My Danish Sweetheart Volume I Part 15

CHAPTER IX.

RESCUED.

This is a thing easy to recall, but how am I to convey the reality of it? What is there in ink to put before you that wide scene of starlighted gloom, the dusky shapes of swell for ever running noiselessly at us--no sounds save the occasional creaking of the raft as she was swayed--the motionless, black outlines of Helga and myself overhanging the pallid streak of cot--at intervals a low sob breaking from the girl's heart, and the overwhelming sense of present danger, of hopelessness, made blacker yet by the night? And amid all this the crazy babbling of the dying Dane, now in English and now in his native tongue!

It was just upon the stroke of one o'clock in the morning when he died.

I had brought my watch to the lamp, when he fetched a sort of groaning breath, of a character that caused me to bend my ear to his lips: and I found that he had ceased to breathe. I continued to listen, and then, to make sure, cast the light of the lamp upon him.

'He has gone!' cried Helga.

'G.o.d has taken him,' said I. 'Come to this side, and sit by me!'

She did as I asked, and I took her hand. I knew by her respiration that she was weeping, and I held my peace till her grief should have had some vent. I then spoke of her father, represented that his ailments must in all probability have carried him off almost as swiftly ash.o.r.e; that he had died a peaceful death, with his daughter beside him, and his wife and home present in a vision to his gaze; and said that, so far from grieving, we should count it a mercy that he had been called away thus easily, for who was to imagine what lay before us--what sufferings, which must have killed him certainly later on?

'His heart broke when his barque sank,' said she. 'I heard it in his cry.'

This might very well have been too.

Never was there so long a night. The moon was behind the sea, and after she was gone the very march of the stars seemed arrested, as though nature had cried 'Halt!' to the universe. Having run the lamp aloft, I resolved to leave it there, possessed now with such a superst.i.tious notion as might well influence a shipwrecked man, that if I lowered it again no vessel would appear. Therefore, to tell the time, I was obliged to strike a match, and whenever I did this I would stare at my watch and put it to my ear and doubt the evidence of my sight, so inexpressibly slow was the pa.s.sage of those hours.

Helga's sobs ceased. She sat by my side, speaking seldom after we had exhausted our first talk on her coming round to where I was. I wished her to sleep, and told her that I could easily make a couch for her, and that my oilskin would protect her from the dew. I still held her hand as I said this, and I felt the shudder that ran through her when she replied that she could not lie down, that she could not sleep. Perhaps she feared I would disturb her father's body to make a bed for her; and, indeed, there was nothing on the raft, but the poor fellow's cloak and his pillows and blankets, out of which I could have manufactured a bed.

Had I been sure that he was dead, I should have slipped the body overboard while it remained dark, so that Helga should not have been able to see what I did; but I had not the courage to bury him merely because I believed he was dead, because he lay there motionless; and I was constantly thinking how I should manage when the dawn came--how I was so to deal with the body as to shock and pain poor Helga as little as possible.

As we sat side by side, I felt a small pressure of her shoulder against my arm, and supposed that she had fallen asleep, but, on my whispering, she immediately answered. Dead tired I knew the brave girl must be, but sleep could not visit eyes whose gaze I might readily guess was again and again directed at the faint pale figure of the cot.

The light air shifted into the north-west at about three o'clock in the morning, and blew a small breeze which extinguished the star-flakes that here and there rode upon the swell, and raised a noise of tinkling, rippling waters along the sides of the raft. I guessed this new direction of the wind by my observation of a bright greenish star which had hung in the wake of the moon, and was now low in the west. This light breeze kindled a little hope in me, and I would rise again and again to peer into the quarter whence it blew, in the expectation of spying some pale shadow of ship. Once Helga, giving a start, exclaimed:

'Hush! I seem to hear the throb of a steamer's engines!'

We both stood up hand in hand, for the sway of the raft made a danger of it as a platform, and I listened with strained hearing. It might have been a steamer, but there was no blotch of darkness upon the obscurity the sea-line round to denote her, nor any gleam of lantern. Yet for nearly a quarter of an hour did we listen, in a torment of attention, and then resumed our seats side by side.

The dawn broke at last, dispelling, as it seemed to my weary despairing imagination, a long month of perpetual night. The cold gray was slow and stealthy, and was a tedious time in brightening into the silver and rose of sunrise. My first act was to sweep the sea for a ship, and I then went to the cot and looked at the face upon the pillows in it. If I had never seen death before, I might have known it now. I turned to the girl.

