THE ICE BREAKS AWAY.
It was not yet eight o'clock. I was restless in my mind, under a great
surprise, and was not sleepy. I filled a pipe, made me a little pannikin
of punch, and sat down before the fire to think. If ever I had suspected
the accuracy of my conjecture that the Frenchman's sudden astonishing
indisposition was the effect of his extreme age coming upon him and
breaking down the artificial vitality with which he had bristled into
life under my hands, I must have found fifty signs to set my misgivings
at rest in his drowsiness, nodding, bowed form, weakness, his tottering
and trembling, and other features of his latest behaviour. If I was
right, then I had reason to be thankful to Almighty God for this
unparalleled and most happy dispensation, for now I should have nothing
to fear from the old rogue's vindictiveness and horrid greed. Supposing
him to be no more than a hundred, the infirmities of five score years
would stand between him and me, and protect me as effectually as his
death. I had nothing to dread from a man who could scarce stand, whose
palsied hand could scarce clasp a knife, whose evil tongue could scarce
articulate the terrors of his soul or the horrors of his recollection.
The wonder of it all was so great it filled me with admiration and
astonishment. Had he been dead and come to life again, as Lazarus, or
one of those bodies which arose during the time our Lord hung upon the
cross, then, questionless, he must have picked up the chain of his life
at the link which death had broken, and continued his natural walk into
age and decay (though interrupted by a thousand years of the sepulchre)
as if his life had been without this black hiatus, and he was proceeding
steadily and humanly from the cradle. But collecting that the vital
spark could never have been extinguished in him, I understood that time,
which has absolute control over life, still knew him as its prey during
all those forty-eight years in which he had lain frozen; that it had
seized him now and suddenly, and pinned upon his back the full burden of
his lustres. This I say, I believed; but the morrow, of course, would
give me further proof.
Well, 'twas a happy and gracious deliverance for me. He could do me no
hurt; the scythe had sheared his talons, and all without occasioning my
conscience the least uneasiness whatever: whereas, but for this
interposition, I did truly and solemnly believe that it must have come
to my having had to slay him that I might preserve my own life.
Thus I sat for an hour smoking and wetting my lips with the punch,
whilst the fire burned low, so exulting in the thought of my escape from
the treacherous villain I had recovered from the grave, and in the
feeling that I might now be able to go to rest, to move here and there,
to act as I pleased without being haunted and terrified by the shadow of
his foul intent, that I hardly gave my mind for a moment to the
situation of the schooner nor to the barren consequences of my fine
scheme of mines.
The wind blew strong. I could hear the humming of it in every fibre of
the vessel. The bed on which she rested trembled to the blows of the
seas upon the rocks. From time to time, in the midst of my musing, I
started to the sharp claps of parted ice. Still feeling sleepless, I
threw a few coals on the fire, and catching sight of the pirate flag
opened it on the deck as wide as the space would permit, and sat down to
contemplate the hideous insignia embroidered on it. My mind filled with
a hundred fancies as my gaze went from the skull on the black field to
the death's-head pipe that had fallen from the grasp of Tassard and lay
on the deck, and I was sitting lost in a deep dreamlike contemplation,
when I was startled and shocked into instantaneous activity by a blast
of noise, louder than any thunder-clap that ever I heard, ringing and
booming through the schooner. This was followed by a second and then a
third, at intervals during which you might have counted ten, and I
became sensible of a strange sickening motion, which lasted about twenty
or thirty moments, such as might be experienced by one swiftly
descending in a balloon, or in falling from a height whilst pent up in a
coach.
For a little while the schooner heeled over so violently that the
benches and all things movable in the cook-room slided as far as they
could go, and I heard a great clatter and commotion among the freight in
the hold. She then came upright again, and simultaneously with this a
vast mass of water tumbled on to the deck and washed over my head, and
then fell another and then another, all in such a way as to make me know
that the ice had broken and slipped the schooner close to the ocean,
where she lay exposed to its surges, but not free of the ice, for she
did not toss or roll.
