THE DARKEST HOUR.
The memory of that awful time is soothed and assuaged to me by
virtue of the strong soul who, under Providence, was given to us to
command it. If destiny had used him its instrument to precipitate the
tragedy, long, I am sure, hanging over our heads, it had done so
consciously, by higher command, in order to neutralize the effects of
its own inexorable decree. So thought Mr. Sant presently; and
gratefully we acquiesced, giving thanks to Providence. Like children,
we had played with fire, not realizing, nor, I think, deserving the
consequences. All honour, then, after God, to His little
self-possessed deputy, who of his confidence and resolution helped us
to the nerve to escape them.
For a time Harry and I--I may surely admit it without shame--were
beside ourselves. To be thus cast away and abandoned on a sandbank in
mid-ocean--for to all appearances, and intents and purposes, our fate
seemed nothing less--it was horrible beyond words. An hour--perhaps
two hours--and a lingering death must overtake us. Already--we could
see by the near lines of foam, could gather from the changed whisper
of the tide--the seaward surges were freshening to their return. We
hurried to and fro, wringing our hands, crying for impossible help,
never once in our distraction holding escape as conceivable save by
external agency. The bank on which we stood stretched north and south,
a sleek, hateful mockery. It were useless to traverse it up and down;
yet we went, as if to hurry this way and that over it were to summon
of our agonized need a causeway to the unseen shore five miles
distant; we went, until the terror of ranging adrift, beyond recovery,
from our one hope of resource, already grown a desolate phantom behind
us in the mist, sent us frantically back to the side of the motionless
figure, which had not once stirred since we parted from it raving.
“Mr. Pilbrow!” I cried. “_What_ are we to do?”
“Ah!” he answered, sharp as an echo: “to command yourselves!”
It was like a tonic of steel served from a pistol.
“We will--we do,” said Harry, forcing down his terror in one great
gulp. “Dick, don’t be a fool!”
Some shame, I think, stiffened me. The debility of despair conceded a
hope to the mere prospect of discussion. What a courage was this to
succumb without an effort; to have reason, and yield it to the shadow
falling before the fact!
“All right,” I muttered. “I’m an ass. Only let him tell us what we’re
to do. He brought this on us, you know.”
He showed no resentment of my bitterness.
“Yes,” he said, in a strong quiet voice. “I brought this on you,
Richard; for you warned me and I overruled your warning, being
sceptical without knowledge, which is the boast of fools. The man was
mad, and I thought to control him with reason, having failed in that
as in everything else. Now accursed shall I be in the eyes of my
co-trustee, your dear uncle.”
His mention of Uncle Jenico quite upset me again.
“O!” I cried violently, “what do _you_ matter! If you drown, you’ve
only yourself to thank. _He_ would have stopped my going, but I
wouldn’t tell him anything about it, because I thought it was nonsense
to be afraid. And now he’ll wait and wait, and we shall never come,
and it will break his heart.”
He stood before me, dripping wet, a most wretched, pathetic expression
on his face. It was due less, I knew, to despair than to sorrow over
my revolt against him. At the vision of it I was moved even against my
will to remorse.
“Well,” I said miserably, “I don’t want to put all the blame on you,
though you might have given me credit for a reason. You don’t know
what we know about the man, or his interest in shutting our mouths. I
ought to have told you, perhaps; but the secret was saving for another
who has more right to it. It doesn’t matter now. We only want to get
out of this--Mr. Pilbrow, do you hear? O, please think of something!
There must be a way! To stand here, and----”
“Richard!” he cried, in great emotion. He half advanced, holding out
his hand, then suddenly commanded himself, let it fall, and became in
a moment a figure of passionless resolution.
“You are right,” he said, dryly defining and articulating each word.
“This is no time for recriminations. We must compose ourselves--must
think. The way out of a trap is never the way in. That is where men
waste themselves. Now, tell me: nobody knows of our coming here?”
