Bob Strong's Holidays Part 43

They were not able to swim far, being incapable of much exertion; but the plunge alone and the immersion in the water while holding to the rope's-end refreshed them greatly, making them feel stronger, in addition to allaying their burning thirst.

Still, when this great longing was quenched, they were tortured with hunger, d.i.c.k actually tearing off one of the soles of his boots and setting to work gnawing it.

Bob kept up his spirits so far as to make fun of this, chaffing his companion and saying that he preferred the way in which the Captain served up his soles to d.i.c.k's!

"Ah," said the other in reply, "I wonder what the good Cap'en 'ud think if he seed us now?"

"Why, that we were two unfortunate fellows!" replied Bob, becoming grave again in an instant. "I'm sure he would pity us from the bottom of his heart!"

Thus the long day wore on; although, it seemed as if it would never end!

However, when night came round again, they wished they had yet the day; it was so dark, so dreary, so eerie, pitching and rolling about there, carried hither and thither as the tide listed, with never a vista of the wished-for land, with never a sound but the sobbing sea.

Yet, it was wonderful how the boys encouraged each other to bear up and be hopeful, in spite of everything.

Whenever, in the early morning previously and during the day in their respective sufferings, one or the other grew despondent d.i.c.k cheered Bob and Bob cheered d.i.c.k, as the case might be.

Then, somehow or other, the princ.i.p.al portion of the cheering-up work was borne by d.i.c.k; the very brightness and look of everything, even while he noticed them, seeming to have the effect of depressing Bob's spirits by some unknown a.s.sociation or connection with those at home.

At night, however, it was Bob's turn to sustain the drooping courage of d.i.c.k, who, like most country-bred lads, was intensely superst.i.tious, fancying the darkness to swarm with ghosts and goblins, who were on the watch to devour him; the boy, while bearing up bravely against palpable privations and open dangers, staring them in the face, from which grown men would have quailed, was now affected by silly fears which a baby would have blushed to own!

All through the wearisome hours of the dragging night, whose minutes were as iron and hours like lead, he was constantly starting up in nervous terror; the moan of the sea, the cry of some belated sea-gull, the plunge of a fish in the water, nay even the creaking of the boat's own timbers, with each and all of which d.i.c.k was perfectly familiar, alike arousing his frenzied alarm.

It was, "Lawks, Master Bob! what be this now?" throughout the terrible interval that elapsed between the fading of the twilight on the one day and sunrise on the next. "Lor', what's that?"

And, that next day!

The boys were weaker then, for very nearly eight-and-forty hours had elapsed since they had been on board the cutter; forty-eight hours without food, without any regular sleep, without any real rest even, as their attention was always kept on the alert, while, all the time, the peril they were in was sufficient alone to have crushed their every energy!

Hope, undying hope that had kept them up so long, now left them at last.

Who could hope against such continual disappointment, with ships all around them sometimes and yet never a one to come near where they floated and drifted and gave way to their despair?

Towards the evening of this day d.i.c.k got very weak.

Strange to say, although brought up in the country and accustomed, probably, all his early life, at any rate, to exposure and hard living, d.i.c.k was not able to bear up against their present sufferings by any means so well as Bob, who, on this third night of their being adrift, was yet full of vitality!

It was in vain for him, though, to try and reanimate d.i.c.k, who, hopeless, and almost helpless, lay down in the bottom of the boat, only asking to be left alone to die.

"I'm a-dying, Master Bob," he gasped out faintly, when Bob tried to raise him up. "Let me be; let me be!"

"Dying, nonsense," repeated Bob, pretending to joke about it; though, truth to say, he felt in little joking mood then, being almost as weak as his companion. "You are worth twenty dead men yet, as the old Captain would say!"

But, in spite of all his encouraging words, d.i.c.k grew gradually weaker and weaker; until, towards midnight, his breathing became so very faint that Bob could hardly feel it, though kneeling down close beside him and with his face touching that of poor d.i.c.k.

"I'm a-dying--Master Bob," he whispered, in such low accents that Bob had to bend down his ear close to his mouth to hear what he said. "I bees--a-dying--Mas-ter--Bob. I knows--I--be! I--hears--the--h'angels-- a-flapping on their wings! I knows they be a-coming--for--me! G.o.d-- bless--'ee, Mas-ter--Bob! Ah, if--'ee--ever--get--'sh.o.r.e--'gain--tell-- Cap'--I--didn't--mean--no--'arm!"

Soon after faltering out these broken words, d.i.c.k fell back insensible in the bottom of the boat.

