My Danish Sweetheart Volume I Part 5

'And so are we!' he exclaimed shrilly, yet without perceptible terror, with nothing worse than wild excitement in his accents. 'There are rocks directly under our stern. Are you a sailor?'

'No!'

'O, du G.o.de Gud! what is to be done?' cried the lad.

I cast my eyes despairingly around. The tar-barrel was still burning bravely upon the deck, defying the ceaseless sweeping of spray from over the bows; the windy unearthly light tinctured the ship with its sickly sallow hue to the height of her lower yards, and the whole ghastly body of her was to be seen as she rolled and plunged under a sky that was the blacker for the light of the distress-flare, and upon a sea whose vast spreads of creaming brows would again and again come charging along to the very height of the bulwark rail.

In the midst of this pause on my part, and while every instinct of self-preservation in me was blindly flinging itself, so to speak, against the black and horrible situation that imprisoned me, and while I was hopelessly endeavouring to consider what was to be done to save the young fellow alongside of me from destruction--for, as to his father, it was impossible to extend my sympathies at such a moment to one whom I had not seen, who did not appeal to me, as it were, in form and voice for succour--I say, in the midst of this pause of hopeless deliberation, the roar of the hurricane ceased on a sudden. Nothing more, I was sure, was signified by this than a lull, to be followed by some fierce chop round, or by the continuance of the westerly tempest with a bitterer spite in the renewed rush of it. The lull may have lasted ten or fifteen seconds. In that time I do not know that there was a breath of air to be felt outside the violent eddyings and draughts occasioned by the sickening motions of the barque. I looked up at the sky, and spied the leanest phantom of a star that glimmered for the s.p.a.ce of a single swing of a pendulum, and then vanished behind a rushing roll of vapour of a midnight hue, winging with incredible velocity _from_ the land.

So insupportable was the movement of the deck that I was forced to support myself by a belaying-pin, or I must have been thrown. My companion clung to a similar pin close beside me. The thunder of running and colliding waters rose into that magical hush of tempest; I could hear the booming of the surf as far as Hurricane Point and the caldron-like noises of the waters round about the rocks astern of us.

'Has the storm ceased?' cried my companion. 'Oh, beloved father, we may be spared yet!' he added, extending his disengaged hand towards the deck-house, as he apostrophized the helpless man who lay there.

Amazed as I was by this instant cessation of the gale, I could yet find mind enough to be struck by my companion's manner, by his words, and now, I may say, by his voice also. I was about to address him; but, as my lips parted, there was a vivid flash of lightning that threw out the whole scene of bay, cliff, foresh.o.r.e, and town, with the line of the horizon seawards, in a dazzle of violet; a crash of thunder followed; but, before its ear-splitting reverberation had ceased, the echoes of it were drowned in the bellowing of the gale coming directly off the land.

What is there in words to express the fury of this outfly? It met the heave of the landward-running seas, and swept them into smoke, and the air grew as white and thick with spume as though a heavy snowstorm were blowing horizontally along. It took the barque and swung her; her labouring was so prodigious as she was thrust by this fresh hurricane broadside round to the surge, that I imagined every second she would founder under my feet. I felt a shock: my companion cried, 'One of the cables has parted!' A moment later I felt the same indescribable tremble running through the planks on which we stood.

'Is that the other cable gone, do you think?' I shouted.

'There is a lead-line over the side,' he cried; 'it will tell us if we are adrift.'

I followed him to near the mizzen rigging; neither of us durst let go with one hand until we had a grip of something else with the other; it was _now_ not only the weight of the wind that would have laid us p.r.o.ne and pinned us to the deck--a pyramidal sea had sprung up as though by enchantment, and each apex as it soared about the bows and sides was blown inboards in very avalanches of water, which with each violent roll of the vessel poured in a solid body to the rail, one side or the other, again and again, to the height of our waist.

My companion extended his hand over the bulwarks, and cried out: 'Here is the lead-line. It stretches towards the bows. Oh, sir, we are adrift!

we are blowing out to sea!'

I put my hand over and grasped the line, and instantly knew by the angle of it that the lad was right. By no other means would he have been able to get at the truth. The weight of lead, by resting on the bottom, immediately told if the barque was dragging. All around was white water; the blackness of the night drooped to the very spit of the brine; not a light was to be perceived, not the vaguest outline of the cliff; and the whole scene of darkness was the more bewildering for the throb of the near yeast upon the eyesight.