“Nobody,” I said, “nor saw us take the boat. There isn’t a hope of our
being rescued from the shore. We can’t see it, even; and if _we_ could
be made out here, who’s abroad to mark us? Besides, even if any one
did, there’s bare time, even now, to put off and cover the distance
before----”
“H’mph!” he pondered, frowning and fondling his gritty chin. Then he
turned to my friend.
“How long have we?” he asked.
Harry gave a desperate glance seawards.
“Say an hour here--perhaps two, if we climbed the wreck. But there’s
deep water between. Ah! you didn’t know that, did you? but there
is--and you----”
Joshua made a gesture of dissent.
“No,” he said, “I can’t swim. Leave me out of the question. But you
two can, I know. Why shouldn’t _you_ reach the shore?”
Harry shook his head.
“The tide’s running in, it’s true; but five miles, and in December!”
He ended with a despairing shrug.
“Very well,” said Joshua, so prompt and decided that he made us jump.
“Then the wreck’s our one asset; and we’ll just go and see the best
use we can make of it.”
With the word, he was striding over the sand, and, sprung to some
sudden thrill of hope at his confidence, we followed him, our hearts
thumping.
When we came down to the little strait, we found it already and
undoubtedly widened. The cream of incoming surf showed more boldly
over the lip of the further bank where the wreck lay; and between that
and ourselves there was a sense of busier movement, as it might be
water yawning and stretching after sleep.
“Now,” said Joshua, sharp as a lash, “swim across to her.”
“Swim! At once?” I exclaimed. “And what about you?”
“I’ve told you to leave me out,” he said, dry and composed. “You must
swim, as you can’t jump. I’ll wait you here. Maybe you’ll find the
means to float back on boards or such.”
Then we saw what was in his mind. It was a chance against all odds,
and so poor a one, that we had hardly considered it, I think, in our
agitation. The storm, we felt, must have gutted the carcase as clean
as a dressed ox’s. Nothing detachable, but must have been wrenched and
flung away. From where we stood, indeed, only the framework of the
poop, gaunt, and inflexible, and rigid in its suggestion of ribs and
spars shattered but unyielding, appeared to have survived its furious
sacking by the waves. Moreover, a certain suspicion had come to us
that Rampick had not now made his first acquaintance with the wreck;
that, even perhaps so early as the serving of the last ebb, when fresh
from hearing of our plans, he had rowed over to examine his ground by
lantern-light, and to make sure--as so cunning a madman would--that no
contingency of crate or cask or loosened plank should be allowed to
mar his wicked purpose.
Though we might or might not be right in this (in point of fact, I
believe, we were right), our hope, looking upon that lean account of
ruin, was a very little hope. Still, for what it was, it lost nothing
in inspiration from the self-confidence of our companion. I turned a
desperate inquiring glance on Harry.
“Come!” he said, in answer; and, without another word between us, we
had slipped down and taken the water.
As for that, it was chill enough, but, to traverse the interval,
child’s play for swimmers so young and hardy. In five minutes we had
emerged, sleek and dripping, on the further side, and the wreck was
close before us.
We shook ourselves like dogs, and ran up the sand. The shivered frame
of the thing lay pitched on the sharp back of the drift, where the
poor ship must have dumped herself to be broken like a stick across a
housemaid’s knee. What remained was a melancholy witness to the
impotence of man’s bravest efforts to command Nature in her passions.
She must have been a fine craft, of many thousand tons burden, by
evidence of this fragment. _Ex pede Herculem_. Now, the forlorn
remnant of her was so shattered as to look, at these close quarters,
more like the wreck of a blown-down hoarding than of a gallant vessel.
Wryed, and gaping, and burst apart, her ribs had been stripped, inside
and out, of everything that could be torn away and swallowed; so that
what survived, survived by virtue of a tenacity, which, inasmuch as it
had defied the wrench of the storm, was little likely to yield _us_
salvage.
