A STORM OF WIND
The atmosphere now took a deeper tinge of gloom. Thunder had followed
the blaze of lightning in the west, low, distant, but continuous, like
a rapid succession of the batteries of several ships of war heard from
afar; and as the echoes of this ominous growling swept to our ears over
the glass-smooth heave of the swell, the fresh dye of gloom came into
the day and made an evening darkness of the afternoon.
The noise of the thunder had been like calling a hush upon the ship.
The men hung in silent groups along the decks; motionless at the wheel
was the tall form of a powerful sailor gripping the spokes with an iron
clutch that was scarcely to be shaken by the frequent hard drag of the
tiller-gear to the kick of the rudder; the seamen stationed at the
guns aft stood with folded arms or hands carelessly thrust into their
pockets gazing at the brig, or, with the impatient looks of sailors
kept idly waiting on deck during their watch below, directing glances
at the horizon or the sky, as though in search of some sign of wind.
The three mates continued to overhang the rail near the captain, who
walked the length of a plank to and fro with a telescope under his arm,
which he would sometimes level at the brig, afterwards addressing his
officers in a low voice.
All the ladies were below; but shortly after Mr. Johnson had left me,
Miss Temple came on deck and went to the side to look at the stranger,
and there lingered, with her gaze upon the western sky, over which the
lightning was now running in fluid lines, a cascading of fiery streaks
with a frequent dull opening blaze low down, which the heads of the
swell would catch and mirror as though it were an instant gleam of
sunset. Had she condescended to glance my way, I should have joined
her. She loitered a while, and then left the deck; and at the same
moment the second-mate came forward to the break of the poop and called
out an order for the foresail and mizzen topsail to be furled and the
foretopsail to be close reefed.
‘Very unpleasant state of suspense this,’ said little Mr. Saunders,
stealing to my side and looking up into my face.
‘Very,’ I answered; ‘but it seems as if the weather was to extinguish
our anxiety as regards the brig.’
‘Yes,’ said he. ‘I heard the captain tell Mr. Prance that he believes
there is a gale of wind behind that storm yonder. Gracious me! what a
very vivid flash. Hark! it nears us quickly.’
There was a rattling peal of thunder now, a long volleying roar of it,
and a few large drops of rain fell. Mr. Cocker stood at the rail with
a telescope in his hand. He busily watched the men up aloft, sometimes
letting fly an order to the boatswain in a voice that went past the
ear like a stone from a sling. A large drop of rain splashed upon Mr.
Saunders’s nose.
‘It’s about to burst, I think,’ said he, looking straight up into the
heavens with his modest yearning eyes. ‘I shall go below;’ and down
trotted the little creature.
‘Mr. Cocker,’ said I, ‘lend me your glass for an instant, will you?’ I
pointed it at the brig. ‘Yes,’ I exclaimed, talking to the second-mate
with the telescope at my eye; ‘I believe I was not mistaken. Full
of men, indeed! Phew! Why, there are hands enough upon her yards to
furnish out the complement of a fifty-gun frigate.’
It was indeed as I said. They were furling all canvas upon the
stranger, intending apparently to let her meet what was to come with a
small storm foretrysail, which I could see a crowd of seamen bending
and making ready for setting. Her fore and topsail yards were loaded
with men swarming like bees along the thin delicate lines of spars,
and even as I watched, the canvas they were rolling up melted away
into slender streaks of white. In the cross-trees of both masts, and
higher yet on the yards above, and in the tops also, were a number of
men busily employed in sending down the royal, skysail, and topgallant
yards and housing the topgallant masts. There looked to me to be at
least a hundred of a crew to the vessel.
You found something almost ghastly and absolutely startling in
the sharp distinctness of the little fabric rolling against the
thunder-black skies behind her, and upon the long, malignant,
greenish-hued swell in which the plunging lightning was sparkling as
though the water were crackling with phosphoric fires. Dark as the
atmosphere was with the deep shadow of storm, the brig stood out to the
eye visible to the minutest detail the sight could reach to, plunging
heavily under her naked spars, with her wet black sides darting out the
mirrored flame of the lightning flashes with as clear a dazzle as glass
or polished brass would throw.
‘The number of her crew witnesses to her character,’ said I, returning
the telescope to Mr. Cocker.
‘Oh, there is no doubt of her,’ he exclaimed; ‘the captain’s an old
hand, and twigged her speedily.’
