THE FIRST NIGHT.
Laura and her sister sat on one of the sailors’ chests that we had sent
up; Johnson leaned on top of a flour or biscuit barrel that stood on
end, with his eyes fixed up on the western sea. There was still a deal
of bright curiosity in Laura’s face as her gaze ran over the deck,
resting again and again with a sparkle in it upon some lovely fibrine
form, some lily-like sea flower, some plant as of green marble; but
Lady Monson’s countenance was listless and almost empty of expression.
Any astonishment she might have felt was exhausted. I had scarce
time after being swayed inboards to take even a swift view of this
glittering miracle before she asked me in a voice cold and commanding,
yet, I am bound to say, of beauty too--some of the notes soft almost
as a flute’s--‘When will the men spread the sail as an awning, Mr.
Morison? They should prepare for the night. Darkness speedily comes
when the sun is gone, and we are without lights.’
‘The men have worked very well, Lady Monson,’ said I. ‘They will rig
up a sail promptly for you, I am sure. I am not in command of them, as
of course you know, but they have attended cheerfully to many of my
suggestions. They were your husband’s servants, madam.’
‘And therefore _mine_, if you put it so,’ she answered with an angry
flash of her eyes at me.
‘I have no doubt,’ said I, ‘that they will be willing to do any thing
you may desire,’ and with that I stepped to the side to see what they
were about, with so strong an aversion in me that I could only heartily
hope it would never betray me into any more defined expression of it
than mere manner might convey.
Laura came to my side as though to observe with me what the men were
about, and whispered, ‘She is very trying, Mr. Monson, but bear with
her. It will not need a long imprisonment of this kind to tame her.’
‘My dearest,’ said I, ‘I have not a word to say against her. My quarrel
is with _you_.’ She stared at me. ‘I call you Laura! Again and again
last night you let me tell you I loved you. By your own admission I am
your sweetheart, and yet you call me _Mr. Monson_.’
‘Oh, I will call you Charles; I never thought of it!’ she exclaimed,
blushing rosy. ‘What are the men doing?’ she exclaimed, peering as
though engrossed by the movements of the seamen.
Cutbill was winding away at the shell-thickened side of the galleon
with an auger; further aft stood Head similarly employed. On a line
with my face as I looked down there was a finger-thick coil of water
spouting out of the vessel’s side, smoking upon the rocks and streaming
away in a rivulet into holes which it overflowed. I explained to Laura
the fellows’ employment.
‘They have a notion,’ said I, ‘that there may be treasure contained
in the hold of this old galleon, but before they can search they must
empty her of the water she is full of. Below there!’ I called.
Finn looked up. ‘I see that you have bored through her,’ said I. ‘Is
her side hard?’
‘As stone, sir,’ he answered. ‘The shells come away pretty easy, but
her timber’s growed into regular iron.’
I asked him how many holes they were going to pierce. He answered
three, that she might be draining handsomely through the night.
‘The sooner we can rig up a sail, Finn, to serve as a shelter, the
better,’ I called down to him. ‘When the sun is gone there’ll be
nothing to see by. The men will be wanting their supper too; then
there’s that lump of a porpoise to be got out of the craft, for we
don’t want to be poisoned as well as shipwrecked; and if daylight
enough lives after all this,’ I continued, ‘we ought to beach high and
dry as much as we can come at to-night that may be washing about out of
the yacht down there, in case it should come on to blow. There’s no
moving on this island for the holes in it when the darkness falls.’
‘Ay, ay, sir, we’ll be with ye in a jiffy,’ he answered.
‘What think you of this marine show?’ I said to Laura.
‘It is too beautiful to believe real. The mermaids have made a garden
of this ship. How lovingly, with what exquisite taste have they
decorated these old decks!’
‘Happy for us,’ I exclaimed, ‘that the earthquake should have struck
her fair, and brought her, beflowered and bejewelled as she is, to the
surface. She is more than an asylum. She compels our attention and
comes between us and our thoughts and fears.’
‘Would she float, do you think, if all the water were to be let out of
her?’