And, indeed, we reached her only to find our apprehensions confirmed.
Shorn through her waist, it appeared, close off by the poop, and her
fore-part lifted, and rolled, and ravished God knew whither, she had
disgorged her vitals into the gulf to the last bolt, so that not one
loose board of her remained to reward us, unless buried beyond our
recovery in the sand, into which the jagged wound of her emptied trunk
was plugged.
We climbed, and pulled, and tested, running hither and thither. We
fell upon our knees, and with our hands dug frantically, until they
bled, into the wedged drift. It yielded nothing. From time to time we
desisted, and gazed, in a panic of fear, at the water, where, but a
few yards beyond and below her stern, it rustled and curvetted,
advancing and retreating, and advancing yet another step to play
cat-like with our anguish.
At last, and for the last time of many, we mounted the slope of
stubborn planks, to struggle with some fractured balk of timber, some
broken rib end, which might seem to promise yielding to our frenzied
blows and kicks. It was all of no avail. Like lost souls we paused,
looking down on a litter of splinters, our great need’s only
recompense; and, “O, my God!” whispered Harry, and staggered back
where he stood, and flung himself, quite ill and overcome, upon the
bulwarks.
He was up by the broken stern-post, and, sick to note the rising of
the tide, he looked down. On the instant he uttered a wild
exclamation, jumped to his feet, went over the side, and vanished.
I was poising myself a little below on the slope of the deck. At his
cry I dropped and slipped, landed at the bottom, recovered my feet,
and raced round to meet him. Then I, too, uttered a yell; for here,
unnoticed by us before, was at least a straw of hope to catch at.
It was a great spar, which lay down the slope of the sand, with some
wreck of tackle yet tangled about it, and its butt wedged under the
stern of the ship.
“Lord!” shrieked my friend. “Come and pull, Dicky! O, Lord! Come and
pull!”
He was skipping and sobbing as if he were cracked. “Get a purchase!”
he screeched. “We must have it out if we bust ourselves!”
I had sprung and seized on it even as he spoke. To lift it was far
beyond our strength; but straining and hauling our mightiest, we found
we could shift it a little, right and left, like a colossal dead tooth
in its socket.
“O, if we only had Uncle Jenico’s wrench!” I panted, as we paused a
moment in exhaustion. We were quite breathless and white. The sweat,
for all the weather, was running down our faces.
“Harry!” I groaned piteously, “if we can’t get it out now, after all
this--this----”
The look in his eyes stopped me. The despair was quite gone from them,
and the old breezy fearlessness returned.
“But we’re going to get it out,” he cried, “and without Uncle Jenico’s
wrench, too.”
His gay new confidence was revivifying, amazing. My heart, for all its
terror, was beginning to expand in the radiance of it.
“How?” I gasped. “Don’t keep me waiting, you--you old beast!”
“I’ll show you,” he said; and with the word was down among the tackle,
unknotting and pulling.
I watched him breathless--helped him where I could. Between us, in a
few minutes, we had disentangled many fathoms of unbroken rope, and
still there was more to come. We wrought hurriedly, feverishly, with
one eye always on the rising water.
“Let it only wait,” said Harry through his teeth, “till we’ve got this
clear, and then it may come as fast as it likes.”
I worked on hard, not asking him why. Perhaps I had a lingering horror
that his answer would disillusion me, show this shadow of hope a
heart-breaking chimera. And still stealthily the tide crept up, and
still we had not done.
But at length the last kink was unravelled, and we rose with a shout.
One end of the rope was still fastened tight to a ring-bolt in the
spar at its seaward end. The other Harry shouldered, and with it
turned to run up the bank.
“Do you understand yet, gaby?” he demanded, grinning triumphant.
“You are going to get a haul on the thing, to one side and further
up?”
“Yes, I am.”
My spirits sank a little.
“We shan’t be able to move it that way any more than we did
before--anyhow, not to pull it out of its hold.”
