THE GALLEON’S HOLD.
I woke from a deep sleep, and opened my eyes against the glare of the
risen sun. Death must be like such sleep as that, thought I. I sat up
and met Laura’s gaze fixed upon me. She was seated on a seaman’s chest
lightly smoothing her hair, and the jewels on her fingers sparkled
like dewdrops on the golden fall of her tresses. She looked the better
for the night’s rest, her complexion fresher, her eyes freed of the
delicate haziness that had yesterday somewhat dimmed their rich violet
sparkles; the pale greenish shadow under them, too, was gone. A little
past her stood Lady Monson, gazing seawards under the shelter of her
hand. Her shape made a very noble figure of a woman against the blue
brilliance of atmosphere betwixt the edge of the spread sail and the
forecastle rail; the cap she wore I supposed she had found in her
sister’s box. Her hair was extraordinarily thick and long and of a
lustreless black, and looked a very thunder-cloud upon her back,
as I have before said; it put a wild and almost savage spirit into
her beauty, which this slender headgear of lace or whatnot somewhat
qualified; in fact, she looked a civilised woman with that cap on, but
her cheeks were so white as to be painful to see. The full life of her
seemed to have entered her eyes; her breast rose and fell slowly, as
if her heart beat with labour; yet, slow as every movement in her was,
whether in the turn of her head, the droop of her arm, the lifting of
her hand, it was in exquisite correspondence with the suggestion of
cold dignity and haughty indifference you seemed to find in her form
and carriage.
I had a short chat with Laura, and found she had rested well. The men
were off the galleon.
‘They have gone to the wreck, I suppose,’ said I, scarce able to see
that way, however, for the blinding dazzle of sunshine that made the
leagues of eastern ocean as insupportable to the gaze as the luminary
himself.
‘The poor man Johnson is dead!’ she exclaimed.
‘Ah! I feared it. I believed I could hear death in his voice when he
spoke in his sleep last night.’
‘Cutbill and Head,’ she continued, for she was now well acquainted
with the names of the men, ‘have carried his body to bury in the sea
past that slope there.’
I sat silent a little. I had all along secretly expected that the man
would die, yet the news that he was dead strangely affected me. It
might be because he had been amongst the saved, and it seemed hard and
cruel that he should perish after having come off with his life out of
a conflict that had destroyed robuster men. Then again there was the
loneliness of his death, expiring, perhaps, after vainly struggling
to make some whispered wants audible to our sleeping ears or to the
nodding figure standing at a distance from him on the look-out.
I sent a look round the sea, compassing the blue line as fully as the
blaze would permit. The calm was as dead as it had been throughout the
night. In the west the heads of a few clouds of the burning hue of
polished brass showed with a stare out of a dimness over the sea there.
There was bitter loathing of all this deadness and tranquillity in me
as I stepped to the side for a sight of Finn down on the beach. What
phantom of chance was there for us unless a breeze blew? Dowling was at
work below winding with his auger into the galleon’s side. He had made
two further holes to starboard, and was now piercing a third.
‘There ain’t anything like the first weight of water in her now, sir,’
he sung out; ‘see how languid these here spurts are as compared to
yesterday’s spouting.’
I overhauled the whip that was rove at the end of the derrick, secured
the end, and went down hand over hand. My skin felt parched and
feverish and thirsty for a dip. ‘I’m off for a plunge,’ I called to
Laura, who came to the side to look at me as I slipped down. I found
Finn exploring amongst the wreckage on the shore; Cutbill and Head were
then coming round from the other side of the island, their heads hung
and their feet taking the pumice rocks with funeral strides.
‘How are you, Finn?’ I called to him.
‘Thank God, I feel myself again. The pain in my side’s gone, and my
breath comes easy. Poor Johnson’s dead.’
‘I know.’
‘Something whilst he was in the water struck agin his heart. But arter
all, sir, what does it matter, since a man can die but once, where he
takes his header from?’
‘We must suffer nothing to depress us, Finn. Good morning, Cutbill. How
are you, Head? A sad job for sunrise to turn you to, men.’
‘Poor Sammy!’ exclaimed Cutbill in a deep sea growl full of emotion,
and a slight lift of his face, smothered in whiskers, to the sky. ‘He’s
been hailed for the last time. He’s gone where there’s no more tarning
out.’
