My Danish Sweetheart Volume II Part 10

Well, I again endeavoured to persuade her to withdraw to her bunk, but she begged hard to remain with me, and so for a long while we continued to sit and talk. Her speaking of herself as a Dane first and an Englishwoman afterwards, started her on the subject of her home and childhood, and once again she talked of Kolding and of her mother, and of the time she had spent in London, and of an English school she had been put to. I could overhear the rumbling of the two fellows' voices outside. By-and-by I crawled out and found the rain had ceased; but it was pitch dark, and blowing a cold wind. Jacob had lighted the fire in the stove. His figure showed in the ruddy glare as he squatted toasting his hands. I returned to Helga, and presently Abraham arrived to ask us if we would have a drop of hot coffee. This was a real luxury at such a time. We gratefully took a mugful, and with the help of it made a midnight meal off a biscuit and a little tinned meat.

How we sc.r.a.ped through those long, dark, wet hours I will not pretend to describe. Towards the morning Helga fell asleep by my side on the sail upon which we were crouching, but for my part I could get no rest, nor, indeed, did I strive or wish for rest. One thing coming on top of another had rendered me unusually nervous, and all the while I was thinking that our next experience might be the feeling some great shearing stem of a sailing-ship or steamer striking into the lugger and drowning the lot of us before we could well realize what had happened. I was only easy in my mind when the boatmen carried the lantern out from under the overhanging deck for some purpose or other.

It came at last, however, to my being able no longer to conceal my apprehensions, and then, after some talk and a bit of hearty 'pooh-poohing' on the part of Abraham, he consented to secure the light to the stump of the mast.

This might have been at about half-past three o'clock in the morning, when the night was blacker than it had been at any previous hour: and then a very strange thing followed. I had returned to my shelter, and was sitting lost in thought, for Helga was now sleeping. The two boatmen were in the open, but what they were about I could not tell you. I was sunk deep in gloomy thought, as I have said, when on a sudden I heard a sound of loud bawling. I went out as quickly as my knees would carry me, and the first thing I saw was the green light of a ship glimmering faintly as a glowworm out in the darkness abeam. I knew her to be a sailing-ship, for she showed no masthead-light, but there was not the dimmest outline to be seen of her. Her canvas threw no pallor upon the midnight wall of atmosphere. But for that fluctuating green light, showing so illusively that one needed to look a little on one side of it to catch it, the ocean would have been as bare as the heavens, so far as the sight went. One after the other the two boatmen continued to shout, 'Ship ahoy!' in hearty, roaring voices, which they sent flying through the arches of their hands; but the light went sliding on, and in a few minutes the screen in which it was hung eclipsed it, and it was all blackness again, look where one would.

There was nothing to be said about this to the men. I crept back to Helga, who had been awakened by the hoa.r.s.e shouts.

'Some sailing-vessel has pa.s.sed us,' said I, in answer to her inquiry, 'as we may know by the green light; but how near or far I cannot tell.

Yet it is more likely than not, Helga, that but for my begging Abraham to keep a light showing, that same ship might have run us down.'

We conversed awhile about the vessel and our chances, and then her voice grew languid again with drowsiness, and she fell asleep.

Somewhile before dawn the rain ceased, the sky brightened, and here and there a star showed. I had been out overhanging the gunwale with Abraham, and listening to him as he talked about his mate Thomas, and how the children were to manage now that the poor fellow was taken, when the gray of the dawn rose floating into the sky off the black rim of the sea.

In a short time the daylight was abroad, with the pink of the coming sun swiftly growing in glory among the clouds in the east. Jacob sat sleeping in the bottom of the boat, squatting Lascar fashion--a huddle of coat and angular knees and bowed head. I got upon a thwart and sent a long thirsty look round.

'By Heaven, Abraham!' I cried, '_nothing_ in sight, as I live to say it!

What, in the name of hope, has come to the sea?'

'We're agoing to have a fine day, I'm thankful to say,' he answered, turning up his eyes. 'But, Lord! what a wreck the lugger looks!'

The poor fellow was as haggard as though he had risen from a sick-bed, and this sudden gauntness or elongation of countenance was not a little heightened by a small powdering of the crystals of salt lying white under the hollow of each eye, where the brine that had been swept up by the squall had lodged and dried.

'Hi, Jacob!' he cried; 'rouse up, matey! Day's broke, and there's work to be done.'

Jacob staggered to his feet with many contortions and grimaces.

'Chock-a-block with rheumatics,' he growled; 'that's how the sea sarves a man. They said it 'ud get warmer the furder we drawed down this way; but if this be what they calls _warm_, give me the scissors and thumbscrews of a Janivary gale in the Jarman Ocean.' He gazed slowly around him, and fixed his eyes on the stump of the mast. 'Afore we begin, Abraham,' said he, 'I must have a drop of hot corffee.'

'Right,' answered the other; 'a quarter of an hour isn't going to make any difference.'

A fire was kindled, a kettle of water boiled, and, Helga now arriving, the four of us sat, every one with a mug of the comforting, steaming beverage in hand, while the two boatmen settled the procedure of strengthening the wounded spar by 'fishing it,' as it is termed, and of making sail afresh.

CHAPTER V.

THE END OF THE 'EARLY MORN.'

The first business of the men was to get the broken mast out of the water. Helga helped, and worked with as much dexterity as though she had been bred to the calling of the Deal waterman. The mast in breaking had been shortened by ten feet, and was therefore hardly as useful a spar to step as the bowsprit. It was laid along the thwarts in the side, and we went to work to strengthen the mast that had been sprung in the Channel by laying pieces of wood over the fractured part, and securely binding them by turn upon turn of rope. This, at sea, they call 'fishing a spar.' Jacob shook his head as he looked at the mast when we had made an end of the repairs, but said nothing. When the mast was stepped, we hoisted the sail with a reef in it to ease the strain. Abraham went to the tiller, the boat's head was put to a south-west course, and once again the little fabric was pushing through it, rolling in a long-drawn way upon a sudden swell that had risen while we worked, with a frequent little vicious shake of white waters off her bow, as though the combing of the small seas irritated her.

