitude!
They hopped and staggered about in his little back-yard, and died of
old age in twenty-four hours. That was his test of a bad egg. If he
wanted to make sure he hatched it.'

Thus ran his careless, good-humoured gabble, and perhaps had he talked
wisely and soberly he would not have done me any good.

He went on deck presently, and the mate, Mr. Green, came below to
get his supper. He was a middle-aged man, of a very nautical cut in
figure and clothes, with a sneering face, and a beard of wiry iron hair
covering his throat, though he shaved to the round of his chin, and a
droop of left eyelid put the expression of an acid leer into that side
of his face.

Mr. Owen had withdrawn to his cabin. Mrs. Burke and I sat at a little
distance upon a comfortable sofa near the stove. The mate squared his
elbows and fell to work slowly but diligently, often lifting his knife
to his mouth and chewing with the solemnity of a goat.

'He rose from before the mast,' said Mrs. Burke. 'I hope he's a good
sailor. This is his first voyage with my husband. He holds a master's
certificate, but that don't signify much, I expect. A man wants to know
human nature to command a crew of sailors. He's been a common seaman
himself, and fared ill, and worked hard on a starvation wage, as most
of the poor creatures do, and that's likely to make him hard with
the men and unpitying. It's always so. It's the person who's been in
service that makes the exacting mistress.'

All this she spoke softly. She then inquired of the mate how the
weather was on deck.

'Why, not so fine as it is down here, mum,' he answered. 'There's a
vast of stars, but 'tis black till the moon comes up.'

'Where are we now?'

'The Girdler ain't far off,' he answered, masticating slowly.

'Is the tug still towing us?'

'Oh, certainly yes, mum!'

He did not seem disposed to talk, and answered with grimaces and the
awkward air of a man ill at ease.

I was looking at his square sturdy figure, with his weather-ploughed
face and the muscles all about it working like vigorous pulses to
the movement of his jaws, when I felt a slight motion of the ship, a
gentle, cradling heave of the deck: the lamp and all things pendulous
swayed; creaking noises arose from all parts; a sudden giddiness took
me. The movement was repeated with the regularity of a clock's tick.

'Isn't the sea getting up?' exclaimed Mrs. Burke, staring at the
gleaming ebony of the skylight windows and then around her.

The mate arrested the tumbler whose contents he was turning into
his mouth to distend his lips in a grin, which he probably thought
concealed.

'Why, I thought we were still in the river!' cried Mrs. Burke again.

The mate, picking up his cap, rose, contorted his square figure into a
bow to us, and went up the companion-steps.

The motion of the vessel affected me. Mrs. Burke got a pillow and made
me comfortable on the sofa, and, wrapping herself in a shawl, went on
deck. She returned presently and said that the river had widened into
a sea, with danger-lights sparkling here and there, and the full moon
rising solemnly and beautifully upon the port bow. She hugged herself
and said it was blowing fresh, and the ship under several breasts of
canvas was chasing the little tug, which was splashing ahead as fast
as she could go.

'We're doing between seven and eight miles an hour. Only think!' she
cried. 'We shall be opening the lights of Margate very soon. To think
of Margate and the sands and the shrimps, and us sailing past it to the
other end of the world. How do you feel, my dear?'

I answered that I felt sick.

'You will suffer for a day or two,' said she, 'and then you'll take no
more notice of it than I do. Hark! what is that?'

The sounds proceeded from Mr. Owen's cabin.

'They'll never get a cure for it,' said Mrs. Burke, looking in the
direction of the doctor's berth.

I lay motionless, feeling very uncomfortable and ill. Mrs. Burke gave
me some brandy and put toilet vinegar to my head. She advised me to go
to bed, but I begged leave to rest where I was. The motion of the ship
grew more lively the further she was towed towards the mouth of the
river, where the weight of the field of water past the Forelands would
dwell in every heave. At last, a little while after ten o'clock, I told
Mrs. Burke I felt as if the fresh air would revive me, on which she
wrapped me up in shawls and helped me on deck. She walked on firm legs
with the ease of an old salt, whilst I so swung and reeled upon her arm
that I must have fallen twenty times but for her support.

But, nevertheless, the moment I emerged through the little
companion-hatch, with its load of warm atmosphere closing behind me in
a sensible pressure of mingled cabin smells and heat, I felt better; a
shout of bright strong moonlight wind fair betwixt my parted lips swept
away for the time all sensation of nausea: I breathed deep and looked
about with wonder.

It was a fine, noble night-scene of water and ship. We were following
the tug under three topsails and a main topgallant sail and a flight of
fore and aft canvas; the sails swelled pale as steam into the moonlight
air, carrying the eye to the fine points of the mastheads, whose black
lines were beating time for a dance of stars. High up was the moon,
full, yellow, and glowing; if land was near, it was buried in the wild
windy sheen under the orb; the water rolled in liquid silver, islanded
here and there by the black flying shadows of bodies of vapour hurling
headlong, down the wind north-east: ahead the black smear of the tug's
smoke full of sparks, with a frequent rush of crimson flame out of the
funnel's throat, was flying low.

Captain Burke came from the pilot's side to salute me, and pointing
abeam to starboard (I offer no excuse for writing of the sea in the
language of the sea) exclaimed:

'There's Whitstable somewhere down there, Miss Otway. And yonder should
be Herne Bay. With a powerful telescope we should presently be able to
see the bathing machines on Margate beach.'

'What is that out there?' I asked.

'A Geordie,' he answered, 'a north-country collier.'

She was swarming along, a very spectre of a ship, lean, visionary,
glistening like the inside of an oyster shell in the moonlight, which
whitened the black hull of her into the same sort of misty sheen
that was upon the water, till she was blended with the air brimful
of moonlight, making a mocking phantom of her to fit in with the
desolation beyond, where you saw a red star of warning hinting at ooze,
and white crawling streaks and a pallid rib or two, with some fragment
of mast upward pointing in a finger of wreck, dumbly telling you
whither the spirit of the rest of it all had flown.

I watched our little ship bowing in pursuit of the tug; she curtseyed
her white cloths to the moon, and the brine flashed at her bows at
every plunge, and went away in a wide, rich race astern, for there was
the churning of the paddles in it too.

But soon I was overcome by nausea once more, the magic of the fresh air
failed me, and, yielding now to Mrs. Burke's entreaty, I suffered her
to carry me to my cabin.

After this for the next four or five days I was so miserably ill that I
lay as one in a fit or swoon, scarcely sensible of more, and therefore
remembering but little more, than that Mrs. Burke was hour after hour
in my cabin, sleeping beside me on a mattress during the night, and
watching over me throughout that distressing time with touching and
unwearied devotion. Mr. Owen was too ill to visit me; but what could he
have done? Did he cure his own nausea? I think he knew of no physic for
mine.

Indeed we met with very heavy weather in the Channel. The wind shifted
shortly after the tug had let go of the ship and blew a moderate
breeze out of the south-east, but in the morning the breeze freshened
into a gale; a head sea ran strong, short, and angry; the captain
drove the vessel along under shortened canvas, with sobbing decks and
spray-clouded bows as I learnt; but to me, inexperienced as I was, her
behaviour seemed frightfully wild and dangerous. I sometimes thought
she was going to pieces. My cabin was aft, the machinery of the helm
was nearly overhead, and the noise of it when she plunged her counter
into the foam, and the rudder received the blow of some immense volume
of rushing brine, sent shock after shock through the planks, and
through me as I lay in my bunk.

But the stupor of sea-sickness was upon me, I had no fear; had the ship
actually gone to pieces I do not think I could or should have opened
my mouth to cry out. All that I asked for was death, and I was so sick
even unto that state that I cannot remember I once wished myself at
home, or thought for an instant of my father or Mr. Moore.

But on the fifth day I was well enough to sit up and partake of a
little cold fowl and wine, and next day I was able to go on deck.

By this time we were clear of the English Channel, and I looked around
me at the great ocean, swelling in long lines of rich sparkling blue
under the high morning sun. Far away, blue in the air, were some
leaning shafts of ships, and at the distance of a quarter of a mile a
large steamer was passing, steering the same road as ourselves.

Weak as I was after my long confinement below, dazzled and confused too
by the splendour of the morning, and the novelty and wonder of that
windy scene of our bowing ship, clothed in canvas, gleaming like silk
to the trucks, I could not but pause with a start of admiration when
my sight went to that steamer. Captain Burke, seeing me as I leaned
on his wife's arm, crossed the deck, and after some commonplaces of
genial greeting told me that yonder vessel was a French man-of-war.
She was round sterned with portholes for guns there, and two white
lines full of gun-ports ran the length of her tall, shapely sides. She
was ship-rigged, and lifted a lustrous fabric of square canvas and
delicate cordage to the soft blue skies, a wide space of whose field
the gilded balls of her trucks traced as she rolled heavily but with
majesty, crushing the water at her bows to the impulse of her sails
and propeller into a heap of splendid whiteness, like to the foam at
the foot of some giant cataract. She was the noblest sea-piece I had
ever beheld: the tricolour was at her gaff-end, a blue vein of smoke,
filtering from a short black funnel, scarcely tarnished the azure over
the horizon betwixt her fore and main masts; a great gilt eagle was
perched with outstretched wings under her bowsprit, and seemed to be
poised for a soaring flight as though affrighted by the roar of spume
beneath; her decks were a blaze of light and colour when she rolled
them towards us, with the sparkle of uniforms, the flash of sun-stars
in bright metal, and gleams breaking from I know not whence, like
sudden flames from artillery.

'I think I see her in charge of an English lieutenant,' said Captain
Burke, 'making a straight course for Portsmouth. They have built good
ships for us and will build again.'

