A TERRIBLE NIGHT.
Miss Laura arrived at the dinner table. She was pale with the heat. She
toyed with a morsel of cold fowl and sipped seltzer and hock.
‘The dead calm,’ said I, ‘gives you a young lady’s appetite.’
‘I am here,’ she answered, ‘because I do not know where else to be.’
‘You are here,’ said I, ‘because you are good and kind, and know that I
delight in your society.’
She fanned herself. As the mercury rises past a certain degree
sentiment falls. Emotion lies north and south of the line, hardly on
it unless in a black skin. How death-like was the repose upon the
yacht! The sun had gone out in the western thickness with a flare like
the snuff of a blown-out candle, and a sort of brown dimness as of
smoke followed him instead of the staring red and living glare that
accompanies his descent in clear weather in those parts. The cabin
lamp was lighted; it hung without a phantom of vibration, and sitting
at that table was like eating in one’s dining room ashore. I glanced
my eye round the interior. Delicate and elegant was the appearance
of the cabin. The mirrors multiplied the white oil flames of the
silver burners; the carpet, the drapery, the upholstery of chairs
and couches stole out in rich soft dyes upon the gaze. The table was
radiant with white damask and glass and plate and plants. Confronting
me was the charming figure of the sweet girl with whom I had been
intimately associated for several weeks. Her golden hair sparkled in
the lamplight; from time to time she would lift her violet eye with a
drowsy gleam in it to mine.
‘Heat depresses the spirits,’ said I. ‘I feel dull. What is going to
happen, I wonder?’
‘Is the wind ever likely to blow again?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I shall have the pleasure of conducting you on deck presently,
when I will show you a fine bank of clouds in the south that will be
revealed to us by lightning, if I truly gather the character of the
vapour from the bronzed lines of it which I witnessed a little while
ago.’
‘Have you seen Wilfrid since lunch?’
‘Yes; he talks very sensibly. He beckoned me to his bunk side to
whisper that Cutbill made him laugh. Anything to divert the dear
fellow’s mind. I presume you have seen nothing of Lady Monson?’
‘Nothing,’ she answered, fanning her pale face till the yellow hair
upon her brow danced as though some invisible hand was showering gold
dust upon her.
‘Jacob Crimp,’ said I softly, ‘is of opinion that he could drive
Wilfrid on deck by blacking his face, looking in upon him through his
open porthole, and calling himself the devil.’
‘He need not black his face,’ said she, with the first smile that I had
seen upon her lip that day, ‘but if he does anything of the sort I hope
he will be treated as Muffin was.’
‘Yet I am of opinion,’ said I, ‘that a great fright would impel Wilfrid
to make for the door. He would pass through it of course, and then his
hallucination would fall from him.’
She shook her head. ‘You must not allow him to be frightened, Mr.
Monson.’
‘Depend upon it I shan’t,’ I replied. ‘I merely repeat a sour seaman’s
rude and homely prescription.’
As I spoke the yacht slightly rolled, and simultaneously with the
movement, as it seemed, one felt the dead atmosphere of the cabin set
in motion.
‘Good!’ I cried, ‘’tis the first of the change. Now heave to it, my
beauty!’
Again the yacht softly dipped her side. I jumped up to look at the
tell-tale compass, and as I did so the skylight glanced to a pale glare
as of sheet lightning. I waited a minute to mark the rolling of the
craft that was now dipping sluggishly but steadfastly with rhythmic
regularity on undulations which were still exceedingly weak, and found
the set of the suddenly risen swell to be north as near as I could
judge.
‘Well, Miss Laura,’ said I, ‘I think now we may calculate upon a breeze
of wind, presently, from a right quarter too.’
I looked at the hour; it was twenty minutes to eight. The death-like
hush was broken; the preternatural repose of the last day and night
gone. Once more you heard the old familiar straining sounds, the click
of hooked doors, the feeble grinding of bulkheads, with the muffled
gurgling of water outside mingled with the frequent flap of canvas; but
I could be sure that there was no breath of air as yet; not the least
noise of rippling flowed to the ear, and the yacht still lay broadside
on to her course.
‘Let us go on deck,’ said I.
She sent her maid, who was passing at the moment, for her hat, and we
left the cabin.