‘The weather will put an end to her, I expect,’ said I. ‘Very lucky for
us, Mr. Cocker. A large crew of ruffians and six guns of a side, not to
mention a twenty-four pounder in the bows, and cutlasses and small arms
in galore, hardly form a joke. It is easy to figure the beauty, that
sails, I daresay, three feet to our one, quietly sheering alongside
and throwing seventy or eighty of her children aboard, dark-skinned
assassins, armed to the teeth, reeking of garlic. Well, hang me, Mr.
Cocker, if I didn’t believe that the times of those gentry had passed
some years ago.’
His lips were moving to answer me, but there was a wide and blinding
flash of lightning at that instant that set the heavens on fire,
immediately followed by a crash of thunder as deafening as though a
first-rate had blown up close aboard us. Yet again the scowl of the
clouds deepened in darkness, and the brig grew vague on a sudden in the
gloom of the storm.
‘There comes the rain!’ cried Mr. Cocker, pointing to a line of greyish
shadow with a look of steam boiling up as it were from the base of it.
It drew creeping slowly on to the brig, and its perpendicular fall made
one think of it as of a vast sheet of water up above overflowing and
cataracting sheer down over the edge of a cloud.
‘There is no wind there,’ said I; ‘it is a regular Irishman’s
hurricane, right up and down. But here goes for a waterproof.’
I trundled below for a suit of rubber clothes, being too anxious to
observe what was to happen to choose to leave the deck. All the
passengers were congregated in the cuddy, and the lightning, as it
glittered in the port-holes and skylights, flashed up their faces in
the gloomy atmosphere, making them look a pale and trembling crowd. The
colonel was pacing the deck near the piano. Miss Hudson leaned against
her mother with her hands over her eyes. If ever there came a brighter
flash than usual, one lady or another would scream. Colledge and Miss
Temple sat over a draught-board; but I could not gather, from the
hurried glance I threw over the people as I passed through them, that
they were playing. I equipped myself from head to foot in waterproofs
and came again into the saloon on my way to the poop.
‘Are you going on deck, Dugdale?’ cried Mr. Johnson, shouting aloud,
to render his voice audible above the continuous cannonading of the
thunder.
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘You will be struck dead, sir,’ called out Mrs. Hudson.
‘I have half a mind to join you,’ said Mr. Emmett, jumping up with a
wild look at the skylight: ‘it’s simply beastly down here.’
‘Hark to that!’ bawled the colonel; ‘there’s a shower for you!’
The wall of rain had reached us. For a minute before it struck the ship
you could hear it hissing upon the sea like twenty locomotives blowing
off steam; then plump! came the cataract on to our decks. Had every
drop been a brick, the noise could not have been more astounding. One
couldn’t hear the thunder for the roaring of the fall of water and
hailstones, though the deep and awful note of the electric storm was
in it to add to its tremendous sound. The darkness was now so heavy
in the cuddy, that in the intervals of the lightning the faces of the
people were scarce distinguishable. Amid the distracting noises of
the thunder, of the breathless storm of hail and rain, of the water
cascading off the decks overboard in a furious gushing and seething,
arose the chorus of a number of seamen on the quarter-deck hauling upon
the maintopsail halliards there, with the piercing chirruping of the
boatswain’s pipe and hoarse orders delivered overhead from the poop.
‘Where’s the steward?’ bawled the colonel in his loudest tones.
‘Confound it, are we to be left in total blackness here? Why don’t
some one light the lamps?’
‘Are you coming on deck, Mr. Emmett?’ I cried; but he had sunk back
on his seat with his arms folded and his head bowed; and obtaining no
reply, I walked to the companion steps, receiving, as I passed Miss
Temple, a half interrogative glance from her, which made me look again
in readiness to answer the question that seemed to hover on her lips.
But her eyes instantly dropped, and the next instant she had turned to
say something to her aunt, who was on a sofa behind her; so, rounding
on my heel, up I went into the smoking wet.
There was nothing to be seen but rain--such a sheet of it as one
must explore the latitudes we were in to parallel. The lightning
flashed amidst it incessantly, and every line of the falling water
sparkled like glowing wire in dazzling hues of crimson and of violet
alternating. I waited under the shelter of the companion cover till the
first weight of all this rain and hail should have passed. Through the
haze of moisture that rose like steam off the decks to the cataractal
swamping I could discern the figure of old Keeling looking like a
soaked scarecrow, the fine-weather hat upon his head reduced to pulp
and hanging about his ears like a rotten fig. The fellow at the wheel
stood like a statue amid the drenching downpour; but the men who had
been stationed at the guns were gone.