He placed chairs, and Mrs. Burke and I seated ourselves. I could now
look about me with enjoyment of what I beheld. The sun shone with some
warmth, and the wind blowing freely out of the west was of an April
mildness. The whole life of the universe seemed to be in that ocean
morning, with our ship in the middle of it bowing as she drove over the
long blue knolls. The hour was half-past eleven. Smoke was feathering
down upon the water over the lee side out of the chimney of the galley,
through whose door as I looked I saw a sailor emerge holding a steaming
tub, with which he staggered in the direction of a little square
hole on the forecastle. Immediately after a second sailor rolled out
similarly burthened.

'The men are going to dinner,' said Mrs. Burke.

'What do you give them to eat?' I asked the captain.

'To-day,' said he, 'they'll dine on beef and pudding.'

'It sounds a good dinner,' said Mrs. Burke. 'But all the while I'm at
sea, I'm wondering how sailors contrive to get through their work on
the food they get.'

'Go and put those notions into their shaggy heads forwards and there'll
be a mutiny,' said the captain.

'Beef as tasteless as one's boot if one could imagine it boiled,' said
Mrs. Burke, 'pudding like slabs of mortar, biscuits which glide about
on the feet of hundreds of little worms called weevils. Edward has had
to live on such food in his day, and I believe it is the beef and pork
of his seafaring youth that give him his premature looks. He oughtn't
to seem his age by ten years.'

He eyed her archly and kindly. 'Premature is a good word,' said he.
'Sailors are always too soon in life. Soon with their money, and soon
with their drink and pleasures, and soon with their years, so that it
is soon over with them.'

'They're a body of workmen I'm very sorry for,' said Mrs. Burke; 'their
wrongs are not understood, and they've got no champions.'

As she pronounced these words the hairy head of a man, clothed in a
Scotch cap, showed in the little square of the forecastle hatch; he
took a wary view of the quarter-deck, then rose into the whole body of
a man picturesquely attired in a red shirt, blue trousers, a belt round
his waist, and a knife in a sheath upon his hip. He was followed by
three others, and after a short conversation they came along the decks
towards us.

Captain Burke, appearing not to notice them, told his wife he was going
to fetch his sextant. Mr. Green, the sour-leering mate, was trudging
the weather side of the quarter-deck. The man who had first risen, the
hairy one of the Scotch cap, exclaimed, as the four of them came to a
halt in the gangway:

'Can we have a word with the capt'n, sir?'

'What d'e want?' answered the mate, speaking with half his back turned
on them as though he addressed some one out upon the water.

'We're come to complain that the beef to-day ain't according to the
articles.'

'As how?' said the mate, still looking seawards.

''Tain't sweet, sir.'

'No call to eat of it,' said the mate, turning his head and letting his
leering eye droop upon them.

'That's not the way to speak,' whispered Mrs. Burke to me with a note
of impatience and temper. 'Why shouldn't the meat be tainted? It's so
in butchers' shops often enough.'

'If there's no call to eat of it there's no call to turn to on it,'
said one of the men with a surly laugh.

Here Captain Burke arrived with a sextant in his hand.

'What is it, my lads?' said he quickly, but good-humouredly.

'The starboard watch's allowance of meat's gone off, sir,' said the man
in the Scotch cap civilly enough.

'The fok'sle's dark with the smell of it,' said another.

'Notice a blue ring round the flame of the lamp?' said the captain.

''Tain't meat for men,' exclaimed the man, who had growled out a laugh.

'Go and bring aft what remains of it,' said Captain Burke, and he
stepped to the side and adjusted his sextant to get a meridional
observation.

The men trudged forward. I could not but notice how eloquent of
grumbling their postures were as they walked. Experience has long since
assured me that no man can so perfectly make every limb and lineament
of him look his grievance as the sailor.

They presently returned, bearing a dish: Captain Burke stooped to it
and sniffed.

'You are right,' he exclaimed. 'Overboard with it, my lads. This should
never have been served out to you. 'Tis the cook's fault to boil such
offal. Mr. Green, see that the starboard watch have some canned mutton
for their dinner at once.'

The men emptied the contents of the kid over the side, looking very
well pleased, and then went forward.

'They have no champions, my wife says,' exclaimed Captain Burke to me
with a smile. 'Poor fellows! But I'll tell you what, Miss Otway: you'll
never find Jack's rights wrong for the want of Jack taking the trouble
to keep them right.'




CHAPTER V

THE HIDDEN LIFE OF THE SHIP


I devoted the afternoon of the first day of my recovery from sickness
to a journal which I meant should serve as a letter both for my father
and Mr. Moore, to be transmitted home in sheets as the opportunity
occurred. My old nurse told me that her husband had written to my
father whilst in the Channel, and had sent the letter ashore at
Plymouth by a smack; so they would have news of me at home down to two
days before.

I was so much interested in the little incident of the tainted meat I
have told you of, that I asked Captain Burke this day to let me taste a
specimen of the beef sailors were fed on. He laughed and said:

'Miss, your teeth are too little and white for such beef as that.'

'I'll try a cut, too, with your leave, captain,' said Mr. Owen.

The captain grinned at his wife, but complied nevertheless, and when we
sat down to supper, the steward placed a cube of forecastle beef before
us. There were plenty of good things on the table: my father had half
filled the lazarette, or after-hold, with delicacies, and we carried an
abundance of live stock: everything in that way, perhaps, but a cow,
for which no room could be made; but the steam of the sailors' beef
filled the atmosphere; the smells of all the other dishes yielded to
it. And yet it was good meat of its sort.

Mrs. Burke wrinkled her nose, and said, 'Miss Marie, please do not
touch it.'

'Captain Burke, I will taste a piece,' said I.

'And I will thank you for a slice, captain,' said Mr. Owen.

The captain made a great business of sharpening a carving knife, all
the while glancing from me to his wife with a laughing eye. The stuff
yielded to the sharp blade in a curled shaving: it was like cutting a
block of wood, that part I mean where the heart is.

'Don't put it to your lips, my dear,' cried Mrs. Burke.

I tasted a morsel: the steward watched me with an ill-concealed grin;
the meat, if meat it could be called, was hard as leather, salt as the
brine over the side, of a texture and hue no more resembling corned
beef such as we know the thing on shore than a whelk is like a turtle.

Mr. Owen chewed and chewed. 'This is what the sailors make snuff-boxes
and models of ships of,' said he.

'Is this as good as can be got?' I asked.

'As good as the best,' said the captain, looking at it earnestly.

'You'll have plenty to talk about when you get home,' said my old nurse.

'It is strange that science doesn't provide the seamen with food fit
to eat,' said Mr. Owen, helping himself eagerly to a slice of ham. 'I
believe I shall give the subject my attention when I get back.'

'Science doesn't think of sailors, only of ships,' said Captain Burke.
'If I had my way my crew should have a fresh mess every day. But you
can't go to sea _all_ live stock.'

Thus we chatted. I listened with interest and asked questions. It was a
new life to me. Little did I then imagine how fearfully and tragically
deep I was to read into the darkest secrets of it.

During a few days, which carried us to the Madeira latitudes, the
weather continued gloriously fine. A quiet north-westerly wind blew
throughout; the ship leaned gently away from the breeze and rippled
through the blue swell dreamily; all was so quiet aloft, all went
so peacefully on deck. I'd hang over the side for an hour at a time,
viewing the passage of the foam stars and flower-shaped bells, and
wreaths of froth sliding aft into a white line on either hand the
oil-smooth scope of wake; I'd watch with admiration the flight of
the flying fish, glancing from the ship's side like arrows of light
discharged through her metal sheathing; I'd drink in the large and
liberal sweetness of the wind, and stand in the sun that its light
might sink through and through me.

In those few days Mr. Owen assured me the ocean had already done me
good.

'But you are bound to profit,' he said as we walked the deck together,
'because you have not come too late to this physic of climates. People
are sent to sea with one lung gone and the other going, and their
friends wonder they should die, and talk of a voyage to sea as of no
use where there is organic mischief. You are here in good time, Miss
Otway: be that reflection your comfort.'

Then there came a change of weather; a few days of wet gale; green
seas ridging into cliffs upon the bow, and all the discomfort of a
long pitching and tossing bout. But I suffered no longer from sickness
however; I ate and slept well, and spent all the time in the cabin,
reading, working, chatting with Mrs. Burke or her husband, or Mr. Owen.

Captain Burke amused me in these early days by explaining how he worked
out his sights. He gave me a very good idea of the art of navigation;
he and his wife shared a pleasant cabin confronting mine. It was a
little parlour in its way as well as a bedroom, cheerful with oil
paintings of ships, a small collection of china, and other matters
all carefully cleated and otherwise secured. Amongst the pictures was
a cutting in black paper mounted upon white of myself when a child
in my nurse's arms, the lineaments defined by streaks of bronze.
Captain Burke told me that his wife valued that little memorial above
everything in the cabin, including himself and all that they owned
ashore.

He showed me his chronometers and explained their use; placed charts
before me and talked of the places we were to visit, and promised that
I should be able to take sights and work out the latitude and longitude
before we returned home.

He said this at the dinner table during one of those days of wet, foul
weather.

'Miss Otway,' he added, addressing Mr. Owen, 'is just doing what
everyone should do who goes a voyage, whether for entertainment or on
business; she's taking an intelligent interest in whatever's passing.
If everybody who went to sea did that the case of Jack would be
understood, and you'd hear no more of young ladies being astonished on
discovering that sailors look exactly like men.'

'I never could make head nor tail myself,' said Mrs. Burke, 'of my
husband's method of finding out where the ship is.'

