THE members of the household were all at the window about noon, next
day, watching the rise of a storm. A murky wing of cloud, shaped like
a hawk’s, hung over the low western hills across the bay. Then the hawk
became an eagle, and the eagle a gigantic phantom, that hovered over
half the visible sky. Beneath it, a little scud of vapor, moved by some
cross-current of air, raced rapidly against the wind, just above the
horizon, like smoke from a battle-field.
As the cloud ascended, the water grew rapidly blacker, and in half an
hour broke into jets of white foam, all over its surface, with an
angry look. Meantime a white film of fog spread down the bay from the
northward. The wind hauled from southwest to northwest, so suddenly
and strongly that all the anchored boats seemed to have swung round
instantaneously, without visible process. The instant the wind shifted,
the rain broke forth, filling the air in a moment with its volume,
and cutting so sharply that it seemed like hail, though no hailstones
reached the ground. At the same time there rose upon the water a dense
white film, which seemed to grow together from a hundred different
directions, and was made partly of rain, and partly of the blown edges
of the spray. There was but a glimpse of this; for in a few moments it
was impossible to see two rods; but when the first gust was over,
the water showed itself again, the jets of spray all beaten down, and
regular waves, of dull lead-color, breaking higher on the shore. All the
depth of blackness had left the sky, and there remained only an obscure
and ominous gray, through which the lightning flashed white, not red.
Boats came driving in from the mouth of the bay with a rag of sail up;
the men got them moored with difficulty, and when they sculled ashore
in the skiffs, a dozen comrades stood ready to grasp and haul them in.
Others launched skiffs in sheltered places, and pulled out bareheaded
to bail out their fishing-boats and keep them from swamping at their
moorings.
The shore was thronged with men in oilskin clothes and by women with
shawls over their heads. Aunt Jane, who always felt responsible for
whatever went on in the elements, sat in-doors with one lid closed,
wincing at every flash, and watching the universe with the air of a
coachman guiding six wild horses.
Just after the storm had passed its height, two veritable wild
horses were reined up at the door, and Philip burst in, his usual
self-composure gone.
“Emilia is out sailing!” he exclaimed,--“alone with Lambert’s boatman,
in this gale. They say she was bound for Narragansett.”
“Impossible!” cried Hope, turning pale. “I left her not three hours
ago.” Then she remembered that Emilia had spoken of going on board the
yacht, to superintend some arrangements, but had said no more about it,
when she opposed it.
“Harry!” said Aunt Jane, quickly, from her chair by the window, “see
that fisherman. He has just come ashore and is telling something. Ask
him.”
The fisherman had indeed seen Lambert’s boat, which was well known.
Something seemed to be the matter with the sail, but before the storm
struck her, it had been hauled down. They must have taken in water
enough, as it was. He had himself been obliged to bail out three times,
running in from the reef.
“Was there any landing which they could reach?” Harry asked.
There was none,--but the light-ship lay right in their track, and if
they had good luck, they might get aboard of her.
“The boatman?” said Philip, anxiously,--“Mr. Lambert’s boatman; is he a
good sailor?”
“Don’t know,” was the reply. “Stranger here. Dutchman, Frenchman,
Portegee, or some kind of a foreigner.”
“Seems to understand himself in a boat,” said another.
“Mr. Malbone knows him,” said a third. “The same that dove with the
young woman under the steamboat paddles.”
“Good grit,” said the first.
“That’s so,” was the answer. “But grit don’t teach a man the channel.”
All agreed to this axiom; but as there was so strong a probability that
the voyagers had reached the light-ship, there seemed less cause for
fear.
The next question was, whether it was possible to follow them. All
agreed that it would be foolish for any boat to attempt it, till the
wind had blown itself out, which might be within half an hour. After
that, some predicted a calm, some a fog, some a renewal of the storm;
there was the usual variety of opinions. At any rate, there might
perhaps be an interval during which they could go out, if the gentlemen
did not mind a wet jacket.
Within the half-hour came indeed an interval of calm, and a light shone
behind the clouds from the west. It faded soon into a gray fog, with
puffs of wind from the southwest again. When the young men went out with
the boatmen, the water had grown more quiet, save where angry little
gusts ruffled it. But these gusts made it necessary to carry a double
reef, and they made but little progress against wind and tide.
A dark-gray fog, broken by frequent wind-flaws, makes the ugliest of all
days on the water. A still, pale fog is soothing; it lulls nature to
a kind of repose. But a windy fog with occasional sunbeams and sudden
films of metallic blue breaking the leaden water,--this carries an
impression of something weird and treacherous in the universe, and
suggests caution.