‘He’s lived hard, worked hard, and died hard,’ said Head, bringing his
eyes in a squint to my face, ‘and it would be hard if he’s gone to hell
arter all.’
‘Stow all sarmons,’ cried Finn; ‘let’s see now if there’s anything come
ashore worth having.’
I left them wading and searching, and trudging to the other side of
the island, stripped, and advanced into the water to the height of my
hips, not daring to venture further for fear of sharks. The plunge made
a new man of me, and when I returned it was with a good appetite and a
hearty disposition to help in any sort of work that might advantage us.
The men met with a barrel of pork and another case of potted meats. The
water was as pure and bright as glass over the shelving beach, and what
lay near to on the fluctuating sulphur-coloured bottom was as plain as
though viewed through air. We were thus enabled to rescue much of what
in thick water we should never have seen; amongst other matters, three
cases of champagne, a case of bottled beer, a small cask of brandy, and
one or two other articles which had formed a portion of the forecastle
stores, not to mention many armsful of stuff for making flares with,
should a vessel show in the night. Of the cabin provisions we recovered
but little, owing to their having been stowed aft for the most part,
where the yacht had been literally torn to pieces. The bows of the
vessel stood gaunt and bare in the light-blue water. I saw poor Finn
gazing at the remains until his eyes moistened, and he broke away with
a deep sigh and a dreary look at me. I never could have imagined that
anything inanimate could have appealed so humanly as that mutilated
fragment of a fabric that but a little while before shone as sweet and
stately a figure upon the sea as any structure of her size that ever
lifted a snow-white spire to the sky.
It was after ten o’clock, as was to be guessed by the sun’s height,
when we started to break into the interior of the galleon. We had
worked hard since sunrise; filled another brace of empty casks, which
we had found on the beach, with water out of the holes in the rocks;
hoisted these casks aboard along with the other provisions and spirits
we had fallen in with; got our breakfast; then with prodigious labour
and difficulty had turned the great dead porpoise out of the ship by
clapping tackles to it and prizing it up with a small studding-sail
boom that served as a handspike. The main-deck was now as dry as the
poop or forecastle. Lady Monson remained seated under the awning.
Laura, on the other hand, with a handkerchief tied over her head,
reckless of her complexion, wandered like a child about the decks,
examining the many gorgeous sea-plants, bending her fair face to
an iridescent cluster of shells, gazing with rounded eyes and an
expression of charming wonder at some flat, flint-coloured, snake-like
creeper as if she believed it lived. The wondrous marine parterre
seemed the richer for the presence and movements of the lustrous-haired
girl, as a rose appears to glow into darker and finer beauty when
lifted to some lovely face.
We resolved to attack the cabin entrance first, but it was hard to
tell where the door lay, whether in the front of the poop or of the
quarter-deck. There were steps leading from one deck to the other on
either hand close against the bulwarks, as you easily guessed by the
incline and appearance of the thick moulding of shells upon them.
Cutbill was for attacking the quarter-deck front, but Finn agreed
with me that the state cabin would lie under the poop, and that the
door to it, therefore, would be somewhere in the front of that deck.
To this part, then, we carried the tool-chest. There were five of us;
every man seized an implement and to it we fell, scraping, hammering,
chipping, prizing. Dowling and Head worked as though they had already
caught sight of the glitter of precious metal within. Some of the
shelly adhesions were hard as rock, some broke away easily in lumps,
like bricks from a house that is being demolished; but the thickness
was staggering, it was a growth of layer upon layer, and every man
had a great mound of splintered or concreted shells at his feet when
the front at which we worked was still heavily coated. There seemed
a sort of sacrilege in the destruction of so much beauty. Again and
again I would pause to admire a shape of exquisite grace, a form of
glorious hue, before striking; and then it seemed to me as I toiled,
many fancies crowding into my head now that I looked close into this
glorious incrustation, that it was impossible this galleon could
have been sunk to the depth I had first imagined. Surely no such
rainbow-like life as I now witnessed existed in the black and tideless
depths, countless fathoms out of reach of the longest and fiercest
lance of light the sun could dart. No, she had probably settled down
on some hilltop within measurable distance of the surface, on some
submarine volcanic eminence where the vitality of the deep was all
about her.