I seized the lanthorn and sprang to the cabin, where I hung it up, and
mounted the companion-steps. But as I put my hand to the door to thrust
it open a sea broke over the side and filled the decks, bubbling and
thundering past the companion-hatch in such a way as to advise me that I
need but open the door to drown the cabin. I waited, my heart beating
very hard, mad to see what had happened, but not daring to trust myself
on deck lest I should be immediately swept into the sea. 'Twas the most
terrible time I had yet lived through in this experience. To every blow
of the billows the schooner trembled fearfully; the crackling noises of
the ice was as though I was in the thick of a heavy action. The full
weight of the wind seemed to be upon the ship, and the screeching of it
in the iron-like shrouds pierced to my ear through the hissing and
tearing sounds of the water washing along the decks, and the volcanic
notes of the surges breaking over the vessel. I say, to hear all this
and not to be able to see, to be ignorant of the situation of the
schooner, not to know from one second to another whether she would not
be crushed up and crumbled into staves, or be hurled off her bed and be
pounded to fragments upon the ice-rocks by the seas, or be dashed by the
cannonading of the surge into the water and turned bottom up, made this
time out and away more terrible than the collision between the _Laughing
Mary_ and the iceberg.
I drew my breath with difficulty, and stood upon the companion-ladder
hearkening with straining ears, my hand upon the door. I was now
sensible of a long-drawn, stately, solemn kind of heaving motion in the
schooner, which I put down to the rolling of the ice on which she
rested; and this convinced me that the mass in whose hollow she had been
fixed had broken away and was afloat and riding upon the swell that
under-ran the billows. But I was far too much alarmed to feel any of
those transports in which I must have indulged had this issue to my
scheme happened in daylight and in smooth water. I was terrified by the
apprehensions which had occurred to me even whilst I was at work on the
mines; I mean, that if the bed broke away the schooner would make it
top-heavy and that it would capsize; and thus I stood in a very agony of
expectancy, caged like a rat, and as helpless as the dead.
Half an hour must have passed, during which time the decks were
incessantly swept by the seas, insomuch that I never once durst open the
door even to look out. But nothing having happened to increase my
consternation in this half-hour, though the movement in the schooner was
that of a very ponderous and majestical rolling and heaving, showing her
bed to be afloat, I began to find my spirits and to listen and wait with
some buddings of hope and confidence. At the expiration of this time the
seas began to fall less heavily and regularly on to the deck, and
presently I could only hear them breaking forward, but without a quarter
their former weight, and nothing worse came aft than large brisk showers
of spray.
I armed myself with additional clothing for the encounter of the wet,
cold, and wind, and then pushed open the door and stepped forth. The sky
was dark with rolling clouds, but the ice put its own light into the
air, and I could see as plain as if the first of the dawn had broken. It
was as I had supposed: the mass of the valley in which the schooner had
been sepulchred for eight-and-forty years had come away from the main,
and lay floating within a cable's length of the coast. A stranger,
wonderfuller picture human eye never beheld. The island shore ran a
rampart of faintness along the darkness to where it died out in liquid
dusk to right and left. The schooner sat upon a bed of ice that showed a
surface of about half an acre; her stern was close to the sea, and about
six feet above it. On her larboard quarter the slope or shoulder of the
acclivity had been broken by the rupture, and you looked over the side
into the clear sea beyond the limit of the ice there; but abreast of the
foreshrouds the ice rose in a kind of wall, a great splinter it looked
of what was before a small broad-browed hill, and the wind or the sea
having caused the body on which the schooner lay to veer, this wall
stood as a shield betwixt the vessel and the surges, and was now
receiving those blows which had heretofore struck her starboard side
amidships and filled her decks.
Oh for a wizard's inkhorn, that I might make you see the picture as I
view it now, even with the eye of memory! The posture of the little berg
pointed the schooner's head seawards, about west; the ice-terraces of
the island lay with the wild strange gleam of their own snow radiance
upon them upon the larboard quarter; around the schooner was the
whiteness of her frozen seat, and her outline was an inky, exquisitely
defined configuration upon it; above the crystal wall on the larboard
bow rose the spume of the breaking surge in pallid bodies, glancing for
an instant, and sometimes shaking a thunder into the ship when a portion
of the seething water was flung by the wind upon the forecastle deck; at
moments a larger sea than usual overran the ice on the larboard beam and
quarter, and boiled up round about the buttocks of the schooner. To
leeward the smooth backs of the billows rolled away in jet, but the
fitful throbbings and feeble flashings of froth commingled with the dim
shine of the ice were over all, tincturing the darkness with a spectral
sheen, giving to everything a quality of unearthliness that was
sharpened yet by the sounds of the wind in the gloom on high and the
hissing and foaming of waters sending their leagues-distant voices to
the ear upon the wings of the icy blast.
