Laura and her sister sat on one of the sailors’ chests that we had sent up; Johnson leaned on top of a flour or biscuit barrel that stood on end, with his eyes fixed up on the western sea. There was still a deal of bright curiosity in Laura’s face as her gaze ran over the deck, resting again and again with a sparkle in it upon some lovely fibrine form, some lily-like sea flower, some plant as of green marble; but Lady Monson’s countenance was listless and almost empty of expression. Any astonishment she might have felt was exhausted. I had scarce time after being swayed inboards to take even a swift view of this glittering miracle before she asked me in a voice cold and commanding, yet, I am bound to say, of beauty too—some of the notes soft almost as a flute’s—‘When will the men spread the sail as an awning, Mr. Morison? They should prepare for the night. Darkness speedily comes when the sun is gone, and we are without lights.’
‘The men have worked very well, Lady Monson,’ said I. ‘They will rig up a sail promptly for you, I am sure. I am not in command of them, as of course you know, but they have attended cheerfully to many of my suggestions. They were your husband’s servants, madam.’
‘And therefore mine, if you put it so,’ she answered with an angry flash of her eyes at me.
‘I have no doubt,’ said I, ‘that they will be willing to do any thing you may desire,’ and with that I stepped to the side to see what they were about, with so strong an aversion in me that I could only heartily hope it would never betray me into any more defined expression of it than mere manner might convey.
Laura came to my side as though to observe with me what the men were about, and whispered, ‘She is very trying, Mr. Monson, but bear with her. It will not need a long imprisonment of this kind to tame her.’
‘My dearest,’ said I, ‘I have not a word to say against her. My quarrel is with you.’ She stared at me. ‘I call you Laura! Again and again last night you let me tell you I loved you. By your own admission I am your sweetheart, and yet you call me Mr. Monson.’
‘Oh, I will call you Charles; I never thought of it!’ she exclaimed, blushing rosy. ‘What are the men doing?’ she exclaimed, peering as though engrossed by the movements of the seamen.
Cutbill was winding away at the shell-thickened side of the galleon with an auger; further aft stood Head similarly employed. On a line with my face as I looked down there was a finger-thick coil of water spouting out of the vessel’s side, smoking upon the rocks and streaming away in a rivulet into holes which it overflowed. I explained to Laura the fellows’ employment.
‘They have a notion,’ said I, ‘that there may be treasure contained in the hold of this old galleon, but before they can search they must empty her of the water she is full of. Below there!’ I called.
Finn looked up. ‘I see that you have bored through her,’ said I. ‘Is her side hard?’
‘As stone, sir,’ he answered. ‘The shells come away pretty easy, but her timber’s growed into regular iron.’
I asked him how many holes they were going to pierce. He answered three, that she might be draining handsomely through the night.
‘The sooner we can rig up a sail, Finn, to serve as a shelter, the better,’ I called down to him. ‘When the sun is gone there’ll be nothing to see by. The men will be wanting their supper too; then there’s that lump of a porpoise to be got out of the craft, for we don’t want to be poisoned as well as shipwrecked; and if daylight enough lives after all this,’ I continued, ‘we ought to beach high and dry as much as we can come at to-night that may be washing about out of the yacht down there, in case it should come[310] on to blow. There’s no moving on this island for the holes in it when the darkness falls.’
‘Ay, ay, sir, we’ll be with ye in a jiffy,’ he answered.
‘What think you of this marine show?’ I said to Laura.
‘It is too beautiful to believe real. The mermaids have made a garden of this ship. How lovingly, with what exquisite taste have they decorated these old decks!’
‘Happy for us,’ I exclaimed, ‘that the earthquake should have struck her fair, and brought her, beflowered and bejewelled as she is, to the surface. She is more than an asylum. She compels our attention and comes between us and our thoughts and fears.’
‘Would she float, do you think, if all the water were to be let out of her?’
‘I would not stake a kiss from you, Laura, on it, but unless she is full of petrified cargo and ocean deposit, stones, shells, and so on, I don’t see why she shouldn’t swim, though she might float deep.’
‘Imagine if we could launch her and save our lives by her!’ cried Laura, clasping her hands; then changing her voice and casting down her eyes she added: ‘I must go to Henrietta. She watches me intently. She wonders that I can smile, I dare say; and I wonder too when I think for an instant. Poor Wilfrid! poor Wilfrid! and my maid too, and the others who are lying dead in that calm sea.’
She moved away slowly towards her sister.
I looked about me for a forecastle or maindeck hatch or any signs of an entrance into the silent interior under foot, but the crust of shells and the grass and plants and vegetation concealed everything. Both the front of the poop and that of the short raised quarter-deck seemed inlaid with shells like a grotto. There was doubtless a cabin under the poop, with probably a door off the quarter-deck, and windows in the cabin front to be come at by beating and scraping. It might furnish us with a shelter, but how would it show? What apparel had the sea clothed it with? An emotion of deep awe filled and subdued me when I looked at this ship. I was sufficiently well acquainted with old types of craft to guess the century to which this vessel had belonged, and even supposing her to have been one of the very last of the ships of her particular build and shape, yet even then I might make sure that she could not be of a less age than a hundred and twenty or thirty years, so that I might safely assume that she had been resting in the motionless dark-green depths of this ocean for above a hundred years. She had been a three-masted vessel, but all traces of her mizen-mast had vanished. Her figure made one think of a tub, the sides slightly pressed in. All about her bows was so thickly encrusted with shells that it was impossible to guess the character of the structure there. I traced the outline of a beak or projection at the stem head with a hollow betwixt it and the fore part of the forecastle deck. Little more was to be gathered, for all curves and[311] outlines here were thickened into grotesque bigness of round and surface out of their original proportions and shape by deposits of shells. Indeed, the well in the head was choked with marine vegetation. It was like a square of tropic soil loaded with the eager growths of a fat and irresistible vitality, appearances as of guinea grass, wondrous imitations of tufts of rushes, beds of pink and feathering mosses, star blossoms, thickets of delicate filaments, gorgeous heads in velvet, snake-like trailings, sea-roses, dark satin masses of plants of a crimson colour, and a hundred other such things, with a subsoil of shells, whose dyes glanced through the growth in gleams of purple and orange and pearl and apple-green, in shapes of mitres, harps, volutes, and so forth.
The men now arrived on board; three holes had been pierced in the galleon’s side, and the water hissed with a refreshing sound on to the rocks, intermingled with the faint lipping of the brine that was slowly filtering down the sides from the main-deck. Finn’s first directions were to make an awning of the stay-foresail. The canvas had long ago dried out into its original whiteness, so fiery had been the heat of the sun, and so ardent the temperature of this porous island. The sail was easily spread. The stump of the foremast, as I have before said, was close into the head; the sparkling shaft served as an upright for the head of the sail to be seized to, and the wide foot of it, shelving like the roof of a house, was secured to the bows. For that night, at all events, we chose the forecastle to rest on, partly because we happened to be on it and our provisions were stocked there, and next because the main-deck was still almost awash; and then, again, there was the great porpoise to get rid of, and, in truth, until one could force an entrance into the craft it mattered little at which end of her one lay.
The sun still floated about half an hour above the sea. I had again and again looked yearningly around the firm, light-blue ocean line, but the azure circle ran flawless to either hand the wedge of dark-red gold that floated without a tremble in the dazzle of it under the sun.
‘Nothing can show in this here calm, sir,’ said Finn, as I brought my eyes away from the sea. ‘No use expecting of steam; and, what’s moved by wind ain’t going to hurry itself this weather, sir.’