We came to woodwork at last, or what had been wood. It was fossilised
timber, and the blows of a hammer rang upon it as though an anvil was
struck.
‘Here’s where the door is,’ roared Cutbill.
We saw the line of what was manifestly a doorway showing in a space
clear of shells, and in a moment we all fell upon it and presently laid
it bare--a little door about five feet high close against the starboard
heap of shells which buried the poop ladder there.
‘Don’t smash it if ’ee can help it,’ called out Finn.
But it would not yield to any sort of coaxing short of Cutbill’s
thunderous hammer, which he swung with such Herculean muscle, that
after half a dozen blows the door went to pieces and tumbled down
with a clatter as of the fragments of iron. It was pitch dark inside,
of course, but for that we were prepared. Dowling and Head were for
thrusting in at once.
‘Back!’ bawled Finn. ‘What sort of air for breathing d’ye think this is
after being bottled up afore your great-grandmothers was born.’
Yet for my part, though I stood close, I tasted nothing foul. The first
breath of the black atmosphere came out with a wintry edge of ice,
and the chill of it went sifting into the sultry daylight of the open
air till I saw Laura, who stood some little distance away watching us,
recoil from the contact of it.
‘There’s nothing to be done in there without a light of some kind,’
said I. ‘How was this cabin illuminated? From the deck, I presume, as
well as by portholes.’
‘Let me go and see, sir,’ said Finn.
The gang of us armed with tools crawled up the line of shells against
the door and gained the poop-deck. There was a coffin-shaped heap of
glittering incrustation close to where the mizzen-mast had probably
stood; the form of it indicated a buried skylight. We fell upon it, and
after we had chipped and hammered for some quarter of an hour, the mass
of it broke away, and went thundering into the cabin below. The sweep
of cold air that rose drove us back.
‘Casements of this skylight were blown out, I reckon, when she
settled,’ said Finn; ‘’stonishing how them shells should have filled up
the cavity without anything to settle on.’
‘Weeds and plants stretched themselves across, maybe,’ said I, ‘and
made a platform for them.’
We returned to the quarter-deck but waited awhile before entering the
cabin, that the atmosphere might have time to sweeten. Thickly as the
upper works of the vessel were coated I suspected that they would be
sieve-like in some places from the circumstance of our finding no
water in the cabin. I put my head into the door, fetched a breath, and
finding nothing noxious in the atmosphere, exclaimed, ‘We may enter
now with safety, I believe.’ The interior lay very clearly revealed. A
sunbeam shone through the deck aperture, and the cold, drowned, amazing
interior lay bathed in a delicate silver haze of the morning light. I
felt a deeper awe as I stood looking about me than any vault in which
the dead had been lying for centuries could have inspired. The hue of
the walls was that of ashes. It was the ancient living-room of the ship
and went the whole width of her, and in length ran from the front of
the deck through which we had broken our way to the moulding of the
castle-like pink-shaped stern, the planks sloping with a considerable
spring or rise. It had been a spacious sea-chamber in its day. There
were here and there incrustations in patches of limpet-like shells
upon the sides and upper deck; under foot was a deal of sand with
dead weeds, no hint of the vegetation that showed without. There were
fragments of wreckage here and there which I took to be the remains of
the furniture of the place; it had mostly washed aft, as though the
vessel had settled by the stern.
Up in a corner on the port side that lay somewhat darksome, on a line
with the door, were a couple of skeletons with their arms round each
other’s neck. They seemed to stand erect, but in fact they rested with
a slight inclination against the scantling of the cabin front. Some
slender remains of apparel clung to the ribs and shoulder-bones, and a
small scattering of like fragments lay at their feet, as though shaken
to the deck with the jarring of the fabric by the volcanic stroke that
had uphove her.
‘Hearts my life,’ murmured Finn. ‘What a hobject to come across! Why,
they’ve been _men_!’
‘A man and a woman more like,’ said Cutbill, ‘a-taking a last farewell
as the ship goes down.’
‘May I come in, Charles?’ exclaimed Laura, putting her head into the
door.
She advanced as she spoke, but her eye instantly caught the embracing
skeletons. She stopped dead and recoiled, and stood staring as if
fascinated.