'No voyage can ever be dull,' exclaimed Mr. Owen, 'that's sensibly
lived into. Yet every voyage is found dull.'

'There's too much water,' said Mrs. Burke, 'and not enough things to
look at. But dull days have long legs, Miss Marie. Time soon passes,'
said she with a cheery look. 'The top's never spinning so fast as when
it is asleep.'

'There's plenty to look at,' said I. 'I don't like weather that keeps
you under deck; but it can't be always so.'

'Scarce once in a white moon, and never even _that_ for sailors,' said
the captain.

'What,' asked Mr. Owen, 'do you consider the great sights of the sea?'

Captain Burke shut his eyes and scratched the back of his head, then
looking full at me he said:

'What do you think of a ship in full sail, becalmed in the heat of
the fan-shaped reflection of the moon, Miss Otway? Or would you prefer
a whale as big as a brig leaping half out of water with a killer at
its throat? Or what d'ye say to a quadrille of water-spouts, the
white satin shoes on their feet gleaming as they slide, and the black
feathers in their hair nodding stately among the clouds brilliant with
electric gems.'

'How?' inquired Mr. Owen, smoothing his bald head.

'But at sea the less you find to talk about the better,' exclaimed
Captain Burke; 'I'd like my ship's log-book to be as dull as a parson's
tale. Trifles on the ocean become serious in a moment; a slight
deviation from dulness will start a tragedy. Give us no excitements.'

The conversation was ended by his going on deck to send the mate down
to dinner.

The miserable weather came to an end, and then we took the north-east
trades and swept down the Atlantic under wide spaces of canvas which
for many feet overhung the ship's weather side, and she rushed onwards
with the salt smoke blowing from her bows, and that swallow of the
deep, the stormy petrel, freckling in its swarm the wide hollows
betwixt the quartering ridges. For five days we sighted nothing, though
Captain Burke promised that the first homeward-bound ship he met with
willing to back her topsail should receive my letter.

Once during these mornings, on coming on deck after breakfast, I found
the ship steadily washing through the seas with easy bowing motions,
leaving a league-long line of white behind her. We were in hot weather
now; an awning sheltered the quarter-deck, and comfortable chairs were
under it.

It was the improving health in me that gave me the spirit I had; I did
not want to sit; the life of the sea seemed to sweep into my being in
a holiday dance of heart. Now that I could feel without the suffering
that had before prostrated me, the whole vitality of the ship coming
out of the gallant flying fabric of her into the very poise of my form,
with a sense as of waltzing in each compelled motion of the figure, I
found an enjoyment in her buoyant motions, and in the rolling measures
of the surge, beyond anything my poor health had suffered me to know in
the ball-room, beyond all delight fine music had given me.

When we came on deck Mrs. Burke stood a little while with her hand on
my arm, whilst I looked aloft and around; our gaze met; she laughed in
the fulness of some instant emotion of pleasure, and cried:

'Oh, dear Miss Marie, I wish Sir Mortimer could see the light that is
in your eyes at this minute!'

'I wonder,' said I, 'if Dr. Bradshaw and the others foresaw that I
should enjoy this voyage?'

'Are you enjoying it?' she exclaimed eagerly.

'I am constantly pining for home,' I answered, 'and longing--and
longing, to see father and Archie. And yet, somehow, this splendid
sunshine and wonderful scene of sea, this delicious feeling of being
borne through the air, makes me so glad and light-hearted that I
believe the strong tonic of the wind has affected my head.'

'No more than it has mine,' she exclaimed.

'It is like drinking wine in sorrow,' said I; 'the mind seems merry
with it, and the eyes sparkle, but the heart is sad all the same and
will speak presently.'

'I'll tell Mr. Owen how you talk,' said she. 'You're not fair to the
remedy.'

'I don't want to sit,' said I. 'Let me look at the ship this fine
morning: I should like to take a peep at the sailors' parlour. And
suppose we go right into the bows there and watch the glorious white
foam.'

Captain Burke was in his cabin, the surly mate had charge of the ship,
so Mr. Owen accompanied us. There was little to see, however; we went
to the galley and looked in, and here we found the ship's cook making a
pie for the cabin. He was the fat-armed, dough-faced man who had stared
at us with imbecile curiosity when we came on board. It was a queer
little kitchen, not many times larger than a sentry box. Mrs. Burke
asked the man if the oven baked well.

'Too vell, mum,' he answered, turning his face with an expression of
dull surprise upon it at sight of us standing in the galley doorway.
'He's for burning up. He vants too much vatching.'

'How do you like being ship's cook?' said Mr. Owen.

'Almost as much, I dessay, as you likes being ship's doctor,' he
answered.

Mr. Owen looked deaf on a sudden, and, stepping back, found something
to interest him aloft.

'What pie is that?' said Mrs. Burke, who had been casting her eye over
the little interior, with its equipment of shelves, crockery, oven,
coppers and the like, with the critical gaze of an exacting housekeeper.

As she asked the question the ship leaned sharply upon a sea; the
cook staggered with a wild flourish of the knife he was trimming the
pie-crust with; the pie slipped and fell with a crash, breaking in
halves, and out rolled a dishful of preserved gooseberries.

'You can see vat it is for yourself, mum,' said the cook, lancing
his knife at the mess on the deck with a force which drove the blade
quivering into the hard plank. 'Who'd be a blooming ship's cook? This
is the sort of life it is!' and, heedless of our presence, he began
to swear, and then roared out for Bill or some such name--meaning,
I suppose, his mate--that the fellow might come and swab up the
gooseberry puddle.

We walked on to the forecastle.

'That cook's a very insolent fellow,' said Mr. Owen. 'I hope he will
give me the pleasure of prescribing for him.'

'All sea cooks are ill-tempered,' said Mrs. Burke. 'They live in little
boxes like that, and are obliged, for want of room, to stand close
to furnaces all day long, and their livers swell. But their trials
are many. I've heard of a sea striking a galley where the cook was in
it full of the business of the cabin dinner, and washing him and his
kitchen right aft, where he was rescued out of a depth of water as high
as a man's waist holding on for his life to a frying-pan. Cooks ashore
never meet with blows of that sort.'

A number of the crew were at work on various jobs in this part of the
vessel. Two sat upon a sail, stitching at it. Hard by was a little
machine called a spun-yarn winch, merrily clinking, with a boy walking
backwards from it as it yielded the line it twisted.

A man with a marline spike stood in the fore-shrouds working at a
ratline. I looked at everything I saw with interest and attention;
to me it was like the rising of a curtain upon a theatrical show of
incomparable beauty and variety; I found novelty in the very men;
I don't remember that I had ever seen such men on shore, least of
all down by the seaside, where the landsman seeks the sailor and
finds him in anything that wears a jersey and owns a boat. They were
hairy, burnt, wildly dressed, half-naked some of them; their trousers
turned above their knees, their chests bare, mossy, gleaming with
perspiration; arrows in Indian ink pointed like weather-cocks upon
their muscular naked arms as they moved them, and every man's fist was
barbarous with rings in Indian ink and his wrists with blue bracelets.

'Do you see that hole there, Miss Otway?' said Mr. Owen, pointing to
a square hatch in the forecastle deck. 'Those men sleep down in that
hole,' said he.

I drew close to the queer little trap-door to look down, taking care to
hold on to Mrs. Burke; for it was not only that the heave of the ship
was to be felt here in her falls and jumps, lofty as the peaks and deep
as the valleys which underran her: the trade wind stormed in thunder
out of the huge rigid hollow of the fore-course with the weight as of
a whole gale in the sweep of it, flying in long, steady shriekings and
whistlings under the arched foot, and smiting every heave of brine
leaping white above the cathead into crystal smoke.

I gazed into a sort of well, at the bottom of which upon an old green
battered sea-chest sat a sailor. The man had a squint that had almost
twisted each ball of vision into his nose; he was deeply pitted, and
had long, curling, sand-coloured hair and a yellow beard; he was pale
and weedy, with but a little piece of nose in the middle of his face,
and cheek-bones starting through his skin pale with heat, and when he
looked up and continued to stare at us with his desperate squint, he
made me guess how drowned sailors look when their bodies are washed
ashore. He was a sick man and off duty.

'How are you feeling?' the doctor called down to him.

'Oh, dot I vhas kep' togedder mit red-hot corkscrews,' he answered in a
voice that creaked like a sea-gull's note.

'Go on taking your physic,' said Mr. Owen.

'By Gott, yaw, dot vould be easy if der physic vhas rum,' answered
the man with a ghastly smile, continuing to stare up at us with an
occasional snapping blink of his eyelids. 'But der vater in der
bilge--und I gif you all der rats of der ship to be drownt in her
too--vas sweet gombared to him.'

Mr. Owen drew back and the sufferer ceased to speak.

'A nasty attack of sub-acute rheumatism,' the doctor said behind me.

The rest of the sailors were on deck: this man sat alone on his chest
in the bottom of that well, and I pitied the poor solitary wretch from
my heart when I considered how every plunge and sharp movement of the
ship must serve to give a new twist to all those red-hot corkscrews he
complained of. It was too dark below to distinguish more than the man's
figure. I observed the fluctuations of a thin, watery yellow light,
and tasted in the occasional puffs of thick atmosphere that came up a
horrid smell of burning fat.

'Do they cook down there?' I asked.

'It is the fumes of the forecastle lamp Miss Otway smells,' said the
doctor. 'It's fed with the slush the sailors make their puddings with.'