‘Hillo!’ I cried as I emerged from the companion, holding her hand
that lay almost as cold in mine as if it were formed of the snow which
it resembled, ‘there’s another of your friends up there, Miss Laura,’
and I pointed to the topgallant yardarm, upon which was floating a
corposant, ghastly of hue but beautiful in brilliance.
She looked up and spoke as though she shuddered. ‘Those things frighten
me. What can be more ghostly than a light that is kindled as that is?
Oh, Mr. Monson, what a wild flash of lightning!’
A wild flash it was, though as far off as the horizon. Indeed it was
more than one stroke: a copper-coloured blaze that seemed to fill
the heavens behind the clouds with fire, against which incandescent
background the sky-line of the long roll of vapour stood out in vast
billows black as pitch, whilst from the heart of the mass there fell
a light like a fireball, to which the sea there leapt out yellow as
molten gold.
I strained my ear. ‘No thunder as yet,’ said I. ‘I hope it is not going
to prove a mere electric storm, flames and detonations and an up and
down cataract of rain breathless in its passage with a deader calm yet
to follow.’
All at once the light at the topgallant yardarm vanished, a soft air
blew, and there arose from alongside a delicate, small, fairy-like
noise of the lipping and sipping of ripples.
‘Oh, how heavenly is this wind!’ exclaimed Miss Laura, reviving on
a sudden like a gas-dried flower in a shower of rain; ‘it brings my
spirits back to me.’
‘Trim sail the watch!’ bawled Crimp. But there was little to trim;
all day long the yacht had lain partially stripped. No good, Finn
had said, in exposing canvas to mere deadness. She wheeled slowly to
the control of her helm, bowing tenderly upon the swell that was now
running steadily with an almost imperceptible gathering of weight in
its folds, and presently she was crawling along with her head pointing
north before the weak fanning, with the lightning astern of her making
her canvas come and go upon the darkness as though lanterns green and
rose-bright were being flashed from the deck upon the cloths. The sea
was pale with fire round about us. Indeed the air was so charged with
electricity that I felt the tingling of it in the skin of my head
as though it were in contact with some galvanic appliance, and I
recollect pulling off my cap whilst I asked Miss Laura if she could see
any sparks darting out of my hair. The skylight, gratings, whatever one
could sit upon, streamed with dew. I called to the steward for a couple
of camp-stools and placed them so as to obtain the full benefit of the
draught feebly breezing down out of the swinging space of the mainsail.
The air was hot, and under the high sun it would doubtless have blown
with a parching bite that must have rendered it even less endurable
than the motionless atmosphere of the calm; but the dew moistened it
now; it was a damp night air, with a smell of rain behind it besides,
and the gushing of it upon the face was inexpressibly delicious and
refreshing.
‘We are but little better than insects,’ said Miss Laura; ‘entirely the
children of the weather.’
‘Rather compare us to birds,’ said I; ‘I don’t like insects.’
‘You complained of feeling depressed just now, Mr. Monson. Are you
better?’
‘I am the better for this air, certainly,’ said I, ‘but I don’t feel
particularly cheerful. I shouldn’t care to go to a pantomime, for
instance, nor should I much enjoy a dance. What is it? The influence
of that heap of electricity out yonder, I suppose,’ I added, looking
at the dense black massed-up line of cloud astern, over all parts
of which there was an incessant play of lightning, with copperish
glances behind that gave a lining of fire to the edges of the higher
reaches of the vast coast of vapour. It was like watching some gigantic
hangings of tapestry wrought in flame. The imagination rather than the
eye witnessed a hundred fantastic representations--heads of horses,
helmets, profiles of titanic human faces, banners and feathers, and I
know not what besides. It was very dark overhead and past the bows; the
thickness that had been upon the sky all day was still there; not the
leanest phantom of star showed, and the stoop of the heavens seemed the
nearer and the blacker for the flashings over our taffrail, and for the
pale phosphoric sheets which went wavering on all sides towards the
murkiness of the horizon.
I spied Finn conversing with Crimp at the gangway; the lightning astern
was as moonlight sometimes, and I could see both men looking aloft and
at the weather in the south and consulting. In a few minutes they came
our way.
‘What is it to be, Finn?’ said I.