‘Not the fittest sight in the world for you, Laura,’ said I, taking her
hand to lead her forth.
‘They were living beings once, Charles!’ she exclaimed, drawing a deep
breath, and slightly resisting my gentle drawing of her to the door.
‘Ay, red hearts beat in them, passions thrilled through them, and love
would still seem with them. What were they? Husband and wife--father
and daughter--or sweethearts going to their grave in an embrace?’
She shuddered and continued to gaze. Ah, my God! the irony of those
skeletons’ posture,--the grin of each skull as though in mirthless
derision of the endearing, caressing grasp of the long and stirless
arms!
‘Oh, Charles!’ exclaimed Laura in a whisper of awe and grief, ‘is love
no more than _that_?’
‘Yes, love is more than that,’ I answered softly, conducting her, now
no longer reluctant, to the door; ‘there is a noble saying, Where we
are death is not; where death is we are not. Death is yonder and so
love is not. But _that_ love lives, horrible as the symbol of it is--it
lives, let us believe! and where it is death is not. Would Lady Monson
like to view this sight?’
‘It is a moral to break her heart,’ she answered; ‘she would not come.’
She went towards her sister thoughtfully.
‘There’s nothing here, men,’ said I, returning.
‘Them poor covies’ll frighten the ladies,’ said Dowling, eyeing the
skeletons with his head on one side; ‘better turn ’em out of this.’
‘Let them rest,’ said I. ‘The ladies will not choose this cabin now to
lie in.’
‘If them bones which are a-hugging one another so fondly to-day could
talk,’ said Cutbill, ‘what a yarn they’d spin!’
‘Pooh,’ said I, ‘I’ve had enough of this cabin,’ and with that I walked
right out.
The men followed. It was broiling hot, the sea a vast white gleam
tremorlessly circling the island and steeping like quicksilver into
the leagues of faint sky; the bronzed brows of the clouds in the west
still burned, looming bigger. I prayed heaven there might be wind
there. Laura had told her sister of our discovery in the cabin, and
when, whilst we sat making a bit of a midday meal, my sweet girl, in a
musing, tender way, talked of this shipwreck of a century and a half
old as though she would presently speak of that cabin memorial of it so
ghastly and yet so touching, Lady Monson imperiously silenced her.
‘Our position is one of horror!’ she exclaimed; ‘do not aggravate it.’
The men, defying the heat, went to work when they had done eating, to
search for the main hatch that they might explore the hold. I observed
that Finn laboured with vigour. In short the four of them had convinced
themselves that there was grand purchase to come at inside this ancient
galleon, and they thirsted for a view of the contents of her. I was
without their power of sustained labour, was enfeebled by the tingling
and roasting of the atmosphere; my sight was pained, too, by the fierce
glare on the unsheltered decks; so I plainly told them that I could
help them no more for the present, and with that threw myself down
on the sail beside the chest on which Laura was seated, and talked
with her and sometimes with Lady Monson, though the latter’s manner
continued as uninviting as can well be imagined.
However, some hope was excited in me by the spectacle of the slowly
growing brass-bright brows of cloud in the west. There was a look of
thunder in the rounds of their massive folds, and in any case they
promised some sort of change of weather, whilst they soothed the eye
by the break they made in the dizzy, winding horizon, and the bald and
dazzling stare of the wide heavens brimming with light, which seemed
rather to rise from the white metallic mirror of the breathless sea
than to gush from the sun that hung almost directly over our heads.
It took the men three hours to find and clear the hatch, and then
uproot it. The square of it then lay dark in the deck, and Laura and
I went to peer down into it along with the others who leant over it
with pale or purple faces. The daylight shone full down and disclosed
what at the first glance seemed no more to me than masses of rugged,
capriciously heaped piles of shells, with the black gleam of water
between, and much delicate festooning of seaweed drooping from the
upper deck and from the side, suggesting a sort of gorgeous arras with
the intermingling of red and green and grey. One could not see far
fore or aft owing to the intervention of the edges of the hatch, but
what little of the interior was visible discovered a vegetable growth
as astonishing as that which glorified the decks; huge fans, plants
exactly resembling the human hand, as though some Titan had fallen
prone with lifted arms, bunches of crimson fibre, with other plants
indescribable in shape and colour of a prodigious variety, though the
growths were mainly from the ceiling, or upon the bends where the sides
of the galleon rounded to her keel.