I had not been a minute in the hatchway when the heavens seemed to be
split open to the very heart of their depths by a flash of lightning,
followed in the space of the beat of a heart by a shock of thunder that
seemed to happen immediately over our mastheads--a most soul-subduing
crash, if ever there was one! and as if by magic, the rain ceased,
and the atmosphere sensibly brightened. There was a great noise of
shrieking in the cuddy, and half blinded, and pretty handsomely dazed
by that terrible blast of lightning and the thunder-clap which had
followed, I crept down the steps with my pulse beating hard in my ears
to see what had happened, scarce knowing but that some one had been
struck and perhaps killed.
‘What is it?’ I shouted to the colonel, who stood at the foot of the
ladder.
‘Only Mrs. Hudson in hysterics,’ he roared; on hearing which I went up
again, being in no temper to make one of the nervous company below.
The swell had flattened; all to starboard there was an oozing as of
daylight into the breathless thickness, with ugly hump-shaped masses
of black vapour defining themselves up in the ugly sallow smother in a
sort of writhing way, as though they were coming together in a jumble;
but to port it was as black as thunder, an inky slope hoary with rain,
with lightning spitting and zigzagging all over it. I went to the rail,
where stood Mr. Cocker with his clothes full of water.
‘A pretty little shower!’ said I.
‘Very,’ he answered, with his face showing of a bleached look like the
flesh of a washerwoman’s hand. ‘A plague on this sort of work, say I!
This serge shrinks consumedly when drenched, and my trousers will be up
to my knees to-morrow morning--three pounds ten as good as washed out
of a man’s pocket.’
‘Where’s your glass, Mr. Cocker?’
‘In that hencoop there,’ said he.
I pulled out and directed it at the dim blotch of brig that had caught
my eye stealing out of the wet dusk like the phantom of a ship.
‘By my great-grandfather’s wig!’ cried I with a start. ‘So! no fear
_now_ of being boarded. Our windpipes are safe for the present. Look
for yourself, Mr. Cocker.’
He ogled her an instant, then bawled to the skipper, who was speaking
to Mr. Prance.
‘The brig’s been struck, sir! Her mainmast is over the side.’
In very truth it was as he declared. I whipped the glass out of his
hand for another look, and, sure enough, could clearly distinguish
a whole lumber of wreckage lifting to the roll of the subdued swell
alongside the swaying hull of the brig. Her foremast and topmast stood
intact to the cross-trees, but abaft she was as completely denuded as
if a chopper had been laid to the foot of the mast. The mess is not to
be described. I could make out that a length of her bulwark was crushed
flat, and the black lines of shrouds and gear went snaking overboard
like so many serpents wriggling out of the hatches into the water. But
the gloom was too deep to suffer me to see what her people were doing.
I went to the companion way and called down to Colonel Bannister.
‘Halloa? What now? Who wants _me_?’ he shouted.
‘Tell the ladies, colonel,’ I sung down, ‘that the brig has been struck
by lightning, and that our safety, so far as _she_ is concerned, is
assured.’
I heard him roar out the news as I went to the side again, and a moment
after up rushed the whole body of passengers to see for themselves.
The decks were full of water, but nobody seemed to mind that. The
ladies came splashing through it to the rail, some of them taking
terrified peeps at the mass of winking blackness settling away down in
the east, and dodging the play of lightning, as it were, with a sort
of involuntary ducking of their heads and lifting of their fingers to
their eyes.
Old Keeling cried out: ‘Ladies, be good enough to take my advice and
return to the cabin. We shall be having a strong blow of wind coming
along in a few minutes.’
‘Gott, she iss on fire!’ here shouted Hemskirk, pointing directly at
the brig with a fat forefinger, whilst with the other hand he kept a
binocular glass glued to his eyes.
‘Is it so then, sir!’ cried Mr. Prance to the skipper; ‘there is smoke
rising from her fore-hatch.’
Mr. Cocker had replaced his telescope in the hencoop; I jumped for
it, and in a trice had the lenses bearing upon the brig. There was an
appearance of smoke, a thin bluish haze of it, as though mounting from
a newly kindled bonfire, slowly going spirally into the motionless air;
but almost at the instant of my first looking I thought I could witness
something of a ruddy tinge flashing for a breath into this smoke, as
if to a sudden leap of flame. Though the brig lay at the same distance
that had separated her from us throughout the afternoon, the shrouded
and heaped-up vaporous wall of firmament beyond her seemed to heave her
as close again to us as she really was; and now quite easily by the aid
of the glass I could see her decks as she rolled them our way dark with
her people, many of them hacking and hewing at her rigging, as though
to clear away the wreckage; others seemingly passing buckets along;
others, again, running wildly and as it might seem aimlessly about,
whilst with the regularity of a swing in action the beautifully moulded
hull rolled quietly from side to side with a rhythmic oscillation
of her one mast upon which the fragment of white trysail filled and
hollowed as it beat the air, starting out upon the eye with a very
ghastliness of pallor as it swelled to its cotton-like hue out of the
shadow of its incurving, and hovered like some butterfly over the
hideous dusky green of the swell.