‘Let’s get supper,’ said I. ‘There should be starlight enough anon, I think, Finn, to enable us to fill a couple of the empty casks with the sweetest of the water that we can find in those holes.
‘It can be managed, I dorn’t doubt,’ said he.
‘These here chests, capt’n,’ exclaimed Cutbill, indicating the three sailors’ boxes that we had hoisted aboard, ‘belonged to O’Connor, Blake, and Tom Wilkinson. How do we stand as consarns our meddling with ’em?’
‘How d’ye suppose, William?’ answered Finn. ‘Use ’em, man, use ’em.’
‘Hain’t the dead got no rights?’ inquired Dowling.
‘Ay, where there’s law, mate,’ responded Finn, with a half-grin at me; ‘but there’s no law on the top crust of an airthquake, and I allow that whatever may come to us in such a place is ourn to do what we like with.’
‘Oh, certainly,’ I cried; ‘who the deuce wants to discuss the subject of law and dead men’s rights here? Overhaul those chests, Dowling, and use whatever you want that you may find in them.’
But one saw the mariner’s prejudices in the way in which the sailors opened and inspected the contents of the boxes. Had they had the handling of a portmanteau of mine or a trunk belonging to Wilfrid they might not have shown themselves so sensitive; but these were the chests of dead shipmates and messmates, of men they had gone aloft with, eaten and drank with, skylarked and enjoyed sailors’ pleasure with, and I saw they felt that they were doing a sort of violence to forecastle traditions by handling the vanished Jacks’ little property without the sort of right to do so which on board ship they would have obtained by a sale of articles at the mast. However, they found tobacco and pipes, which went far towards reconciling them towards Finn’s theory of appropriation. They also met with shoes, which were an unspeakable comfort to Dowling and Head, who were barefooted, and in torture with every step they took from the sharp edges and points of shells. There were rude articles of clothing too, which, when dried, would give the men a shift.
Well, we got supper, and when the meal was ended, there being yet a little space of daylight in the west, Cutbill, Dowling, and Head went to the beach to roll empty water-casks near to the galleon for filling with such water as we could find that was least brackish, and to drag clear of the wash of the sea any further casks and cases of provisions, wine, and the like, which they might chance to come across. Johnson continued too feeble to be of use. We had three mattresses already as dry as if they had never touched salt water, and one of them I unrolled and made the poor creature lie upon it. Then Finn and I went about to prepare for the night whilst we could still see. We stretched the gaff foresail over the plants and shrubs, placed the other two mattresses on one side of it, covering them with a portion of the sail-cloth that the ladies might have clean couches, and made a roll of the sail at the head of these mattresses to serve as a bolster. Tough as the growth of plants on the deck was, stiff as steel as I had thought at first, they proved brittle for the most part to rough usage, and were speedily broken by our tramping and stamping so as to form a sort of mattress under the sail, and we were grateful enough when by-and-by we came to lie down for the intervention of these petals and leaves and bulbs between our bones and the flint-like surface of the shells, as barbed and jagged as though formed of scissors and thumbscrews.
The sun sank and the darkness of the evening swept over the[313] sea as swiftly as the shadow of a storm, but it proved a glorious dusk, fine, clear, glittering though dark, the sky like cloth of silver, flashful in places with a view of the cross of the southern hemisphere low down to make one contrast this heat and stillness and placid grandeur of constellations with the roaring of Cape Horn and the rush of the mountain-high surge, down upon which that divinely planted symbol was gazing with trembling eyes. Nothing sounded save the plashing of the fountains of water spouting from the sides of the galleon, and the soft, cat-like breathing of the black line of sea sliding up and down the beach.
The men had made short work of filling the casks; and leaving them where they stood for the night, had clambered afresh to the forecastle. It was now too dark to deal with the porpoise; so we agreed to let the great thing rest till the morning. I and one or two of the others had tinder-boxes, and the means therefore of procuring a light, but we were without candles or lantern. This was a hardship in the absence of the moon that rose so late as to be worthless to us and that would be a new moon presently without light; though if I thought of that it was only to hope in God’s name that the rise of the silver paring would find us safe on board some ship homeward bound.
We were unable to distinguish more of one another than the vague outlines of our figures, and this only against the stars over the crested height of bulwark, for the sail we had spread as an awning deepened the gloom; the growths on the galleon’s decks were black, and the shadows lay very thick to the height of the rail where the spangled atmosphere glistened to the edge of the stretched sail overhead. The faces of Laura and her sister showed in a dream-like glimmer. Finn and I had made a little barricade of casks, cases, and the like betwixt the mattresses on which the ladies were to lie and the other part of the forecastle, that they might enjoy the trifling privacy such an arrangement as this could furnish them with. The men formed into a group round about the mattress where Johnson lay, and lighted the pipes which they had been fortunate enough to meet with in the seamen’s chests. As they sucked hard at the bowls the glowing tobacco would cast a faint coming and going light upon their faces. They subdued their voices out of respect to us, and their tones ran along in a half-smothered growl. Much of their talk was about the yacht, her loss, their drowned mates, and the like. I sat beside Laura, with Lady Monson seated at a little distance from her sister, and we often hushed our own whispers to listen to the men. Their superstitions were stirred by their situation. This galleon lay under the stars, a huge looming mystery, vomited but a little while since from the vast depths of yonder black ocean; and now that the night had come her presence, her aspect, the stillness in her of the hushed, unconjecturable, fathomless liquid solitude out of which she had been hurled, stirred them to their souls. I could tell that by the superstitious character of their talk. They told stories of[314] their drowned shipmates’ behaviour on the preceding day—repeated remarks to which nothing but death could give the slightest significance. Johnson in a feeble voice from his mattress said that O’Connor half an hour before the yacht struck told him that he felt very uneasy, and that he’d give all he owned if there were a Roman Catholic priest on board that he might confess to him. He had led a sinful life, and he had made up his mind to give up the sea and to find work if he could in a religious house. ‘I thought it queer,’ added Johnson in accents so weak that they were painful to listen to, ‘that a chap like that there O’Connor, who was always a-bragging and a-grinning and joking, should grow troubled with his conscience all on a sudden. Never knew he was a Papish till he got lamenting that there warn’t a priest aboard to confess to.’
‘Mates,’ said Finn, whose voice sounded hollow in the darkness, ‘when death’s a-coming for a man he’ll often hail him, sometimes a good bit afore he arrives. The sperrit has ears, and it’s them that hears him, men. O’Connor had heard that hail, but only the secret parts in him onderstood it, and they set him a commiserating of himself for having lived sinfully, and started him on craving for some chap as he at all events could reckon holy, t’whom he could tell how bad he’d been. Though what good the spinning of a long yarn about his hevil ways into an old chap’s ear was going to do him, I’m not here to explain.’
Then Cutbill had something to tell of poor old Jacob Crimp, and Head of a shipmate whose name I forget. But they rumbled away presently from depressing topics into the more cheerful consideration of the contents of the galleon’s hold. I sat hand in hand with Laura listening.
‘This time yesterday,’ said I, ‘the cabin of the “Bride” was a blaze of light. I see the dinner table sparkling with glass and silver, the rich carpet, the elegant hangings, the lustrous glance of mirrors. What is there that makes life so dreamlike and unreal as the ocean? The reality of one moment is in a breath made a vision, a memory of in the next. The noble fabric of a ship melts like a snowflake, and her people vanish as utterly as though they had been transformed into spirits.’