‘All them heaps’ll signify cargo,’ said Dowling.
‘No doubt,’ said I; ‘but how is it to be got at?’
‘Mr. Monson, sir,’ exclaimed Finn, ‘you’re a scholar, and will know
more about the likes of such craft as this than us plain sailor-men.
What does your honour think? Was this vessel a plate ship?’
‘I wish I could tell you all you want to know,’ I replied. ‘She was
unquestionably a galleon in her day, and a great vessel as tonnage then
went--seven hundred tons; what d’ye think, Finn?’
‘Every ounce of it, sir. Look at her beam.’
‘Well, here is a ship that was bound to or from some South American
port. She’s too far afield for considerations of the Spanish Main and
the towns of the Panama coast. Was treasure carried to or from the
cities of the eastern American seaboard? I cannot say. But if she
was from round the Horn--which I don’t think likely, for the Manilla
galleons clung to the Pacific, and transhipments came to old Spain by
way of the Cape--then I should say there may be treasure aboard of her.’
‘Well, I’m going to overhaul her, if I’m here for a twelvemonth,’ cried
Dowling.
‘So says I,’ exclaimed Head.
‘Would she float, I wonder,’ said Cutbill, ‘when the water’s gone out
of her?’
‘I’ll offer no opinion on that,’ said I, laughing. ‘I hope I may not be
on board should it come to a trial.’
‘If she was full up with cargo it must have wasted a vast,’ remarked
Head.
‘Where did these here Spaniards keep their bullion?’ exclaimed Finn,
stroking down his long cheek-bones.
‘Why down aft under the capt’n’s cabin. They was leary old chaps; they
wouldn’t stow it forrads or amidships,’ exclaimed Cutbill.
‘All the water will have run out of her by to-morrow morning, I allow,’
said Finn; ‘but there’s no sarching of her with it up over a man’s
head.’
‘I wish this deck were sheltered,’ said Laura. ‘What a glorious scene!
I could look at it for hours. But the sun pains me.’
I took her hand, and we returned together to the shadow of the sail
spread over the forecastle, leaving the four men talking and arguing
and staring down, dodging with their heads to send greedy looks into
the gloom past the hatch. But there was nothing to be done till the
ship was clear of water, as Finn had said, and presently they came
forward and lighted their pipes, seating themselves at a respectful
distance from us; but all their talk ran upon the treasure they were
likely to meet with, and though I would sometimes catch a half-look
from Finn, as though my presence somewhat subdued him, yet I saw that
at heart he was as hot and as full of expectation as the others.
The clouds had risen a third of the way to the zenith, when the sun
struck his fiery orb into them and disappeared, turning them as black
as thunder against the heaven of blood-red light that lingered long
in waving folds as though the atmosphere were incandescent. Then the
lightning showed in zigzag lines of sparkling violet, though all
remained hushed whilst the sea went spreading in a sheet of glass that
melted out of its crimson dye into a whitish blue in the clear east.
‘Should it come on to blow,’ said I to Laura, ‘this sail over our heads
will yield us no shelter. We shall have to betake ourselves to the
cabin.’
‘With two skeletons in it?’ said Lady Monson sarcastically.
‘We shall not see them,’ I answered, ‘and skeletons cannot hurt us.’
‘We shall see them by the lightning,’ exclaimed Laura, ‘and they will
be very dreadful!’
‘I would rather remain in the storm,’ said Lady Monson.
‘But if those figures are carried out of the cabin,’ said I, ‘you will
not object to take shelter in it.’
‘I would rather die,’ she said, ‘than enter that part of this horrid
ship.’
‘Well,’ said I, mildly, ‘we will first see what is going to happen.’
