My Danish Sweetheart Volume I Part 12

'No, Captain, no,' I answered. 'Our toil has been as regular as we have had strength for. Already your daughter has done too much; look at her!'

I cried, pointing to the girl. 'Judge with your father's eye how much longer she is capable of holding out!'

'The pump must be manned!' he exclaimed, in such another shrieking note as he had before delivered. 'The _Anine_ must not sink; she is all I have in the world. My child will be left to starve! Oh, she has strength enough. Helga, the gentleman does not know your strength and courage!

And you, sir,--you, Mr. Tregarthen--Ach! G.o.d! You will not let your courage fail you--you who came here on a holy and beautiful errand--no, no! you will not let your courage fail you, now that the wind is ceasing and the sun has broken forth, and the worst is past?'

Helga looked at me.

'Captain Nielsen,' said I, 'if there were a dozen of us we might hope to keep your ship long enough afloat to give us a chance of being rescued; but not twelve, not fifty men could save her for you. The tempest has made a sieve of her, and what we have now to do is to construct a raft while we have time and opportunity, and to be ceaseless in our prayer that the weather may suffer us to launch it and to exist upon it until we are succoured.'

He gazed at me with a burning eye, and breathed as though he must presently suffocate.

'Oh, but for a few hours' use of my limbs!' he cried, lifting his trembling hands. 'I would show you both how the will can be made to master the body's weakness. Must I lie here without power?' and as he said these words he grasped again the edge of his cot, and writhed so that I was almost prepared to see him heave himself out; but the agony of the wrench was too much; his face grew whiter still, he groaned low, and lay back, with his brow glistening with sweat-drops.

'Father!' cried Helga, 'bear with us! Indeed it is as Mr. Tregarthen says. I feared it last night, and this morning has made me sure. We must not think of the ship, but of ourselves, and of you, father dear--of you, my poor, dear father!' She broke off with a sob.

I waited until he had recovered a little from the torment he had caused himself, and then gently, but with a manner that let him know I was resolved, began to reason with him. He lay apparently listening apathetically; but his nostrils, wide with breathing, and the hurried motions of his breast were warrant enough of the state of his mind.

While I addressed him Helga went out, and presently returned with the sounding-rod, dark with the wet fresh from the well. He turned his feverish eyes upon it, but merely shook his head and lightly wrung his hands.

'Father, you see it for yourself!' she cried.

'Miss Nielsen,' said I, 'we are wasting precious minutes. Will your father tell you what depth of water his ship must take in to founder?'

He, poor fellow, made no response, but continued to stare at the rod in her hand as though his intelligence on a sudden was all abroad.

'Shall we go to work?' said I. She looked at her father wistfully.

'Come,' I exclaimed, 'we _know_ we are right. We must make an effort to save ourselves. Are not our lives our first consideration?'

'I stepped to the door; as I put my hand to it, Captain Nielsen cried: 'If you do not save the ship, how will you save yourselves?'

'We must at once put some sort of raft together,' said I, halting.

'A raft! in this sea!' he clasped his hands and uttered a low mocking laugh that was more shocking in him than the maddest explosion of temper could have shown.

I could no longer linger to hear his objections. Helga might be very dear to him, but his ship stood first in his mind, and I had no idea of breaking my heart at the pump and then of being drowned after all. My hope was indeed a forlorn one, but it was a hope for all that; whereas I knew that the ship would give us no chance whatever. Besides, our making ready for the worst would not signify that we should abandon the vessel until her settling forced us over the side. And was the gentle, heroic Helga to perish without a struggle on my part, because her father clung with a sick man's craziness--which in health he might be quick to denounce--to this poor tempest-strained barque that was all he had in the world?

I went out and on to the deck, and was standing thinking a minute of the raft and how we should set about it, when Helga joined me.

'He is too ill to be reasonable,' she exclaimed.

'Yes,' said I, 'but we will save him and ourselves too, if we can. Let us lose no more time. Do you observe that the wind has sensibly decreased even while we have been talking in your father's cabin? The sky has opened more yet to windward, and the seas are running with much less weight.'

As I spoke the sun flashed into a rift in the vapour sweeping down the eastern heaven, and the glance of the foam to the splendour, and the sudden brightening of the cloud-shadowed sea into blue, animated me like some new-born hope, and was almost as invigorating to my spirits as though my eyes had fallen upon the gleam of a sail heading our way.