‘Fire will destroy more completely than the ocean!’ exclaimed Lady Monson.
‘I think not,’ said I; ‘fire leaves ashes, the sea nothing.’
‘To the eye,’ said Lady Monson.
‘This time to-morrow we may be sailing home, Charles,’ said Laura.
‘Heaven grant it! Give me once more, Laura, the pavements of Piccadilly under my feet, and I believe there is no man in all England eloquent enough to persuade me that what we have undergone from the hour of our departure in the “Bride” to the hour of our return in the whatever her name may prove actually happened.’
‘But I am real,’ she whispered, and I felt her hand tremble in mine.
I pressed her fingers to my lips. Had Lady Monson been out of hearing I should have known what to say. I tried to put a cheerful face upon our perilous and extraordinary position, but I found it absolutely impossible to talk of anything else than our chances of escape, how long we were to be imprisoned, Wilfrid’s death, the destruction of the yacht, incidents of the voyage, and the like. I spoke freely of these matters, caring little for Lady Monson’s presence. One of the men in talking with the others said something about the ‘Eliza Robbins,’ and Laura, turning to her sister, exclaimed:
‘I hope some other ship may take us off. How could you have endured such a horrid atmosphere, Henrietta, even for the short time you lived on board her?’
But to this her ladyship deigned no reply; her silence was ominous, full of wrath. I can imagine that she abhorred her sister at that moment for recalling that ship, and the infamous withering memories which the mere utterance of the name carried with it. She rose as though to go to the galleon’s side, but sat again after the first stride, finding the deck with its slippery and cutting shells and its tripping interlacery of growths too ugly a platform to traverse in the dark. I had hoped that she would break through the husk of sulkiness, haughtiness, selfishness with which she had sheathed herself for such comfort as Laura might have obtained from some little show in her sister of geniality and humanity and sympathetic perception of the dire disaster that had befallen us. There was indeed a time that evening when I believed her temper was mending; for during some interval of our listening to the conversation of the sailors Laura spoke of Muffin, of the horror and fear that had possessed him that night of the severe squall when I found him on his knees, his detestation of the sea, his eagerness to get home, his tricks to terrify Wilfrid into altering the yacht’s course, and how the poor wretch’s struggles in that way seemed now justified by his being drowned, ‘so much so,’ added Laura, ‘that I cannot bear to think of the unfortunate fellow having been whipped by the men.’
On hearing this, Lady Monson began to ask questions. Apparently she had been ignorant until now that Muffin was on board the ‘Bride.’ Naturally, she perfectly well remembered him, for the man was her husband’s valet some time before she ran off with the Colonel. Her inquiries led to Laura telling her of the tricks that Muffin had played. The girl’s voice faltered when she spoke of the phosphoric writing on the cabin wall.
‘What words did Muffin write?’ asked Lady Monson.
‘Oh, Henrietta!’ exclaimed Laura, who paused to a tremulous sigh, and then added, ‘He wrote, “Return to baby.”’
I might have imagined there would be something in this to have silenced her ladyship for a while, but apparently there was as[316] little virtue in thoughts of her child to touch her as in thoughts of her husband. She asked coldly, but in a sort of dictatorial, pressing way, as though eager to scrape over this mention of her child as you might crowd sail on your ship to run her into deep water off a shoal on which her keel is hung: ‘This Muffin was a ventriloquist too, you say?’
I could guess how grieved and shocked Laura was by the tone of her answer. She told her sister how the valet had tricked us with his voice, how he had been sent forward into the forecastle to work as a sailor, and how the men had punished him on discovering that it was he who terrified them. Several times Lady Monson broke into a short laugh, of a music so rich and glad that one might easily have imagined such notes could proceed only from a very angel of a woman. I did not doubt that she sang most ravishingly, and as her laughter fell upon my ear in the great shadow of that galleon, with the narrow breadth of star-clad sky twinkling with blue and green and white-faced orbs, there arose before me the vision of her ladyship seated at the piano with the gallant Colonel Hope-Kennedy turning the pages of the music for her, and sweet, true, unsuspicious little Laura listening well pleased, and my poor half-witted cousin maybe up in the nursery playing with his baby.
However, as I have said, this was but a short burst on Lady Monson’s part. Laura’s reference to the ‘Eliza Robbins’ silenced her; then Laura and I fell still, her hand in mine, and we listened to the men, who were talking of the galleon, and arguing over the state and contents of her hold.
‘Well, treasure ain’t perishable anyhow,’ said Cutbill.
‘That’s all right,’ answered Finn, whose deep sea voice I was glad to hear had regained something of its old heartiness. ‘Gold’s gold whether it’s wan or wan thousand years old. But what I says is, bar treasure, as ye calls it, which ’ee may or may not find—and I hope ye may, I’m sure—there ain’t nothen worth coming at in the inside of a wessel that was founded, quite likely as not, afore George the Fust was born.’
‘But take a cargo of wine,’ said Dowling. ‘I’ve been told that these here galleons was often chock ablock with wines and sperrits of fust-rate quality. The longer ’ee keep wine the more waluable it becomes.’
‘If there’s nought but wine,’ said Cutbill, ‘better put on a clean shirt, mate, and tarn in. There’ll be nothen in any cask under these here hatches that worn’t have become salt water after all them years. Dorn’t go and smile in your dreams to the notion that there’ll be anything fit to drink below.’
‘How long’s she going to take to drain out, I wonder?’ said Head.
‘I allow she’ll be empty by the time you’ve lifted the hatches,’ answered Finn; ‘that’ll be a job to test the beef in ’ee, lads.’
‘Well,’ cried Dowling, ‘there’ll be no leaving this here island, as far as I’m consarned, till the old hooker’s been overhauled. Skin[317] me, capt’n, if there mayn’t be enough aboard to let a man up ashore as a gentleman for life, and here sits a sailor as wants what he can get. I’ve lost all my clothes and a matter of three pun fifteen on top of them. Blarst the sea, says I!’
‘Belay that,’ growled Cutbill; ‘recollect who’s a listening onto ye.’
‘How long’s this island going to remain in the road?’ asked Head; ‘do it always mean to stop here? They’ll have to put a lighthouse upon it.’
‘Likely as not, it’ll go down just as it came up,’ answered the sick voice of Johnson.
Laura started. ‘That may not be an idle fancy, Charles,’ she whispered.
‘Do you think this hulk would float, captain,’ I called out, ‘if the head of this rock were to subside, as Johnson yonder suggests?’
‘Well, she ain’t buried, sir!’ he exclaimed; ‘there’s nothen to stop her from remaining behind, that I can see, if she’s buoyant enough to swim. If she’s pretty nigh hollow she’ll do it, I allow; for look at the shape of her. As there’s a chance of such a thing, then, when she’s done draining, we’d better plug the holes we’ve made.’
‘I’ll see to that,’ said Dowling; ‘there’s no leaving of her with me till I’ve seen what’s inside of her.’
Here Head delivered a yawn like a howl.
‘It will be proper to keep a look-out, I suppose, sir,’ said Finn.
‘Why, yes,’ I answered; ‘the night is silent enough now, but there may come a breeze of wind at any minute and bring along a ship, and one pair of eyes at least must be on the watch.’
‘There’s nothen aboard to make a flare with,’ said Cutbill; ‘a pity. This here’s a speck of rock to miss a short way off in the dark.’