"Oh, d.i.c.k, poor d.i.c.k, good d.i.c.k!" sobbed out Bob, throwing himself down beside him on the floor of the boat's little cabin and bursting into an agony of tears. "It is I who have killed you. But for me, you would never have been here at all! Poor, brave d.i.c.k, you saved my life, and in return I've killed you!"

The torture of mind in which he now was on seeing, as he thought, d.i.c.k dead before him, coupled with all he had already gone through, but of which he had taken little heed while he had his comrade to console, now coming together affected Bob's mind.

He began to wander in delirium, imagining himself not only safe ash.o.r.e, but in his London home, amid all the surroundings to which he had been accustomed before coming to Southsea and to this sad extremity.

He thought it was Sunday and that he was going to church with his mother and Nell; and that he was late, as usual, and they were calling him to hurry.

"I'm coming, I'm coming!" he screamed out in such a shrill voice, attenuated by famine, as hardly to be recognised as human, so shrill that it startled the sea-gulls hovering over the boat. "I'm coming!

There's lots of time, the bells are ringing still! The bells are ringing, I hear them!--Ring--ring--ring--I--hear--I hear--I--"

Then he, too, lost consciousness and fell, like a log, insensible, across the body of poor d.i.c.k; the far-off bell which he had fancied to be ringing miles and miles distant from where the boat was floating in the Channel, being the last echo that sounded in his ears as he fainted away.

But, there was reason in his madness.

A bell was ringing; and ringing too realistically not to be real!

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN.

ON THE CASQUETTES.

Bob's hearing was not at fault, this sense of his remaining perfect though his mind was wandering; and so, the unwonted sound that fell upon his ear had got woven amongst his delirious fancies.

It was, without doubt, a real bell, which if it might not summon pious folk to prayer, yet fulfilled almost as sacred a duty, warning, as it did, poor mariners of impending peril and so answering the pet.i.tion oft put up "for those travelling by sea."

This ball belonged to the lighthouse-tower erected on the highest peak of the Casquettes, a terrible group of rocks jutting out into the Channel, just off the French coast hard by Alderney, some six miles to the north-west of which island they lie. Rocks that are cruel and relentless as the surges that sweep over them in stormy weather, and which are so quaintly named from their helmet, or "casque"-like resemblance--rocks, concerning which the poet Swinburne has sung in his eloquent verse, that breathes the very spirit of the sea in depicting the strife of the elements:

"From the depths of the waters that lighten and darken, With change everlasting of life and of death, Where hardly by morn if the lulled ear hearken It hears the sea's as a tired child's breath, Where hardly by night, if an eye dare scan it, The storm lets shipwreck be seen or heard, As the reefs to the waves and the foam to the granite Respond one merciless word.

"Sheer seen and far, in the sea's life heaven, A sea-mew's flight from the wild sweet land, White plumed with foam, if the wind wake, seven Black helms, as of warriors that stir, not stand, From the depths that abide and the waves that environ Seven rocks rear heads that the midnight masks; And the strokes of the swords of the storm are as iron On the steel of the wave-worn casques.

"Be night's dark word as the word of a wizard, Be the word of dawn as a G.o.d's glad word, Like heads of the spirits of darkness visored That see not for ever, nor ever have heard, These basnets, plumed as for fight or plumeless, Crowned by the storm and by storm discrowned, Keep word of the lists where the dead lie tombless And the tale of them is not found!"

Hither the boat had drifted in the course of the three days that had elapsed since she had been first becalmed off Spithead, or rather between the Nab and Warner lights; for, it was then that the wind had dropped, leaving her at the mercy of the stream, going whither the current willed.

She had pursued a most erratic course, however, to reach this point.

To commence with, she had floated on the ebb-tide, which for two hours after high-water runs south by west, out into the Channel past the Isle of Wight; the wind, slight as it was, that subsequently sprung up from the eastward, to which point it had veered after the sea-fog had risen, combined with the westward action of the tideway, making the little vessel take almost a straight course across the stream of the current towards the French coast.

When about midway, however, she got into a second channel current, which swept her nearer and nearer to Cape La Hogue.

Then, again, when still some miles out from the land, yet another current took charge of her, bringing her within the influence of the strong indraught which runs into the Gulf of Saint Malo; by which, finally, she was wafted, in a circular way, up to "the Caskets," or "Casquettes," to adopt the proper French version.

Here she had arrived at the time of Bob's delirium, drifting in closer and closer to the rocks, on which the cutter would probably have been dashed to pieces and her fragments possibly picked up anon on the opposite side of the Atlantic, had not fate intervened.

It was in this wise.

The little cutter drifted in near the rocks while it was still early morning; and the reason for the bell on the lighthouse ringing was because some of the mist, or fog, that had been blown across the Channel, yet lingered in the vicinity, as if loth to leave altogether the waters over which it loved to brood.