Malbone Part 16

And the sacred "ordinance," with all other proprieties, was left in ruins that day. They tore along the Avenue with unexplained and most inexplicable speed, Hope being concealed by riding backward, and by a large shawl, and Blanche and her admirer receiving the full indignation of every chaste and venerable eye. Those who had tolerated all this girl's previous improprieties were obliged to admit that the line must be drawn somewhere. She at once lost several good invitations and a matrimonial offer, since Jones, junior, was swept away by his parents to be wedded without delay to a consumptive heiress who had long pined for his whiskers; and Count Posen, in his Souvenirs, was severer on Blanche's one good deed than on the worst of her follies.

A few years after, when Blanche, then the fearless wife of a regular-army officer, was helping Hope in the hospitals at Norfolk, she would stop to shout with delight over the reminiscence of that stately Jones equipage in mad career, amid the barking of dogs and the groaning of dowagers. "After all, Hope," she would say, "the fastest thing I ever did was under your orders."

XXI. A STORM.

THE members of the household were all at the window about noon, next day, watching the rise of a storm. A murky wing of cloud, shaped like a hawk's, hung over the low western hills across the bay. Then the hawk became an eagle, and the eagle a gigantic phantom, that hovered over half the visible sky. Beneath it, a little scud of vapor, moved by some cross-current of air, raced rapidly against the wind, just above the horizon, like smoke from a battle-field.

As the cloud ascended, the water grew rapidly blacker, and in half an hour broke into jets of white foam, all over its surface, with an angry look. Meantime a white film of fog spread down the bay from the northward. The wind hauled from southwest to northwest, so suddenly and strongly that all the anch.o.r.ed boats seemed to have swung round instantaneously, without visible process. The instant the wind shifted, the rain broke forth, filling the air in a moment with its volume, and cutting so sharply that it seemed like hail, though no hailstones reached the ground. At the same time there rose upon the water a dense white film, which seemed to grow together from a hundred different directions, and was made partly of rain, and partly of the blown edges of the spray. There was but a glimpse of this; for in a few moments it was impossible to see two rods; but when the first gust was over, the water showed itself again, the jets of spray all beaten down, and regular waves, of dull lead-color, breaking higher on the sh.o.r.e. All the depth of blackness had left the sky, and there remained only an obscure and ominous gray, through which the lightning flashed white, not red.

Boats came driving in from the mouth of the bay with a rag of sail up; the men got them moored with difficulty, and when they sculled ash.o.r.e in the skiffs, a dozen comrades stood ready to grasp and haul them in.

Others launched skiffs in sheltered places, and pulled out bareheaded to bail out their fishing-boats and keep them from swamping at their moorings.

The sh.o.r.e was thronged with men in oilskin clothes and by women with shawls over their heads. Aunt Jane, who always felt responsible for whatever went on in the elements, sat in-doors with one lid closed, wincing at every flash, and watching the universe with the air of a coachman guiding six wild horses.

Just after the storm had pa.s.sed its height, two veritable wild horses were reined up at the door, and Philip burst in, his usual self-composure gone.

"Emilia is out sailing!" he exclaimed,--"alone with Lambert's boatman, in this gale. They say she was bound for Narragansett."

"Impossible!" cried Hope, turning pale. "I left her not three hours ago." Then she remembered that Emilia had spoken of going on board the yacht, to superintend some arrangements, but had said no more about it, when she opposed it.

"Harry!" said Aunt Jane, quickly, from her chair by the window, "see that fisherman. He has just come ash.o.r.e and is telling something. Ask him."

The fisherman had indeed seen Lambert's boat, which was well known.

Something seemed to be the matter with the sail, but before the storm struck her, it had been hauled down. They must have taken in water enough, as it was. He had himself been obliged to bail out three times, running in from the reef.

"Was there any landing which they could reach?" Harry asked.

There was none,--but the light-ship lay right in their track, and if they had good luck, they might get aboard of her.

"The boatman?" said Philip, anxiously,--"Mr. Lambert's boatman; is he a good sailor?"

"Don't know," was the reply. "Stranger here. Dutchman, Frenchman, Portegee, or some kind of a foreigner."

"Seems to understand himself in a boat," said another.

"Mr. Malbone knows him," said a third. "The same that dove with the young woman under the steamboat paddles."

"Good grit," said the first.

"That's so," was the answer. "But grit don't teach a man the channel."

All agreed to this axiom; but as there was so strong a probability that the voyagers had reached the light-ship, there seemed less cause for fear.

The next question was, whether it was possible to follow them. All agreed that it would be foolish for any boat to attempt it, till the wind had blown itself out, which might be within half an hour. After that, some predicted a calm, some a fog, some a renewal of the storm; there was the usual variety of opinions. At any rate, there might perhaps be an interval during which they could go out, if the gentlemen did not mind a wet jacket.

Within the half-hour came indeed an interval of calm, and a light shone behind the clouds from the west. It faded soon into a gray fog, with puffs of wind from the southwest again. When the young men went out with the boatmen, the water had grown more quiet, save where angry little gusts ruffled it. But these gusts made it necessary to carry a double reef, and they made but little progress against wind and tide.

A dark-gray fog, broken by frequent wind-flaws, makes the ugliest of all days on the water. A still, pale fog is soothing; it lulls nature to a kind of repose. But a windy fog with occasional sunbeams and sudden films of metallic blue breaking the leaden water,--this carries an impression of something weird and treacherous in the universe, and suggests caution.