‘It cannot be helped,’ I exclaimed; ‘we have all of us done a hard day’s work since dawn, and there is always in a miserable business of this sort some job or other that must be kept waiting. There’s plenty of stuff on the beach to collect to-morrow. As for to-night, a breeze may come, as I have said, but mark how hotly those stars burn. There’ll be but little air stirring, I fear.’
‘There are four of us to keep a look-out, lads,’ said Finn.
‘Five,’ I interrupted; ‘I’m one of you. I’ll stand my watch!’
‘Very good, sir,’ said Finn. ‘An hour and a half apiece. That’ll bring us fair on to daybreak.’
‘There ain’t no timepiece aboard that’s going,’ said Head; ‘how’s a man to know when his watch is up?’
‘Well, damn it, ye must guess,’ growled Cutbill sulkily and sleepily.
‘I’m the least tired of you all, I believe,’ said I; ‘so with your good leave, lads, I’ll keep the first look-out.’
This was agreed to; the men knocked the ashes out of their pipes, and, with a rough call of ‘Good-night’ to the ladies and myself, lay down upon the sail.
They occupied the port side of the galleon’s forecastle, and made a little huddle of shadows upon the faintness of the canvas, well apart from where the mattresses for the ladies had been placed. Indeed, as you will suppose, the gaff foresail of a schooner of the dimensions of the ‘Bride’ provided a plentiful area of sail-cloth, and the space between the ladies and the sailors could have been considerably widened yet, had the main-deck been dry enough to use.
‘Where am I to lie?’ demanded Lady Monson.
‘Your sister, I am sure, will give you choice of either mattress,’ said I. ‘These casks and cases will keep you as select as though they were the bulkhead of a cabin.’
‘A dreadful bed!’ she cried. ‘How long is it possible for these horrors to last? I am without a single convenience. There is not even a looking-glass. To be chased and hunted down to this!’ she added in a voice under her breath, as though thinking aloud, whilst her respiration was tremulous with passion.
‘I wish the deck was fit to walk on,’ said Laura; ‘I do not feel sleepy. I should like to walk up and down with you, Charles.’
‘It would be worse than pacing a cabbage-field, my dear,’ said I. ‘You are worn out, but will not know it until your head is pillowed. Let me see you comfortable.’
She at once rose, went to the mattress that was nearest the vessel’s side, and seated herself upon it, preparatory to stretching her limbs.
‘I should like that bed,’ said Lady Monson. ‘I suffer terribly from the heat. Your blood runs more coldly than mine, Laura.’
‘Either bed will do for me, Henrietta,’ answered the girl with a pleasant little laugh, and she stepped on to the other couch, and stretched herself along it.
I turned the edge of the sail over her feet, saw that the roll of the canvas made a comfortable bolster for her, and tenderly bidding her ‘Good-night,’ crossed to the other side of the deck, leaving to Lady Monson the task of adjusting her own fine figure, and of snugging herself according to her fancy. It was about nine o’clock by the stars. Now that the men had ceased speaking, and the hush as of slumber had descended upon this galleon, I cannot express how mysterious and awful was the stillness. You heard nothing but the cascading of the water from the holes in the vessel’s side, a soft fountain-like hissing sound, and the stealthy, delicate seething of the sea slipping up and down the honeycombed beach. The men at a little distance away breathed heavily in the deep slumber that had swiftly overtaken them. Once Johnson spoke in a dream, and his disjointed syllables, amid that deep ocean serenity, grated harshly on every nerve. The heavens overhead were blotted out by the stretched space of canvas, but aft the line of the galleon rose, broken and black, against the stars which floated in clouds of silver in the velvet dusk of the sky. The silence seemed like some material thing, creeping,[319] as though it were an atmosphere, to this central speck of rock, out of the remote glistening reaches of the huge circle of the horizon.
But deeper than any silence that could reign betwixt the surface of the earth and the stars was the stillness of the bottom of the ocean that had risen with this galleon, the dumbness which filled the blackness of her stonified interior. Imagination grew active in me as I sent my sleepless eye over the sombre, mysterious loom of the ship to where the narrow deck of the poop went in a gentle acclivity, cone-shaped, to the luminaries which glanced over the short line of her taffrail like the gaze of the spectres of her crew, who would presently be noiselessly creeping over the sides. I figured, and indeed beheld, the ship in the days of her glory, her sides a bright yellow, the grim lips of little ordnance grinning through portholes, the flash of brass swivel-guns upon the line of her poop and quarter-deck rail, her canvas spreading on high, round, spacious, flowing and of a lily-white brightness, enriched by flaring pennants, many ells in length, with figures aft and forward, Spanish ladies in gay and radiant attire, their black eyes shining, their long veils floating on the tropic breeze, grave se?ors in plumed hats, rich cloaks half draping the sheaths of jewel-hilted swords, a priest or two, shaven, sallow, with a bead-like pupil of the eye in the corner of the sockets; the pilot and the captain pacing yonder deck together, and where I was standing, crowds of quaintly-apparelled mariners with long hair and chocolate cheeks, yet with roughest voices rendered melodious by utterance of the majestic dialects of their country—and then I thought of her resting, as I now beheld her, motionless in the tideless, dark-green waters at the bottom of the ocean!—figures of her people, lying, sitting, standing round about her in the attitudes they were drowned in, preserved from decay by the petrifying stagnation of the currentless dark brine.
It was now that I was alone, the deep breathing of sleepers rising from the deck near me, the eyes of my mind quickened by high-strung imagination into perception, vivid as actuality itself, of the visions of this galleon in her sunlit heyday and then in her glory of shells and plants in the unimaginable hush of the fathomless void from which she had emerged, that I fell to thinking gravely and wonderingly over what Johnson, the sick sailor, had said touching the possibility of this island’s sudden disappearance. Of such volcanic upheavals as this I had read and heard again and again. Sometimes the land thus created stood for years; sometimes it vanished within a few hours of its formation.
I particularly recollected a story that I had met with in the ‘Naval Chronicle’; how two ships were in company off a height of land rising sixty feet above the level of the sea, that was uncharted and unknown to the captains of the vessels, though one of them had been in those waters a few weeks before and both men were intimately well-acquainted with the navigation of that tract of ocean; how after masters and crews had been staring, lost[320] in wonder, at the tall, pale, sterile, sugar-loaf acclivity, one of the commanders sent a boat over in charge of his mate, that he might land and return with a report; when, whilst the boat was within a long musket-shot of the island, the land sank softly but swiftly without noise, and with so small a commotion of the sea following the disappearance of the loftiest point of peak, that the darkening of the surface of the ocean with ripples there seemed as no more than the shadow of a current.
This and like yarns ran in my head, and indeed the more I thought of it the more I seemed to fancy that this head of pumice upon which the galleon was seated was of the right sort to crumble down flat all in a minute. Why, think of the height of it! Since those times I believe the plummet has sounded the depths of that part of the equinoctial waters, but in those days the ocean there was held unsearchable. Was it all lava that had been spewed up? some mountain of volcanic vomit, hardened by the brine into an altitude of many thousands of feet from ooze to summit; and hollow as a drum, too, with a mere film of crust on top? Oh God! I mused, wrung from head to foot with a shudder; think of this crust yielding, letting the galleon sink miles down the gigantic shaft of porous stuff, the walls on top yet standing above the water-line, high enough to prevent the sea from rolling into the titanic funnel! Gracious love! figure our being alive when we got to the bottom, and looking up at the mere star of daylight that stared down upon us from the vast distance as the galleon grounded on a bottom deeper than the seat of the hell of the medi?val terrorists!