‘I would not stake a kiss from you, Laura, on it, but unless she is
full of petrified cargo and ocean deposit, stones, shells, and so on, I
don’t see why she shouldn’t swim, though she might float deep.’
‘Imagine if we could launch her and save our lives by her!’ cried
Laura, clasping her hands; then changing her voice and casting down her
eyes she added: ‘I must go to Henrietta. She watches me intently. She
wonders that I can smile, I dare say; and I wonder too when I think for
an instant. Poor Wilfrid! poor Wilfrid! and my maid too, and the others
who are lying dead in that calm sea.’
She moved away slowly towards her sister.
I looked about me for a forecastle or maindeck hatch or any signs of an
entrance into the silent interior under foot, but the crust of shells
and the grass and plants and vegetation concealed everything. Both the
front of the poop and that of the short raised quarter-deck seemed
inlaid with shells like a grotto. There was doubtless a cabin under the
poop, with probably a door off the quarter-deck, and windows in the
cabin front to be come at by beating and scraping. It might furnish
us with a shelter, but how would it show? What apparel had the sea
clothed it with? An emotion of deep awe filled and subdued me when I
looked at this ship. I was sufficiently well acquainted with old types
of craft to guess the century to which this vessel had belonged, and
even supposing her to have been one of the very last of the ships of
her particular build and shape, yet even then I might make sure that
she could not be of a less age than a hundred and twenty or thirty
years, so that I might safely assume that she had been resting in the
motionless dark-green depths of this ocean for above a hundred years.
She had been a three-masted vessel, but all traces of her mizen-mast
had vanished. Her figure made one think of a tub, the sides slightly
pressed in. All about her bows was so thickly encrusted with shells
that it was impossible to guess the character of the structure there.
I traced the outline of a beak or projection at the stem head with a
hollow betwixt it and the fore part of the forecastle deck. Little more
was to be gathered, for all curves and outlines here were thickened
into grotesque bigness of round and surface out of their original
proportions and shape by deposits of shells. Indeed, the well in the
head was choked with marine vegetation. It was like a square of tropic
soil loaded with the eager growths of a fat and irresistible vitality,
appearances as of guinea grass, wondrous imitations of tufts of rushes,
beds of pink and feathering mosses, star blossoms, thickets of delicate
filaments, gorgeous heads in velvet, snake-like trailings, sea-roses,
dark satin masses of plants of a crimson colour, and a hundred other
such things, with a subsoil of shells, whose dyes glanced through the
growth in gleams of purple and orange and pearl and apple-green, in
shapes of mitres, harps, volutes, and so forth.
The men now arrived on board; three holes had been pierced in the
galleon’s side, and the water hissed with a refreshing sound on to the
rocks, intermingled with the faint lipping of the brine that was slowly
filtering down the sides from the main-deck. Finn’s first directions
were to make an awning of the stay-foresail. The canvas had long ago
dried out into its original whiteness, so fiery had been the heat of
the sun, and so ardent the temperature of this porous island. The sail
was easily spread. The stump of the foremast, as I have before said,
was close into the head; the sparkling shaft served as an upright for
the head of the sail to be seized to, and the wide foot of it, shelving
like the roof of a house, was secured to the bows. For that night,
at all events, we chose the forecastle to rest on, partly because we
happened to be on it and our provisions were stocked there, and next
because the main-deck was still almost awash; and then, again, there
was the great porpoise to get rid of, and, in truth, until one could
force an entrance into the craft it mattered little at which end of her
one lay.
The sun still floated about half an hour above the sea. I had again and
again looked yearningly around the firm, light-blue ocean line, but the
azure circle ran flawless to either hand the wedge of dark-red gold
that floated without a tremble in the dazzle of it under the sun.
‘Nothing can show in this here calm, sir,’ said Finn, as I brought my
eyes away from the sea. ‘No use expecting of steam; and, what’s moved
by wind ain’t going to hurry itself this weather, sir.’
‘Let’s get supper,’ said I. ‘There should be starlight enough anon, I
think, Finn, to enable us to fill a couple of the empty casks with the
sweetest of the water that we can find in those holes.
‘It can be managed, I dorn’t doubt,’ said he.