The wind was about east, of a November coldness, and it blew somewhat lightly till a little before ten o'clock in the morning, when it came along freshening in a gust which heeled the boat sharply, and brought a wild, anxious look into Abraham's eyes as he gazed at the mast. The horizon slightly thickened to some film of mist which overlay the windward junction of heaven and water, and the sky then took a windy face, with dim breaks of blue betwixt long streaks of hard vapour, under which there nimbly sailed, here and there, a wreath of light-yellow scud. The sea rapidly became sloppy--an uncomfortable tumble of billows occasioned by the lateral run of the swell--and the boat's gait grew so staggering, such a sense of internal dislocation was induced by her brisk, jerky wobbling--now to windward, now to leeward, now by the stern, now by the head, then all the motions happening together, as it were, followed by a sickly, leaning slide down some slope of rounded water--that for the first time in my life I felt positively seasick, and was not a little thankful for the relief I obtained from a nip of poor Captain Nielsen's brandy out of one of the few jars which had been taken from the raft, and which still remained full.

Some while before noon it was blowing a fresh breeze, with a somewhat steadier sea; but the rolling and plunging of the lugger continued sharp and exceedingly uncomfortable. To still further help the mast--Abraham having gone into the forepeak to get a little sleep--Helga and I, at the request of Jacob, who was steering, tied a second reef in the sail: though, had the spar been sound, the lugger would have easily borne the whole of her canvas.

'If that mast goes, what is to be done?' said I to Jacob.

'Whoy,' he answered, 'we shall have to make shift with the remains of the mast that went overboard last night.'

'But what sail will you be able to hoist on that shortened height?'

'Enough to keep us slowly blowing along,' he answered, 'till we falls in with a wessel as will help us to the sort o' spar as 'll sarve.'

'Considering the barrenness of the sea we have been sailing through,'

said I, 'the look-out seems a poor one, if we're to depend upon pa.s.sing a.s.sistance.'

'Mr. Tregarthen,' said he, fixing his eyes upon my face, 'I'm an older man nor you, and therefore I takes the liberty of telling ye this: that neither ash.o.r.e nor at sea do things fall out in the fashion as is hantic.i.p.ated. That's what the Hi-talian organ-grinder discovered. He conceived that if he could get hold of a big monkey he'd do a good trade; so he buys the biggest he could meet with--a chap pretty nigh as big as himself. What happened? When them parties was met with a week arterwards, it was the monkey that was a-turning the handle, while the horgan-grinder was doing the dancing.'

'The public wouldn't know the difference,' said Helga.

'True for you, lady,' answered Jacob, with an approving nod and a smile of admiration. 'But Mr. Tregarthen here'll find out that I'm speaking the Lard's truth when I says that human hantic.i.p.ation always works out contrariwise.'

'I heartily hope it may do so in our case!' I exclaimed, vexed by the irrationality, as it seemed to me, of this homely boatman's philosophic views.

'About toime for Abraham to take soights, ain't it?' said he.

I went to the hatch and called to Abraham, who in a few minutes arrived, and, with sleepy eyes, fell to groping after the sun with his old quadrant. While he was thus occupied, Helga touched me lightly on the shoulder and pointed astern. I peered an instant, and then said:

'I see it! A sail!--at the wrong end of the sea again, of course!

Another _Thermopylae_, maybe, to thunder past us with no further recognition of our wants than a wagging head over the rail, with a finger at its nose.'

'It's height bells!' cried Abraham; and he sat down to his rough calculations.

Jacob looked soberly over his shoulder at the distant tiny s.p.a.ce of white canvas.

'If there's business to be done with her,' said he, 'we must steer to keep her head right at our starn. What course'll she be taking?'

'She appears to be coming directly at us,' answered Helga.

'Why not lower your sail, heave the lugger to, and fly a distress signal?' said I.

I had scarcely uttered the words when the boat violently jumped a sea; a crash followed, and the next instant the sail, with half of the fished mast, was overboard, with the lugger rapidly swinging, head to sea, to the drag of the wreckage.

I was not a little startled by the sudden cracking of the mast, that was like the report of a gun, and the splash of the sail overboard, and the rapid slewing of the boat.

Helga quietly said in my ear, 'Nothing better could have happened. We are now indeed a wreck for that ship astern to sight, and she is sure to speak to us.'

Abraham flung down his log-book with a sudden roaring out of I know not what 'longsh.o.r.e profanities, and Jacob, letting go the helm, went scrambling forwards over the thwarts, heaping sea-blessings, as he sprawled, upon the eyes and limbs of the boat-builder who had supplied the lugger with spars. The three of us went to work, and Helga helped us as best she could, to get the sail in; but the sea that was now running was large compared to what it had been during the night, and the task was extraordinarily laborious and distressful. Indeed, how long it took us to drag that great lugsail full of water over the rail was to be told by the ship astern, for when I had leisure to look for her I found her risen to her hull, and coming along, as it seemed to me, dead for us, heeling sharply away from the fresh wind, but rolling heavily too on the swell, and pitching with the regularity of a swing in motion.

Helga and I threw ourselves upon a thwart, to take breath. The boatmen stood looking at the approaching vessel.

'She'll not miss seeing us, any way,' said Abraham.

'I'm for letting the lugger loie as she is,' exclaimed Jacob: 'they'll see the mess we're in, and back their taws'l.'