My Danish Sweetheart Volume I Part 6

My mind dwelt for a moment upon him, upon the clearness and purity of his voice, upon a something in his speech which I could not define, and which puzzled me; upon his words, which were as good English as one could hope to hear at home, albeit there was a certain sharpness and incisiveness--perhaps I might say a little of harshness--in his accentuation that might suggest him a foreigner to an English ear, though, as I then supposed, it was more likely than not this quality arose from the excitement and dismay and distress which worked in him as in me.

But he speedily ceased to engage my thoughts. What could I dwell upon but the situation in which I found myself--the spectacle of the black outline of barque painting herself upon the volumes of white water she hove up around her as she rushed forward pitching bows under, her rigging echoing with unearthly cries, as if the dark waving ma.s.s of spar and gear aloft were crowded with tormented souls wailing and howling and shrieking dismally? I recalled my mother's dream; I believed I was acting in some dreadful nightmare of my own slumbers; all had happened so suddenly--so much of emotion, of wild excitement, of agitation, and, I may say, horror, had been packed into the slender s.p.a.ce of time between the capsizal of the lifeboat and this rushing out of the bay, that, now I had a little leisure to bend my mind to contemplation of the reality, I could not believe in it as an actual thing. I was dazed; my hearing was stunned by the ceaseless roar of wind and seas. The _Janet_ stove and sunk! All my lion-hearted men drowned, perhaps! The poor Danes, for whom they had forfeited their lives, long ago corpses! Would not this break my mother's heart? Would there be a survivor to tell her that when I was last seen I was aboard the barque? Once again I figured the little parlour I had quitted but a few hours since--I pictured my mother sitting by the fire, waiting and listening--the long night, the bitter anguish of suspense!--it was lucky for me that the obligation of having to watch and steer the vessel served as a constant intrusion upon my mind at this time, for could I have been able to sit down and surrender myself wholly to my mood, G.o.d best knows how it must have gone with me.

The lad was about ten minutes absent. I found him alongside the wheel without having witnessed his approach. He came out of the darkness as a spirit might shape itself, and I did not know that he was near me until he spoke.

'My father says that our safety lies in heading into the open sea, to obtain what you call a wide offing,' said he.

'What does he advise?' I asked.

'"We must continue to run," he says,' answered the lad, meaning by _run_ that we should keep the barque before the wind. '"When the coast is far astern we must endeavour to heave to." So he counsels. I told him we are but two. He answered, "It may be done."'

'I wish he were able to leave his cabin and take charge,' said I. 'What is his complaint?'

'He was seized, shortly after leaving Cuxhaven, with rheumatism in the knees,' he answered; 'he cannot stand--cannot, indeed, stir either leg.'

'Why did he not get himself conveyed ash.o.r.e for treatment?'

'He hoped to get better. We were to call at Swansea before proceeding to Porto Allegre, and if he had found himself still ill when he arrived there, it was his intention to procure another captain for the _Anine_, and remain at Swansea with me until he was able to return home.'

'Who had charge of the barque when she brought up in the bay?' I inquired, finding a sort of relief in asking these questions, and, indeed, in having somebody to converse with, for even my ten minutes of loneliness at the helm of that pitching and foaming vessel had depressed me to the very core of my soul.

'The carpenter, who acted as second mate.'

'Yes, I recollect some of our boatmen brought the news. Your chief mate broke his leg and was sent ash.o.r.e. But did your father consent to the _Anine_ dropping anchor in so perilous a bay as ours--perilous, I mean, considering the weather at the time?'

'He was at the mercy of the man Damm--the carpenter, I mean,' he answered. 'The crew had refused to keep the sea: they said a tempest was coming, and that shelter must be sought before the wind came, and the carpenter steered the barque for the first haven he fell in with, which happened to be your bay. Our crew were not good men; they were grumbling much, as your English word is, from the hour of our leaving Cuxhaven.'

'But surely,' said I, 'the poor fellows who sprang out of the fore-rigging could not have formed the whole of the crew of a ship of this burthen.'

'No,' he answered; 'the carpenter and five men got away in one of the boats when they found that the barque was dragging her anchors. They lowered one boat, which filled and was knocked to pieces, and the wreck of it, I dare say, is still swinging at the tackles. They lowered the other boat and went away in her.'