I wished to ask several questions, but the roar of the wind and the
sea silenced me. Mr. Owen took me by one arm, Mrs. Burke by the other,
and we carefully made our way into what is called the ship's head, past
a huge anchor and a little capstan, and ropes taut as harp-strings,
and vibrating with the wild drumming music of the sails whose corners
they confined. The huge bowsprit shot out directly ahead of us. It ran
tapering, and was like the finger of a giant pointing, inviting the
eye to the deep blue distant recess towards which we were rushing, and
which opened like the whole morning upon the sight each time our bows
soared to the foaming summit.

They say that the finest sight in the world is a ship in full sail,
and perhaps it is, but I doubt if there's one in a thousand, one in a
hundred thousand, who has ever seen such a thing; and the reason is
that a ship in full sail means studding sails out on both sides, and
every stitch of the rest of her canvas set, and this figure she can
make only under conditions of wind so rare as to render the spectacle,
as I understand it, something outside the experience of anyone, sailor
or landsman, that ever I have conversed with.

But to my mind there is a finer sight than a ship in full sail: and
that is the view of the vessel you are on board of rushing at you,
thundering at you, for ever charging into the seething troughs of brine
with the white foam scaling her wet and flashing bow, you meanwhile
perched out beyond her, watching her coming at you.

They provided this magnificent treat for me that day. It fell out thus:
I overhung the rail in the head, looking down at the boiling dazzle
there, watching with indescribable delight and wonder the beautiful
sight of the cutwater of the ship, metalled high, sliding through the
brine, bowing till the ivory-white lady that was her figure-head was
depressed almost to the sip of the cloud of foam which the hurl of the
bows sent roaring and flashing far ahead, to rush back in a singing,
seething sheet a moment after when the ship's head lifted upon the next
swelling heave, bright blue till it was charged and out-turned into
a noise and splendour of thunder and snow. Mrs. Burke and the doctor
looked down with me. My old nurse would sometimes turn an eye full of
satisfaction upon my face, which I felt was glowing with the spirit
this rushing ocean picture had kindled. I looked yearningly towards the
bowsprit end and exclaimed:

'Oh, now, if I were a man, to be able to get out there and watch the
ship coming at me!'

'Here comes Captain Burke,' said Mr. Owen.

He had arrived on deck just then, and, seeing us in the bows of the
ship, was advancing.

'Are you going to paint a picture of the "Lady Emma," Miss Otway?'
said he, coming to my side and looking down at the thick and giddy
foam, roaring and spitting sometimes within arm's reach, and throbbing
aft into a wake whose tail went out of sight in the windy blue haze.

'No.'

'You are studying every effect!'

'It is worth leaving home to see this!' said I. 'How fast are we
sailing?'

'Thirteen knots an hour.'

'Miss Marie wishes she was a man, Edward,' said Mrs. Burke.

'All gallant-hearted girls wish that,' said he. 'But why?'

'That she might be able to climb out on to the bowsprit and watch the
"Lady Emma" rushing at her.'

'Is that so, miss?' cried the captain, whipping round upon me with his
Irish briskness and arch merry eyes. I smiled. 'It can be managed if
you please.'

I looked at the long bowsprit forking out into jib-booms far ahead,
with white jibs curving upon it motionless as ice, save when now and
again one or another breathed to the plunge of the ship.

'There must be no risks!' cried Mrs. Burke.

'Chaw!' exclaimed her husband. 'Will you trust yourself in my hands,
Miss Otway?'

'I will indeed.'

He called to the boatswain of the ship, a big seaman with strong red
whiskers and a whistle round his neck: the finest specimen of an
English seaman I ever saw _out_ of a man-of-war; this man who acted
as second mate, though uncertificated, I had once or twice conversed
with when he was on the quarter-deck, and found him very civil and
communicative, and a relief to the eye after leering Mr. Green.

The captain gave him certain directions. He called to a couple of men,
and amongst them--but I am unable to explain their procedure--they
rigged up a chair attached by a tackle to a stay; they bound me
securely in the chair, and by some machinery of ropes they gently and
slowly hauled me on to the bowsprit, the captain and the boatswain
sliding out in company. Mrs. Burke watched us with a countenance of
fright: I felt excessively nervous whilst I was being drawn to the
extremity of the great spar, and held my eyes closed, but did not
shriek nor speak. Indeed, somehow I felt safe, though a landsman might
have regarded my situation as in the last degree perilous.

'Now look at the ship and tell me what you think of her,' said the
captain.

They had got me to the end of the bowsprit sitting very comfortably
and tightly secured in a chair, and the captain and boatswain were on
either hand of me, though what they held on by I don't know. I looked,
and what I saw I shall never forget. For there, right in front of me,
heeled by the shouting wind, was the whole body of the ship, her milky
whiteness, mounting to the royal yards, rounding into violet gloom from
the sun, with gleaming half-moons of blue betwixt each yard, and every
afterbreast sliding under the netted shadow of rigging. I rose high in
my chair above the sea. Under me ran the blue surge sparkling deep and
clear to the bows, where it burst into snowstorms. I commanded a clear
view of the white decks through the arch of the foresail, a hundred
shadows slipped along them as they slanted up and then slanted down
with the rhythmic swing of a pendulum; a hundred fiery lights broke
from all parts as the ship leaned to the sun. The wind was filled with
the music of the rigging: deep organ notes, then a large swelling of
fifes and trumpets, coming in a sudden gust or gun of wind, with a
drum-like roll trembling out of the taut shrouds and backstays, and a
ceaseless bugling in the hollow of the canvas that arched like some
vast pinion close beside me.

They carefully swayed my chair down the bowsprit and got me on to the
forecastle.

'If this don't do you good, Miss Marie,' said my old nurse, extending
her hand to help me on to my feet, 'what will?'




CHAPTER VI

A STRANGE MAN ON BOARD


A few mornings after this, whilst we were at breakfast, the mate looked
down upon us through the open skylight, and called out:

'There's a sail right ahead.'

When we went on deck we found the vessel on the lee bow, within
signalling distance. The wind was the tail of the trade, a fiery
fanning out of north-north-east, with the loose scud brown as smoke
flying down it. The sea was full of violet gleams and blinkings of
froth; the billow ran without weight and its volume was small. It
seemed as if the heat was sucking the wind out of the sky, and still
we were a good many degrees north of the equator, though I cannot
recollect the latitude.

A signal of flags was run aloft to the end of the mizzen gaff: the
string of gay colours painted the wind and made a holiday figure of the
ship in a moment. When the stranger perceived our signal she hauled
down the red flag of the English merchant service which had been flying
at her trysail peak ever since we had been able to distinguish it, and
hoisted a long, thin streamer called an answering pennant.

'All right!' exclaimed Captain Burke, putting down the glass he had
been viewing through. 'She is an Englishman, and is, no doubt, bound
home. Get your letter ready, Miss Otway, and if that brig is for
England I will send it across to her.'

I ran to my cabin. The mere thought of communicating with home filled
me with excitement. This, though we had been some weeks at sea, was the
first opportunity for sending a letter home that had occurred. And
then little things on the ocean stir and move one greatly. Life is so
dull that the merest trifle is important, and what would scarcely be
noticeable ashore takes the aspect of a wonder.

I had kept my journal punctually down to the preceding evening, and
had now only to write that a brig was approaching and would take the
letter, and send a thousand kisses to father and to Archie. I added
that I was happy and greatly improved in health. I lingered over this
bit of writing. It was like holding on to the dear hands of those I
addressed.

When I had made an end, I went on deck with the letter. The brig had
slided abreast of us by this time: she looked a very smart little
vessel, with sharp bows and raking masts, very lofty. She had backed
her topsail as we had ours, and the two vessels lay within speaking
distance, bowing to one another with all imaginable civility. I
laughed to notice this; you would have thought them old acquaintances
who couldn't salute each other too often for delight in this meeting.

'Brig ahoy!' hailed Captain Burke.

'Hallo!' shouted a man standing a head and shoulders above the bulwark
rail with a staring negro at the wheel, showing a little past him,
whenever the brig swayed, her sand-coloured decks to us.

'What ship is that, and where are you bound for?'

'"The Queen o' the Night" from Mauritius vur Liverpool, a hundred and
ten days out. What ship's yon?'

The information was fully given, and then Captain Burke bawled out to
know if the other would carry a letter home for him?

'Ay, ay, but ye mun send it,' waved back the head and shoulders, with a
flourish of arm.

Captain Burke flourished in response. Sailors talk more eloquently
by gesture than the people of any nation in the world. The contortion
of a hump-backed posture will in an instant reveal a voyage full of
troubles, and more than half an hour of talk is contained in a peculiar
toss of the hand.

A number of the crew came running aft to the call of the mate: a
quarter-boat was cleared and lowered, four men entered her along with
the mate, who put my letter into his pocket and away they went for the
brig, miraculously vitalising and humanising the desert plain of ocean
by the mere picture of their straining forms and flashing oars, and the
gilt lines running astern from the white sides of the boat as she was
swept through it with Mr. Green's square frame, stiff-backed in the
stern, bobbing cask-like with the jump of the little craft, his hand on
the tiller.

'One could almost think oneself at the seaside to see that boat,' said
Mrs. Burke.

'Yes, I just now caught myself half looking round,' I answered, 'with
a fancy of tall chalk cliffs, a little pier, a nest of houses in a
split----'

I paused.

'And a fine house on the top of the cliff, and trees at the back, and
a flight of rooks going up like smoke out of them,' said Mrs. Burke,
smiling.

'It'll not be far off even, when we've gone all the way we've got to
go,' said the captain, 'and by the time we've hove it into sight again,
we shall have been as good as our word, Miss--good as the doctor's word
anyhow. What now would I give for some portrait machine that takes
colour and light instantaneously, that when they get your letter they
might see you as we do!'