I shook my head; such a fancy was like to drive me mad—with the sort of possibility of it, too, in its way. Could I have but stirred my stumps I might have been able to walk off something of my mood of horror, but every pace along that deck was like wading and floundering. I went to the high forecastle rail and leaned my arms upon it and looked into the night, and presently the beauty and the serenity and the wide mystery of the dark ocean brimming to the wheeling stars worked in me with the influence of a benediction; my pulse slackened and I grew calm. What could the worst that befel us signify but death? I reflected; and I thought of my cousin sleeping in the black void yonder. The splashing of the water streaming from the holes in the side sounded refreshingly upon the ears. There was a suggestion as of caressing in the tender noise of the dark fingers of the sea blindly and softly pawing the incline of the beach. The atmosphere was hot, but the edge of its fever was blunted by the dew.
Thus passed the time, and when I thought my hour and a half had gone I stepped quietly over to Finn and shook him, and with a sailor’s promptitude he sprang to his feet, understanding, dead as his slumber had been, our situation and arrangements the instant he opened his eyes. My mind was full, nor was I yet sleepy, and I could have talked long with him on the thoughts which had visited me. But to what purpose? There was nothing[321] that he could have suggested. Like others in desperate straits our business was to wait and hope and help ourselves as best we could. I took a peep at Laura before lying down; she lay motionless, sound asleep, breathing regularly. Lady Monson stirred as I was in the act of withdrawing, and laughed low and so oddly that I knew it was a dreamer’s mirth.
I woke from a deep sleep, and opened my eyes against the glare of the risen sun. Death must be like such sleep as that, thought I. I sat up and met Laura’s gaze fixed upon me. She was seated on a seaman’s chest lightly smoothing her hair, and the jewels on her fingers sparkled like dewdrops on the golden fall of her tresses. She looked the better for the night’s rest, her complexion fresher, her eyes freed of the delicate haziness that had yesterday somewhat dimmed their rich violet sparkles; the pale greenish shadow under them, too, was gone. A little past her stood Lady Monson, gazing seawards under the shelter of her hand. Her shape made a very noble figure of a woman against the blue brilliance of atmosphere betwixt the edge of the spread sail and the forecastle rail; the cap she wore I supposed she had found in her sister’s box. Her hair was extraordinarily thick and long and of a lustreless black, and looked a very thunder-cloud upon her back, as I have before said; it put a wild and almost savage spirit into her beauty, which this slender headgear of lace or whatnot somewhat qualified; in fact, she looked a civilised woman with that cap on, but her cheeks were so white as to be painful to see. The full life of her seemed to have entered her eyes; her breast rose and fell slowly, as if her heart beat with labour; yet, slow as every movement in her was, whether in the turn of her head, the droop of her arm, the lifting of her hand, it was in exquisite correspondence with the suggestion of cold dignity and haughty indifference you seemed to find in her form and carriage.
I had a short chat with Laura, and found she had rested well. The men were off the galleon.
‘They have gone to the wreck, I suppose,’ said I, scarce able to see that way, however, for the blinding dazzle of sunshine that made the leagues of eastern ocean as insupportable to the gaze as the luminary himself.
‘The poor man Johnson is dead!’ she exclaimed.
‘Ah! I feared it. I believed I could hear death in his voice when he spoke in his sleep last night.’
‘Cutbill and Head,’ she continued, for she was now well[322] acquainted with the names of the men, ‘have carried his body to bury in the sea past that slope there.’
I sat silent a little. I had all along secretly expected that the man would die, yet the news that he was dead strangely affected me. It might be because he had been amongst the saved, and it seemed hard and cruel that he should perish after having come off with his life out of a conflict that had destroyed robuster men. Then again there was the loneliness of his death, expiring, perhaps, after vainly struggling to make some whispered wants audible to our sleeping ears or to the nodding figure standing at a distance from him on the look-out.
I sent a look round the sea, compassing the blue line as fully as the blaze would permit. The calm was as dead as it had been throughout the night. In the west the heads of a few clouds of the burning hue of polished brass showed with a stare out of a dimness over the sea there. There was bitter loathing of all this deadness and tranquillity in me as I stepped to the side for a sight of Finn down on the beach. What phantom of chance was there for us unless a breeze blew? Dowling was at work below winding with his auger into the galleon’s side. He had made two further holes to starboard, and was now piercing a third.
‘There ain’t anything like the first weight of water in her now, sir,’ he sung out; ‘see how languid these here spurts are as compared to yesterday’s spouting.’
I overhauled the whip that was rove at the end of the derrick, secured the end, and went down hand over hand. My skin felt parched and feverish and thirsty for a dip. ‘I’m off for a plunge,’ I called to Laura, who came to the side to look at me as I slipped down. I found Finn exploring amongst the wreckage on the shore; Cutbill and Head were then coming round from the other side of the island, their heads hung and their feet taking the pumice rocks with funeral strides.
‘How are you, Finn?’ I called to him.
‘Thank God, I feel myself again. The pain in my side’s gone, and my breath comes easy. Poor Johnson’s dead.’
‘I know.’
‘Something whilst he was in the water struck agin his heart. But arter all, sir, what does it matter, since a man can die but once, where he takes his header from?’
‘We must suffer nothing to depress us, Finn. Good morning, Cutbill. How are you, Head? A sad job for sunrise to turn you to, men.’
‘Poor Sammy!’ exclaimed Cutbill in a deep sea growl full of emotion, and a slight lift of his face, smothered in whiskers, to the sky. ‘He’s been hailed for the last time. He’s gone where there’s no more tarning out.’
‘He’s lived hard, worked hard, and died hard,’ said Head, bringing his eyes in a squint to my face, ‘and it would be hard if he’s gone to hell arter all.’
‘Stow all sarmons,’ cried Finn; ‘let’s see now if there’s anything come ashore worth having.’
I left them wading and searching, and trudging to the other side of the island, stripped, and advanced into the water to the height of my hips, not daring to venture further for fear of sharks. The plunge made a new man of me, and when I returned it was with a good appetite and a hearty disposition to help in any sort of work that might advantage us. The men met with a barrel of pork and another case of potted meats. The water was as pure and bright as glass over the shelving beach, and what lay near to on the fluctuating sulphur-coloured bottom was as plain as though viewed through air. We were thus enabled to rescue much of what in thick water we should never have seen; amongst other matters, three cases of champagne, a case of bottled beer, a small cask of brandy, and one or two other articles which had formed a portion of the forecastle stores, not to mention many armsful of stuff for making flares with, should a vessel show in the night. Of the cabin provisions we recovered but little, owing to their having been stowed aft for the most part, where the yacht had been literally torn to pieces. The bows of the vessel stood gaunt and bare in the light-blue water. I saw poor Finn gazing at the remains until his eyes moistened, and he broke away with a deep sigh and a dreary look at me. I never could have imagined that anything inanimate could have appealed so humanly as that mutilated fragment of a fabric that but a little while before shone as sweet and stately a figure upon the sea as any structure of her size that ever lifted a snow-white spire to the sky.
It was after ten o’clock, as was to be guessed by the sun’s height, when we started to break into the interior of the galleon. We had worked hard since sunrise; filled another brace of empty casks, which we had found on the beach, with water out of the holes in the rocks; hoisted these casks aboard along with the other provisions and spirits we had fallen in with; got our breakfast; then with prodigious labour and difficulty had turned the great dead porpoise out of the ship by clapping tackles to it and prizing it up with a small studding-sail boom that served as a handspike. The main-deck was now as dry as the poop or forecastle. Lady Monson remained seated under the awning. Laura, on the other hand, with a handkerchief tied over her head, reckless of her complexion, wandered like a child about the decks, examining the many gorgeous sea-plants, bending her fair face to an iridescent cluster of shells, gazing with rounded eyes and an expression of charming wonder at some flat, flint-coloured, snake-like creeper as if she believed it lived. The wondrous marine parterre seemed the richer for the presence and movements of the lustrous-haired girl, as a rose appears to glow into darker and finer beauty when lifted to some lovely face.