'Is your binnacle-light burning?' I cried.

The lad answered, 'Yes.'

'Then,' I shouted, 'we must find out the quarter the gale has shifted into and get her stern on to it, and clear Hurricane Point, if Almighty G.o.d will permit. There may be safety in the open; there is none here.'

With the utmost labour and distress we made our way aft. The flare had been extinguished by the heavy falls of water, and it was worse than walking blindfolded. The binnacle-light was burning--this was, indeed, to be expected. The barque was plunging directly head to wind, and a glance at the card enabled me to know that the gale was blowing almost due east, having shifted, as these cyclonic ragings often do, right into the quarter opposite whence it had come.

'We must endeavour to get her before it,' I cried; 'but I am no sailor.

There may come another shift, and we ought to clear the land while the hurricane holds as it does. What is to be done?'

'Will she pay off if the helm is put hard over?' he answered. 'Let us try it!'

He seized the spokes on one side; I put my shoulder to the wheel on the other, and thus we jammed and secured the helm into the posture called by sailors 'hard a-starboard.' She fell off, indeed--into the trough, and there she lay, amid such a diabolical play of water, such lashings of seas on both sides, as it is not in mortal pen to portray!

Had we been in the open ocean, a better att.i.tude than the barque herself had taken up we could not have wished for. She was, indeed, 'hove-to,'

as the sea-expression is, giving something of her bow to the wind, and was in that posture which the shipmaster will put his vessel into in such a tempest as was now blowing. But, unhappily, the land was on either hand of us, and though our drift might be straight out to sea, I could not be sure that it was. The tide would be making to the west and north; the coils and pyramids and leapings of surge had also a sort of yearning and leaning towards north-west, as if in sympathy with the tide; the deadly terrace of Hurricane Point lay that way; and so the leaving of the barque in the trough of the sea might come, indeed, to cost us our lives, which had only just been spared by the shift in the storm of wind.

'She does not answer the helm,' I cried to my young companion.

'Her head will pay off,' he answered, 'if we can manage to hoist a fragment of sail forward. It _must_ be done, sir. Will you help me?'

'G.o.d knows I will do anything!' I cried. 'Show me what is to be done. We must save our lives if we can. There may be a chance out on the ocean for us.'

Without another word he went forward, and I followed him. We had to pause often to preserve ourselves from being floated off our feet. The flood, which washed white betwixt the rails, lifted the rigging off the pins, and sent the ropes snaking about the decks, and our movements were as much hampered as though we fought our way through a jungle. The foam all about us, outside and inboards, put a wild, cold glimmer into the air, which enabled us to distinguish outlines. In fact, at moments the whole shape of the barque, from her bulwarks to some distance up her masts, would show like a sketch in ink upon white paper as she leaned off the slant of the sea and painted her figure upon the hill of froth thundering away from her on the lee-side.

My companion paused for a moment or two under the shelter of the caboose or galley, to tell me what he meant to do. We then crawled on to the forecastle, and he bade me hold by a rope which he put into my hand, and await his return. I watched him creep into the 'eyes' of the vessel and get upon the bowsprit, but after that I lost sight of him, for the seas smoked so fiercely all about the ship's head--to every plunge of her bows there rose so shrouding a thickness of foam--that the air was a fog of crystals where the lad was, and had he gone overboard he could not have vanished more utterly from my sight. Indeed, I could not tell whether he was gone or not, and a feeling of horror possessed me when I thought of being left alone in the vessel with a sick and useless man lying somewhere aft, and with the rage and darkness of the dreadful storm around me, the chance of striking upon Hurricane Point, and no better hope at the best than what was to be got out of thinking of the midnight breast of the storming Atlantic.

After a few minutes there was the noise of the rattling of canvas resembling a volley of small shot fired off the bows. The figure of the lad came from the bowsprit out of a burst of spray that soared in steam into the wind.

'Only a fragment must be hoisted!' he exclaimed with his mouth at my ear. 'Pull with me!'

I put my weight upon the rope, and together we rose a few feet of the sail upon the stay--it was the foretopmast staysail, as I afterwards discovered.

'Enough!' cried my companion in his clear, penetrating voice; 'if it will but hold till the vessel pays off, all will be well. We dare not ask for more.'