Mr. Green handed up the letter to the man who had hailed us, and
returned. The boat was then hoisted, the topsail swung, and the ensign
dipped as a farewell and thank you to the little homeward-bound brig.
I stood straining my eyes at her as her topsail swept out of hollow
shadow into a full breast of sunshine, and I watched her break the
long, soft, glittering wave into a little leap of scaling and combing
foam at her bow, leaning from the hot quiet wind with yard-arm sharply
pointed to it, in a posture of something living that steadies itself
aslant for a firmer grip. She was my ocean post-office. I cannot
express my thoughts as I viewed her thinning down and growing blue
in the atmosphere that was silver blue with water and blue sky, and
brimming sunshine. Captain Burke said she would probably arrive in
Liverpool before we were up with the Horn, for all that the catspaw and
the calm and the hard head wind had dismally belated her down to this
time.

And now it is that a dreadful thing happened, making this day, with
what had gone before, the most remarkable of any to that hour.

We were standing under the fore end of the quarter-deck awning, where
we could command the heights of the main and fore as well as see the
brig astern. Whilst Captain Burke was talking to me about her, his
wife hard by listening, assuring me I need have no doubt if the vessel
safely arrived at her port that her master would forward the letter to
my father, seeing that captains of ships hold this sort of obligation
as sacred: I say whilst the captain was talking thus, he happened to
look aloft, and, following the direction of his eye, I saw a seaman
on the weather fore topsail yard; his feet were on the foot-rope, he
overlay the yard, the outline of his figure clear as a tracing in ink
with his yellow naked calves and feet dingy against the white canvas.
What he did I could not see.

The captain broke off and eyed the man intently; then, looking round
a little at Mr. Green, he exclaimed, 'What does that fellow mean by
sogering up there? I've been watching him. Who is it? Call him down. I
don't want any loafing of that sort aboard my ship.'

The mate went some steps forward and, looking up, bellowed in a voice
as harsh as the noise of surf on shingle, 'Fore topsail yard there!
Come down out of that, you ----' and here he employed several examples
of the forecastle speech which I will not write down because they are
not proper to remember, though we are to believe that the business of
the sea cannot be got through without brutal language.

The man looked down at the mate, and said something; Mr. Green roared
out again to him to 'lay down,' on which I observed the sailor slided a
yard or two along the foot-ropes towards the topmast rigging; he then
fell!

He struck the deck near the galley. Mrs. Burke shrieked. The man got
up in a moment, stood erect with blood gushing down his cheeks, and
smiled at us, and the next moment dropped dead.

I fainted, and when I came to my head was resting on Mrs. Burke's knee,
and Captain Burke was fanning me. The body had been carried into the
forecastle, a couple of seamen were scrubbing at the stains in the
white planks. Mr. Owen came slowly aft, and said that the poor fellow
was dead; then saw to me, took me by the hand, and seated me in the
coolness under the awning, where the pleasant shadow was fresh with the
gushing of the wind out of the hollow of the great mizzen.

It was a frightful thing to have seen. I was looking at the man when
he fell, and my sight followed the flash of the poor figure to the
shocking _thud_ of the deck! I saw him rise and smile--a smile made
dreadful by blood and heart-subduing by the suddenness of his falling
back dead.

'How'll Mr. Green like to recall the violent words he used to the poor
fellow, I wonder?' said Mrs. Burke, glancing at the mate, who, to
be sure, showed no sensibility. He trudged the deck athwartship with
rounded back and arms up and down in the sea fashion; occasionally
leering at the sky to windward, or darting a sour look at the canvas
aloft. _He_ was no man to muse with regret on the death of the sailor,
and lament his own intemperate speech; on the contrary, he was one
of those mates who sometimes become masters, to whom human life,
provided their own be not imperilled, is of no more consequence than
the extinction of the flame of the slush-fed lamp which lights the
sailor's sea-parlour. There were many dogs of that sort at sea in those
times, and some have survived into these; but the odious breed grows
scarce. Indeed, the world has agreed to find the type intolerable, and
may the day be at hand when the very last of the race shall be brought
to the gangway in the holy grip of the giantess Education, and dropped
overboard to plumb the depths of time, where lie the green bones of
Trunnion, Hatchway, and others of the clan!

Mr. Owen recommended that the body should be buried that afternoon. The
weather was very hot; the breeze was slackening and the sea sheeting
out--full of fitful winding lanes of light as though the sun struck
upon wakes and tracks of oil--into the thickening distance, where the
heat was showing in a sensible presence of film, blending sky and water
till it was like looking at them through tears.

'Very well,' said Captain Burke; 'in the first dog watch, if you
please.'

It was at that hour almost calm, with a broad road of hot red light,
billowing snakelike from the ship's side over the soft undulations of
the western swell towards the rayless sun that still floated at some
height in the sky. I stood beside Mrs. Burke on the quarter-deck,
prayer-book in hand; the sailors came in a body from forward, and
amongst them they bore the corpse--an outline of tragic suggestion
under the large red ensign that hid it. They lifted out a portion of
the gangway and rested one end of the plank in the gap, and the captain
began to read.

What is there in shore-going ceremony to compare in solemnity, in
pathos, in all the deepest of the meanings which are interpretable
out of human forms and customs, with the simple burial at sea? All
was as silent upon the water as the sinking of the sun himself into
the broadening road of gold under him. Aloft was a gentle sound of
winnowing canvas; a sob of the sea from alongside sometimes broke in
upon the captain's delivery.

The expressions on the faces of the rough seamen were for the most part
fixed. How many shipmates and messmates had they helped bury in their
time? How should they be concerned by death? themselves having the
Skeleton at their heels every hour of their existence at sea, allowed
but a crooked finger for their own lives, all the remainder of their
hands being their owner's!

_Now_, knowing sailors as I do, I can read those seamen's faces by the
aid of memory, and almost tell their thoughts as they stood there near
the gangway.

'Well, poor Bill, there he lies.'--'My turn next perhaps.'--'What's
that yarn the skipper's a-reading? A blooming good job for them it's
true of! No call to talk of _souls_ at sea. It's work hard, live hard,
and die hard here; and what's arterwards there's Bill there to say.'

At a signal the flag was withdrawn, the stitched hammock was revealed,
the plank was tilted, and the grim parcel despatched.

The night that followed was breathless and beautiful. In the south-east
under the moon the water stretched in a stainless field of light,
flashing, but still as a sheet of looking-glass; our sails glowed
blandly like starlight itself as they rose one above another into the
whitened gloom in whose clear profound many meteors were darting,
leaving a smoke of spangles for all the world like sky-rockets under
the large trembling stars. Lovely _they_ were: but for the moon I think
many had studded the water with points of light, to ride and widen upon
the black and noiseless lift of swell, thick and sluggish as though it
were oil that ran, and scarcely putting three moons'-breadth of motion
into our mastheads, though it sweetened the air with the rain of dew it
softly beat out of the canvas.

The cabin was too hot to sit in. There was no magic in two windsails
and a wide skylight to cool it. I had played at cribbage with Mrs.
Burke till, with a yawn, the hour being about half-past nine, I
proposed that we should go on deck. The steward followed us with a tray
of refreshments; the captain and Mr. Owen joined us, pipes in mouth,
and we sat, nothing betwixt us and the stars but the moonlit shadow of
the night through which we saw them.

Four bells were struck, ten o'clock; there was no light forward saving
a little sheen of the forecastle lamp round about the fore-scuttle,
like a dim luminous mist there. But the moon lay bright upon the white
planks of the deck, and though the rigging rose pale as tarnished
silver to the mastheads it made a network of shadows black as ebony,
which swung with the roll of the ship as though they kept time to music.

I was looking at some of this delicate network on the main deck when
the figure of a man passed through it and approached the boatswain,
who had charge of the ship till midnight. They talked with a rumble in
their notes that was as good as telling you something was wrong. The
captain called out:

'What does that man want?'

The boatswain then came to us, leaving the man standing, and
exclaimed, 'He says there's a strange sailor in the ship.'

'What's that?' demanded Captain Burke.

'He says there's a man walking about as don't belong to the ship's
company.'

'Whose grog has he been cribbing?' said Mr. Owen.

The captain called to the man, who came and stood before us. The
moonlight whitened him: he was a powerfully built fellow, with a
quantity of black hair hanging about his ears and dark nervous eyes,
which caught the light in silver stars.

'What's this about a strange man being aboard?' said the captain.

'There's a strange man in the ship, sir,' he answered.

And now I observed that in the black shadow of the galley forward there
stood a little group of men, apparently striving to hear what was
spoken aft.

'Have you seen him?'

'Certainly I have, sir.'

'Go on,' exclaimed the captain, impatiently.

'I was on the fok'sle when he passed me. He walked slow. He looked at
me as he passed, and his face was wet.'

'How could you tell _that_ in this light?' said Mr. Owen.

'The moonshine rippled in it, sir.'

'Go on,' said the captain.

'He was going aft as though just come out of the head. I made a step or
two and lost him.'

'Where did he disappear?' said the boatswain in a voice of awe.

'Why, in the gloom about the foremast.'

'It'll be a stowaway come to light at a pretty late date,' exclaimed
Captain Burke, stiffening himself in his chair with a start of temper.
'Bo'sun, get a lantern, and take and give everything forward a good
overhaul.'

'It's no stowaway, sir,' said the man who had seen the stranger.

'Ho, d'ye know him, then?' cried the captain.

'He was no stowaway,' repeated the seaman in a sudden roaring voice of
irrepressible excitement.

The captain stared at him.

'You won't make him a ghost, will you?' said Mr. Owen.