'Helga,' said I gently, 'you can guess what my duty is--for your sake, and for mine, and for his too.'

I looked earnestly at her as I spoke: she was deadly pale, haggard, her eyes red and inflamed with weeping, and her expression one of exquisite touching sorrow and mourning. But the sweetness of her young countenance was dominant even in that supreme time, and, blending with the visible signs of misery in her looks, raised the mere prettiness of her features into a sad beauty that impressed me as a spiritual rather than as a physical revelation.

'Yes, I know what must be done,' she answered. 'Let me kiss him first.'

She approached the cot, knelt by it, and put her lips to her father's: then raising her clasped hands above her head, and looking upwards, she cried out: '_Jeg er faderlos! Gud hjelpe mig!_'

I stood apart waiting, scarcely able to draw my breath for the pity and sorrow that tightened my throat. It is impossible to imagine the plaintive wailing note her voice had as she uttered those Danish words: '_I am fatherless! G.o.d help me!_' She then hid her face in her hands, and remained kneeling and praying.

After a few minutes she arose, kissed again the white face, and seated herself with her back upon the cot.

No one could have named to me a more painful, a more distasteful piece of work than the having to handle the body of this poor Danish captain, and launch him into that fathomless grave upon whose surface we lay.

First I had to remove the ropes which formed our little bulwark, that I might slide the cot overboard; then with some ends of line I laced the figure in the cot, that it should not float away out of it when launched. The work kept me close to the body, and, thin and white as he was, yet he looked so lifelike, wore an expression so remonstrant, that my horror was sensibly tinctured with a feeling of guilt, as though instead of burying him I was about to drown him.

I made all despatch possible for Helga's sake, but came to a pause, when the cot was ready, to look about me for a sinker. There was nothing that I could see but the jars, and, as they contained our little stock of spirits and fresh water, they were altogether too precious to send to the bottom. I could do no more than hope that the canvas would speedily grow saturated, then fill and sink; and, putting my hands to the cot, I dragged it to the edge of the raft, and went round to the head and pushed.

It was midway over the side, when a huge black rat sprang from among the blankets out through the lacing, and disappeared under the hatch-cover.

I had no doubt it was the same rat that had leapt from my shoulder aboard the barque. If it had terrified me there, you will guess the shock it caused me now! I uttered some cry in the momentary consternation raised in me by this beastly apparition of life flashing, so to speak, out of the very figure and stirlessness of death, and Helga looked and called to know what was the matter.

'Nothing, nothing,' I replied. 'Turn your eyes from me, Helga!'

She immediately resumed her former posture, covering her face with her hands. The next moment I had thrust the cot fair into the sea, and it slid off to a distance of twice or thrice its own length, and lay rising and falling, to all appearances buoyant as the raft itself. I knew it would sink so soon as the canvas and blankets were soaked, yet that might take a little while in doing, and dreading lest Helga should look--for you will readily conceive how dreadful would be to the girl that sight of her father afloat in the square of canvas, his face showing clearly through the lacing of rope--I went to her, and put my arm round her, and so, but without speaking, obliged her to keep her face away. I gathered from her pa.s.siveness that she understood me. When I glanced again, the cot was in the act of sinking; in a few beats of the heart it vanished, and all was blank ocean to the heavens--a prospect of little flashful and feathering ripples, but glorious as molten and sparkling silver in the east under the soaring sun.

I withdrew my hand from Helga's shoulder. She then looked, and sighed heavily, but no more tears flowed. I believe she had wept her heart dry!

'In what words am I to thank you for your kindness and sympathy?' said she. 'My father and my mother are looking down upon us, and they will bless you.'

'We must count on being saved, Helga,' said I, forcing a cheerful note into my voice. 'You will see Kolding again, and I shall hope to see it too, by your side.' And, with the idea of diverting her mind from her grief, I told her of my promise to her father, and how happy it would make me to accompany her to Denmark.