‘Well, sir,’ he answered, ‘this here swell that’s slowly a-gathering
means wind. It will be but little more, though, than an electric
squall, I think--a deal of fire and hissing and a burst of breeze, and
then quietness again with the black smother spitting itself out ahead.
The barometer don’t seem to give more caution than that anyway, sir.
But there’s never no trusting what ye can’t see through.’
He turned to Crimp. ‘Better take the mainsail off her, Jacob,’ said
he, ‘and let her slide along under her foresail till we see what all
that there yonder sinnifies.’
The order was given; the sailors tumbled aft; the great stretch of
glimmering, ashen cloths, burning and blackening alternately as they
reflected the tempestuous flares withered upon the dusk as the peak
and throat halliards were settled away; the sail was furled, the huge
mainboom secured, and the watch went forward softly as cats upon their
naked feet.
Ha! what is that? Right ahead, on a line with our bowsprit, there leapt
from the black breast of the sea, on the very edge of the ocean, if
not past it, a body of flame, brilliant as sunshine but of the hue of
pale blood. It came and went, but whilst it lived it made a ghastly
and terrifying daylight of the heavens and the water in the north,
revealing the line of the horizon as though the sun’s upper limb were
on a level with it till the circle of the sea could have been followed
to either quarter.
‘_That_ was not lightning,’ cried Miss Laura in a voice of alarm.
‘Finn,’ I shouted, ‘did you see that?’
‘Ay, sir,’ he cried with an accent of astonishment from the opposite
side of the deck.
‘What in the name of thunder was it, think you?’ I inquired.
‘Looked to me like a cloud of fire dropped clean out of the sky, sir,’
he answered.
‘No, no,’ exclaimed the hoarse voice of the fellow who grasped the
helm, ‘my eye was on it, capt’n. It rose up.’
‘Listen,’ cried I, ‘if any report follows it.’
But we could hear no sound save the distant muttering of thunder astern.
‘It looked as though a ship had blown up,’ said Miss Laura.
‘I say, captain,’ I called, ‘d’ye think it likely that a vessel has
exploded down there?’
‘There’s been nothen in sight, sir,’ he answered.
‘And why? Because the atmosphere has been blind all day,’ I replied.
‘You’d see the light of an explosion when the craft herself would be
hidden.’
‘’Twarn’t no ship, sir,’ muttered the fellow at the wheel, considering
himself licensed by the excitement of the moment to deliver his
opinion. ‘I once see the like of such a flare as that off the Maldives.’
‘What was it?’ inquired Miss Laura.
‘A sea-quake, miss.’
‘Ha!’ I exclaimed, ‘that’ll be it, Finn.’
We fell silent, all of us gazing intently ahead, never knowing but that
another wild light would show that way at any moment. Though I was
willing enough to believe it to have been a volcanic upheaval of flame,
I had still a fancy that it might be an explosion on board a ship too,
some big craft that had been out of sight all day in the thickness;
and I kept my eyes fixed upon the horizon in that quarter with a
half-formed fancy in me of witnessing something there by the light
of some stronger flash than the rest out of the stalking and lifting
blackness astern of us.
‘I cannot help thinking,’ said Miss Laura, rising as she spoke, and
arching her fingers above her eyes to peer through the hollow of her
hands, ‘that I sometimes see a pale, steam-like column resembling
ascending smoke that spreads out on top in the form of a palm-tree.
_Now_ I see it!’ she cried, as a brilliant flash behind us sent its
ghastly yellow into the far confines ahead, till the whole ocean lifted
dark and flat to it.
The thunder began to rattle ominously, the light breeze faltered, and
the foresail swung sulkily to the bowing of the vessel upon the swell
that was distinctly increasing in weight. We all looked, but none of us
could distinguish anything resembling the appearance the girl indicated.
‘If the flame rose from the sea,’ said I, ‘it is tolerably certain to
have sent up a great body of steam. That is, no doubt, what you see,
Miss Jennings.’
‘It lingers,’ she exclaimed, continuing to stare.
‘The draught’s a-taking off,’ rumbled Finn. ‘Stand by for a neat little
shower.’
As the air died away it grew stiflingly hot again, hotter, it seemed,
than it was before the breeze blew. The huge volumes of dense shadows
astern were literally raining lightning; the swell ran in molten
glass, and the still comparatively subdued roar of the thunder came
rolling along those sweeping, polished brows as though the ocean were
an echoing floor and there were a body of giants away down where the
lightning was sending colossal bowls at us.
