THE SECOND DAY.
“Mr. Holdsworth,” said the General, “will you not let me watch whilst
you get some sleep? You have been up now for nearly three nights
running, and I beg you to consider the preciousness of your life to us
all.”
“I am much obliged to you, General. I’ll do as you ask me. Johnson,
come aft and relieve Winyard here. Keep a sharp look-out, my lads, and
wake me up if the breeze freshens.” He seated himself in the bottom of
the boat, rested his head upon a thwart, and in a few moments was fast
asleep.
A hush fell upon the boat which nothing broke but the quick angry
sousing of the bows as the boat fell with her short length into the
trough of the sea. The widow had fallen asleep at last, and leaned
against Johnson, who steered, whilst her boy slumbered with his head on
her lap. The sailor sat motionless for fear of waking her, calling once
in a whisper to Winyard to come aft and look at the little ’un, and
tell him if he thought that God would let such innocence be drowned.
“He’s the image of my little Bill,” answered Winyard, stooping his
bearded face low that he might see the child’s features. “I’m glad the
poor lady’s sleeping. Keep steady, Dick, or you’ll wake her. She ain’t
tasted a mossil of food all this blessed day, and it ’ud cut me to the
heart to see the little ’un left without a mother.”
“Ay, and so it would me, Harry. May be we’ll sight a ship to-morrow.
I’ve got my old woman to keep ashore, and I guess, when rent-time
comes, she won’t know what to do, unless I get back.”
“I wish I had some ’baccy with me. Ain’t got a bit in all my pockets.
I wonder where t’other boats have got to?”
The conversation, which had been carried on in hoarse whispers, was at
this point interrupted by a movement of the little boy. Johnson raised
his hand and Winyard crept forward, where he sat like a bronze statue,
watching the horizon.
It was about four o’clock, as the seamen guessed, when the wind, which
had been pretty steady from the south-east, lulled, and then veering
northward came on to blow freshly. The men awakened Holdsworth, who
went to the helm. Mrs. Tennent, who had been aroused by the withdrawal
of the sailor’s shoulder, shivered with the cold and crouched down to
hug herself in her clothes. Indeed, the north wind was cold enough;
but Holdsworth, observing the woman’s condition, whipped off his coat
without a word and buttoned it over her shoulders, silencing her
protests by kindly laughter and encouraging words.
The change of wind produced a cross sea which drenched the boat and
made her movements horribly uncomfortable. The wind increased, bringing
up large clouds, each of which was charged with a small rain-loaded
squall of its own. The sea rose, and matters began to wear an ugly
look. The men close-reefed the sail, and Holdsworth finding that the
boat shipped water when on the wind, let her go free; and away they
scudded with a breeze growing in force every five minutes astern of
them. The utmost vigilance was now needful in steering the boat. The
waves were quick and irritable, and broke in noisy surfaces of foam on
either gunwale, and from time to time it seemed inevitable that their
curling crests must arch themselves clean into the boat and swamp her.
Holdsworth parried them with the rudder like a fencer with a foil. His
eye was marvellously quick, the movements of his hands delicate and
unerring. What the waves were to that small open boat, the seas of
the Pacific under a westerly gale are to a full-rigged ship. She sank
into hollows half-mast deep, where the air was stagnant, behind and
before her black walls of illuminated water, the hinder ones of which,
catching her under the stern, raised her with irresistible force to a
height that turned her inmates giddy and sick; and there, exposed to
the wind, her sail blew out to cracking limits and hurled her madly
forward--to sink into a new abysm, to experience another interval of
breathless, deadly calm.
“May God have mercy upon us!” exclaimed the General, in one of these
awful intervals, folding his arms tightly and fixing his eyes on a
towering sea rearing astern of them like a hill.
But Holdsworth’s voice echoed cheerily: “She is a brave boat, General;
and it’s not my intention to let such ripples as these” ... the rest of
the sentence was drowned in the hooting of the wind, as one of these
“ripples” swung the boat high in the full face of it, and the “ripple”
itself broke into an acre of foam under the boat’s bows.
The two sailors sat like logs, ready for the worst; yet with a supreme
confidence in Holdsworth’s skill as a steersman, which he had already
illustrated in a hundred subtle ways, appreciable to none but them.
St. Aubyn lay in the bottom of the boat, motionless. The General,
holding on to the mast, was seated amidships, commending his soul, and
the souls of his comrades, to God, in inaudible prayers. The widow
crouched with her boy, who still slept, in the stern-sheets; and
beside her towered the form of Holdsworth, a yoke-line in each hand,
his body inclined forward, his shirt-sleeves rolled above his elbows,
every nerve, every muscle in him strung to the tension of steel,
his glittering eyes fixed upon the seas ahead, his whole attitude
resembling a sculptured personation of audacity, skill, and the finest
British courage.
