My Danish Sweetheart Volume I Part 2

'Porto Allegre, is it?' said I.

'Ay,' he answered, 'that zounds nearer to the name that vur given to us.

She's got a general cargo aboard. The master's laid up in the cabin; the chief mate broke un's leg off Texel, and they zent him into Partsmouth aboard of a zmack. The chap in charge calls himself Damm. I onderstood he'z carpenter, acting as zecond mate. But who's to follow such a lingo as he talks?'

'He's brought up here with the master's sanction, I suppose?'

'Can't tell you that,' he answered, 'for I don't know. 'Pears to me as if this here traverse was Mr. Damm's own working out. He's got a cross-eye, and I don't rightly like his looks. He pointed aloft and zhook his head, and made us understand that he was here for zhelter.

Jimmy, meaning one of the boat's crew, pointed to the Twins, and Mr.

Damm he grins and says, "Yaw, yaw, dot's right!"'

'But if he's bound to the Brazils,' I said, 'how does it happen that he is on this side the Land's End? Porto Allegre isn't in Wales.'

Here another of the boat's crew who had joined us said, 'I understood from a man who spoke a bit of English that they was bound round to Swansea, but what to take in, atop of a general cargo, I can't say.'

The sailors aboard the vessel were now slowly rolling the up canvas upon the yards. She was a wall-sided vessel, with a white figure-head and a square stern, and she pitched so heavily upon the swell sweeping to her bows that one could not but wonder how it would be with her when it came on to blow in earnest, with such a sea as the Atlantic in wrath threw into this rock-framed bight of coast. She rolled as regularly as she curtseyed, and gave us a view of a band of new metal sheathing that rose with a dull rusty gleam out of the water, as though to some swift vanishing touch of stormy sunlight. The white lines of her furled canvas, with the delicate interlacery of shrouds and running-gear, the fine fibres of her slender mastheads with a red spot of dog-vane at the mizzenmast--the whole body of the vessel, in a word, stood out with an exquisite clearness that made the heaving fabric resemble a choicely wrought toy upon the dark, tempestuous green which went rising and falling past her, and against the low and menacing frown of the sky beyond her.

A deeper shadow seemed to have entered the atmosphere since she let go her anchor. Away down upon her port-quarter the foam was leaping upon the black Twins and the larger rock beyond, and the round of the bay was sharply marked by the surf twisting in a wool-white curve from one point to another, but gathering a brighter whiteness as it stretched towards those extremities of the land which breasted the deeper waters and the larger swell.

The clock of St. Saviour's Church chimed five--tea-time; and as I turned to make my way home two bells were struck aboard the barque, and the light insh.o.r.e wind brought in the distant tones upon the ear with a fairy daintiness of faint music that corresponded to perfection with the toy-like appearance of the vessel. One of the crew of the boat accompanied me a short distance on his way to his own humble cottage in Swim Lane.

'If that Dutchman,' said he--and by 'Dutchman' he meant Dane, for this word covers all the Scandinavian nations in Jack's language--'if that Dutchman, Mr. Tregarthen, knows what's good for him, he'll up anchor and "ratch" out afore it's too late.'

'Did you see the captain?'

'No, sir. He's in his cabin, badly laid up.'

'I thought I made out two men on top of the deck-house, who seemed in command--one the captain, and the other the mate, as I supposed.'

'No, sir; the capt'n's below. One of them two men you saw was the carpenter Damm; t'other was a boy--a pa.s.senger he looked like, though dressed as a sailor man. I didn't hear him give any orders, though his eyes seemed everywhere, and he looked to know exactly what was going forward. A likelier-looking lad I never see. Capt'n's son, I dare say.'

'Well,' said I, sending a glance above and around, 'spite of drunken old Isaac and his prediction of "airthquakes," as he calls them, it's as likely as not, to my mind, that all this gloom will end as it began--in quietude.'

The man--one of the most intelligent of our 'longsh.o.r.emen--shook his head.

'The barometer don't tell lies, sir,' said he; 'the drop's been too slow and regular to signify nothing. I've known a gale o' wind to bust after taking two days to look at the ocean with his breath sucked in, as he do now. This here long quietude's the worst part, and----Smother me! Mr.