I should but weary you to relate, step by step, how we went to work to construct a raft. The motion of the deck was still very violent, but it found us now as seasoned as though we had kept the sea for years; and, indeed, the movement was becoming mere child's-play after the tossing of the night. A long hour of getting such booms as we wanted off the sailors' house on to the deck, and of collecting other materials for our needs, was not, by a very great deal, so exhausting as ten minutes at the pump. We broke off a little after nine o'clock to get some food, and to enable Helga to see to her father; and now the cast we took with the sounding-rod advised us, with most bitter significance of indication, that, even though my companion and I had strength to hold to the pump for a whole watch--I mean for four hours at a spell--the water would surely, if but a little more slowly, vanquish us in the end. Indeed, there was no longer question that the vessel had, in some parts of her, been seriously strained; and though I held my peace, my sincere conviction was that, unless some miracle arrested the ingress of the water, she would not be afloat at five o'clock that day.

By one we had completed the raft, and it lay against the main hatch, ready to be swayed over the side and launched. I had some small knowledge of boat-building, having acquired what I knew from a small yard down past the lifeboat-house at Tintrenale, where boats were built, and where I had killed many an hour, pipe in mouth, watching and asking questions, and even lending a hand; and in constructing this raft I found my slender boat-building experiences very useful. First we made a frame of four stout studdingsail booms, which we securely lashed to four empty casks, two of which lay handy to our use, while of the other two, one we found in the galley, half full of slush, and the other in the cabin below where the provisions were stored. We decked the frame with booms, of which there was a number, as I have previously said, stacked on top of the sailors' deck-house, and to this we securely lashed planking, to which we attached some hatch-covers, binding the whole with turn upon turn of rope. To improve our chance of being seen, I provided for setting up a topgallant-studdingsail boom as a mast, at the head of which we should be able to show a colour. I also took care to hedge the sides with a little bulwark of life-lines lest the raft should be swept.

There were many interstices in this fabric fit for holding a stock of provisions and water.

I had no fear of its not floating high, nor of its not holding together: but it would be impossible to express the heaviness of heart with which I laboured at this thing. The raft had always been the most dreadful nightmare of the sea to my imagination. The stories of the sufferings it had been the theatre of were present to my mind as I worked, and again and again they would cause me to break off and send a despairing look round; but never a sail showed; the blankness was that of the heavens.

We had half-masted a second Danish ensign after coming out from breaking our fast, and one needed but to look at the breezy rippling of its large folds to know that the wind was rapidly becoming scant. By one o'clock, indeed, it was blowing no more than a pleasant air of wind, still out of the north-east. The stormy, smoke-like clouds of the morning were gone, and the sky was now mottled by little heaps of prismatic vapour that sailed slowly under a high delicate shading of cloud, widely broken, and showing much clear liquid blue, and suffering the sun to shine very steadily. There was a long swell rolling out of the north-east; but the brows were so wide apart that there was no violence whatever in the swaying of the barque upon it. The wind crisped these swinging folds of water, and the surface of the ocean scintillated with lines of small seas feathering, with merry curlings, into foam. But it was fine-weather water, and the barometer had risen greatly, and I could now believe that there was nothing more in the rapidity of its indications than a promise of a pleasant day and of light winds.

I could have done nothing without Helga. Her activity, her intelligence, her spirit, were amazing, not indeed only because she was a girl, but because she was a girl who had undergone a day and two frightful nights of peril and distress, who had slept but little, whose labours at the pump might have exhausted a seasoned sailor. She seemed to know exactly what to do, was wise in every suggestion, and I could never glance at her face without finding the sweetness of it rendered n.o.ble by the heroism of the heart that showed in her firm mouth, her composed countenance, and steadfast, determined gaze.

At times we would break off to sound the well, and never without finding a fresh nimbleness coming into our hands and feet, a wilder desire of hurry penetrating our spirits from the a.s.surance of the rod. Steadily, inch by inch, the water was gaining, and already at this hour of one o'clock it was almost easy to guess the depth of it by the sluggishness of the vessel's rolling, by the drowning character of her languid recovery from the slant of the swell. I felt tolerably confident, however, that she would keep afloat for some hours yet, and G.o.d knows we could not have too much time granted to us, for there was much to be done; the raft to be launched and provisioned; and the hardest part was yet to come, I mean the bringing of the sick captain from his cabin and hoisting him over the side.

At one o'clock we broke off again to refresh ourselves with food and drink, and Helga saw to her father. For my part I would not enter his berth. I dreaded his expostulations and reproaches, and, indeed, I may say that I shrank from even the sight of him, so grievous were his white face and dying manner--so depressing to me, who could not look at the raft and then turn my eyes upon the ocean without guessing that I was as fully a dying man as he, and that, when the sun set this night, it might go down for ever upon us.