All at once, and in a manner to drive the breath out of one’s body with
the suddenness and astonishment of it, the yacht’s bows rose to a huge
roller that came rushing at her from right ahead. Up she soared till
I dare say she showed twenty foot of her keel forward out of water.
The vast liquid mass swept past the sides with a roar that drowned the
cannonading of the heavens. Down flashed the vessel’s bows whilst her
stern stood up as though she were making her last plunge. I grasped
Laura by the waist, clipping hold of a backstay just in time to save
us both from being dashed on the deck. Finn staggered and was thrown.
Out of the obscurity in the fore part of the schooner rose a wild,
hoarse cry of dismay and confusion mingled with the din of crockery
tumbling and breaking below, and the grinding sound of movable objects
sliding from their places. Heaven and earth, what is it? Another! Not
so mountainous this time, but a terribly heavy roller nevertheless. Up
rose the yacht again to it, then down fell her stem with a boiling of
white waters about her bow, amid the seething of which and the thunder
of the liquid volume rushing from off our counter you heard a second
cry, or rather groan of amazement and alarm, from the sailors forward,
with more distracting noises below.
I continued to grip Laura and to hold firmly to the backstay with
my wits almost scattered by the incredible violence of the yacht’s
soaring and plunging, and by the utter unexpectedness of the swift,
brief, headlong dance. But now the yacht floated on a level keel again
and continued so to float, the calm being as dead as ever it had been
in the most stagnant hour of the day, saving always the southerly
undulation which the two gigantic rollers had temporarily flattened
out, though the heaving presently began again. I saw Finn rubbing his
nose like a dazed man as he stood staring towards the lightning.
‘What could it have been?’ cried Laura.
‘Two volcanic seas, mum,’ answered the fellow who grasped the wheel;
‘there’s most times three. Capt’n, beg pardon, sir, but that’ll ha’
been a mighty bust up yonder to have raised a weight of rollers to be
felt as them two was all this distance away.’
‘The most surprising thing that ever happened to me, Mr. Monson,’ cried
Finn, still bewildered.
A great drop of rain--a _drop_ do I call it? it seemed as big as a
hen’s egg--splashed upon my face, and at the same moment a flash of
lightning swept an effulgence as of noontide into heaven and ocean,
followed rapidly by an ear-splitting burst of thunder.
‘Finn’s little shower is beginning,’ said I, grasping Laura’s hand;
‘let us take shelter. Anyway the wet should cool the atmosphere if
no wind follows. Bless me! how disgusting if it’s to prove merely a
thunderstorm.’
I conducted her to the cabin. At the foot of the companion steps stood
Lady Monson. She was without a hat, her face was of a deadly white, her
large black eyes glowed with terror, her hair was roughly adjusted on
her head, and long raven-hued tresses of it lay upon her shoulder and
hung down her back. I could well believe that the old lord whom Laura
had met at my cousin’s found something in this woman’s tragic airs and
stately person to remind him of Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth.
‘What has happened?’ she exclaimed, addressing me without noticing
her sister. I explained. ‘Are we in danger?’ she exclaimed, with an
imperious sweep of her fiery eyes over my figure as though she could
not constrain herself to the condescension of looking me full in the
face.
‘I believe not,’ said I coldly, making as though to pass on, for I
abhorred her manner and was shocked by her treatment of her sister.
She stood a moment looking up; but there came just then a fierce flash
of lightning; she covered her eyes; at the same moment somebody on deck
closed the companion. She then, without regarding us, went to her cabin.
Hardly had we seated ourselves when down plumped the rain. It seemed to
roll over the edge of the cloud like the falls of Niagara, in a vast
unbroken sheet of water. There was as much hail as rain; the stones
of the bigness you find only in the tropics, where there is plenty
of lightning to manufacture them, and the sound of the downrush as it
struck the deck and set the sea boiling was so deafening that, though
the thunder was roaring almost overhead, nothing was to be heard of
it. The lightning was horribly brilliant, and the cabin seemed filled
with the sulphur-smelling blazes, though there was only a comparatively
small skylight for them to show through. In a few minutes the rush of
rain slackened, the volleying claps and rolling peals of thunder were
to be heard again, with a noise, in the intervals, of the gushing of
water overboard from our filled decks.