The dawn broke and found them swinging over an ugly sea, with the
wind moderating. As the pallid light spread over the bleak surface of
gray and moving waters, the weary shipwrecked men turned their eyes
about in search of a vessel; but the ocean was tenantless save by
its own leaping seas, which played around in an eternal mockery of a
fluctuating hilly horizon.
They were now sailing due south. Holdsworth steered the boat, and
Winyard baled her out; but, thanks to the wonderful skill with which
the rudder was used, no single sea had been shipped, and what water
there was consisted of the spray that had been blown into the boat off
the crests of the waves when she was in their hollows.
The sun rose and diffused an exquisite pink through the ribbed clouds
that barred the sky. His glorious light flashed jewels upon the water,
and sent a message of hope among the inmates of the tiny boat striving
amid the wild and throbbing wilderness of the deep.
The General stood up, and arching his hand over his eyes, gazed slowly
and intently around the whole circumference of the water-line.
“We are alone,” he said; but instantly corrected himself. “No, I speak
thoughtlessly. We have God with us. He has been with us all night.
We thank Thee, O God,” he murmured, folding his hands and reverently
lifting his face to the sky, “for Thy protection; and we humbly
implore Thee not to abandon us, but to be with us in our anguish and
desolation, and in Thine own good time to snatch us from the perils
that encompass us.”
They all cried Amen!
“The wind’s lulling, master,” said Johnson to Holdsworth. “We’ll have
the sea smooth before long.”
“Oh, Mr. Holdsworth!” exclaimed Mrs. Tennent, starting up suddenly and
hurriedly removing his coat from her shoulders, “how cruelly selfish
I have been to deprive you of this covering throughout the long cold
night.”
“I’m better without it,” cried Holdsworth. “Even my shirt-sleeves were
too heavy for me--you see I have had to turn them up. Winyard, rouse up
Mr. St. Aubyn. We shall be none the worse, any of us, for a mouthful of
biscuit.”
He patted the little boy with his left hand, with his right kept the
boat’s head straight as a line.
“Come, sir, wake up, please. Biscuit’s going to be served out,” said
Winyard, pulling the actor somewhat unceremoniously by the arm.
Both seamen thought him a white-livered gentleman, and despised him
accordingly.
The poor man lay athwart the boat, his legs doubled up and his arms
hiding his face. He shook his head, without raising it, when Winyard
pulled him, but did not speak. The man, thinking him numbed or cramped,
raised him up; whereupon St. Aubyn struggled to his feet, and looked
about him with a fixed smile. That smile made his face terrible
to behold, for he was deadly white, and a wild fire, with no more
merriment in it than a madman’s laugh, shone in his eyes, which looked
unnaturally large, and his lips were blue and thin, and laid his teeth
almost bare.
“You fellows may shrug your shoulders, and some of you may hiss,” he
muttered, never remitting his fixed smile, but speaking through his
teeth and bringing his clenched fist upon his knee, “but you shan’t
starve me, because you don’t understand what true acting means. Do you
think I can’t tell what this hollowness, this sinking is, here!” laying
his hand upon his stomach and sending his lustrous eyes travelling
over the others, who watched him in silence. “You are starving me, you
fiends, and driving a poor actor to death. But do you think you will
force him into the workhouse? No, by God! He has spirit, and will seek
a new home, a new country, a new world, rather! Who tells me I cannot
act? Try me in farce, in comedy, in tragedy! See now--shall I play you
Tony Lumpkin?” He began to sing:
“‘Then, come, put the jorum about,
And let us be merry and clever!
Our hearts and our liquor are stout,
Here’s the three Jolly Pigeons for ever.’
“Or shall I give you Lear?” He stretched out his hands to the sea:--
“‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Sings my white head!’
Is not that fine, gentlemen? Now turn about with more shrugs, and drive
me mad with your cant. Ha! ha! ha!”
His laughter was shocking. The seamen shrank away from him.
“He has gone mad with terror!” whispered the General.
The widow hid her face in her hands.
“Johnson,” said Holdsworth, “mix some rum and water in that pannikin
and give it to him with a biscuit.”
The actor took both, staring first at the pannikin, then at the biscuit.
“Gentlemen!” he cried, with his wild smile, “I am Timon of Athens,
sour, crusty, and” ... he stopped with a laugh. “But before his mind
went, he pledged his friends, standing thus:--‘Here’s to you--dogs!’”