Tregarthen,' said he, halting and turning his face seawards, 'if the draught that was just now blowing ain't gone!'

It was as he had said. The light breathing of air had died out, and the swell was rolling in, burnished as liquid gla.s.s.

This day-long extraordinary pause in the most menacing aspect of weather that I had ever heard of--and never in my time had I seen the like of it--seemed to communicate its own quality of breathless suspense to every living object my eye rested upon. The very dogs seemed to move with a cowed manner, as though fresh from a whipping. There was no alacrity--little movement, indeed, anywhere visible. Men hung about in small groups and conversed quietly, as though some trouble that had affected the whole community was upon them. The air trembled with the noise of the breaking surf, and there was a note in that voice, sounding as it did out of the unnatural dark hush upon sea and land, that constrained the attention to it as to something new and even alarming. A tradesman, with his ap.r.o.n on and without a hat, would come to his shop-door and look about him uneasily, and perhaps have a word with a customer as he entered before going round the counter and serving him.

The gulls flew close insh.o.r.e and screamed harshly. Here and there, framed in a darkling pane of window, you would see an old face peering at the weather and pale in the shadow.

I found my mother a good deal troubled by the appearance of the ship.

She asked, with a pettishness I had seldom witnessed in her, 'What does she want? Why does she come here? Do they court destruction?'

I told her all that I had learnt about the vessel.

'There was no occasion for them to come here,' she said. 'Your dear father would have told you that the more distant a ship is upon the ocean in violent weather the safer she is; and here now come the foolish Danes to nestle among rocks, and to sneer at the advice our people give them, with the sky looking more threatening than ever I can remember it.

Who could have patience with such folk?' she cried, pouring out the tea with an air of distraction and an agitated hand. 'If there were no such sailors as they at sea I am sure there would be no need for lifeboats, and brave fellows would not have to risk their lives, and perhaps leave their wives and little children to starve, to a.s.sist people whose stupidity renders them almost unfit to be rescued.'

'Why, mother,' cried I, 'this is not how you are accustomed to talk about such things.'

'I am depressed,' she answered; 'my spirits have taken their colour from the day. A most melancholy heavy day, indeed! Hark, my dear! Is not that the sound of wind?'

She looked eagerly, straining her hearing.

'Yes,' said I, 'it is the wind come at last, mother,' catching, at the instant of her speaking, the hollow groaning, in the chimney, of a sudden gust of wind flying over the housetop. 'From which quarter does it blow? I must find out!'

I ran to the house-door, and as I opened it, the wind blew with the sweep of a sudden squall right out of the darkness upon the ocean. It filled the house, and such was the weight of it that I drove the door to with difficulty. It was but a quarter before six, but the shadow of the night had entered to deepen the shadow of the storm, and it was already as dark as midnight. I went to the window and parted the curtains to take a view of the bay, but the panes of gla.s.s were made a sort of mirror of by the black atmosphere without, and when I looked they gave me back my own countenance, darkly gleaming, and the reflection of objects in the room--the lamp with its green shade upon the table, the sparkle of the silver and the china of the tea-things, and my mother's figure beyond. Yet, by peering, I managed to distinguish the speck of yellow l.u.s.tre that denoted the riding light of the Danish barque--the lantern, I mean, that is hung upon a ship's fore-stay when she lies at anchor; otherwise, it was like looking down into a well. Nothing, save the flash of the near foam tumbling upon the beach right abreast of the house, was to be seen.

'Which way does the wind come, Hugh?' called my mother.

'From the westward, with a touch of south in it, too, right dead insh.o.r.e. It is as I have been expecting all day.'

That night of tempest began in gusts and squalls, with lulls between, which were not a little deceptive, since they made one think that the wind was gone for good, though while the belief was growing there would come another shrieking outrush and a low roaring in the chimney, and such a shrill and doleful whistling in the cas.e.m.e.nts, which there was no art in carpentry to hermetically seal against the winds of that wild, rugged western coast, as might have made one imagine the air to be filled with the ghosts of departed boatswains plying their silver pipes as they sped onwards in the race of black air.