“Shan’t we? Wait and see.”
“O, Harry! Don’t be such a fiend.”
“Why, Dicky, you stoopid, look here. I examined the thing, which you
didn’t, no more than Rampick himself, if it’s true he’s been here
already. He thought it wedged tight, maybe, and safe from us. Well, I
tell you it’s only caught by the tip of its nose--far enough in to
baffle us lying as it does, _but easy enough to pull out floating_.”
I stared at him a moment; then gave a wild hoot, and began to dance
about as he had done before, and threw up my cap, and ended by hugging
him.
“You beauty, you beauty! You dear old positive genius and darling! We
shall get away, after all, with nothing but a ducking. And Uncle
Jenico----”
A sudden choke stopped me. I turned away so that my friend shouldn’t
see my shame.
“Dick, old man,” he said, soberly. “You mustn’t be too wild even now.
It’s all right, I hope; only--well, it’s cold, and three of us to
drift five miles on a spar----”
But I wouldn’t heed a word of his admonition. The recoil from despair
had sent my wits toppling clean head over heels. If nothing but a bowl
had offered, I should have been as joyous as a wise man of Gotham to
commit our destinies to it. To have some means, any, to escape this
hideous nightmare of enchainment to a living death!
“Hi! Gee-whoa! Get on!” I cried, chuckling hysteric, and drove Harry,
holding the rope-end, up the sand before me. It paid out behind, and
did not pull taut till we were well on the slope. Then, for the first
time, we thought of Joshua, and turned to look for him.
He was standing, with some suggestion of agitation, on the edge of the
further drift. The water had crept up since we left him, widening
ominously the channel between. We waved our hands to him, and he
responded.
“Look here,” said Harry. “He mustn’t be left in his ignorance; it’s
torture. Besides---- Hold on, Dicky, while I go to him.”
“Why don’t you bawl across?”
“He’d never gather. We must have him ready, and I can’t explain here.
Don’t drop the rope for a moment while I’m gone.”
“All right. But why not have a pull first, to see if it’ll come free
without?”
“Mighty! Not for the world! It’s been rotting in the water: supposing
it snapped? There’ll hardly be a strain when the tide lifts the thing,
and gets under the seat of the old girl--you believe me. Did you see
her name?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s _The Good Hope_. Hurrah!”--and he scuttled from me, and
the next moment was squattering through the water of the little
strait. I watched his chestnut ball of a head lovingly as it drew a
line across the channel; and I danced with excitement again to see his
streaming shoulders emerge presently, and Joshua, as near wrought-up
as I, run out knee-deep to help him ashore, and support him--as if he
needed support--and kneel to wring out his clothes, while the faint
gabble of their voices came to me. And then I turned to look seawards
once more, and, behold! the comb of a little wave struck the spar-end,
and seethed up and over it, and the sight made my heart flutter.
“Harry!” I screeched; and gripped the rope as if I feared some
unnamable wickedness were seeking to snatch it out of my hands. I did
not dare to turn again; but watched the hurrying tide fascinated; and,
almost before I knew it, Harry was at my side.
“Lord, Dicky!” he whispered, his eyes glistening; “it comes, don’t it!
Don’t let go! We mustn’t give it a chance.”
If it had only answered to our thoughts! How slow it crawled, without
haste or flurry, sometimes seeming to drop dormant as if to take us
off our guard. Presently, what with the strain and our shivering, we
were fain to squat gingerly upon the sand, and grip, and watch,
setting our chattering teeth. What if our expectations were to be
cruelly baffled after all! What if the spar were anchored by some
unexpected unseen grapnel to the bank! I turned sick at the thought.
The water by now lipped along it, covering some three feet of its end.
And still, to any gentle test of pulling it responded nothing.