As the boat floated on, every sight and sound appeared strange. The
music from the fort came sudden and startling through the vaporous
eddies. A tall white schooner rose instantaneously near them, like
a light-house. They could see the steam of the factory floating low,
seeking some outlet between cloud and water. As they drifted past a
wharf, the great black piles of coal hung high and gloomy; then a stray
sunbeam brought out their peacock colors; then came the fog again,
driving hurriedly by, as if impatient to go somewhere and enraged at the
obstacle. It seemed to have a vast inorganic life of its own, a volition
and a whim. It drew itself across the horizon like a curtain; then
advanced in trampling armies up the bay; then marched in masses
northward; then suddenly grew thin, and showed great spaces of sunlight;
then drifted across the low islands, like long tufts of wool; then
rolled itself away toward the horizon; then closed in again, pitiless
and gray.
Suddenly something vast towered amid the mist above them. It was the
French war-ship returned to her anchorage once more, and seeming in that
dim atmosphere to be something spectral and strange that had taken form
out of the elements. The muzzles of great guns rose tier above tier,
along her side; great boats hung one above another, on successive pairs
of davits, at her stern. So high was her hull, that the topmost boat and
the topmost gun appeared to be suspended in middle air; and yet this
was but the beginning of her altitude. Above these were the heavy masts,
seen dimly through the mist; between these were spread eight dark lines
of sailors’ clothes, which, with the massive yards above, looked
like part of some ponderous framework built to reach the sky. This
prolongation of the whole dark mass toward the heavens had a portentous
look to those who gazed from below; and when the denser fog sometimes
furled itself away from the topgallant masts, hitherto invisible, and
showed them rising loftier yet, and the tricolor at the mizzen-mast-head
looking down as if from the zenith, then they all seemed to appertain
to something of more than human workmanship; a hundred wild tales of
phantom vessels came up to the imagination, and it was as if that one
gigantic structure were expanding to fill all space from sky to sea.
They were swept past it; the fog closed in; it was necessary to land
near the Fort, and proceed on foot. They walked across the rough
peninsula, while the mist began to disperse again, and they were buoyant
with expectation. As they toiled onward, the fog suddenly met them at
the turn of a lane where it had awaited them, like an enemy. As they
passed into those gray and impalpable arms, the whole world changed
again.
They walked toward the sound of the sea. As they approached it, the dull
hue that lay upon it resembled that of the leaden sky. The two elements
could hardly be distinguished except as the white outlines of the
successive breakers were lifted through the fog. The lines of surf
appeared constantly to multiply upon the beach, and yet, on counting
them, there were never any more. Sometimes, in the distance, masses
of foam rose up like a wall where the horizon ought to be; and, as the
coming waves took form out of the unseen, it seemed as if no phantom
were too vast or shapeless to come rolling in upon their dusky
shoulders.
Presently a frail gleam of something like the ghost of dead sunshine
made them look toward the west. Above the dim roofs of Castle Hill
mansion-house, the sinking sun showed luridly through two rifts of
cloud, and then the swift motion of the nearer vapor veiled both sun and
cloud, and banished them into almost equal remoteness.
Leaving the beach on their right, and passing the high rocks of the
Pirate’s Cave, they presently descended to the water’s edge once more.
The cliffs rose to a distorted height in the dimness; sprays of withered
grass nodded along the edge, like Ossian’s spectres. Light seemed to be
vanishing from the universe, leaving them alone with the sea. And when
a solitary loon uttered his wild cry, and rising, sped away into
the distance, it was as if life were following light into an equal
annihilation. That sense of vague terror, with which the ocean sometimes
controls the fancy, began to lay its grasp on them. They remembered that
Emilia, in speaking once of her intense shrinking from death, had said
that the sea was the only thing from which she would not fear to meet
it.
Fog exaggerates both for eye and ear; it is always a sounding-board for
the billows; and in this case, as often happens, the roar did not appear
to proceed from the waves themselves, but from some source in the unseen
horizon, as if the spectators were shut within a beleaguered fortress,
and this thundering noise came from an impetuous enemy outside. Ever
and anon there was a distinct crash of heavier sound, as if some special
barricade had at length been beaten in, and the garrison must look to
their inner defences.
The tide was unusually high, and scarcely receded with the ebb, though
the surf increased; the waves came in with constant rush and wail, and
with an ominous rattle of pebbles on the little beaches, beneath the
powerful suction of the undertow; and there were more and more of those
muffled throbs along the shore which tell of coming danger as plainly as
minute-guns. With these came mingled that yet more inexplicable humming
which one hears at intervals in such times, like strains of music caught
and tangled in the currents of stormy air,--strains which were perhaps
the filmy thread on which tales of sirens and mermaids were first
strung, and in which, at this time, they would fain recognize the voice
of Emilia.