At half-past five or thereabouts we got what the sailors would have
called our supper. There was indeed plenty to eat, enough to last
us some weeks, with husbandry. All the casked meat, it is true, was
uncooked, but enough galley utensils had come ashore--a big kettle, I
remember, and a couple of saucepans--to enable us to boil our pork and
beef when our stock of preserved food should be exhausted. Our supply
of water, however, justified uneasiness. One’s thirst was incessant
under skies of brass, and on an island whose crust was as hot as the
shell of a newly-boiled egg. But then, to be sure, the surface was
honeycombed with wells. In a very short time the salt water would have
dried out of the deepest of them, and we might hope that the next
thunder-shower would yield us drink enough to last out this intolerable
imprisonment.
But when was it to end? I stood up to take a view of the sea. The
galleon’s forecastle probably showed a height of between thirty and
forty feet above the water-line, and one seemed to command a wide
prospect of ocean; but not a gleam of the size of a tip of feather met
the eye the whole wide stagnant sweep around. The sun was now low in
the heart of the dark masses of vapour in the west, a sickly purple
shadow underhung the clouds upon the sea and glanced back with an eye
of fire to every lightning dart that flashed from above. Overhead the
sky had fainted into a sickly hectic, and it was an ugly sallow sort of
green down in the east, with a large star there trembling mistily.
‘It’s coming on a black thundering night,’ I heard Cutbill say as he
stood up to send a look into the west, with the inverted bowl of a
sooty pipe showing past his whisker and a large sweatdrop glancing like
a jewel at the end of his nose.
‘There’ll be wind there,’ exclaimed Finn.
‘What signs do you find to read?’ said I.
‘Well, your honour, there’s a haze of rain if ye look at the foot of
that smother down there,’ he answered, pointing with the sharp of his
hand, ‘and the verse concerning manifestations of that sort is gospel
truth: _When the rain before the wind, Then your tops’l halliards
mind_.’
‘If it’s coming on a breeze of wind,’ said Dowling, who like the others
felt himself privileged by stress of shipwreck to join freely in any
conversation that was going forward, ‘this here sail’ll blow away and
we shall lose it,’ meaning the jib that we had stretched as an awning.
‘Pity to lose it,’ exclaimed Finn; ‘shall we take it in, sir, whilst
there’s light?’
‘No,’ cried Lady Monson, who probably imagined that if this shelter
went she would be driven to the cabin.
Finn knuckled his forehead to her.
‘I’m afraid, Lady Monson,’ said I, ‘that this sail will be carried away
by the first puff, and it will be carried into the sea.’
‘If you remove it you leave us without shelter,’ she answered.
‘But we shall be without shelter if the wind removes it,’ said I.
‘Then it cannot be helped,’ she exclaimed, looking at me as though she
found me irritating.
‘We shall have to carry this sail aft anyway,’ said I, pointing to the
one that was spread upon the forecastle. ‘The first gust of wet will
soak it through, and we shall not be able to use it until it is dry for
fear of rheumatic fever.’
‘To what part do you wish it carried?’ said Laura.
‘To the only sheltered spot the ship supplies, the cabin,’ I answered.
‘You do not intend that we should sleep there, Charles?’ she cried.
‘We needn’t sleep, my dearest, we can keep wide awake. But will it not
be madness to expose one’s self to a violent storm merely because----’
‘Oh, horror!’ interrupted Lady Monson; ‘I shall remain here though the
clouds rain burning sulphur.’
‘Finn,’ said I, ‘when you have smoked your pipe out fall to with the
others, will you, to get this sail into the cabin, and turn the two
silent figures there out of it?’
‘Where are they to go, sir?’
‘Oh, lower them into the hold for to-night. Lady Monson, is your
mattress to be left here?’
‘Certainly,’ she answered indignantly; ‘how am I to rest without a
mattress?’
‘Only one mattress, then, is to be carried aft, Finn,’ said I. ‘Now
bear a hand like good sailor-men whilst there’s daylight. We shall
have that blackness yonder bursting down upon us in a squall, then it
will be thick as pitch, with decks like a surface of trawlers’ nets to
wade through, and yonder main hatch at hand grinning like a man-trap.’
‘Come, lads!’ cried Finn.
The four of them sprang to their feet, rolled up the sail and hauled it
aft, singing out a shipboard chorus as they dragged. When they had got
it into the cabin, they cut off a big stretch of it which they spread
over the open skylight, and secured by weighting the corners heavily
with the masses of shell which had been chipped away to come at the
aperture. Then Head arrived for Laura’s mattress, flung it over his
back and staggered with it, grinning, along to the quarter-deck. Lady
Monson looked on, cold, white, but with anger brilliant in her great
black eyes.