The man viewed the doctor in silence, then suddenly shouted, whipping
round upon the boatswain:

'Tom Hartley saw him.'

'Call Tom Hartley aft,' exclaimed the captain.

The name was bawled by the boatswain, and repeated in echoes like
distant laughter aloft. Then a man stepped out of the huddle of figures
in the shadow of the galley and came through the moonlight, followed by
four or five who halted at the gangway.

'What's this you've seen, Hartley?' said Captain Burke.

'I was at the scuttle butt with the dipper in my hand, when, turning my
head to look forrard, I see the shadow of a man with the glimmer of a
face upon it standing near the foremast. I took a step, thinking it was
one of the men, and lost it.'

'How d'ye mean, lost it?' said the captain.

'It sort of went out, sir.'

'Take a lantern and search the ship forward, bo'sun,' said the captain.

The three of them went forward, but I heard the first man tell the
boatswain that the way to see the stranger that had come aboard was not
by showing a light.

'What's the meaning of it?' said Mrs. Burke.

The captain rose in silence and walked the deck, going somewhat towards
the gangway, and staring forward and around. The group of seamen had
followed the boatswain, and were now on the forecastle, a knot of
silvered figures with their shadows like carvings of jet lying at
their feet.

'Was it a strange man they saw?' I asked. 'If so, how did he come into
the ship?' and I own a chill ran through me as I asked the question.

The mystery and awe of this wonderful, beautiful night of moonlight
and trance of ocean, glazed by the nightbeam as though it were an
ice-field, was in this hour to heighten into a sort of horror the
fancy of a strange man with a wet face walking forward; and then again
there was the memory of the death in the morning and the burial before
sundown. Mrs. Burke was silent, and I saw her watching her husband as
he uneasily moved here and there.

'Pity it's happened,' said Mr. Owen. 'It's all nonsense, of course.
They'll find nobody. A very small optical illusion will carry
conviction into the brain of a noodle. All sailors are noodles in
superstition. And now all hands'll think there's a ghost aboard.'

Captain Burke rejoined us abruptly, and seated himself.

'They'll find nothing,' said he.

'So I was just saying,' said the doctor.

'But that'll be the worst of it,' exclaimed the captain. 'I wish it had
been that confounded seaman's watch below. I don't like such things as
this to happen in my ship.'

'Why, Captain Burke, you don't mean to tell me----?' said Mr. Owen,
catching, as I did, the note of awe and nervousness in the other's
utterance.

'I tell you what it is,' burst out the captain irritably; 'it's
devilish hot to-night, I know. Is this the Red Sea?'

'Would it were, for that's where all the ghosts are laid,' said the
doctor good-humouredly.

'I'm no infidel,' said the captain. 'I thank God I have my faith.
There's testimony enough in the Bible to the existence of ghosts to
satisfy any Christian man.'

'Why, Edward,' cried Mrs. Burke, 'do you want to frighten Miss Marie?'
and she poured out a small tumbler of brandy and seltzer for him; he
swallowed the draught and said:

'They'll find nothing; which will prove, of course,' said he, looking
at me, 'that there is nothing.'

And then he began to talk a little mysteriously of a brig that had
sailed out of Cork; the crimps or runners had bundled a man stone
drunk into the forecastle, where the captain let him lie for a day or
two, guessing he would rally and turn to; instead of which they found
him dead, and there was no doubt he had been dead when put on board,
the crimps shipping the corpse in order to secure the man's wages.
They buried the loathly thing, but every night throughout the voyage
the apparition of it moved in the forepart of the vessel, and always
its ghostly hand struck one bell, which is half an hour past midnight
at sea, after which the shape disappeared, and the watch on deck
breathed freely again. I say Captain Burke talked of this brig a little
mysteriously, as though he secretly believed in the story, yet was
ashamed we should think he did so.

Whilst Mr. Owen was trying to make Mrs. Burke and me laugh with some
silly story of a spectre, the boatswain came aft.

'Well,' said the captain.

'There's no strange man forward, sir.'

'Where have ye searched?'

The boatswain named all sorts of places.

'All right!' said the captain, springing to his feet. 'It's happened
right or wrong, and must take time to wear off. The dew is heavy: I
recommend Miss Otway to go below.'




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.'

'There is nothing to forgive, Mr. Owen, nor is this a time to talk of
such things.'

'The captain was scarcely manly in his language,' said he, turning to
Mrs. Burke. 'I am not an officer of the ship nor one of his crew. I am
practically a passenger, and claim the privileges of a passenger.'

'Passengers are not allowed to take too much. All captains object
to drinking in their ships, particularly in such dreadful times of
excitement as last night,' said Mrs. Burke.

I lifted my finger to call attention to the cries of men and the tread
of heavily shod feet overhead. Mr. Owen returned to his seat at the
table. Soon after this the skylight that was thick with frozen snow
whitened as to a watery beam of sunshine, or to some transient glance
of clearer day in the sky. I asked Mrs. Burke to take me on deck. She
seemed to shrink. I asked her if she had been on deck.

'Yes,' she answered.

'Then why should not I go?'

'Feel how dangerously the hull rolls,' said she. 'You might be thrown
and break your neck.'

But I saw that her real objection did not lie so much in that as in her
fear of the effect of the scene of the wreck upon me. Thus reading her
mind, I exclaimed:

'I will go alone; but why will you not come?' and went to my cabin for
more wraps.

She was ready before I was, and we clasped hands, and holding on
carefully likewise, stopping always for that sudden recovery of the
deck which would happen out of its slant with the rush of a cannon
ball slung by a line and let go at an angle, so ungovernable were the
motions of the dismasted hull, we gained the companion ladder, and
crawled to the head of the steps, where we stood in the companion
itself, with our heads above the hood.

I shrieked on looking! Let my imaginations have been what they would,
here was the reality! I could not credit my sight. All three masts were
gone! nothing of the lower-masts remained saving a height of two or
three feet of jagged and splintered trunk-sheaves of barbed milk-white
wood on the main and quarter decks, and about ten to fifteen feet of
the foremast. On the right or starboard side, lengths of the bulwark
were crushed flat. The decks were littered with gear, ropes' ends were
swimming overboard in the leaden swell like huge eels and sea-snakes
making from the wreck. On one side, dangling between the irons, was the
keel of a quarter-boat--all that remained of her; the opposite davits
were empty.

But what idea can such talk as this give you of that wonderful dismal
picture of shipwreck, that spectacle of decks covered with snow, of
rails like an armoury with their bristling pendants of bayonet-blue
icicles? The galley was partly wrecked; the bowsprit stood soaring and
sinking upon the leaping waters, but the jibbooms were gone. I did
not know the hull. She looked shrunk to half her former size. The
sky stooped to the sea with its burden of vapour, but a break right
overhead hovered in a colour of sulphur. No wind stirred. Never was
there a deader stagnation in the atmosphere under the height of the
Line. Yet you were sensible of the presence of the spirit of this
wild, desolate part of the world even in such pauses as this, when you
watched the sullen motion of that troubled breast of deep, hurling
its glassy folds in comminglings which ran in silent warring to the
horizon. Far astern was a shape of white, a gleam in the sallow air
there, like that of a sail; but my eye was now experienced, and since
that dash of radiance was too big to be a ship, it must needs be ice. I
saw a collection of white tips on the starboard quarter when the swell
threw us high, and some points or shafts faint and bluish over the
bows. Otherwise the ocean line swept clear.




CHAPTER X

THE JURY-MAST


All the remaining hands of the ship's company were at work forward. A
number of spare booms were stowed on top of the galley and had probably
saved the long-boat from being crushed when the masts fell. The sailors
had rigged up a triangle of booms with blocks and tackle dangling, and
even as Mrs. Burke and I stood in the companion way, they broke into
song as they hoisted a huge spar that was to serve as a mast. Their
hearty chorus was frequently interrupted by sharp, eager shouts from
Captain Burke or the boatswain Wall.

The break overhead thinned out yet and made more light. A strange dim
dye of sulphur went sifting down to the horizon, and the sea in places
worked against it dark as bottle glass. About two miles off some whales
were blowing; their vast bulks showed in a black wet gleam amid the
swell; but even then such was the blending of their curved forms with
the confused running, that, but for their fountains, the eye had missed
them.

We stood watching in the shelter of the companion way. The longer I
looked, the stranger, the more forlorn, the more lamentable the scene
showed, the more perilous and hopeless our situation seemed. What sort
of cloths were they going to spread upon such a height of boom as
they were chorusing at? I thought of the spacious concavities which
had risen to the stars, and to the blue heavens of our voyage, those
symmetric breasts of lustrous canvas which, when trimmed, snatched an
impulse for our clipper keel, from the antagonism of the head wind
itself; I saw the ship robed in the beauty of her sails, lifting her
star-saluting royals to the very path of the flying scud with jibs and
staysails yearning from bowsprit and jibboom towards some deeper ocean
solitude past the horizon; and then I looked at the naked boom the men
were hoisting at the triangle or shears.

'Oh, that cannot help us,' I cried; 'what does Captain Burke intend?'

'Even if it should fail as a mast,' Mrs. Burke answered, 'it will be
useful as a flag-post. Why, this hull lies so flat without spars a ship
might pass three or four miles off and not see us.'

Here the captain looked round and spied our heads. With a note of his
old cheerfulness he called out:

'Many a good prize has been navigated out of an ocean battle-field
under leaner sticks than that, and added to the Royal Navy after
tasselling Jack's pocket-handkerchief with dollars.'

This he seemed to say as much for the men as for me. He then approached
and asked me how I did; and told me not to look too long at the wreck.