‘I hope the lightning will not strike the yacht,’ exclaimed Laura.
‘There is no safer place in a thunderstorm than a vessel in the middle
of the wide ocean,’ I answered.
At that moment the burly form of Cutbill came out of Wilfrid’s cabin.
His head dodged to right and left awhile in the corridor whilst he
sought to make out who we were; then distinguishing us he approached.
‘Beg pardon, sir,’ he exclaimed, ‘but his honour’s growed very crazy,
and wants to know what was the cause of the yacht pitching so heavily
just now.’
‘I will go to his berth and explain,’ said I.
‘Oh, Mr. Monson, please don’t leave me,’ cried Laura. ‘The lightning
terrifies me.’
‘Then Cutbill,’ said I, ‘give my love to Sir Wilfrid and tell him
that the pitching of the yacht was to a couple of seas caused, as we
suppose, by a submarine earthquake away down in the north, probably
fifteen miles distant.’
‘Thought as much, sir,’ said Cutbill, from whose face the perspiration
was streaming, whilst his immense whiskers sparkled like a dew-laden
bramble-bush in sunrise.
‘Also explain that I do not desire to leave Miss Jennings until this
deafening and blinding business is over. I shall hope to carry my pipe
to his berth by-and-by. But it must be very hot for you, Cutbill, in
that cabin?’
‘Melting, sir. I feel to be a-draining away. Reckon there’ll be nothen
left of me but my clothes if this here lasts.’
‘How is Sir Wilfrid?’
‘Well, sir, to be honest, I don’t at all like what I see in him.
There’s come a sing’ler alteration in him. Can’t xactly describe it,
sir; sort of stillness, and a queer whiteness of face, and a constant
watching of me; his eyes are never off me, indeed. The heat’ll have a
deal to do with it, I dessay.’
‘Some change may be at hand,’ said I, ‘from which he may emerge with
his miserable hallucinations gone. Yet the heat should account for a
deal too. Give him my message, Cutbill.’
The man knuckled his forehead and withdrew. The heat was so great
owing to the companion hatch and skylight being closed, that my sweet
companion seemed half-dead with it, and leaned against me with her
eyes closed, almost in a swoon. But the worst of the storm was over
apparently, for the rain had ceased, and though the lightning was still
intensely vivid, one knew by the sound of the thunder that what was
fiercest had forged ahead of us and was settling away into the north. I
called to the steward to open the companion doors and report the state
of the weather. The moment the hatch lay clear to the night I felt a
gush of refreshing and rain-sweetened air. Laura sat upright and gave a
deep sigh.
‘Does it rain, steward?’ I sung out.
‘No, sir.’
‘Tell Captain Finn,’ said I, ‘to get some space of deck swabbed dry for
Miss Jennings. The heat here is too much for the young lady.’
In a few moments I heard the slapping of several swabs and Finn’s long
face glimmered through the open skylight. ‘The weather’s a-clearing,
sir,’ he called down. ‘There’s a nice little air a-blowing. The lady’ll
find the port side of the quarter-deck comfortable now.’
I conducted the girl up the ladder, but she kept her hand in my
arm. Her manner had something of clinging in it, not wholly due to
fear either. It was, in fact, as though she was influenced by an
overpowering sense of loneliness, easy to understand when one thought
of Wilfrid lying mad in his cabin and her sister shunning her with hate
and rage.
What Finn meant by saying the weather was _clearing_ I could not quite
understand. It was pitch black to windward, that is to say, right
over the stern, whence there was a small breeze blowing in faint,
fitful, weak gusts as though irresolute. The thunderstorm was ahead and
its rage seemed spent, for the lightning was no longer plentiful or
brilliant and the thunder had faded into a sullen muttering. A lantern
or two had been brought up from below by whose feeble lustre you
witnessed the shadowy forms of seamen swabbing the decks or squeezing
the water with scrubbing-brushes into the scuppers. The dark swell ran
regularly and with power from the south, but there was nothing to be
seen of it saving here and there the glittering of green sea fire upon
some running brow to let you guess how tall it was. I went aft with
Laura and looked over; the wake was a mere dim, glistening, crawling,
dying out after a few fathoms. Indeed, the yacht had but the foresail
on her with a headsail or two, and she seemed to owe what small way she
was making more to the heave of the swell than to the light breeze. The
darkness was a wonderful jumble of shadows. I never remember the like
of such confusion of inky dyes. The obscurity resembled an atmosphere
of smoke denser in one place than another, a little thin yonder, then
just over the mastheads a stooping belly of soot, elsewhere a sort of
faintness merging into impenetrable darkness.