I replaced the telescope.
‘Here comes the wind!’ I heard Mr. Cocker sing out.
‘Ladies,’ cried old Keeling, ‘let me beg of you to step below.’
Most of them complied, but a few lingered, staring with curiosity at
the coming weather. I watched it with amazement, for never before had I
seen a storm of wind coming down upon a ship in a sort of wall. One saw
the line of it in a ridge of foam whose extremities were lost in the
gloom on either hand. It was of a glass-like smoothness all in front
of it, and not a breath of air was to be felt when the stormy hissing
of it was loud in our ears as it came sweeping up, the clouds on high
darting to right and left, and a paler faintness, as of increasing
daylight, coming into the air along with it. The bull-like notes of Mr.
Prance rang from the poop through the ship.
‘Stand by maintopsail halliards--foretopsail sheets--foretopmast
staysail down-haul.’
The wind struck the brig. My eye was upon her, and she disappeared in
the shrieking whirl of flying spume as you extinguish a reflection in
a mirror by breathing upon the glass. A minute later it was upon us.
It smote the Indiaman right abeam, and down she lay in a seething and
hissing flatness of boiling waters, stooping yet and yet, till the line
of the topgallant bulwark rail looked to be flush with the furious
yeasty smother. There were two men at the helm holding the wheel jammed
hard over. I swung to a belaying pin on the weather rail, and the poop
deck went down from me to leeward at an angle that made one’s eyes
reel in the head to look along it. There was a true hurricane note in
the bellowing of the wind on high under the rush and disparting of the
maddened clouds, and the first flash of it between our masts was as
the passage of a score of locomotives racing by at express speed and
shrieking as they went.
I was waiting to see what the ship meant to do, when the weather
maintopsail sheet parted, though a treble-reefed sail, with a sound
like another clap of thunder, and in a moment the canvas was flogging
away from the yard in ribands, with Mr. Cocker shouting at the top
of his voice, and a crowd of seamen tumbling and capsizing about the
main deck to the officer’s orders to haul upon the clewlines. It was
at that instant, amidst all this prodigious hallabaloo, that I caught
sight of Miss Temple to leeward of the mizzen mast holding on to some
gear that was belayed at the foot of the mast. As my gaze rested on
her, the rope she grasped either overhauled itself or was detached from
the pin, and she swung out to leeward. There were hencoops and rails
and the mizzen shrouds to save her from going overboard; but there was
nothing to prevent her from breaking a limb, or even her neck, if she
let go. Though my legs yet preserved something of their old seafaring
nimbleness, the slope of the deck made desperate work for them. Yet
the girl must be reached, and at once. She did not appear to have
sense enough to lower herself down the rope till her feet touched, in
which posture she might have hung with safety. She maintained her first
clutch of the gear, and swung above the deck to the height of some two,
perhaps three feet. Keeling, who was clinging to the weather vang, did
not seem to see her. The helmsmen grinding at the wheel heeded nothing
but their business. Mr. Prance and the second officer clawing at the
brass rail at the break of the poop, leaned to windward, with their
eyes on the streaming rags of the maintopsail shouting commands.
There was only one means of arriving at the girl with any approach to
swiftness. I dropped on to the deck, and went down upon my knees with
my head to windward, and worked my way stern first in that attitude
to the line of lee hencoops, along which I made shift to travel half
jammed by my own weight against the bars of the coops, until, coming
abreast of the girl, I got upon my legs, and firmly planting my left
foot against the bottom of the row of boxes in which the fowls were
immured, and leaning on my right leg in a fencing posture, I put my
arms round her waist and told her to let go. She did so at once, as
likely as not because she could hold on no longer. The weight of her
noble figure was rather more than I had bargained for. I had thought to
hold her fairly off the deck and ease her away, whilst in my arms, down
to the hencoop behind, on which she could sit; but she was too much for
me. I was forced to let her feet touch the planks, where, losing her
balance, she threw her arm round my neck to save herself from falling.
The next moment I was lodged upon the hencoop, she on my knee, and her
arms still enclosing my head; but this was only for a breath or two.
It was easy to lift her to my side, and there she sat, her fine face
dark with blushes, and her eyes sparkling with alarm and confusion and
twenty other passions and emotions, whilst the curve of her bosom rose
and fell with hysteric swiftness.