'Did they reach the sh.o.r.e?'

'I do not know,' said he.

'They must have been a bad lot,' said I--'those who escaped in the boat and those who hung in the shrouds, to leave your helpless father to his fate.'

'Oh! a bad lot, a wicked lot!' he cried. 'They were not Danes,' he added. 'Danish sailors would not have acted as those men did.'

'Are you a Dane?' I asked.

'My father is,' he answered. 'I am as much English as Danish. My mother was an Englishwoman.'

'I should have believed you wholly English,' said I. 'Are you a sailor?'

He answered, 'No.' I was about to speak, when he exclaimed: 'I am a girl!'

Secretly for some time I had supposed this, and yet I was hardly less astonished than had I been without previous suspicion.

'A _girl_!' I cried, sending my sight groping over her figure; but to no purpose. She was absolutely indistinguishable saving her arms, which were dimly touched by the haze of the binnacle-light as they lay upon the spokes of the wheel.

'It is my whim to dress as a boy on board ship!' she exclaimed, with no stammer of embarra.s.sment that I could catch in her clear delivery, that penetrated to my ear without loss of a syllable through the heavy storming of the gale, flashing with the fury of a whirlwind off the brows of the seas which rushed at us, as the barque's counter soared into the whole weight and eye of the tempest.

So far had we conversed; but at this moment a great surge took the barque and swung her up in so long, so dizzy, and sickening an upheaval, followed by so wild a fall into the frothing hollow at its base, that speech was silenced in me, and I could think of nothing else but the mountainous billows now running. Indeed, as my companion had predicted, the farther we drew out from the land the heavier we found the sea. The play of the ocean, indeed, out here, was rendered fierce beyond words by the dual character of the tempest; for the seas which had been set racing out of the west had not yet been conquered by the violence of the new gale and by the hurl of the liquid hills out of the east; and the barque was now labouring in the same sort of pyramidal sea as had run in the bay, saving that here the whole power of the great Atlantic was in each billow, and the fight between the contending waters was as a combat of mighty giants.

The decks were full of water; at frequent intervals the brow of the sea rushing past us, swift as was our own speed upon its careering back, would arch over the rail and tumble aboard in a heavy fall of water, and the smoke of it would rise from the planks as though the barque were on fire, and make the blackness forward of the mainmast h.o.a.ry. I sought in vain for the least break in the dark ceiling of the sky. Will the vessel be able to keep afloat? I was now all the time asking myself. Is it possible for any structure put together by human hands to outlive such a night of fury as this? As I have said, I was no sailor, yet my 'longsh.o.r.e training gave me very readily to know that the best, if not the only, chance for our lives was to get the barque hove-to, and leave her to breast the seas and live the weather out as she could with her helm lashed, and, perhaps some bit of tarpaulin in the weather-rigging, to keep her head up. But this, that was to be easily wished, was inexpressibly perilous to attempt or achieve, for, in bringing the vessel to, it was as likely as not we should founder out of hand. A single sea might be enough to do our business; and, failing that, there was the almost certain prospect of the decks being swept, of every erection from the taffrail to the bows being carried away, ourselves included; of a score of leaks being started by a single blow, and, even if the girl and I managed to hold on, of the barque foundering under our feet.

Thus we rushed onward, very literally indeed scudding under bare poles, as it is called; and for a long while we had neither of us a word to exchange, so present was calamity, so near was death, so dreadful were the thunderous sounds of the night, so engrossing our business of keeping the flying fabric dead before the seas.

I pulled out my watch and held it hastily to the binnacle-lamp, and found the hour exactly one. The girl asked me the time. This was the first word that had pa.s.sed between us for a long while. I replied, and she said in a voice that indicated extraordinary spirit, but that nevertheless sounded languishingly after her earlier utterance: 'Now that it is past midnight, the gale may break; surely such fierce weather cannot last for many hours!'

'I wish you would go,' said I, 'and get some refreshment for yourself, and lie down for awhile. I believe I can manage single-handed to keep the vessel before it.'