The wind, as I have said, blew from the south-west, but the trend of the
island-coast was north-east and as the mass of ice I was upon in parting
from the main had floated to a cable's length from the cliffs, there was
not much danger, whilst the wind and sea held, of the berg (if I may so
term it) being thrown upon the island. That the ice under the schooner
was moving, and if so, at what rate, it was too dark to enable me to
know by observing the marks on the coast. There was to be no sleep for
me that night, and knowing this, I stepped below and built up a good
fire, and then went with the lanthorn to see how Tassard did and to give
him the news; but he was in so deep a sleep, that after pulling him a
little without awakening him I let him lie, nothing but the sound of his
breathing persuading me that he had not lapsed into his old frozen state
again.
Of all long nights this was the longest I ever passed through. I did
truly believe that the day was never to break again over the ocean. I
must have gone from the fire to the deck thirty or forty times. The
schooner continued upright. I had no fear of her oversetting; she sat
very low, and the ice also showed but a small head above the water, and
as the body of it lay pretty flat, then, even supposing its submerged
bulk was small, there was little chance of its capsizing. I also noticed
that we were setting seawards--that is to say, to the westward--by a
noticeable shrinking of the pallid coast. But I never could stay long
enough above to observe with any kind of narrowness, the wind being full
of the wet that was flung over the ice-wall and the cold unendurable.
All night I kept the fire going, and on several occasions visited the
Frenchman, but found him motionless in sleep. I kept too good a look-out
to apprehend any sudden calamity short of capsizal, which I no longer
feared, and during the watches of that long night I dreamt a hundred
waking dreams of my deliverance, of my share of the treasure, of my
arriving in England, quitting the sea for ever, and setting up as a
great squire, marrying a nobleman's daughter, driving in a fine coach,
and ending with a seat in Parliament and a stout well-sounding handle to
my name.
At last the day broke; I went on deck and found the dawn brightening
into morning. The wind had fallen and with it the sea; but there still
ran a middling strong surge, and the breeze was such as, in sailors'
language, you would have shown your top-gallant sails to. I could now
take measure of our situation, and was not a little astonished and
delighted to observe the island to be at least a mile distant from us,
and the north-east end lying very plain, the ocean showing beyond it,
though in the south-west the ice died out upon the sea-line. That we had
been set away from the main by some current was very certain. There was
a westerly tendency in all the bergs which broke from the island, the
small ones moving more quickly than the large, for the sea in the north
and west was dotted with at least fifty of these white masses, great and
little. On the other hand, the wind and seas were answerable for the
progress we had made to the north.
The wall of ice (as I call it) that had stood over against the larboard
bow was gone, and the seas tumbled with some heaviness of froth and much
noise over the ice, past the bows, and washed past the bends on either
side in froth rising as high as the channels. I noticed a great quantity
of broken ice sinking and rising in the dark green curls of the billows,
and big blocks would be hurled on to the schooner's bed and then be
swept off, sometimes fetching the bilge such a thump as seemed to swing
a bellow through her frame. It was only at intervals, however, that
water fell upon the decks, for the ice broke the beat of the moderating
surge and forced it to expend its weight in spume, which there was not
strength of wind enough to raise and heave. Since the vessel continued
to lie head to sea, my passionate hope was that these repeated washings
of the waves would in time loosen the ice about her keel, in which case
it would not need much of a billow, smiting her full bows fair, to slide
her clean down and off her bed and so launch her. There were many
clouds in the heavens, but the blue was very pure between. The morning
brightening with the rising of the sun, I directed an earnest gaze along
the horizon, but there was nothing to see but ice. Some of the bergs,
however, and more particularly the distant ones, stole out of the blue
atmosphere to the sunshine with so complete a resemblance to the lifting
canvas of ships that I would catch myself staring fixedly, my heart
beating fast. But there was no dejection in these disappointments; the
ecstasy that filled me on beholding the terrible island, the hideous
frozen prison whose crystal bars I had again and again believed were
never to be broken, now lying at a distance with its northern cape
imperceptibly opening to our subtle movement, was so violent that I
could not have found my voice for the tears in my heart.