‘I believed that these men were still my servants to command,’ she
exclaimed.
‘I am sure they will obey any order your ladyship may give them,’ said
I.
‘They have no right to denude this part of the deck since it is my
intention to remain here,’ she exclaimed, drawing her fine figure
haughtily erect and surveying me with dislike and temper.
‘Henrietta dear,’ broke in the soft voice of Laura, ‘Mr. Monson
instructs them in the interests of all. See how bright the lightning
is. You will not be able to remain here. How frightful was the rain
when the “Bride” was wrecked!’
‘The strongest man had to turn his back to the wind,’ said I.
Lady Monson, whose eyes had glanced aft at that moment, jumped from
the chest on which she was seated and went in a headlong way to the
bulwark as though she meant to leap overboard. I could not understand
this sudden wild disorder in her till I saw Cutbill, Dowling, and Head,
with Finn superintending the business, bearing the pair of embracing
skeletons to the main hatch. Laura started and looked away; but there
was no absurd demonstration of horror in her. A ghastly sight, indeed,
the skeleton twain made, dreadfuller objects to behold in the wild,
flushed, stormy light of the moment than they had appeared in their
twilighted corner of the cabin. The long bones of arms clung like
magnets to the skeleton necks, fossilised, I suppose, by the action
of the sea into that posture; and thus grimly embracing, whilst they
looked with death’s dreadful grin over each other’s shoulder, they were
lowered by the sailors down the main hatch.
‘Mr. Monson, sir,’ suddenly bawled Finn, ‘will you and the ladies step
this way and see the beautifullest sight mortal eyes ever beheld?’
‘Where is it, Finn?’ I called back to him.
‘In the hold, sir,’ he answered.
‘He cannot mean the skeletons,’ exclaimed Laura.
‘Will you come, Lady Monson?’ I exclaimed.
‘Certainly not,’ she replied from the bulwark, where she stood staring
seawards, and answering without turning her head.
Laura seemed a little reluctant. ‘Come, my love,’ I whispered; ‘is not
a beautiful sight, even according to Finn’s theory of beauty, worth
seeing?’
I took her hand and together we proceeded to the open hatch.
On peeping down, my first instinctive movement was one of recoil. I
protest I believed the interior of the hull to be on fire. The whole
scene was lighted up by crawling fluctuations, creepings and blinkings
of vivid phosphoric flame. It might be that the atmosphere of this
storm-laden evening was heavily charged with electricity; yet since
the gloom had drawn down I had often cast my eyes upon the sea in the
direction where the shadow of the tempest lay and where the water
brimmed darkly to the slope of the beach, and therefore had the ocean
been phosphorescent even to a small extent I should have observed it;
yet no further signs of fire were apparent than a thin dim edging of
wire-drawn, greenish light, flickering on the lip of the brine as it
stealthily, almost imperceptibly, crept up and down the declivity of
the rock. But in this hold the sparkling was so brilliant that every
object the eye rested upon showed even to the most delicate details of
its conformation, though the hue was uniform (a pale green), so that
there was no splendour of tint, nothing but the wonder of a phosphoric
revelation, grand, striking, miraculous to my sight, so unimaginable a
spectacle was it. It was like, indeed, a glimpse of another world, of a
creation absolutely different from all scenes this earth had to submit,
as though, in truth, one were taking a peep into some lunar cave rich
with stalactites, wondrous with growths which owed nothing to the sun,
all robed with the colour of death--the pale pearl of the moonbeam!
Laura, whose hand grasped my arm, held her breath.
‘Did ever man see the like of such a thing afore!’ exclaimed Finn in an
awed voice, as though amazement were of slow growth in him.
Immediately on a line with the hatch, resting on a heap of shells,
whose summit rose to within an easy jump, lay the two skeletons in that
embrace of theirs which was so full of horror, of pathos, of suggestion
of anguish. Ah, Heaven, what a light to view them in! And yet they
communicated an inexpressibly impressive element of unreality to the
picture. It was as though the hand of some sorcerer had lifted a corner
of the black curtain of the future and enabled you to catch a glimpse
of the secret principality of the King of Terrors.