'If I lie down, it would not be to sleep,' she answered; 'but if you think I can be spared from the wheel for a few minutes, I will obtain some refreshment for us both, and I should also like to see how my father does.'

I answered that if the helm was to prove too heavy for me, her help might hardly save me from being obliged to let go.

'Do not believe this,' she exclaimed, 'because you now know that I am a girl!'

'I have had no heart to express wonderment as yet,' said I, 'otherwise my astonishment and admiration would rea.s.sure you, if you suppose I doubt your strength and capacity now that I know you to be a girl. A little refreshment will help us both,' and I was going to advise her to seize the opportunity to attire herself in dry clothes, for I was in oilskins, whereas, so far as I was able to gather, her dress was a pea-jacket and a cloth cap; and I knew that again and again she had been soaked to the skin, and that the wind pouring on her would be chilling her to her very heart. But even amid such a time as this I was sensible of a diffidence in naming what was in my mind, and held my peace.

She left the wheel, and I stood steering the barque single-handed, with my eyes fixed upon the illuminated compa.s.s-card, while I noticed that the course the vessel was taking, which always held her dead before the gale, was now above a point, nay, perhaps two points, to the southward of west, whence it was clear the hurricane was veering northwardly.

Whether it was because this small shift in the wind still found the colliding seas travelling east and west, or that some heavy surge sweeping its volume along the starboard bow caused the barque to 'yaw'

widely, as it is termed, and so brought a great weight of billow against the rudder: be the cause what it will, while my eye was rooted upon the card, the stern of the vessel was on a sudden run up with the velocity of a balloon from whose car all the ballast has been thrown, the spokes were wrenched from my hand as they revolved like the driving-wheel of a locomotive in full career, and I was sent spinning against the bulwark, from which I dropped upon my knees and so rolled over, stunned.

For all I could tell I might have lain five minutes or five hours without my senses. I believe I was brought to by the washing over me of the water that lay in that lee-part of the deck into which I had been shot. I sat erect, but for a long while was unable to collect my mind, so bewildered were my brains by the fall, and so confounded besides by the uproar round about. I then made out the figure, as I took it, of the girl standing at the wheel, and got on my legs, and after feeling over myself, so to speak, to make sure that all my bones were sound, I staggered, or rather clawed my way up to the wheel; for the barque seemed now to me to be upon her beam-ends, and rolling with dreadful wildness, and there were times when the foaming waters rushed inboards over the rail which she submerged to leeward.

The girl cried out when she spied me. I had to draw close, indeed, to be seen; it was as black down where I was thrown, as the inside of the vessel's hold. She cried out, I say, uttering some Danish exclamation, and then exclaimed:

'I feared you were lost; I feared that you had been thrown overboard; I ought not to have left you alone at the wheel. Tell me if you are hurt?'

'No; I am uninjured,' I replied. 'But what has become of the ship? I am only just recovered from my swoon.'

'Oh!' she cried, 'she has taken up the very situation you wished for.

She has hove herself to. She came broadside to the sea after you were flung from the wheel. We are mercifully watched over. We dared not of ourselves have brought her to the wind.'

All my senses were now active in me once more, and I could judge for myself. It was as the girl had said. The barque had fallen into the trough, and had taken up a position for herself, and was shouldering the heavy western surge with her bow, coming to and falling off in rhythmic sweep. Clouds of froth repeatedly broke over her forecastle; but she seemed while I then watched her to rise buoyant to each black curl of billow as it took her amidships.

'Will you help me to lash the helm?' cried the girl. 'It is all that the _Anine_ will need, I am sure. She will be able to fight the storm alone if we can secure the wheel.'

Between us, we drove the helm 'hard a-lee,' to use the sea term--for which, indeed, it is impossible to find an equivalent, though I trust to be as sparing in this language as the obligation of explanation will permit--and then, by means of ropes wound round the spokes, so bound the wheel as to cripple all play in it.

'Will she lie up to the wind, do you think,' said I, 'without some square of canvas abaft here to keep her head to it?'

'I have been watching her. I believe she will do very well,' the girl answered. 'I feared that that little head of sail we hoisted in the bay would blow her bows round, and, by this not happening, I suppose that sail is in rags. One would not have heard it split in such a thunder of wind as this.'

'Have you seen your father?'