We resolved to attack the cabin entrance first, but it was hard to tell where the door lay, whether in the front of the poop or of[324] the quarter-deck. There were steps leading from one deck to the other on either hand close against the bulwarks, as you easily guessed by the incline and appearance of the thick moulding of shells upon them. Cutbill was for attacking the quarter-deck front, but Finn agreed with me that the state cabin would lie under the poop, and that the door to it, therefore, would be somewhere in the front of that deck. To this part, then, we carried the tool-chest. There were five of us; every man seized an implement and to it we fell, scraping, hammering, chipping, prizing. Dowling and Head worked as though they had already caught sight of the glitter of precious metal within. Some of the shelly adhesions were hard as rock, some broke away easily in lumps, like bricks from a house that is being demolished; but the thickness was staggering, it was a growth of layer upon layer, and every man had a great mound of splintered or concreted shells at his feet when the front at which we worked was still heavily coated. There seemed a sort of sacrilege in the destruction of so much beauty. Again and again I would pause to admire a shape of exquisite grace, a form of glorious hue, before striking; and then it seemed to me as I toiled, many fancies crowding into my head now that I looked close into this glorious incrustation, that it was impossible this galleon could have been sunk to the depth I had first imagined. Surely no such rainbow-like life as I now witnessed existed in the black and tideless depths, countless fathoms out of reach of the longest and fiercest lance of light the sun could dart. No, she had probably settled down on some hilltop within measurable distance of the surface, on some submarine volcanic eminence where the vitality of the deep was all about her.
We came to woodwork at last, or what had been wood. It was fossilised timber, and the blows of a hammer rang upon it as though an anvil was struck.
‘Here’s where the door is,’ roared Cutbill.
We saw the line of what was manifestly a doorway showing in a space clear of shells, and in a moment we all fell upon it and presently laid it bare—a little door about five feet high close against the starboard heap of shells which buried the poop ladder there.
‘Don’t smash it if ’ee can help it,’ called out Finn.
But it would not yield to any sort of coaxing short of Cutbill’s thunderous hammer, which he swung with such Herculean muscle, that after half a dozen blows the door went to pieces and tumbled down with a clatter as of the fragments of iron. It was pitch dark inside, of course, but for that we were prepared. Dowling and Head were for thrusting in at once.
‘Back!’ bawled Finn. ‘What sort of air for breathing d’ye think this is after being bottled up afore your great-grandmothers was born.’
Yet for my part, though I stood close, I tasted nothing foul. The first breath of the black atmosphere came out with a wintry[325] edge of ice, and the chill of it went sifting into the sultry daylight of the open air till I saw Laura, who stood some little distance away watching us, recoil from the contact of it.
‘There’s nothing to be done in there without a light of some kind,’ said I. ‘How was this cabin illuminated? From the deck, I presume, as well as by portholes.’
‘Let me go and see, sir,’ said Finn.
The gang of us armed with tools crawled up the line of shells against the door and gained the poop-deck. There was a coffin-shaped heap of glittering incrustation close to where the mizzen-mast had probably stood; the form of it indicated a buried skylight. We fell upon it, and after we had chipped and hammered for some quarter of an hour, the mass of it broke away, and went thundering into the cabin below. The sweep of cold air that rose drove us back.
‘Casements of this skylight were blown out, I reckon, when she settled,’ said Finn; ‘’stonishing how them shells should have filled up the cavity without anything to settle on.’
‘Weeds and plants stretched themselves across, maybe,’ said I, ‘and made a platform for them.’
We returned to the quarter-deck but waited awhile before entering the cabin, that the atmosphere might have time to sweeten. Thickly as the upper works of the vessel were coated I suspected that they would be sieve-like in some places from the circumstance of our finding no water in the cabin. I put my head into the door, fetched a breath, and finding nothing noxious in the atmosphere, exclaimed, ‘We may enter now with safety, I believe.’ The interior lay very clearly revealed. A sunbeam shone through the deck aperture, and the cold, drowned, amazing interior lay bathed in a delicate silver haze of the morning light. I felt a deeper awe as I stood looking about me than any vault in which the dead had been lying for centuries could have inspired. The hue of the walls was that of ashes. It was the ancient living-room of the ship and went the whole width of her, and in length ran from the front of the deck through which we had broken our way to the moulding of the castle-like pink-shaped stern, the planks sloping with a considerable spring or rise. It had been a spacious sea-chamber in its day. There were here and there incrustations in patches of limpet-like shells upon the sides and upper deck; under foot was a deal of sand with dead weeds, no hint of the vegetation that showed without. There were fragments of wreckage here and there which I took to be the remains of the furniture of the place; it had mostly washed aft, as though the vessel had settled by the stern.
Up in a corner on the port side that lay somewhat darksome, on a line with the door, were a couple of skeletons with their arms round each other’s neck. They seemed to stand erect, but in fact they rested with a slight inclination against the scantling of the cabin front. Some slender remains of apparel clung to the ribs and shoulder-bones, and a small scattering of like fragments[326] lay at their feet, as though shaken to the deck with the jarring of the fabric by the volcanic stroke that had uphove her.
‘Hearts my life,’ murmured Finn. ‘What a hobject to come across! Why, they’ve been men!’
‘A man and a woman more like,’ said Cutbill, ‘a-taking a last farewell as the ship goes down.’
‘May I come in, Charles?’ exclaimed Laura, putting her head into the door.
She advanced as she spoke, but her eye instantly caught the embracing skeletons. She stopped dead and recoiled, and stood staring as if fascinated.
‘Not the fittest sight in the world for you, Laura,’ said I, taking her hand to lead her forth.
‘They were living beings once, Charles!’ she exclaimed, drawing a deep breath, and slightly resisting my gentle drawing of her to the door.
‘Ay, red hearts beat in them, passions thrilled through them, and love would still seem with them. What were they? Husband and wife—father and daughter—or sweethearts going to their grave in an embrace?’
She shuddered and continued to gaze. Ah, my God! the irony of those skeletons’ posture,—the grin of each skull as though in mirthless derision of the endearing, caressing grasp of the long and stirless arms!
‘Oh, Charles!’ exclaimed Laura in a whisper of awe and grief, ‘is love no more than that?’
‘Yes, love is more than that,’ I answered softly, conducting her, now no longer reluctant, to the door; ‘there is a noble saying, Where we are death is not; where death is we are not. Death is yonder and so love is not. But that love lives, horrible as the symbol of it is—it lives, let us believe! and where it is death is not. Would Lady Monson like to view this sight?’
‘It is a moral to break her heart,’ she answered; ‘she would not come.’
She went towards her sister thoughtfully.
‘There’s nothing here, men,’ said I, returning.
‘Them poor covies’ll frighten the ladies,’ said Dowling, eyeing the skeletons with his head on one side; ‘better turn ’em out of this.’
‘Let them rest,’ said I. ‘The ladies will not choose this cabin now to lie in.’
‘If them bones which are a-hugging one another so fondly to-day could talk,’ said Cutbill, ‘what a yarn they’d spin!’