There was but one way of getting the raft over, and that was by the winch and a tackle at the mainyard-arm. Helga said she would take the tackle aloft, but I ran my eye over her boy-clad figure with a smile, and said 'No.' She was, indeed, a better sailor than I, but it would be strange indeed if I was unable to secure a block to a yardarm. We braced in the mainyard until the arm of it was fair over the gangway, and I then took the tackle aloft and attached the block by the tail of it.

I lay over the yard for a minute or two while I looked round; but the sea brimmed unbroken towards the sky, and I descended again and again shuddering without control over myself, as I gazed at the little fabric of the raft and contrasted it with the size of the ship that was slowly foundering, and then with the great sea upon whose surface it would presently be afloat--the only object, perhaps, under the eye of heaven for leagues and leagues!

Our business now was to get the raft over the side. I should have to fatigue and perhaps perplex you with technicalities exactly to explain our management of it. Enough if I say that, by hooking on the lower block of the tackle to ropes which formed slings for the raft, and by taking the hauling part to the winch, we very easily swayed the structure clear of the bulwark-rail--for you must know that the winch, with its arrangements of handles, cogs, and pawls, is a piece of shipboard mechanism with which a couple of persons may do as much as a dozen might be able to achieve using their arms only.

When the raft was high enough Helga stood by the winch ready to slacken away on my giving the word of command; while I went to a line which held the fabric over the deck. This line I eased off until the raft had swung fairly over the water, and then called to Helga to slacken away, and the raft sank, and in a minute or two was water-borne, riding upon the swell alongside, and buoyed by the casks even higher above the surface than I had dared hope.

'Now, Miss Nielsen!' cried I.

'Oh! pray call me Helga,' she broke in; 'it is my name: it is short! I seem to answer to it more readily, and in this time, this dreadful time, I could wish to have it, and none other!'

'Then, Helga,' said I, even in such a moment as this feeling my heart warm to the brave, good, gentle little creature as I p.r.o.nounced the word, 'we must provision the raft without delay. Our essential needs will be fresh water and biscuit. What more have you in your provision-room below?'

'Come with me!' said she, and we ran into the deck-house and descended the hatch, leaving the raft securely floating alongside, not only in the grip of the yardarm tackle, which the swaying of the vessel had fully overhauled, but in the hold of the line with which we had slacked the structure over the rail.

It was still dark enough below; but when we opened the door of the berth in which, as I have told you, the cabin provisions were stowed, we found the sunshine upon the scuttle or porthole, and the apartment lay clear in the light. In about twenty minutes, and after some three or four journeys, we had conveyed on deck as much provisions as might serve to keep three persons for about a month: cans of meat, some hams, several tins of biscuit, cheese, and other matters, which I need not catalogue.

But we had started the fresh water in the scuttle-b.u.t.ts that they might be emptied to serve as floats for the raft, and now we had to find a cask or receptacle for drinking-water, and to fill it, too, from the stock in the hold. Here I should have been at a loss but for Helga, who knew where the barque's fresh water was stowed. Again we entered the cabin or provision-room, and returned with some jars whose contents we emptied--vinegar, I believe it was, but the hurry my mind was then in rendered it weak in its reception of small impressions; these we filled with fresh water from a tank conveniently stowed in the main hatchway, and as I filled them Helga carried them on deck.

While we were below at this work I bade her listen.

'Yes, I hear it!' she cried: 'it is the water in the hold.'

With every sickly lean of the barque you could hear the water inside of her seething among the cargo as it cascaded now to port and now to starboard.

'Helga, she cannot live long,' said I. 'I believe, but for the hissing of the water, we should hear it bubbling into her.'

I handed her up the last of the jars, and grasped the coaming of the hatch to clamber on to the deck, for the cargo came high. As I did this, something seemed to touch and claw me upon the back, and a huge black rat of the size of a kitten leapt from my shoulder on to the deck and vanished in a breath. Helga screamed, and indeed, for the moment, my own nerves were not a little shaken, for I distinctly felt the wire-like whisker of the horrible creature brush my cheek as it sprang from my shoulder.

'If there be truth in the proverb,' said I, 'we need no surer hint of what is coming than the behaviour of that rat.'

The girl shuddered, and gazed, with eyes bright with alarm, into the hold, recoiling as she did so. I believe the prospect of drifting about on a raft was less terrible to her than the idea of a second rat leaping upon one or the other of us.

CHAPTER VIII.

ADRIFT.