‘These here chests, capt’n,’ exclaimed Cutbill, indicating the three
sailors’ boxes that we had hoisted aboard, ‘belonged to O’Connor,
Blake, and Tom Wilkinson. How do we stand as consarns our meddling with
’em?’
‘How d’ye suppose, William?’ answered Finn. ‘Use ’em, man, use ’em.’
‘Hain’t the dead got no rights?’ inquired Dowling.
‘Ay, where there’s law, mate,’ responded Finn, with a half-grin at me;
‘but there’s no law on the top crust of an airthquake, and I allow that
whatever may come to us in such a place is ourn to do what we like
with.’
‘Oh, certainly,’ I cried; ‘who the deuce wants to discuss the subject
of law and dead men’s rights here? Overhaul those chests, Dowling, and
use whatever you want that you may find in them.’
But one saw the mariner’s prejudices in the way in which the sailors
opened and inspected the contents of the boxes. Had they had the
handling of a portmanteau of mine or a trunk belonging to Wilfrid they
might not have shown themselves so sensitive; but these were the chests
of dead shipmates and messmates, of men they had gone aloft with, eaten
and drank with, skylarked and enjoyed sailors’ pleasure with, and I
saw they felt that they were doing a sort of violence to forecastle
traditions by handling the vanished Jacks’ little property without the
sort of right to do so which on board ship they would have obtained
by a sale of articles at the mast. However, they found tobacco and
pipes, which went far towards reconciling them towards Finn’s theory
of appropriation. They also met with shoes, which were an unspeakable
comfort to Dowling and Head, who were barefooted, and in torture with
every step they took from the sharp edges and points of shells. There
were rude articles of clothing too, which, when dried, would give the
men a shift.
Well, we got supper, and when the meal was ended, there being yet a
little space of daylight in the west, Cutbill, Dowling, and Head went
to the beach to roll empty water-casks near to the galleon for filling
with such water as we could find that was least brackish, and to drag
clear of the wash of the sea any further casks and cases of provisions,
wine, and the like, which they might chance to come across. Johnson
continued too feeble to be of use. We had three mattresses already as
dry as if they had never touched salt water, and one of them I unrolled
and made the poor creature lie upon it. Then Finn and I went about to
prepare for the night whilst we could still see. We stretched the gaff
foresail over the plants and shrubs, placed the other two mattresses
on one side of it, covering them with a portion of the sail-cloth that
the ladies might have clean couches, and made a roll of the sail at the
head of these mattresses to serve as a bolster. Tough as the growth
of plants on the deck was, stiff as steel as I had thought at first,
they proved brittle for the most part to rough usage, and were speedily
broken by our tramping and stamping so as to form a sort of mattress
under the sail, and we were grateful enough when by-and-by we came to
lie down for the intervention of these petals and leaves and bulbs
between our bones and the flint-like surface of the shells, as barbed
and jagged as though formed of scissors and thumbscrews.
The sun sank and the darkness of the evening swept over the sea as
swiftly as the shadow of a storm, but it proved a glorious dusk, fine,
clear, glittering though dark, the sky like cloth of silver, flashful
in places with a view of the cross of the southern hemisphere low
down to make one contrast this heat and stillness and placid grandeur
of constellations with the roaring of Cape Horn and the rush of the
mountain-high surge, down upon which that divinely planted symbol was
gazing with trembling eyes. Nothing sounded save the plashing of the
fountains of water spouting from the sides of the galleon, and the
soft, cat-like breathing of the black line of sea sliding up and down
the beach.
The men had made short work of filling the casks; and leaving them
where they stood for the night, had clambered afresh to the forecastle.
It was now too dark to deal with the porpoise; so we agreed to let the
great thing rest till the morning. I and one or two of the others had
tinder-boxes, and the means therefore of procuring a light, but we were
without candles or lantern. This was a hardship in the absence of the
moon that rose so late as to be worthless to us and that would be a new
moon presently without light; though if I thought of _that_ it was only
to hope in God’s name that the rise of the silver paring would find us
safe on board some ship homeward bound.