‘Lay aft and loose the mains’l,’ rattled out Finn. ‘Double reef and
then set it.’
The breeze now began to freshen; the watch came running on to the
quarter-deck, and presently the wan space of double-reefed canvas
slowly mounted.
‘I wish it would brighten a bit astern,’ said I; ‘no wolf’s throat
could be blacker. There’ll be more than a capful of wind there, but it
will blow the right way for us, so let it come.’
‘I feel,’ said Laura, ‘as though I had recovered perfect health after a
dreadful illness.’
‘Now she walks,’ cried Finn, approaching where we stood to peer over
the side; ‘blow, my sweet breeze. By the nose on my face, Mr. Monson, I
smell a strong wind a-coming.’
It did not need the faculty of smell to hit the truth. The breeze was
freshening as if by magic. A little sea was already running and the
yeasty flashing of breaking heads spread far into the gloom. A loud
noise of torn and simmering waters came from the bows and a white race
of foam was speeding arrowlike from under the counter.
‘There is my sister,’ whispered Laura.
I instantly spied the tall figure of Lady Monson standing on the top
step of the companion ladder taking in the deep refreshment of the
wind. She stepped on to the deck, approached, saw us, and crossed to
the other side. She called to Captain Finn.
‘Yes, my lady.’
‘A chair, if you please. I will sit here.’
A seat was procured from the cabin and placed for her abreast of the
wheel close against the bulwarks. This time Laura was not to be driven
below by the presence of her sister. The heat in the cabin outweighed
her sensitiveness, and then again there was the darkness of the night
which sundered the sides of the deck as effectually as if each had
been as far off as the horizon. Yet for all that, the sort of fear in
which she held Lady Monson subdued her now through the mere sense of
the woman being near, scarce visible as she was, just a shadow against
the bulwarks. I had to bend my ear to catch her voice through the
hissing of the wind aloft and the singing and the seething of the foam
alongside, so low was her utterance. We sat together right aft against
the grating on the port side. The helmsman stood near with his eyes
on the illuminated compass bowl, the reflection of which touched him
as with a lining of phosphor and exposed a kind of gilded outline of
his figure against the blackness as he stood swinging upon the wheel
with a twirl of it now and again to left or to right as the vessel’s
course on the compass card floated to port or starboard of the lubber’s
mark. Though it was Finn’s watch below he kept the deck with Crimp,
rendered uneasy by the thunder-black look of the night, along with
the freshening wind and the lift of seas leaping with a foul-weather
snappishness off the ebony slopes of the swell that had grown somewhat
heavy and hollow. I could just distinguish the dark forms of the two
men pacing the deck abreast of the gangway. The main sheet was well
eased off, the great boom swung fairly over the quarter, and there
was a note of howling in the pouring of the wind, as it swept with
increasing power into the glimmering ashen hollow of the reefed canvas
and rushed away out from under the foot of it. There was no more
lightning; the sea with its glancings of foam went black as ink to the
ink of the heavens. There was no star, no break of faintness on high.
The yacht flashed through the mighty shadow, whitening a long narrow
furrow behind her, and helped by every dusky fold that drove roaring to
her counter.
On a sudden there arose a loud and fearful cry forward.
‘Breakers ahead!’
The hoarse voice rang aft sheer through the shrill volume of the wind
strong as a trumpet-note with the astonishment and fear in it.
Finn went to the side to look over, whilst I heard him roar out to
Crimp, ‘Breakers in his eye. The nearest land’s a thousand miles off.’
I jumped up and thrust my head over the rail and saw, sure enough,
startlingly close ahead a throbbing white line that, let it be what
else it might, bore an amazing resemblance to the boiling of surf at
the base of a cliff. There was nothing else to be seen; the pallid
streak stretched some distance to right and left. ‘It’ll be a tide rip,
sir!’ shouted Finn to me, and his figure melted into the obscurity as
he went forward to view the appearance from the forecastle.