‘Pooh,’ said I, ‘I’ve had enough of this cabin,’ and with that I walked right out.
The men followed. It was broiling hot, the sea a vast white gleam tremorlessly circling the island and steeping like quicksilver into the leagues of faint sky; the bronzed brows of the clouds in the west still burned, looming bigger. I prayed heaven there might be[327] wind there. Laura had told her sister of our discovery in the cabin, and when, whilst we sat making a bit of a midday meal, my sweet girl, in a musing, tender way, talked of this shipwreck of a century and a half old as though she would presently speak of that cabin memorial of it so ghastly and yet so touching, Lady Monson imperiously silenced her.
‘Our position is one of horror!’ she exclaimed; ‘do not aggravate it.’
The men, defying the heat, went to work when they had done eating, to search for the main hatch that they might explore the hold. I observed that Finn laboured with vigour. In short the four of them had convinced themselves that there was grand purchase to come at inside this ancient galleon, and they thirsted for a view of the contents of her. I was without their power of sustained labour, was enfeebled by the tingling and roasting of the atmosphere; my sight was pained, too, by the fierce glare on the unsheltered decks; so I plainly told them that I could help them no more for the present, and with that threw myself down on the sail beside the chest on which Laura was seated, and talked with her and sometimes with Lady Monson, though the latter’s manner continued as uninviting as can well be imagined.
However, some hope was excited in me by the spectacle of the slowly growing brass-bright brows of cloud in the west. There was a look of thunder in the rounds of their massive folds, and in any case they promised some sort of change of weather, whilst they soothed the eye by the break they made in the dizzy, winding horizon, and the bald and dazzling stare of the wide heavens brimming with light, which seemed rather to rise from the white metallic mirror of the breathless sea than to gush from the sun that hung almost directly over our heads.
It took the men three hours to find and clear the hatch, and then uproot it. The square of it then lay dark in the deck, and Laura and I went to peer down into it along with the others who leant over it with pale or purple faces. The daylight shone full down and disclosed what at the first glance seemed no more to me than masses of rugged, capriciously heaped piles of shells, with the black gleam of water between, and much delicate festooning of seaweed drooping from the upper deck and from the side, suggesting a sort of gorgeous arras with the intermingling of red and green and grey. One could not see far fore or aft owing to the intervention of the edges of the hatch, but what little of the interior was visible discovered a vegetable growth as astonishing as that which glorified the decks; huge fans, plants exactly resembling the human hand, as though some Titan had fallen prone with lifted arms, bunches of crimson fibre, with other plants indescribable in shape and colour of a prodigious variety, though the growths were mainly from the ceiling, or upon the bends where the sides of the galleon rounded to her keel.
‘All them heaps’ll signify cargo,’ said Dowling.
‘No doubt,’ said I; ‘but how is it to be got at?’
‘Mr. Monson, sir,’ exclaimed Finn, ‘you’re a scholar, and will know more about the likes of such craft as this than us plain sailor-men. What does your honour think? Was this vessel a plate ship?’
‘I wish I could tell you all you want to know,’ I replied. ‘She was unquestionably a galleon in her day, and a great vessel as tonnage then went—seven hundred tons; what d’ye think, Finn?’
‘Every ounce of it, sir. Look at her beam.’
‘Well, here is a ship that was bound to or from some South American port. She’s too far afield for considerations of the Spanish Main and the towns of the Panama coast. Was treasure carried to or from the cities of the eastern American seaboard? I cannot say. But if she was from round the Horn—which I don’t think likely, for the Manilla galleons clung to the Pacific, and transhipments came to old Spain by way of the Cape—then I should say there may be treasure aboard of her.’
‘Well, I’m going to overhaul her, if I’m here for a twelvemonth,’ cried Dowling.
‘So says I,’ exclaimed Head.
‘Would she float, I wonder,’ said Cutbill, ‘when the water’s gone out of her?’
‘I’ll offer no opinion on that,’ said I, laughing. ‘I hope I may not be on board should it come to a trial.’
‘If she was full up with cargo it must have wasted a vast,’ remarked Head.
‘Where did these here Spaniards keep their bullion?’ exclaimed Finn, stroking down his long cheek-bones.
‘Why down aft under the capt’n’s cabin. They was leary old chaps; they wouldn’t stow it forrads or amidships,’ exclaimed Cutbill.
‘All the water will have run out of her by to-morrow morning, I allow,’ said Finn; ‘but there’s no sarching of her with it up over a man’s head.’
‘I wish this deck were sheltered,’ said Laura. ‘What a glorious scene! I could look at it for hours. But the sun pains me.’
I took her hand, and we returned together to the shadow of the sail spread over the forecastle, leaving the four men talking and arguing and staring down, dodging with their heads to send greedy looks into the gloom past the hatch. But there was nothing to be done till the ship was clear of water, as Finn had said, and presently they came forward and lighted their pipes, seating themselves at a respectful distance from us; but all their talk ran upon the treasure they were likely to meet with, and though I would sometimes catch a half-look from Finn, as though my presence somewhat subdued him, yet I saw that at heart he was as hot and as full of expectation as the others.
The clouds had risen a third of the way to the zenith, when the sun struck his fiery orb into them and disappeared, turning them as black as thunder against the heaven of blood-red light that lingered long in waving folds as though the atmosphere were incandescent. Then the lightning showed in zigzag lines of sparkling violet, though all remained hushed whilst the sea went spreading in a sheet of glass that melted out of its crimson dye into a whitish blue in the clear east.
‘Should it come on to blow,’ said I to Laura, ‘this sail over our heads will yield us no shelter. We shall have to betake ourselves to the cabin.’
‘With two skeletons in it?’ said Lady Monson sarcastically.
‘We shall not see them,’ I answered, ‘and skeletons cannot hurt us.’
‘We shall see them by the lightning,’ exclaimed Laura, ‘and they will be very dreadful!’
‘I would rather remain in the storm,’ said Lady Monson.
‘But if those figures are carried out of the cabin,’ said I, ‘you will not object to take shelter in it.’
‘I would rather die,’ she said, ‘than enter that part of this horrid ship.’
‘Well,’ said I, mildly, ‘we will first see what is going to happen.’
At half-past five or thereabouts we got what the sailors would have called our supper. There was indeed plenty to eat, enough to last us some weeks, with husbandry. All the casked meat, it is true, was uncooked, but enough galley utensils had come ashore—a big kettle, I remember, and a couple of saucepans—to enable us to boil our pork and beef when our stock of preserved food should be exhausted. Our supply of water, however, justified uneasiness. One’s thirst was incessant under skies of brass, and on an island whose crust was as hot as the shell of a newly-boiled egg. But then, to be sure, the surface was honeycombed with wells. In a very short time the salt water would have dried out of the deepest of them, and we might hope that the next thunder-shower would yield us drink enough to last out this intolerable imprisonment.
But when was it to end? I stood up to take a view of the sea. The galleon’s forecastle probably showed a height of between thirty and forty feet above the water-line, and one seemed to command a wide prospect of ocean; but not a gleam of the size of a tip of feather met the eye the whole wide stagnant sweep around. The sun was now low in the heart of the dark masses of vapour in the west, a sickly purple shadow underhung the clouds upon the sea and glanced back with an eye of fire to every lightning dart that flashed from above. Overhead the sky had fainted into a sickly hectic, and it was an ugly sallow sort of green down in the east, with a large star there trembling mistily.