We were unable to distinguish more of one another than the vague
outlines of our figures, and this only against the stars over the
crested height of bulwark, for the sail we had spread as an awning
deepened the gloom; the growths on the galleon’s decks were black, and
the shadows lay very thick to the height of the rail where the spangled
atmosphere glistened to the edge of the stretched sail overhead. The
faces of Laura and her sister showed in a dream-like glimmer. Finn and
I had made a little barricade of casks, cases, and the like betwixt
the mattresses on which the ladies were to lie and the other part
of the forecastle, that they might enjoy the trifling privacy such
an arrangement as this could furnish them with. The men formed into
a group round about the mattress where Johnson lay, and lighted the
pipes which they had been fortunate enough to meet with in the seamen’s
chests. As they sucked hard at the bowls the glowing tobacco would
cast a faint coming and going light upon their faces. They subdued
their voices out of respect to us, and their tones ran along in a
half-smothered growl. Much of their talk was about the yacht, her loss,
their drowned mates, and the like. I sat beside Laura, with Lady Monson
seated at a little distance from her sister, and we often hushed our
own whispers to listen to the men. Their superstitions were stirred
by their situation. This galleon lay under the stars, a huge looming
mystery, vomited but a little while since from the vast depths of
yonder black ocean; and now that the night had come her presence, her
aspect, the stillness in her of the hushed, unconjecturable, fathomless
liquid solitude out of which she had been hurled, stirred them to
their souls. I could tell that by the superstitious character of their
talk. They told stories of their drowned shipmates’ behaviour on the
preceding day--repeated remarks to which nothing but death could give
the slightest significance. Johnson in a feeble voice from his mattress
said that O’Connor half an hour before the yacht struck told him that
he felt very uneasy, and that he’d give all he owned if there were a
Roman Catholic priest on board that he might confess to him. He had led
a sinful life, and he had made up his mind to give up the sea and to
find work if he could in a religious house. ‘I thought it queer,’ added
Johnson in accents so weak that they were painful to listen to, ‘that a
chap like that there O’Connor, who was always a-bragging and a-grinning
and joking, should grow troubled with his conscience all on a sudden.
Never knew he was a Papish till he got lamenting that there warn’t a
priest aboard to confess to.’
‘Mates,’ said Finn, whose voice sounded hollow in the darkness, ‘when
death’s a-coming for a man he’ll often hail him, sometimes a good bit
afore he arrives. The sperrit has ears, and it’s them that hears him,
men. O’Connor had heard that hail, but only the secret parts in him
onderstood it, and they set him a commiserating of himself for having
lived sinfully, and started him on craving for some chap as he at all
events could reckon holy, t’whom he could tell how bad he’d been.
Though what good the spinning of a long yarn about his hevil ways into
an old chap’s ear was going to do him, I’m not here to explain.’
Then Cutbill had something to tell of poor old Jacob Crimp, and Head of
a shipmate whose name I forget. But they rumbled away presently from
depressing topics into the more cheerful consideration of the contents
of the galleon’s hold. I sat hand in hand with Laura listening.
‘This time yesterday,’ said I, ‘the cabin of the “Bride” was a blaze
of light. I see the dinner table sparkling with glass and silver, the
rich carpet, the elegant hangings, the lustrous glance of mirrors. What
is there that makes life so dreamlike and unreal as the ocean? The
reality of one moment is in a breath made a vision, a memory of in the
next. The noble fabric of a ship melts like a snowflake, and her people
vanish as utterly as though they had been transformed into spirits.’
‘Fire will destroy more completely than the ocean!’ exclaimed Lady
Monson.
‘I think not,’ said I; ‘fire leaves ashes, the sea nothing.’
‘To the eye,’ said Lady Monson.
‘This time to-morrow we may be sailing home, Charles,’ said Laura.
‘Heaven grant it! Give me once more, Laura, the pavements of Piccadilly
under my feet, and I believe there is no man in all England eloquent
enough to persuade me that what we have undergone from the hour of our
departure in the “Bride” to the hour of our return in the whatever her
name may prove actually happened.’
‘But _I_ am real,’ she whispered, and I felt her hand tremble in mine.