'Keep up your heart, miss,' said he. 'We'll have you out of this in
good time. Mary, don't let her stand here dwelling upon this scene.
Why, it was a nightmare even to my seasoned eyes when it first came out
of the dawn.'

'Is that mast meant to carry a sail?' said I.

'When we fix it and stay it we'll set something square upon it,
certainly. There'll be room for a bit of fore and aft canvas between
the head of it and the bowsprit end. Then let the wind blow south with
God's blessing, or east or west will do, to edge us north. We need but
steerage way, after which there'll be nothing to do but keep warm till
all's well. Take her below, Mary. Look at her face! She'll wither here.'

The hours of daylight were so few that the night was upon the rolling
hull before the seamen had done more than lash the jury-mast to the
stump with a stay or two for support. And with the darkness of the
night there came along a black Cape Horn snow squall, like a dust storm
in its blinding power, with a thunder of wind in it, and so much more
afterwards that by five o'clock as high a sea was running as that of
the preceding day.

The crew came into the cabin for shelter, and cooked their own supper
as before. They ate and then went to the stove, and afterwards Captain
Burke and his wife and myself sat down to some cold food and a cup of
hot coffee. Mr. Owen came to the door of his berth, but seeing the
captain at table at once retired, closing the door upon himself. The
captain took no notice. His good spirits were gone again. He drank
some coffee, but scarcely tasted food. His posture was one of gloomy
despondency as he sat at table, and he rarely lifted his eyes save to
dart a glance now and again at the sailors, which put it into my head
to think that more worked as causes for his dejection than the new
fierce gale and our awful situation. His wife often furtively looked
towards him but never ventured to address him, no, not even to ask him
if he would eat.

Well, just such another evening and night as had passed happened
with us now. From time to time one or another would go on deck and
come below and report the night a flying blackness. On the boatswain
returning from one of these errands of observation the captain said:

'Does it clear at all?'

'Still as thick as muck, sir.'

'Any smell of ice about?'

'No, sir.'

I wondered to hear them talk of smelling ice in a snow storm as thick
as froth, and said to the captain:

'Is ice to be smelt?'

He looked at me as though he had no mind to answer, to be even civil,
then said sharply, 'Yes.'

My poor old nurse bristled like an angry hen at this behaviour, though
she was still afraid of the mood upon him, yet being determined that
I should get all the comfort possible out of any information the men
could give, she turned upon the boatswain, whose bulky, oilskinned
figure swung on frock-shaped leggings beside the stove, and said:

'Did you ever smell ice, Mr. Wall?'

He looked doubtfully at the captain, and answered awkwardly, 'Yes mum,
scores of times.'

The captain rose and went on deck. At the same moment Mr. Owen came out
of his berth. It might have been that through some crevice in the cabin
bulkhead he was able to observe the captain's movements.

'What sort of smell has ice?' I asked, for I could think of no thing
but icebergs, of the helplessness of our hull, of our being swung by
these giant seas against a berg, and I wanted to hear how sailors tell
that ice is near without seeing it.

'It's the extra coldness that makes the smell. Tain't no smell in the
or'nary meaning,' said the boatswain after a pause. 'The first time I
ever learnt that a man could smell ice in a breeze full of frost and
snow was in my first voyage in these parts. We was running off the
Horn, not so low as this here, in a smother o' flakes, nothen visible
of the ship from the wheel but her mainmast. I and another was steering
the ship, the mate comes rushing aft and sings out to the captain who
was walking abreast of the wheel, "I smell ice, sir." They both took
a sniff, and I could see by their way of snuffing they both smelt it
plain. They looked into the driving smother to starboard and then to
port, and then all on a sudden a man on the fok'sle cries out, "Ice
right ahead." "Hard aport!" sings out the capt'n, and out it jumped,
big as a church, right on the bow. Smelt it myself then.'

A low growl of laughter ran amongst the men, and several looked as
though they too had yarns to spin.

I scarcely slept that night. The cold was terrible, and there were
the noises of the sea and the gale, and the heart-maddening rolling
and plunging. Yet, wonderful to relate, next morning, exactly as on
the day before, a dead calm was in the air, and the swollen hills
of swell ran in liquid lead in a confused shouldering. I went on
deck with Mrs. Burke at about twelve, and watched the men completing
the captain's toy-like affair of jury-mast. They had set a jib upon
the bowsprit, and were now bending a sail to a yard which was to be
hoisted to the head of the jury-mast. The lean stick was so abundantly
stayed that it looked like the inside of an umbrella. The rolls of
the hull were dangerous and very fierce; it was impossible to walk
the deck. This morning they had got a fire in the galley, which had
been roughly repaired. The brown smoke floated straight up out of the
swaying chimney, and, trifling as that detail of colour and life was,
yet somehow it brought back to the poor old hull something of her old
spirit and look. No farmyard sounds came from forward; no grunt from
the long-boat, no cackle nor crow from the hencoop; all the live-stock
had been frozen or drowned during the first night of the gale, when the
masts went.

I saw those glancings of ice on the horizon which I had taken notice
of yesterday; they hung in the same quarters, and flamed at the same
distance against the dark sky with a fairy, star-like brightness. I
turned my eyes in every direction for a sail.

'Don't ships ever come this way?' I asked.

'Oh, yes, many,' answered Mrs. Burke.

'What sort of ships?'

'Whalers chiefly, Edward says.'

'Suppose one should come; what will Captain Burke do?'

'Ask her to tow us.'

'If the master declines? This is a big, helpless vessel for another
ship to tow in such seas as run here. And what would a ship do with us
in tow should we meet with such weather as blew last night or the night
before?'

She made no answer.

'Surely Captain Burke will transfer us all.'

'He'll not leave this vessel,' said she. 'It is not only that he has
himself an uninsured venture in her, his obtaining further employment
might depend upon his carrying the "Lady Emma" into safety. And if it
can be done, it ought to,' she added, with a flat, peering, anxious
look around the sea.

Presently all was ready with the sail. The seamen raised a song, and,
to a steady, shearing noise of ropes in sheaves, with a frequent
chorus that swept like a shout of hope into the bitter, motionless
atmosphere, the yard slowly ascended the jury-mast. It was like a huge
lug-sail in form and fittings. Tauten it as they would, the breast
hollowed and rounded with such blows as of a cudgel, and such claps
as of musketry, that the boom sprang and buckled like a willow in a
breeze; the sail was therefore lowered until wind came to steady it.

It put a weariness as of rheumatism into the body to stand long, and
when we saw the sail hoisted we went below.

Mr. Owen was sitting beside the stove; he rose on our descending, and
went on deck to look around, then, after a brief halt in the shelter
of the companion-way returned, and sat him down at the table with the
fingers of his right hand buried in his right bush of hair, his whole
bearing abjectly disconsolate. Presently, looking at Mrs. Burke, he
exclaimed:

'Is that single pole on the forecastle all the mast the captain means
to navigate this ship with?'

'I do not know. My husband will be glad to tell you, I am sure,'
answered Mrs. Burke.

He gave a ghastly sarcastic smile, that instantly vanished in his
former expression of sullen, resentful grief and dismay, showing, as
a man might, who is under a sudden tragic surprise, which enrages him
also. He looked down, shaking his head softly, and drumming, then
started as if he would walk, but the jerk and tumble of the deck was
too strong. I began to fear for the poor man's mind.

Mrs. Burke told me the men would get dinner in the forecastle that
day--there, or in the galley. They did not come to the cabin. The only
man of them who arrived was the steward. He clothed the table, and made
us a tolerable show of dinner. I beg to recall to your memory the many
delicacies my father had laid in for me.

It was about half-past one, I think, and about the time when the
steward was done with the table, when the companion doors were opened,
and the captain came below. The lamp burned brightly: indeed, it made
most of the light we had. The skylight was, perhaps, half a foot thick
with frozen snow; the companion doors were kept closed to exclude
the cold; and little light came through the cabin windows, which the
hull dipped with pendulum-like monotony into the thunder shadow of
the swollen brine. Yet by the lamp-light we saw very clearly, and I
observed that the captain's face was lighted up with some life and
hope. I thought a sail was in sight, and started, expecting to hear him
say so.

'There's some luck for us in this devil's own ocean after all,' said
he, swinging his figure towards us, eagerly watched by Mr. Owen, who
was on his feet leaning upon the table, and staring with head moving as
the captain moved.

'What is it?' cried his wife hysterically.

'Why,' said he, 'there's a breeze sprung up out of the south'ard:
I've been watching the ship; there's drag enough in the rag we've got
upon her to give her way. And so, Miss Otway, be easy, now that we're
heading for the sun afresh, with a man at the wheel and a little scope
of wake astern of us.'

'Anything better than lying like a log,' cried Mrs. Burke, with a short
swallow in her speech. 'I had hoped from your face there was a ship in
sight.'

'And so did I,' I exclaimed.

Mr. Owen sat down suddenly, and again buried his hand in his hair.

'But this is as good as a ship being in sight,' cried the captain
irritable on a sudden. 'I want to blow north where ships are to be
fallen in with, and we're something to see now, with a thirty foot
hoist of canvas on top ten foot of freeboard; whereas, before--but
let's get something to eat.'

We seated ourselves. Mr. Owen took a corner chair and spoke not a word
for some time, till at last, on the captain saying that if he fell in
with a vessel he would offer handsome sums for a tow, the doctor said
abruptly:

'To where?'

The captain eyed him with an unfeeling pause of contempt, and then
answered:

'That would not rest with you, sir.'

'I must request you to transfer me, if we fall in with a ship,' said
Mr. Owen.

'I shall be happy,' said the captain, nervous and convulsive with
temper, 'at least--you've got to remember the object you're here for.'
He looked at me. 'Miss Otway is not likely to accompany you, and you'll
be no gentleman if you desert her.'