He secured the rope we had dragged upon to a pin, and I followed him aft, finding leisure even in that time of distress and horror to wonder at the coolness, the intrepidity of soul, that was expressed in his clear unfaltering speech, in the keen judgment and instant resolution of a lad whose age, as I might gather from his voice, could scarcely exceed fifteen or sixteen years. Between us we seized the wheel afresh, one on either side of it, and waited. But we were not to be kept long in suspense. Indeed, even before we had grasped the helm, the barque was paying off. The rag of canvas held n.o.bly, and to the impulse of it the big bows of the vessel rounded away from the gale, and in a few minutes she was dead before it, pitching furiously, with the sea snapping and foaming to her taffrail and quarters.

But the thickness of her yards, with the canvas rolled up on them, the thickness of the masts, too, the spread of the tops, the complicated gear of shroud, backstay, and running rigging--all offered resistance enough to the dark and living gale that was bellowing right over the stern to put something of the speed of an arrow into the keel of the fabric. Through it she madly raced, with pallid clouds blowing about her bows, and white peaks hissing along her sides, and a wake of snow under her counter heaving to half the height of the mizzenmast with the hurl of the seas, and a ceaseless blowing of froth over our heads as the lad and I stood together grasping the wheel, steering the vessel into the darkness of the great Atlantic Ocean, with our eyes upon the compa.s.s-card, whose illuminated disc showed the course on which we were being flashed forwards by the storm to be a trifle south of west.

CHAPTER IV.

HELGA NIELSEN.

For full twenty minutes the lad and I clung to the helm without exchanging a word. The speed of the driven vessel rendered her motion comparatively easy, after the intolerable lurching and rolling and plunging of her as she lay at anchor or in the trough. She was swept onwards with such velocity that I had little or no fear of her taking in the seas over her stern, and she steered well, with but little wildness in the swerving of her bows, as was to be seen by the comparative regularity of the oscillation of the compa.s.s-card.

This running before the tempest, of course, diminished the volume and power of it, so far, I mean, as our own sensations were concerned; but the sight of the sea, as much of it at least as was visible, coupled with the thunder of the wind up aloft in the sky, and the prodigious crying and shrieking and shrilling of it in the rigging, was warrant enough that were we to heave the barque to we should find the hurricane harder now than it had been at any other time since it first came on to blow. Yet our racing before it, as I have said, seemed somewhat to lull it, and we could converse without having to cry out, though for twenty minutes we stood mute as statues waiting and watching.

At last my companion said to me: 'Have we pa.s.sed that point which you spoke of, do you think?'

'Oh yes,' I answered. 'It would not be above two miles distant from the point where we broke adrift. Our speed cannot have been less than eight or nine knots. I should say Hurricane Point is a full mile away down on the quarter there.'

'I fear that we shall find the sea,' said he, 'grow terribly heavy as we advance.'

'Yes,' said I; 'but what is to be done? There is nothing for it but to advance. Suppose such another shift of wind as has just happened--what then? We should have a line of deadly sh.o.r.e right under our lee. No, we must hold on as we are.'

'There are but two of us!' cried he: 'my father cannot count. What are we to do? We cannot work this big ship!'

'The weather may break,' said I; 'it is surely too fierce to last. What can we hope for but to be rescued or a.s.sisted by some pa.s.sing vessel? Is this ship stanch?'

'Yes; she is a strong ship,' he replied. 'She is about six years old. My father is her owner. I wish I could go to him,' he added; 'he will be dying to learn what has happened and what is being done, and it is past the time for his medicine, and he will be wanting his supper!'

I tried to catch a view of him as he spoke these words, but the haze of the binnacle-lamp did not reach to his face, and it was as black as the face of the sky itself out of that sheen. What he had said had a girlish note in it that I could not reconcile with his dress, with his seafaring alertness, with his spirited behaviour, his nimble crawling out upon the bowsprit, and his perception of what was to be done, under conditions which might well have clouded the wits of the oldest and most audacious sailor.

'Pray go and see your father,' said I. 'I believe I can keep this helm amidships without help.' And, indeed, if I could not have steered the barque alone, I do not know that such a.s.sistance as he could offer would have suffered me to control her. He seemed but a slender lad--so far, at least, as I had been able to judge from the view I got when the flare was burning--very quick, but without such strength as I should have looked for in a young seaman, as I could tell whenever the wheel had to be put up or down.

He let go the spokes, and stood apart for a minute or two, as though to judge whether I could manage without him; then said he, 'I will return quickly,' and with that he took a step and vanished in the blackness forward of the binnacle-stand.