As the boat floated on, every sight and sound appeared strange. The music from the fort came sudden and startling through the vaporous eddies. A tall white schooner rose instantaneously near them, like a light-house. They could see the steam of the factory floating low, seeking some outlet between cloud and water. As they drifted past a wharf, the great black piles of coal hung high and gloomy; then a stray sunbeam brought out their peac.o.c.k colors; then came the fog again, driving hurriedly by, as if impatient to go somewhere and enraged at the obstacle. It seemed to have a vast inorganic life of its own, a volition and a whim. It drew itself across the horizon like a curtain; then advanced in trampling armies up the bay; then marched in ma.s.ses northward; then suddenly grew thin, and showed great s.p.a.ces of sunlight; then drifted across the low islands, like long tufts of wool; then rolled itself away toward the horizon; then closed in again, pitiless and gray.

Suddenly something vast towered amid the mist above them. It was the French war-ship returned to her anchorage once more, and seeming in that dim atmosphere to be something spectral and strange that had taken form out of the elements. The muzzles of great guns rose tier above tier, along her side; great boats hung one above another, on successive pairs of davits, at her stern. So high was her hull, that the topmost boat and the topmost gun appeared to be suspended in middle air; and yet this was but the beginning of her alt.i.tude. Above these were the heavy masts, seen dimly through the mist; between these were spread eight dark lines of sailors' clothes, which, with the ma.s.sive yards above, looked like part of some ponderous framework built to reach the sky. This prolongation of the whole dark ma.s.s toward the heavens had a portentous look to those who gazed from below; and when the denser fog sometimes furled itself away from the topgallant masts, hitherto invisible, and showed them rising loftier yet, and the tricolor at the mizzen-mast-head looking down as if from the zenith, then they all seemed to appertain to something of more than human workmanship; a hundred wild tales of phantom vessels came up to the imagination, and it was as if that one gigantic structure were expanding to fill all s.p.a.ce from sky to sea.

They were swept past it; the fog closed in; it was necessary to land near the Fort, and proceed on foot. They walked across the rough peninsula, while the mist began to disperse again, and they were buoyant with expectation. As they toiled onward, the fog suddenly met them at the turn of a lane where it had awaited them, like an enemy. As they pa.s.sed into those gray and impalpable arms, the whole world changed again.

They walked toward the sound of the sea. As they approached it, the dull hue that lay upon it resembled that of the leaden sky. The two elements could hardly be distinguished except as the white outlines of the successive breakers were lifted through the fog. The lines of surf appeared constantly to multiply upon the beach, and yet, on counting them, there were never any more. Sometimes, in the distance, ma.s.ses of foam rose up like a wall where the horizon ought to be; and, as the coming waves took form out of the unseen, it seemed as if no phantom were too vast or shapeless to come rolling in upon their dusky shoulders.

Presently a frail gleam of something like the ghost of dead sunshine made them look toward the west. Above the dim roofs of Castle Hill mansion-house, the sinking sun showed luridly through two rifts of cloud, and then the swift motion of the nearer vapor veiled both sun and cloud, and banished them into almost equal remoteness.

Leaving the beach on their right, and pa.s.sing the high rocks of the Pirate's Cave, they presently descended to the water's edge once more.

The cliffs rose to a distorted height in the dimness; sprays of withered gra.s.s nodded along the edge, like Ossian's spectres. Light seemed to be vanishing from the universe, leaving them alone with the sea. And when a solitary loon uttered his wild cry, and rising, sped away into the distance, it was as if life were following light into an equal annihilation. That sense of vague terror, with which the ocean sometimes controls the fancy, began to lay its grasp on them. They remembered that Emilia, in speaking once of her intense shrinking from death, had said that the sea was the only thing from which she would not fear to meet it.

Fog exaggerates both for eye and ear; it is always a sounding-board for the billows; and in this case, as often happens, the roar did not appear to proceed from the waves themselves, but from some source in the unseen horizon, as if the spectators were shut within a beleaguered fortress, and this thundering noise came from an impetuous enemy outside. Ever and anon there was a distinct crash of heavier sound, as if some special barricade had at length been beaten in, and the garrison must look to their inner defences.

The tide was unusually high, and scarcely receded with the ebb, though the surf increased; the waves came in with constant rush and wail, and with an ominous rattle of pebbles on the little beaches, beneath the powerful suction of the undertow; and there were more and more of those m.u.f.fled throbs along the sh.o.r.e which tell of coming danger as plainly as minute-guns. With these came mingled that yet more inexplicable humming which one hears at intervals in such times, like strains of music caught and tangled in the currents of stormy air,--strains which were perhaps the filmy thread on which tales of sirens and mermaids were first strung, and in which, at this time, they would fain recognize the voice of Emilia.

XXII. OUT OF THE DEPTHS.

AS the night closed in, the wind rose steadily, still blowing from the southwest. In Brenton's kitchen they found a group round a great fire of driftwood; some of these were fishermen who had with difficulty made a landing on the beach, and who confirmed the accounts already given.

The boat had been seen sailing for the Narragansett sh.o.r.e, and when the squall came, the boatman had lowered and reefed the sail, and stood for the light-ship. They must be on board of her, if anywhere.

"There are safe there?" asked Philip, eagerly.

"Only place where they would be safe, then," said the spokesman.

"Unless the light-ship parts," said an old fellow.

"Parts!" said the other. "Sixty fathom of two-inch chain, and old Joe talks about parting."

"Foolish, of course," said Philip; "but it's a dangerous sh.o.r.e."

"That's so," was the answer. "Never saw so many lines of reef show outside, neither."

"There's an old saying on this sh.o.r.e," said Joe:--

"When Price's Neck goes to Brenton's Reef, Body and soul will come to grief.

But when Brenton's Reef comes to Price's Neck, Soul and body are both a wreck."

"What does it mean?" asked Harry.