'Miss Otway will accompany me if you give her an opportunity of leaving
this wreck,' said Mr. Owen.

'This is no wreck, sir,' said the captain in a low-level voice of
menace, stooping his head and looking at the doctor under crooked
eyebrows.

Mr. Owen muttered that he intended to save his life if he could, and
Miss Otway's too if he was allowed--the rest he mumbled: after ceasing
to articulate his lips moved; then, with a sudden impassioned motion
of despair and horror, he sprang from his chair and disappeared in his
berth, having barely taken three bites.

'I fear his intellects have become disordered,' said Mrs. Burke.

'He'd like to drive me out of the ship. The lily liver would have me
abandon a craft that's as staunch as the newest line-of-battle ship
afloat. What would it signify to _him_ that I left a couple of thousand
pounds of my hard earnings to go to the bottom here, so long as _his_
dingy skinful of bones and bobs of curls were safely landed?' exclaimed
the captain in a low-pitched deliberate speech, that trembled
nevertheless with emotion and temper.

His wife gave me a look as though she would entreat me not to talk to
him. Now and again he lifted up his eyes to a tell-tale compass that
hung exactly over his chair; almost as regular as the beat of a clock
was the plunge of the ship from right to left, from left to right.
The blinding green sense of one side and then the other of the cabin
portholes, and a loud yearning thunder of water washing past.

After a little the captain went to his cabin. I said I would like to
see the ship under sail, and when we had clothed ourselves for the deck
Mrs. Burke and I went to the companion-steps.

A seaman, clad in oilskins and swathed about the neck till he showed
nothing of his face but a pair of eyes, stood at the wheel. Some
delicate stars and darts of snow were falling, but they did not
cloud the view. The square of white canvas was stretched by a fresh
following breeze of bitter coldness, beyond frost itself: the sea was
feathering upon the swell, and a number of grey and white petrels
skimmed the flashes as they moulded their flight to the wind-furrowed
rounds. The white sail looked like a wild and sickly light when the
hull swung it athwart the soot over the horizon, but there could be no
doubt that the vessel was in motion. We durst not leave the holding
place of the companion-hood to look over the taffrail or side, but you
saw she had steerage way by the manner in which the fellow twirled the
wheel.

A group of seamen with their hands deep buried, some of them sea-booted
fisherman-like to their knees, trudged the white frozen deck opposite
the galley. It was wonderful to see them keep their feet; the rumbling
hum of their strong, lungs stole aft against the wind; they swayed in
earnest talk, and minded us not when they faced our way, again and
again staring round at the sea as though for a sail.

Now we had not been looking about us above five minutes when, happening
to glance aft past the helmsman, I saw the ocean not above half a mile
distant, white as milk, the forestretch of it was about two miles long;
how wide it went back I could not say, nor could I guess what it was;
there was no snow nor any particular blackness of cloud over it, nor
uncommon wildness of flight in the vapour overhanging us. Before I
could call Mrs. Burke's attention to the wonder, the seaman at the helm
turned and spied it, and instantly roared out in a voice that swept
past the ear like the wind of something heavy swiftly flying.

'Why,' cried Mrs. Burke--but the rest of the sentence was clipped sheer
off her lips in a yell of squall, a very hurricane blast; the air was
dark with spray, in the midst of which I just caught sight of the
jury-mast and sail disappearing--not abruptly, but in a dissolving
way, as a snowflake dies on water. The whole thing went in the shriek
of the blast, with a single report and a snowstorm of flying tatters;
the next instant Mrs. Burke was dragging me down the companion-steps
and we both got into the cabin dazed, frozen to the marrow, as much
confounded and terrified by that sudden meteoric shock and blast of
wind, with its burthen of white brine and its noise of fierce yells and
whistlings, as though we had scarcely escaped with our lives.

The captain heard, or guessed what had happened; he rushed from his
berth on to the deck, but the squall pinned him in the companion-way
for a minute, and he stood struggling as though some man had taken him
by the throat. In five minutes, however, the furious outburst was spent
or had flown ahead; I could tell that by glancing at the cabin windows
whenever they lifted clear. The steward came below to trim the lamp.
Mrs. Burke asked him what was doing on deck. He answered, nothing, and
told us what we knew, that the jury-mast and sail had blown over the
bows.

It was now to be felt by the distressful, horrid, jerky motion, that
the hull had taken up her old situation in the trough.

'What has happened?' said Mr. Owen, coming out of his berth.

Mrs. Burke told him. He groaned, and sat down close beside the stove,
folding his arms tightly, and said:

'What is to become of us? This is distracting. I am prepared to meet my
Maker, but it is the suspense--it is the suspense--it is the having to
wait for death that crazes.'

'I am surprised at you,' exclaimed Mrs. Burke, drawing herself up.
'How, as a man, can you talk so before this young lady? As for me, I
don't mind what you say; I am the wife of a sailor, and it's not in you
to improve my spirits or make me despair. But you have no right to
forget yourself as a man before Miss Otway.'

He slapped his knee violently, crying out, 'Poor as I am, I would give
five hundred pounds had I never heard of your husband or his ship.'

The poor woman looked at him with her flat eyes and curled her lip,
then gave me an expressive glance when he arose and began to move about
the cabin, holding on and looking at the windows to left and right as
they soared blind with the foam dazzle.

It was dark as midnight on deck before the captain came below, and yet
it may not have been three o'clock. He approached the fire and stood
before it, his wife and myself sitting on either hand of him. He seemed
to steadfastly regard Mr. Owen, who was on a locker at the after end of
the cabin, but did not offer to speak. Presently his wife said:

'Are the mast and sail lost for good, Edward?'

'Ay.'

'What was the whiteness that swept them away?'

'What but a squall? This is a great ocean, and mark our luck; there
were thousands of miles of water for that squall to sweep over on
either hand of us, but Old Stormy bestrode it, and, scenting us, made
for the hull.'

'There are other booms to rig up a mast with.'

'So there are,' he answered, speaking quietly, with his eyes fixed upon
the form of the doctor as though he addressed him. 'There are other
spars, but there's not another crew to do the work.'

His wife gave a start at this and looked up at him with a passion of
anxiety, putting her hand upon his arm.

'The men have as good as told me,' said he, 'through the bo'sun, that
there's nothing to be done with jury-masts. They're willing to try
their hands to-morrow on another--to oblige me--but they'd rather get
my permission to prepare the long-boat for leaving the ship so as
to give chase to a sail if one should show too far off to speak us:
failing that, then to take advantage of a smooth in the weather and to
make for the northward in an open boat--in this sea--the idiots!'

'But something must be done,' shouted Mr. Owen from his corner. 'The
ship will go to pieces if she's to be left to knock about in this
hollow sea.'

Captain Burke took no more notice than had the doctor's voice been the
creaking of a bulkhead.

It was quieter on that than on the preceding night. The wind, we
learnt, was a scanty breeze out of the south; here and there the vapour
had thinned, and a pale star shivered in the openings: our drift that
day had lifted some northward point of ice, and the dim faintness of
it was visible on the port beam, as the helpless hull lay; that was
all the ice to be seen, and it was far enough off to keep us easy. A
large black swell was flowing north and south, but the folds were wide
and regular and the motion of the hull was almost easy upon it. These
matters about that scene of night outside I got from the captain and
steward.

The sailors remained forward. I understood they managed very well now
they could keep the galley fire going. Once during this evening I asked
Captain Burke, when he came below for a glass of hot grog and biscuit,
why he did not burn a signal fire.

'And risk setting the hull in a blaze?' said he, 'with the chance of
there being nothing within five hundred miles of us.'

'It might bring help, Edward,' said his wife.

He flung from us in a passion. It was a bad sign with him now, that
the merest nothings, such as my question, put him into a rage. He
swallowed his glass of grog and returned on deck, and when half-way
up the companion ladder he paused to shout back, 'No use in making a
flare unless there's something to signal to,' and then stepped into the
blackness outside.

It was fine weather next day--fine for that part of the world, I mean;
glimpses of watery blue, betwixt curtains of ashy yellow and brown
vapour, some slanting pencils of dull sulphur in the north, striking
the line of the horizon out of a long ragged edge of cloud. The wind
was west, fresh enough to flash plumes of spray out of the running
wrinkles; there was the head of an iceberg away north to the right of
the weak shower of sunshine. This was all to be seen--saving always the
hull with her deck of frozen snow, and her catheads barbed with ice,
and her lines of rails bristling with daggers and small arms of frozen
dew and brine--when I looked through the companion hatch after leaving
my cabin.

Whilst Mrs. Burke, Mr. Owen and myself breakfasted, we heard the people
on deck busy with another jury-mast. The captain's voice rang out again
in loud eager shouts. Mrs. Burke sent the steward up to beg her husband
come below and breakfast whilst the coffee was hot; he sent answer
that he could not leave; but even whilst the steward was delivering
the captain's reply, a long strange hallo was delivered by one of the
men; the sounds of bustle ceased; in a minute or two we heard a rush
of feet; Mr. Owen jumped from his chair and ran up the ladder, whence,
after he had paused to stare round, he shouted down in a voice of
ecstasy:--

'A sail, Mrs. Burke! There's a ship in sight, Miss Otway!'

I screamed with a sudden impulse of delight; I could no more have
arrested that cry than have stopped the hull from rolling; then,
swiftly as my legs would carry me and my arms would work, I gained
my berth and attired myself for the deck, and rushed up reckless of
foothold.


END OF THE FIRST VOLUME


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End of Project Gutenberg's Heart of Oak, vol. 1., by William Clark Russell