‘What a very ridiculous position! It serves me right. I should have
taken the captain’s advice. I should have gone below.’
This was all my haughty companion condescended to say. Not a syllable
of thanks--not a glance of softness to reward me! However, to be
reasonable, she could have scarcely been audible had she attempted
more words. Even to catch the few sentences she uttered I had to
strain my ear to the movement of her lips, off which the wind clipped
her speech with a silencing yell.
There had been but little in the thunder of the storm, which still
showed livid over the eastern horizon, that surpassed the wild and
prodigious roaring of this first outfly of the hurricane. The ship
continued to lie down to the fierce sweep of the wind at the angle she
had reached to--it was as good or bad, indeed, as being on her beam
ends--and Miss Temple and I were forced to keep our seats upon the
hencoop, no more able to crawl up the deck to where the companion hatch
was than had it been a slope of polished ice. This maybe was what she
meant by ‘the ridiculousness of her position.’ The captain, standing to
windward, was sending ominous looks at the band of the foretopsail and
at the foretopmaststay-sail, the cloths of which continued miraculously
to hold. There was too much wind for the sea to rise suddenly; indeed,
the weight of the blast had smoothed down what remains of swell the
rain and hail had left; the ocean was a level surface of foam, out of
which the tempest of wind was tearing up whole snowstorms of flakes
of spume, which flew over the ship in clouds that whitened out into a
sort of dazzle, as though sun touched, as they flew in their throbbing
masses athwart the leaden sky which poured across the sea over the
ship’s bows in rags and trailing lengths and gyrating coils of sooty
vapour.
‘Look!’ I shouted to Miss Temple, and pointed over our stern, where,
out of the flying faintness and thickness of spray, the figure of the
brig was at that instant forming itself.
I sprang upon the hencoop, the better to see, grasping the mizzen
shrouds for support.
‘Shall I give you a hoist?’ I cried to the girl.
Her curiosity was too strong; the flying brig--a fleeting vision of the
object which had filled us with alarm and suspense throughout the day,
was a wonder to be witnessed at such a time as that at any cost. Her
lips parted in the word yes to the howl of the gale, and in a moment I
had her up alongside of me, my arm through hers, securely gripping and
supporting her, and the pair of us gazing breathlessly at the sight
astern.
With her single mast rising to the topmast cross-trees, the yards
square, the remains of the trysail streaming like white hair from gaff
and boltrope, the brig swept under our stern, shooting sheer athwart,
seething smoothly as a sleigh over a level plain of snow, and rushing
before the wind straight as the flight of an arrow. A coil of thick
black smoke, whose base was reddened by sudden tongues of fire, blew
over her bow, and coloured the atmosphere into which she rushed with a
complexion of thunder. It seemed to rise from the fore-hatch, and it
fled straight off the deck. I caught a sight of crowds of men forward
and aft, with a couple of fellows leaping into the fore-rigging as the
brig rushed by, to gesticulate to us. But the vision came and went in
a few breaths like an object seen by lightning. So dense was the gale
with spray, that there was scarcely a cable’s length of opening round
about us. The brig showed and was gone! a phantasm, with the white
waters pouring over her spritsail yard as she rushed through it, and no
more of her was to be noted by the eye during the headlong swiftness of
her plunge from one wall of spindrift into another, than the delicate
lines of her rigging supporting the foremast, the bowsprit vanishing
in a cloud of smoke, blowing ahead of her, a length of white deck, a
flash of skylight glass, the glimmer, so to speak, of some score of
faces turned our way.
‘She is on fire,’ I cried in Miss Temple’s ear: ‘she carries a doomed
crew into that thickness!’
She moved, as if to resume her seat, and very carefully I got her on to
the hencoop again.
But the first terrific spite of the gale was now gone, and the squab
form of the Indiaman lifting a little out of the seething cauldron in
which she lay with her main-deck rail flush with the yeasty surface,
was beginning slowly to pay off. Her decks gradually grew level, and
presently she was right before the wind, with the howl of it at her
taffrail, and her huge bows heaping up the white sea till the leaps of
the summits were at either cathead.
Mr. Colledge’s face showed in the companion-way.
‘Oh, there you are, Miss Temple!’ he roared. ‘Mrs. Radcliffe is firmly
persuaded you have been blown overboard.’
She rose, but sat again, for the wind was too strong for her. Friend
Colledge himself seemed pinned by the weight of it in the hatch.
‘We may be able to manage it between us,’ I shouted; and passing my arm
through hers, I drove the pair of us to windward, and got her on to the
companion ladder, down which she went.