I pressed her fingers to my lips. Had Lady Monson been out of hearing
I should have known what to say. I tried to put a cheerful face upon
our perilous and extraordinary position, but I found it absolutely
impossible to talk of anything else than our chances of escape, how
long we were to be imprisoned, Wilfrid’s death, the destruction of the
yacht, incidents of the voyage, and the like. I spoke freely of these
matters, caring little for Lady Monson’s presence. One of the men in
talking with the others said something about the ‘Eliza Robbins,’ and
Laura, turning to her sister, exclaimed:
‘I hope some other ship may take us off. How could you have endured
such a horrid atmosphere, Henrietta, even for the short time you lived
on board her?’
But to this her ladyship deigned no reply; her silence was ominous,
full of wrath. I can imagine that she abhorred her sister at that
moment for recalling that ship, and the infamous withering memories
which the mere utterance of the name carried with it. She rose as
though to go to the galleon’s side, but sat again after the first
stride, finding the deck with its slippery and cutting shells and its
tripping interlacery of growths too ugly a platform to traverse in the
dark. I had hoped that she would break through the husk of sulkiness,
haughtiness, selfishness with which she had sheathed herself for such
comfort as Laura might have obtained from some little show in her
sister of geniality and humanity and sympathetic perception of the dire
disaster that had befallen us. There was indeed a time that evening
when I believed her temper was mending; for during some interval of our
listening to the conversation of the sailors Laura spoke of Muffin, of
the horror and fear that had possessed him that night of the severe
squall when I found him on his knees, his detestation of the sea, his
eagerness to get home, his tricks to terrify Wilfrid into altering the
yacht’s course, and how the poor wretch’s struggles in that way seemed
now justified by his being drowned, ‘so much so,’ added Laura, ‘that I
cannot bear to think of the unfortunate fellow having been whipped by
the men.’
On hearing this, Lady Monson began to ask questions. Apparently she
had been ignorant until now that Muffin was on board the ‘Bride.’
Naturally, she perfectly well remembered him, for the man was her
husband’s valet some time before she ran off with the Colonel. Her
inquiries led to Laura telling her of the tricks that Muffin had
played. The girl’s voice faltered when she spoke of the phosphoric
writing on the cabin wall.
‘What words did Muffin write?’ asked Lady Monson.
‘Oh, Henrietta!’ exclaimed Laura, who paused to a tremulous sigh, and
then added, ‘He wrote, “_Return to baby._”’
I might have imagined there would be something in this to have silenced
her ladyship for a while, but apparently there was as little virtue
in thoughts of her child to touch her as in thoughts of her husband.
She asked coldly, but in a sort of dictatorial, pressing way, as though
eager to scrape over this mention of her child as you might crowd sail
on your ship to run her into deep water off a shoal on which her keel
is hung: ‘This Muffin was a ventriloquist too, you say?’
I could guess how grieved and shocked Laura was by the tone of her
answer. She told her sister how the valet had tricked us with his
voice, how he had been sent forward into the forecastle to work as a
sailor, and how the men had punished him on discovering that it was
he who terrified them. Several times Lady Monson broke into a short
laugh, of a music so rich and glad that one might easily have imagined
such notes could proceed only from a very angel of a woman. I did not
doubt that she sang most ravishingly, and as her laughter fell upon my
ear in the great shadow of that galleon, with the narrow breadth of
star-clad sky twinkling with blue and green and white-faced orbs, there
arose before me the vision of her ladyship seated at the piano with the
gallant Colonel Hope-Kennedy turning the pages of the music for her,
and sweet, true, unsuspicious little Laura listening well pleased, and
my poor half-witted cousin maybe up in the nursery playing with his
baby.
However, as I have said, this was but a short burst on Lady Monson’s
part. Laura’s reference to the ‘Eliza Robbins’ silenced her; then Laura
and I fell still, her hand in mine, and we listened to the men, who
were talking of the galleon, and arguing over the state and contents of
her hold.
‘Well, treasure ain’t perishable anyhow,’ said Cutbill.