'I have been too much of a home bird,' said I. 'You will provide me with a good excuse for a ramble, Helga; but first you shall meet my dear old mother, and spend some time with us. I am to save your life, you know. I am here for that purpose;' and so I continued to talk to her, now and again coaxing a light sorrowful smile to her lips; but it was easy to know where her heart was; all the while she was sending glances at the sea close to the raft, where she might guess the cot had sunk, and twice I overheard her whisper to herself that same pa.s.sionate, grieving sentence she had uttered when she kissed her father's dead face: '_Jeg er faderlos! Gud hjelpe mig!_'

The morning stole away. Very soon after I had buried the Captain I lowered the lamp, and sent the Danish flag we had brought with us to the head of the little mast, where it blew out bravely, and promised to boldly court any pa.s.sing eye that might be too distant to catch a sight of our flat platform of raft. I then got breakfast, and induced Helga to eat and drink. Somehow, whether it was because of the sick complaining Captain, with his depressing menace of death, being gone, or because of the glad sunshine, the high marbling of the heavens, full of fine weather, and the quiet of the sea, with its placid heave of swell and its twinkling of prismatic ripples, my heart felt somewhat light, my burden of despondency was easier to carry, was less crushing to my spirits. What to hope for I did not know. I needed no special wisdom to guess that if we were not speedily delivered from this raft we were as certainly doomed as though we had clung to the barque and gone down in her. Yet spite of this there was a stirring of hope in me. It seemed impossible but that some ship must pa.s.s us before the day was gone. How far we had blown to the southward and westward during the gale I could not have told, but I might be sure we were not very distant from the mouth of the English Channel, and therefore in the fair way of vessels inward and outward bound, more particularly of steamers heading for Portuguese and Mediterranean ports.

But hour after hour pa.s.sed, and nothing hove into view. The sun went floating from his meridian into the west, and still the horizon remained a blank, near, heaving line, with the sky whitening to the ocean rim.

Again and again Helga sought the boundary, as I did. Side by side we would stand, she holding by my arm, and together we gazed, slowly sweeping the deep.

'It is strange!' she once said, after a long and thirsty look. 'We are not in the middle of the ocean. Not even the smoke of a steamer!'

'Our horizon is narrow,' answered I. 'Does it exceed three miles? I should say not, save when the swell lifts us, and then, perhaps, we may see four. Four miles of sea!' I cried. 'There may be a dozen ships within three leagues of us, all of them easily within sight from the maintop of the _Anine_, were she afloat. But what, short of a straight course for the raft, could bring this speck of timber on which we stand into view? This is the sort of situation to make one understand what is signified by the immensity of the ocean.'

She shivered and clasped her hands.

'That I--that we,' she exclaimed, speaking slowly and almost under her breath, 'should have brought you to this pa.s.s, Mr. Tregarthen! It was our fate by rights--but it ought not to be yours!'

'You asked me to call you Helga,' said I; 'and you must give me my Christian name.'

'What is it?' she asked.

'Hugh.'

'It is a pretty name. If we are spared, it will be sweet to my memory while I have life!'

She said this with an exquisite artlessness, with an expression of wonderful sweetness and gentleness in her eyes, which were bravely fastened upon me, and then, suddenly catching up my hand, put her lips to it and pressed it to her heart, letting it fall as she turned her face upon the water on that side of the raft where her father's body had sunk.

My spirits, which remained tolerably buoyant while the sun stood high, sank as he declined. The prospect of another long night upon the raft, and of all that might happen in a night, was insupportable. I had securely bound the planks together, as I believed, but the constant play of the swell was sure to tell after a time. One of the ligatures might chafe through, and in a minute the whole fabric scatter under our feet like the staves of a stove boat, and leave us no more than a plank to hold on by in the midst of this great sea which all day long had been without ships. I often bitterly deplored I had not brought a sail from the barque, for the air that hung steady all day blew landwards, and there was no weight in it to have carried away the flimsiest fabric we could have erected. A sail would have given us a drift--perhaps have put us in the way of sighting a vessel, and in any case it would have mitigated the intolerable sense of helpless imprisonment which came to one with thoughts of the raft floating without an inch of way upon her, overhanging all day long, as it might have seemed, that very spot of waters in which Helga's father had found his grave.

Shortly before sundown Helga sighted a sail in the south-west. It was the merest shaft of pearl gleaming above the ocean rim, and visible to us only when the quiet heave of the sea threw us up. It was no more than a vessel's topmost canvas, and before the sun was gone the dim starlike sheen of those cloths had faded out into the atmosphere.

'You must get some rest to-night, Helga,' said I. 'Your keeping awake will not save us if we are to be drowned, and if we are to be saved then sleep will keep you in strength. It is the after-consequences of this sort of exposure and mental distress which are to be dreaded.'

'Shall I be able to sleep on this little rickety platform?' she exclaimed, running her eyes, glowing dark against the faint scarlet in the west, over the raft. 'It brings one so dreadfully near to the surface of the sea. The coldness of the very grave itself seems to come out of it.'