Some while before seven o'clock it had settled into a gale, that was slowly but obstinately gathering in power, as I might know by the gradually raised notes in the humming it made, and by the ever-deepening thunder of warring billows rushing into breakers and bursting upon sand and crag. It came along in a furious play of wet, too, at times; the rain lashed the windows like small shot, and twice there was a brilliant flash of lightning that seemed spiral and crimsoned; but, if thunder followed, it was lost in the uproar of the wind. It was a night to 'stand by,' as a sailor would say; at any moment a summons might come, and, while that weather held, I knew there must be no sleep for me. It would have been all the same, indeed, barque or no barque, for this was a night to make a very h.e.l.l of the waters along our line of coast; there was not another lifeboat station within twenty-five miles, and, even had the bay been empty, as I say, yet, as c.o.xswain of the boat, I must have held myself ready for a call--ready for the notes of the bell summoning us to the rescue of a vessel that had been blown out of the sea into the bay--ready for a breathless appeal for help from some mounted messenger despatched by the coastguards miles distant to tell me that there was a ship stranded and that all hands must perish if we did not hurry to her.

My mother sat silent, with her face rendered austere by anxiety. It was about eight o'clock, when someone knocked hurriedly at the door. I ran out, being too eager to await the attendance of the servant; but, instead of some rough figure of a boatman which I had expected to see, in swept Mr. Trembath, who was carried by the violence of the wind several feet along the pa.s.sage before he could bring himself up. I put my shoulder to the door, but believed I should have had to call for help to close it, so desperate was the resistance.

'What a night! What a night!' cried the clergyman. 'What is the news?

You will not tell me, Tregarthen, that the ship yonder is going to hold her own against this wind and the sea that is running?'

'Pray step in,' said I. 'You are plucky to show your face to it!'

'Oh, tut!' he cried; 'it is not for a clergyman any more than for a seaman to be afraid of weather. I fear there'll be a call for you, Tregarthen. I thought I would look round--I have finished my sermon for to-morrow morning.' And thus talking in a disjointed way while he pulled off his topcoat, he entered the parlour.

After warming himself and exchanging a few sentences with my mother about the weather, he began to talk about the barque.

'Hark to that, now!' he cried, as the wind struck the front of the house with a crash that had something of the weight of a great sea in the sound of it, while you heard it in a roar of thunder overhead, charged always with an echo of pouring waters; 'what chain cables wrought by mortal skill are going to hold a vessel in the eye of all this?'

'What business have they to come here?' cried my mother.

'I met young Beckerley just now,' continued Mr. Trembath, 'and he tells me that there's some talk among our men of there having been a mutiny aboard that Dane.'

'Nothing was said to me about that,' I said.

'Beckerley was in the boat's crew that boarded her,' he went on.

'Probably he imagined a mutiny--misinterpreted a gloomy look among the Danes into an air of revolt. Anyway, nothing short of a mutiny should justify a master in anchoring in such a roadstead as this, in the face of the ugliest sky I ever saw in my life.'

'They told me the master was below, ill and helpless,' said I.

He went to the window and parted the curtains to peer through, but the wet ran down the gla.s.s, and it was like straining the gaze against a wall of ebony.

'You see,' he continued, coming back to his chair, 'the vessel has those deadly rocks right under her stern, and even if her cables don't part, it is impossible to suppose that she will not drag and be on to them in the blackness, perhaps without her people guessing at their neighbourhood until she touches--and then, G.o.d help them!'

'I suppose Pentreath,' exclaimed my mother, naming the second c.o.xswain of the lifeboat, 'is keeping a look-out?'

'We need not doubt it,' I answered. 'As to her dragging,' said I, addressing Mr. Trembath, 'the Danes are as good sailors as the English, and understand their business; and, mutiny or no mutiny, those fellows down there are not going to take whatever may come without a shrewd guess at it, and outcry enough when it happens. They'll know fast enough if their vessel is dragging; then a flare will follow, and out we shall have to go, of course.'