‘That’s all right,’ answered Finn, whose deep sea voice I was glad to
hear had regained something of its old heartiness. ‘Gold’s gold whether
it’s wan or wan thousand years old. But what I says is, bar _treasure_,
as ye calls it, which ’ee may or may not find--and I hope ye may, I’m
sure--there ain’t nothen worth coming at in the inside of a wessel that
was founded, quite likely as not, afore George the Fust was born.’
‘But take a cargo of wine,’ said Dowling. ‘I’ve been told that these
here galleons was often chock ablock with wines and sperrits of
fust-rate quality. The longer ’ee keep wine the more waluable it
becomes.’
‘If there’s nought but wine,’ said Cutbill, ‘better put on a clean
shirt, mate, and tarn in. There’ll be nothen in any cask under these
here hatches that worn’t have become salt water after all them years.
Dorn’t go and smile in your dreams to the notion that there’ll be
anything fit to drink below.’
‘How long’s she going to take to drain out, I wonder?’ said Head.
‘I allow she’ll be empty by the time you’ve lifted the hatches,’
answered Finn; ‘that’ll be a job to test the beef in ’ee, lads.’
‘Well,’ cried Dowling, ‘there’ll be no leaving this here island, as
far as I’m consarned, till the old hooker’s been overhauled. Skin me,
capt’n, if there mayn’t be enough aboard to let a man up ashore as a
gentleman for life, and here sits a sailor as wants what he can get.
I’ve lost all my clothes and a matter of three pun fifteen on top of
them. Blarst the sea, says I!’
‘Belay that,’ growled Cutbill; ‘recollect who’s a listening onto ye.’
‘How long’s this island going to remain in the road?’ asked Head; ‘do
it always mean to stop here? They’ll have to put a lighthouse upon it.’
‘Likely as not, it’ll go down just as it came up,’ answered the sick
voice of Johnson.
Laura started. ‘_That_ may not be an idle fancy, Charles,’ she
whispered.
‘Do you think this hulk would float, captain,’ I called out, ‘if the
head of this rock were to subside, as Johnson yonder suggests?’
‘Well, she ain’t buried, sir!’ he exclaimed; ‘there’s nothen to stop
her from remaining behind, that I can see, if she’s buoyant enough to
swim. If she’s pretty nigh hollow she’ll do it, I allow; for look at
the shape of her. As there’s a chance of such a thing, then, when she’s
done draining, we’d better plug the holes we’ve made.’
‘I’ll see to that,’ said Dowling; ‘there’s no leaving of her with me
till I’ve seen what’s inside of her.’
Here Head delivered a yawn like a howl.
‘It will be proper to keep a look-out, I suppose, sir,’ said Finn.
‘Why, yes,’ I answered; ‘the night is silent enough now, but there may
come a breeze of wind at any minute and bring along a ship, and one
pair of eyes at least must be on the watch.’
‘There’s nothen aboard to make a flare with,’ said Cutbill; ‘a pity.
This here’s a speck of rock to miss a short way off in the dark.’
‘It cannot be helped,’ I exclaimed; ‘we have all of us done a hard
day’s work since dawn, and there is always in a miserable business of
this sort some job or other that must be kept waiting. There’s plenty
of stuff on the beach to collect to-morrow. As for to-night, a breeze
may come, as I have said, but mark how hotly those stars burn. There’ll
be but little air stirring, I fear.’
‘There are four of us to keep a look-out, lads,’ said Finn.
‘Five,’ I interrupted; ‘I’m one of you. I’ll stand my watch!’
‘Very good, sir,’ said Finn. ‘An hour and a half apiece. That’ll bring
us fair on to daybreak.’
‘There ain’t no timepiece aboard that’s going,’ said Head; ‘how’s a man
to know when his watch is up?’
‘Well, damn it, ye must guess,’ growled Cutbill sulkily and sleepily.
‘I’m the least tired of you all, I believe,’ said I; ‘so with your good
leave, lads, I’ll keep the first look-out.’
This was agreed to; the men knocked the ashes out of their pipes, and,
with a rough call of ‘Good-night’ to the ladies and myself, lay down
upon the sail.