This, then, was the result of my scheme; it was no failure, as Tassard
had said; as he owed his life to me, so now did he owe me his liberty.
Nay, my transports were so great that I would not suffer myself to feel
an instant's anxiety touching the condition of the schooner--I mean
whether she would leak or prove sound when she floated--and how we two
men were to manage to navigate so large a craft, that was still as much
spellbound aloft in her frozen canvas and tackle as ever she had been in
the sepulchre in which I discovered her.
I went below, and put the provisions we needed for breakfast into the
oven, and entered Tassard's cabin. On bringing the lanthorn to his face
as he lay under half a score of coats upon the deck, I perceived that
he was awake, and, my heart being full, I cried out cheerily, "Good
news! good news! the gunpowder did its work! The ice is ruptured and we
are afloat, Mr. Tassard, afloat--and progressing north!"
He looked at me vacantly, and giving his head a shake exclaimed, "How
can I crawl from this mound? My strength is gone."
If I was amazed that the joyful intelligence I had delivered produced no
other response than this querulous inquiry, I was far more astonished by
the sound of his voice. It was the most cracked and venerable pipe that
ever tickled the throat of old age, a mingling of wailing falsettos and
of hollow gasping growls, the whole very weak. I threw the clothes off
him, and said, "Do you wish to rise? I will bring your breakfast here if
you wish."
He looked at me, but made no answer. I bawled again, and observed (by
the dim lanthorn light) that he watched my lips with an air of
attention; and whilst I waited for his reply he said, "I don't hear
you."
Anxious to ascertain to what extent his hearing was impaired, I kneeled
on the deck, and putting my lips to his ear said, not very loud, "Will
you come to the cook-house?" which he did not hear; and then louder,
"Will you come to the cook-house?" which he did not hear either. I
believed him stone-deaf till, on roaring with all the power of my lungs,
he answered "Yes."
I took him by the hands and hauled him gently on to his feet, and had
to continue holding him or he must have fallen. Time was beginning with
him when he had gone to bed, and the remorseless old soldier had
completely finished his work whilst his victim slept. I viewed the
Frenchman whilst I grasped his hands, and there stood before me a
shrunk, tottering, deaf, bowed, feeble old man. What was yesterday a
polished head was now a shrivelled pate, as though the very skull had
shrunk and left the skin to ripple into wrinkles and sit loose and
puckered. His hands trembled excessively. But his lower jaw was held in
its place by his teeth, and this perpetuated in the aged dwindled
countenance something of the likeness of the fierce and sinister visage
that had confronted me yesterday. I was thunder-struck by the
alteration, and stood overwhelmed with awe, confusion, and alarm. Then,
re-collecting my spirits, I supported the miserable relic to the fire,
putting his bench to the dresser that he might have a back to lean
against.
He could scarce feed himself--indeed, he could hardly hold his chin off
his breast. He had gone to bed a man, as I might take it, of fifty-six,
and during the night the angel of Time had visited him, and there he
sat, _a hundred and three years of age_!
He looked it. Ha, thought I, I was dreading your treachery yesterday;
there is nothing more to fear. Besides that he was nearly stone deaf, he
could hardly see; and I was sure, if he should be able to move at all,
he could not stir a leg without the help of sticks. I was going to roar
out to him that we were adrift, but he looked so imbecile that I
thought, to what purpose? If there be aught of memory in him, let him
sit and chew the cud thereof. He cannot last long; the cold must soon
stop his heart. And with that I went on eating my breakfast in silence,
but greatly affected by this astonishing mark of the hand of Providence,
and under a very heavy and constant sense of awe, for the like of such a
transformation I am sure had never before encountered mortal eyes, and
it was terrifying to be alone with it.