‘One sees so little of this marvel here,’ exclaimed Laura. ‘How
magnificent must be the scene viewed from the depths there!’
‘Have you courage to descend?’ said I.
She was silent a moment, eyeing askant with averted face the two
skeletons immediately beneath, then fetching an eager breath of
resolution, she said, ‘Yes, I have courage to go--with you.’
‘Finn,’ I exclaimed, ‘this is too grand and incomparable a spectacle
to witness only in part. If we are to come off with our lives in this
galleon, there,’ said I, pointing into the hold, ‘is the chance of a
memory that I should bitterly reproach myself for not grasping and
making the most of. Can you lower Miss Laura and myself into that hold
on to that dry, smooth heap there, clear of where those figures lie?’
‘Why, yes, your honour, easy as lighting a pipe. William, fetch the
chair, will ’ee, and overhaul the whip, and bring ’em along?’
The chair was procured, and a turn taken round the stump of the
mainmast. I seated myself and was lowered, then down sank Laura and I
lifted her out; a moment after the four seamen sprang from the edge
of the hatch. Now indeed we could behold the glowing interior as it
deserved to be seen. The galleon was apparently bulk-headed from her
forecastle deck down to the keelson, and the fore hold, accessible
doubtless by a hatch in the lower forecastle deck, was hidden from us.
But aft the vault-like interior stretched in view to plumb with the
poop deck, past which nothing of the after hold was to be seen; but the
vessel’s great beam and such length of her as we commanded submitted a
large area of illuminated wonders, and as you stood gazing around it
made you feel as if you were under the sea, as if you had penetrated to
the silent lighted hall of a dumb ocean god that was eyeing you, for
all you knew, from some ambush of glittering green growth whither he
had fled on your approach.
The irradiation was phosphoric, I was sure, by the hue and character
of it, but how kindled I could not imagine; the water had sunk low;
in the death-like stillness you could hear through the hatchway the
sounds of it gushing on to the rocks from the perforations. It lay
black with gleams of green fire upon it, deep down amid the billowy
sheathing of shell under which we might be sure was secreted such of
the cargo as had not been washed out of the vessel. Pendent from the
upper deck was a very forest of multitudinous vegetation; the sides,
far as the eye could pierce, were thickly covered; the writhings of the
grave-like glow quickened the snake-shaped plants, the bulbous forms,
the distended fingers as of gigantic hands, green outlines which the
imagination easily wrought into the aspect of the heads of men and
beasts and such wild sights as one traces in clouds; these writhings
vitalised all such sights into an aspect of growing and increasing
life; they seemed to stir uneasily, to mop and mow, to elongate and
shrink.
‘It’s almost worth being cast away,’ cried Cutbill, ‘to see such a
picter as this. Lord, now for a steamer to tow her into port! My
precious eyes! what a fortune as a mere sightseeing job!’
‘If there’s treasure aboard there’s where it’ll lie stowed,’ cried
Dowling, pointing aft; his figure with his long outstretched arm
looking like a drawing in phosphorus. Indeed, in that astonishing
light we all had a most unhuman, unearthly appearance. Laura’s hair
and skin were blended indistinguishably into a faint greenish outline,
in the midst of which her violet eyes glowed black as her sister’s by
lamplight. Suddenly I felt her hand tremble upon my arm.
‘I feel a little faint,’ she said softly; ‘the atmosphere here is
oppressive--and then those----’ She averted her eyes in a shuddering
way from the skeletons.
As she spoke the hatch was flashed into a dazzling blaze of sun-bright
light.
‘Quick, lads,’ I cried, ‘or the storm will be on us! Hark, how near the
thunder rattles!’
The detonation boomed through the hollow hold as though a broadside had
been fired within half a mile of us by a line-of-battle ship.
‘There’s her ladyship a-singing out,’ exclaimed Finn; and sure enough
we heard Lady Monson violently calling for her sister.
‘Heaven preserve us! I hope she hain’t been hurt by that flash,’
shouted Cutbill.
‘Up with us, now lads, before it is upon us!’ I cried.
Dowling, seizing the two ends of the whip, went up hand after hand, and
in a few moments we were all on deck.