They occupied the port side of the galleon’s forecastle, and made a
little huddle of shadows upon the faintness of the canvas, well apart
from where the mattresses for the ladies had been placed. Indeed, as
you will suppose, the gaff foresail of a schooner of the dimensions
of the ‘Bride’ provided a plentiful area of sail-cloth, and the space
between the ladies and the sailors could have been considerably widened
yet, had the main-deck been dry enough to use.
‘Where am I to lie?’ demanded Lady Monson.
‘Your sister, I am sure, will give you choice of either mattress,’ said
I. ‘These casks and cases will keep you as select as though they were
the bulkhead of a cabin.’
‘A dreadful bed!’ she cried. ‘How long is it possible for these
horrors to last? I am without a single convenience. There is not even
a looking-glass. To be chased and hunted down to _this_!’ she added
in a voice under her breath, as though thinking aloud, whilst her
respiration was tremulous with passion.
‘I wish the deck was fit to walk on,’ said Laura; ‘I do not feel
sleepy. I should like to walk up and down with you, Charles.’
‘It would be worse than pacing a cabbage-field, my dear,’ said I. ‘You
are worn out, but will not know it until your head is pillowed. Let me
see you comfortable.’
She at once rose, went to the mattress that was nearest the vessel’s
side, and seated herself upon it, preparatory to stretching her limbs.
‘I should like that bed,’ said Lady Monson. ‘I suffer terribly from the
heat. Your blood runs more coldly than mine, Laura.’
‘Either bed will do for me, Henrietta,’ answered the girl with a
pleasant little laugh, and she stepped on to the other couch, and
stretched herself along it.
I turned the edge of the sail over her feet, saw that the roll of the
canvas made a comfortable bolster for her, and tenderly bidding her
‘Good-night,’ crossed to the other side of the deck, leaving to Lady
Monson the task of adjusting her own fine figure, and of snugging
herself according to her fancy. It was about nine o’clock by the stars.
Now that the men had ceased speaking, and the hush as of slumber had
descended upon this galleon, I cannot express how mysterious and awful
was the stillness. You heard nothing but the cascading of the water
from the holes in the vessel’s side, a soft fountain-like hissing
sound, and the stealthy, delicate seething of the sea slipping up and
down the honeycombed beach. The men at a little distance away breathed
heavily in the deep slumber that had swiftly overtaken them. Once
Johnson spoke in a dream, and his disjointed syllables, amid that deep
ocean serenity, grated harshly on every nerve. The heavens overhead
were blotted out by the stretched space of canvas, but aft the line of
the galleon rose, broken and black, against the stars which floated in
clouds of silver in the velvet dusk of the sky. The silence seemed like
some material thing, creeping, as though it were an atmosphere, to
this central speck of rock, out of the remote glistening reaches of the
huge circle of the horizon.
But deeper than any silence that could reign betwixt the surface of the
earth and the stars was the stillness of the bottom of the ocean that
had risen with this galleon, the dumbness which filled the blackness
of her stonified interior. Imagination grew active in me as I sent my
sleepless eye over the sombre, mysterious loom of the ship to where the
narrow deck of the poop went in a gentle acclivity, cone-shaped, to the
luminaries which glanced over the short line of her taffrail like the
gaze of the spectres of her crew, who would presently be noiselessly
creeping over the sides. I figured, and indeed beheld, the ship in the
days of her glory, her sides a bright yellow, the grim lips of little
ordnance grinning through portholes, the flash of brass swivel-guns
upon the line of her poop and quarter-deck rail, her canvas spreading
on high, round, spacious, flowing and of a lily-white brightness,
enriched by flaring pennants, many ells in length, with figures aft and
forward, Spanish ladies in gay and radiant attire, their black eyes
shining, their long veils floating on the tropic breeze, grave señors
in plumed hats, rich cloaks half draping the sheaths of jewel-hilted
swords, a priest or two, shaven, sallow, with a bead-like pupil of
the eye in the corner of the sockets; the pilot and the captain
pacing yonder deck together, and where I was standing, crowds of
quaintly-apparelled mariners with long hair and chocolate cheeks, yet
with roughest voices rendered melodious by utterance of the majestic
dialects of their country--and then I thought of her resting, as I now
beheld her, motionless in the tideless, dark-green waters at the bottom
of the ocean!--figures of her people, lying, sitting, standing round
about her in the attitudes they were drowned in, preserved from decay
by the petrifying stagnation of the currentless dark brine.