Suddenly, eccentric as always in its motions, the tide bowled a
succession of heavier wavelets shorewards. The first found us sitting,
the rope taut between us and the spar, and left us sprawling backwards
in a puddle of water. I thought the mere wash of it had upset us,
till, in the midst of my spluttering and clutching to recover
purchase, I heard my friend sing out--
“Get up! Hold on! Dick! O, come, come!”
Then, scrambling, gasping, to my feet, I saw what had happened. The
spar, answering to our strain in the bobble of water, had swung
towards us, the rope had slackened, and over we had tumbled.
Chattering with excitement, we got hold once more, and pulled.
Still it did not come free, nor for long minutes yet. We tugged and
hauled what we dared, and ceased, and tugged again. Not--to cut short
that tale of agony and suspense--until we were ankle deep in water;
not until the rush of little incoming waves foamed high on the stern
of _The Good Hope_, kicking her up, and loosening her nip on that
grim-held relic of her own; not until the sands were whelmed near and
far, so that we seemed to sprout, three fantastic trunks of humanity,
from the surface of the ocean itself, did a great surge and vortex,
answering to our last despairing wrench, show us that we had been
successful.
And even then some dreadful moments passed--moments of terror lest the
rope had given--before the mass, rolling sluggishly to the surface,
revealed itself.
We were panting and sobbing as we hauled it in. But Harry kept his
wits through all.
“Get astride, Dick,” he said, “and help me to fasten this home.”
“This” was the running gear, which he wanted to dispose about the spar
in such way as to give us all some hold to cling by. We wrought quick
and hard, and in a little had it looped to our satisfaction. The
wreckage consisted of a huge segment of a main lower and top-mast,
with the step, pretty complete, and the whole of the over-lapping part
bolted snug, on either side of which the great sticks had snapped. It
was in all some twenty feet long, perhaps, with rings and shroud
fastenings and cut ends of rigging yet attached; and it floated
massive, on an even keel, so to speak, so that in places we could even
walk on it without fear of upsetting in that tranquil sea.
“Now,” said Harry at last, “to get to Mr. Pilbrow!”
I swear till that moment we had realized no difficulty; and then, with
the word, we were staring aghast at one another. The spar sat too deep
to move; not till the tide had risen another two feet at least would
she ride over the bank; we knew no way round. Could he plant himself
firm in that hurrying sway of water until we reached him?
We stood up and waved and shouted: “We’re coming in a little! Hold on
till we come!” I don’t know if he heard us. He stood there plunged to
the knees--the oddest, most tragic sight. He waved back and screeched
something--what, we could not understand. Every few minutes we dropped
overboard, and heaved our utmost at the great hulk, only to have her
ride a few feet and ground again. But at last, when the water was up
to his shoulders, she gave a little dip and curtsey, and the following
wave washed her on. We yelled, then, and slipped into the water for
the last time, and, finding no bottom, kicked out frantic, holding
each to a loop of the rope, and propelled her slowly before us, The
tide took her now, and do what we would, we could not coax her in a
direct course for our friend. We saw we should miss him by a full
fathom; he was staggering, desperate to keep his foothold; we drove
near.
“Fling yourself forward!” shrieked Harry. “It’s your only chance!” And
with the word scrambled on to the spar again. I was on Joshua’s side;
and I dwelt in an agony, holding on to the rope with one hand, while I
strained to draw her closer.
It was no use, and seeing we must float past, I echoed Harry’s scream.
Joshua sprang out and forward on the instant, and, with a mighty
flounder of water, disappeared. But the impetus of his leap carried
him towards me, and suddenly, like a crooked bough borne on a flood,
an arm of him was stuck out within a yard of my reach. I let go my
hold to dash and clutch it, and as I swerved, Harry, snapping down,
caught at one of my kicking ankles and held on. My head went under;
but I had the wrist like a vice; and in another minute I and my quarry
were drawn to the spar side, and our noddles, gobbling and clucking
and purple with suffocation, helped right way up.
We were saved! So far we had won free. _Vogue la galère_!