I continued peering. ‘No, it is breakers by heaven!’ I cried, with
a wild leap of my heart into my very throat to the dull thunderous
warring note I had caught during an instant’s lull in the sweep of the
wind past my ear.
Laura came to my side; we strained our eyes together.
‘Breakers, my God!’ I cried again, ‘we shall be into them in a minute.’
Then out of the blackness of the forecastle there came from Finn,
though ’twas hard to recognise his voice, a fierce, half-shrieking cry:
‘Hard a starboard! Hard a starboard!’
I rushed to the wheel to assist the man in putting it hard over. At
that instant the yacht struck! In a breath the scene became a hellish
commotion of white waters leaping and bursting fiercely alongside,
of yells and cries from the men, of screams from Lady Monson, of the
grinding and splintering of wood, the cracking of spars, the furious
beating of canvas. I felt the hull lifted under my feet with a brief
sensation of hurling, then crash! she struck again. The shock threw
me on my back; though I was half-stunned I can distinctly recollect
hearing the ear-splitting, soul-subduing noise of the fall of the
mainmast, that broke midway its height and fell with all its gear and
weight of canvas like a thunderbolt from the heavens on the port side
of the vessel, shattering whole fathoms of bulwark. I sprang to my
feet; Laura had me by the arm when I fell and she still clung to me.
There was a life-buoy close beside us; it hung by a laniard to a peg.
I whipped it off and got it over Laura’s head and under her arms, and
the next thing I remember is dragging her towards the forecastle, where
I conceived our best chance would lie.
What had we struck? There was no land hereabouts. If we had not run
foul of the hulk of some huge derelict buried from the sight in the
blackness and revealing nothing but the foam of the seas beating
against it, then we must have been caught by a second volcanic upheaval
into whose fury we had rushed whilst the devilish agitation was in
full play. So I thought, and so I remember thinking; but that even a
rational reflection could have entered my mind at such a time, that
my brain should have retained the power of keeping its wits in the
least degree collected, I cannot but regard as a miracle, when I look
back out of this calm mood into the distraction and horror and death
of that hideous night. The seas were breaking in thunder shocks over
the vessel; the wind was hoary with flying clouds of froth. In a few
instants the ‘Bride’ had become a complete wreck aloft. Upon whatever
it was that she had struck she was rapidly pounding herself into
staves, and the horrible work was being expedited outside her by the
blows of the wreckage of spars which the seas poised and hurled at her
with the weight and rage of battering-rams. The decks were yawning
and splitting under foot; every white curl of sea flung inboard black
fragments of the hull. There is nothing in language to express the
uproar, the cries and groans and screams of men maimed and mutilated by
the fall of the spars or drowning alongside. I thought of Wilfrid; but
the life of the girl who was clinging to me was dearer to my heart than
his or my own. I could hear Lady Monson screaming somewhere forward as
I dragged Laura towards the forecastle. Sailors rushed against me, and
I was twice felled in measuring twenty paces. The agony of the time
gave me the strength of half-a-dozen men; the girl was paralysed, and
I snatched her up in my arms and drove forward staggering and reeling,
blinded with the flying wet, half-drowned by the incessant play of seas
over the side, feeling the fabric crumbling under my feet as you feel
sand yielding under you as the tide crawls upon it. I knew not what I
was about nor what I aimed at doing. I believe I was influenced by the
notion that, since the yacht had struck bow on, her forecastle would
form the safest part of her, as lying closest to whatever it was that
she had run foul of. I recollect that as I approached the fore rigging,
stumbling blindly with the girl in my arms, a huge black sea swept over
the forward part of the wreck and swept the galley away with it as
though it had been a house of cards. The rush of water floated me off
my legs; I fell and let go of Laura. Half-suffocated I was yet in the
act of rising to grope afresh for her when another sea rolled over the
rail and I felt myself sweeping overboard with the velocity that a man
falling from the edge of a cliff might be sensible of!
What followed is too dream-like for me to determine. Some small piece
of floating spar I know I caught hold of, and that is what I best and
perhaps only remember of that passage of mortal anguish.