It was now that I was alone, the deep breathing of sleepers rising
from the deck near me, the eyes of my mind quickened by high-strung
imagination into perception, vivid as actuality itself, of the visions
of this galleon in her sunlit heyday and then in her glory of shells
and plants in the unimaginable hush of the fathomless void from which
she had emerged, that I fell to thinking gravely and wonderingly over
what Johnson, the sick sailor, had said touching the possibility of
this island’s sudden disappearance. Of such volcanic upheavals as this
I had read and heard again and again. Sometimes the land thus created
stood for years; sometimes it vanished within a few hours of its
formation.
I particularly recollected a story that I had met with in the ‘Naval
Chronicle’; how two ships were in company off a height of land rising
sixty feet above the level of the sea, that was uncharted and unknown
to the captains of the vessels, though one of them had been in those
waters a few weeks before and both men were intimately well-acquainted
with the navigation of that tract of ocean; how after masters and
crews had been staring, lost in wonder, at the tall, pale, sterile,
sugar-loaf acclivity, one of the commanders sent a boat over in charge
of his mate, that he might land and return with a report; when, whilst
the boat was within a long musket-shot of the island, the land sank
softly but swiftly without noise, and with so small a commotion of the
sea following the disappearance of the loftiest point of peak, that the
darkening of the surface of the ocean with ripples there seemed as no
more than the shadow of a current.
This and like yarns ran in my head, and indeed the more I thought of
it the more I seemed to fancy that this head of pumice upon which the
galleon was seated was of the right sort to crumble down flat all in a
minute. Why, think of the height of it! Since those times I believe the
plummet has sounded the depths of that part of the equinoctial waters,
but in those days the ocean there was held unsearchable. Was it all
lava that had been spewed up? some mountain of volcanic vomit, hardened
by the brine into an altitude of many thousands of feet from ooze to
summit; and hollow as a drum, too, with a mere film of crust on top?
Oh God! I mused, wrung from head to foot with a shudder; think of this
crust yielding, letting the galleon sink miles down the gigantic shaft
of porous stuff, the walls on top yet standing above the water-line,
high enough to prevent the sea from rolling into the titanic funnel!
Gracious love! figure our being alive when we got to the bottom, and
looking up at the mere star of daylight that stared down upon us from
the vast distance as the galleon grounded on a bottom deeper than the
seat of the hell of the mediæval terrorists!
I shook my head; such a fancy was like to drive me mad--with the sort
of possibility of it, too, in its way. Could I have but stirred my
stumps I might have been able to walk off something of my mood of
horror, but every pace along that deck was like wading and floundering.
I went to the high forecastle rail and leaned my arms upon it and
looked into the night, and presently the beauty and the serenity and
the wide mystery of the dark ocean brimming to the wheeling stars
worked in me with the influence of a benediction; my pulse slackened
and I grew calm. What could the worst that befel us signify but death?
I reflected; and I thought of my cousin sleeping in the black void
yonder. The splashing of the water streaming from the holes in the
side sounded refreshingly upon the ears. There was a suggestion as of
caressing in the tender noise of the dark fingers of the sea blindly
and softly pawing the incline of the beach. The atmosphere was hot, but
the edge of its fever was blunted by the dew.
Thus passed the time, and when I thought my hour and a half had gone
I stepped quietly over to Finn and shook him, and with a sailor’s
promptitude he sprang to his feet, understanding, dead as his slumber
had been, our situation and arrangements the instant he opened his
eyes. My mind was full, nor was I yet sleepy, and I could have
talked long with him on the thoughts which had visited me. But to
what purpose? There was nothing that he could have suggested. Like
others in desperate straits our business was to wait and hope and help
ourselves as best we could. I took a peep at Laura before lying down;
she lay motionless, sound asleep, breathing regularly. Lady Monson
stirred as I was in the act of withdrawing, and laughed low and so
oddly that I knew it was a dreamer’s mirth.