He flung the contents of the pannikin at Holdsworth, and dashed the
vessel into the boat; “and with this, I feed the winds!” and he hurled
the biscuit into the sea.
“Seize him!” shrieked Holdsworth, noticing a quick movement on the
actor’s part. The men sprang forward, but too late to catch him. He
leaped on to the thwart and bounded overboard with a peal of laughter,
ere you could have cried “Hold!” and vanished under the crest of a
wave that was breaking at the moment under the boat.
“See!” cried the General; “he has come to the surface! There is his
head! He may be saved yet!”
But the boat was foaming through the water at six or seven knots an
hour; the sea was still so lively that to broach her to would have been
to capsize her in an instant.
“We cannot save him!” exclaimed Holdsworth, bitterly, grasping the
situation at once; and kept the boat’s head doggedly away.
Those who watched the drowning man, saw him, a mere dot, on the
tumbling waters, heaved high on the summit of a wave, with both his
arms upraised; then down he sank into the trough of the sea, the next
wave boiled over him, and they beheld him no more.
The General covered his face with his hands and wept aloud. The widow
was so sick and faint with the horror of the scene, that she leaned
back, white and motionless, with her eyes closed. Johnson came aft
and put some rum to her lips, which revived her, and then she began
to weep silently, casting shuddering backward glances at the sea, and
hugging her boy to her passionately. She had become, during the night,
the very ghost of her former self; her complexion was ashen, her eyes
hollow, her countenance gaunt with a hard, weird look of old age upon
it. Holdsworth noticed that her dress was wet with salt water and clung
to her legs; but this it was impossible to remedy. Infinite pity smote
him as he gazed from her to her child, and he handed her a biscuit,
entreating her to eat it. The boy ate his allowance quickly; but even
out of him something of the youthfulness and freshness of his infancy
had passed; a perception of their danger and misery appeared to have
visited him; and he clung to his mother’s side, holding her dress with
one hand whilst he ate the biscuit, and gazing about him with puzzled
eyes, in which was mixed up a strong expression of terror.
The impression produced by the sudden and tragical death of the actor
was more lasting on the widow and the General than on the sailors,
who were too sensible of their own peril to find more than a passing
occasion of horror in the scene they had witnessed. They and Holdsworth
ate a biscuit apiece and drank their allowance of water mixed with rum;
but the General turned, with an expression of loathing in his face,
from the food, and Mrs. Tennent could not be induced to eat more than
a few mouthfuls. Both drank of the water.
The waves were still lively enough to demand the utmost care in the
steering of the boat; but Winyard had proved himself a smart steersman,
and Holdsworth, whose hands were cramped and blue with long grasping of
the yoke-lines, gladly surrendered his place to the sailor.
“Strange,” muttered the General, “that we sight no ships!”
“Our course is east,” said Holdsworth. “If the wind would haul round a
few points to the west, I’d out reefs and bear up.”
The breeze held until twelve o’clock, when it slackened. The sea having
grown smoother during the morning, Holdsworth hauled the sheet of the
sail aft and steered south-east by the compass, which was as close to
the sea as he deemed it advisable to sail the boat. The sun now shone
hot overhead, which greatly comforted Mrs. Tennent and revived the
spirits of her boy, who pulled a piece of string from his pocket, to
which he fastened a crooked pin, and began to fish. As the afternoon
advanced, the wind gradually died away, and a thin haze settled upon
the southern horizon, portending both heat and calm. The water’s
surface turned to an aspect of polished steel; the boat rose and sank
to the swell, easily and with a soothing motion, and the sail flapped
idly against the mast.
During the afternoon, some porpoises came to the surface of the water,
about a stone’s throw from the boat, rolling their gleaming black
bodies in a southerly direction.
“They always make for the quarter the wind’s coming from,” said Winyard.
“I am afraid we shall have no wind to-night,” answered Holdsworth; “the
weather looks too settled.”
They watched the fish turning their solemn somersaults until they were
out of sight, and then, as though to meet hope half-way, Holdsworth
swarmed up the boat’s mast and swept the horizon with piercing eyes,
but saw nothing but the boundless water-line paling away against the
sky.
The sun went down in glorious majesty, burnishing the deep, and
dazzling the eye with a splendour of small radiant clouds, pierced with
threads of glory, and momentarily changing their brilliant hues until
the orb was under the sea, when they turned a bright red colour. The
twilight followed fast, the stars came out, and the darkness of night
fell upon the lonely deep.