‘It’s coming on a black thundering night,’ I heard Cutbill say as he stood up to send a look into the west, with the inverted bowl[330] of a sooty pipe showing past his whisker and a large sweatdrop glancing like a jewel at the end of his nose.
‘There’ll be wind there,’ exclaimed Finn.
‘What signs do you find to read?’ said I.
‘Well, your honour, there’s a haze of rain if ye look at the foot of that smother down there,’ he answered, pointing with the sharp of his hand, ‘and the verse concerning manifestations of that sort is gospel truth: When the rain before the wind, Then your tops’l halliards mind.’
‘If it’s coming on a breeze of wind,’ said Dowling, who like the others felt himself privileged by stress of shipwreck to join freely in any conversation that was going forward, ‘this here sail’ll blow away and we shall lose it,’ meaning the jib that we had stretched as an awning.
‘Pity to lose it,’ exclaimed Finn; ‘shall we take it in, sir, whilst there’s light?’
‘No,’ cried Lady Monson, who probably imagined that if this shelter went she would be driven to the cabin.
Finn knuckled his forehead to her.
‘I’m afraid, Lady Monson,’ said I, ‘that this sail will be carried away by the first puff, and it will be carried into the sea.’
‘If you remove it you leave us without shelter,’ she answered.
‘But we shall be without shelter if the wind removes it,’ said I.
‘Then it cannot be helped,’ she exclaimed, looking at me as though she found me irritating.
‘We shall have to carry this sail aft anyway,’ said I, pointing to the one that was spread upon the forecastle. ‘The first gust of wet will soak it through, and we shall not be able to use it until it is dry for fear of rheumatic fever.’
‘To what part do you wish it carried?’ said Laura.
‘To the only sheltered spot the ship supplies, the cabin,’ I answered.
‘You do not intend that we should sleep there, Charles?’ she cried.
‘We needn’t sleep, my dearest, we can keep wide awake. But will it not be madness to expose one’s self to a violent storm merely because——’
‘Oh, horror!’ interrupted Lady Monson; ‘I shall remain here though the clouds rain burning sulphur.’
‘Finn,’ said I, ‘when you have smoked your pipe out fall to with the others, will you, to get this sail into the cabin, and turn the two silent figures there out of it?’
‘Where are they to go, sir?’
‘Oh, lower them into the hold for to-night. Lady Monson, is your mattress to be left here?’
‘Certainly,’ she answered indignantly; ‘how am I to rest without a mattress?’
‘Only one mattress, then, is to be carried aft, Finn,’ said I. ‘Now bear a hand like good sailor-men whilst there’s daylight.[331] We shall have that blackness yonder bursting down upon us in a squall, then it will be thick as pitch, with decks like a surface of trawlers’ nets to wade through, and yonder main hatch at hand grinning like a man-trap.’
‘Come, lads!’ cried Finn.
The four of them sprang to their feet, rolled up the sail and hauled it aft, singing out a shipboard chorus as they dragged. When they had got it into the cabin, they cut off a big stretch of it which they spread over the open skylight, and secured by weighting the corners heavily with the masses of shell which had been chipped away to come at the aperture. Then Head arrived for Laura’s mattress, flung it over his back and staggered with it, grinning, along to the quarter-deck. Lady Monson looked on, cold, white, but with anger brilliant in her great black eyes.
‘I believed that these men were still my servants to command,’ she exclaimed.
‘I am sure they will obey any order your ladyship may give them,’ said I.
‘They have no right to denude this part of the deck since it is my intention to remain here,’ she exclaimed, drawing her fine figure haughtily erect and surveying me with dislike and temper.
‘Henrietta dear,’ broke in the soft voice of Laura, ‘Mr. Monson instructs them in the interests of all. See how bright the lightning is. You will not be able to remain here. How frightful was the rain when the “Bride” was wrecked!’
‘The strongest man had to turn his back to the wind,’ said I.
Lady Monson, whose eyes had glanced aft at that moment, jumped from the chest on which she was seated and went in a headlong way to the bulwark as though she meant to leap overboard. I could not understand this sudden wild disorder in her till I saw Cutbill, Dowling, and Head, with Finn superintending the business, bearing the pair of embracing skeletons to the main hatch. Laura started and looked away; but there was no absurd demonstration of horror in her. A ghastly sight, indeed, the skeleton twain made, dreadfuller objects to behold in the wild, flushed, stormy light of the moment than they had appeared in their twilighted corner of the cabin. The long bones of arms clung like magnets to the skeleton necks, fossilised, I suppose, by the action of the sea into that posture; and thus grimly embracing, whilst they looked with death’s dreadful grin over each other’s shoulder, they were lowered by the sailors down the main hatch.
‘Mr. Monson, sir,’ suddenly bawled Finn, ‘will you and the ladies step this way and see the beautifullest sight mortal eyes ever beheld?’
‘Where is it, Finn?’ I called back to him.
‘In the hold, sir,’ he answered.
‘He cannot mean the skeletons,’ exclaimed Laura.
‘Will you come, Lady Monson?’ I exclaimed.
‘Certainly not,’ she replied from the bulwark, where she[332] stood staring seawards, and answering without turning her head.
Laura seemed a little reluctant. ‘Come, my love,’ I whispered; ‘is not a beautiful sight, even according to Finn’s theory of beauty, worth seeing?’
I took her hand and together we proceeded to the open hatch.
On peeping down, my first instinctive movement was one of recoil. I protest I believed the interior of the hull to be on fire. The whole scene was lighted up by crawling fluctuations, creepings and blinkings of vivid phosphoric flame. It might be that the atmosphere of this storm-laden evening was heavily charged with electricity; yet since the gloom had drawn down I had often cast my eyes upon the sea in the direction where the shadow of the tempest lay and where the water brimmed darkly to the slope of the beach, and therefore had the ocean been phosphorescent even to a small extent I should have observed it; yet no further signs of fire were apparent than a thin dim edging of wire-drawn, greenish light, flickering on the lip of the brine as it stealthily, almost imperceptibly, crept up and down the declivity of the rock. But in this hold the sparkling was so brilliant that every object the eye rested upon showed even to the most delicate details of its conformation, though the hue was uniform (a pale green), so that there was no splendour of tint, nothing but the wonder of a phosphoric revelation, grand, striking, miraculous to my sight, so unimaginable a spectacle was it. It was like, indeed, a glimpse of another world, of a creation absolutely different from all scenes this earth had to submit, as though, in truth, one were taking a peep into some lunar cave rich with stalactites, wondrous with growths which owed nothing to the sun, all robed with the colour of death—the pale pearl of the moonbeam!
Laura, whose hand grasped my arm, held her breath.
‘Did ever man see the like of such a thing afore!’ exclaimed Finn in an awed voice, as though amazement were of slow growth in him.
Immediately on a line with the hatch, resting on a heap of shells, whose summit rose to within an easy jump, lay the two skeletons in that embrace of theirs which was so full of horror, of pathos, of suggestion of anguish. Ah, Heaven, what a light to view them in! And yet they communicated an inexpressibly impressive element of unreality to the picture. It was as though the hand of some sorcerer had lifted a corner of the black curtain of the future and enabled you to catch a glimpse of the secret principality of the King of Terrors.
‘One sees so little of this marvel here,’ exclaimed Laura. ‘How magnificent must be the scene viewed from the depths there!’
‘Have you courage to descend?’ said I.
She was silent a moment, eyeing askant with averted face the two skeletons immediately beneath, then fetching an eager breath of resolution, she said, ‘Yes, I have courage to go—with you.’
‘Finn,’ I exclaimed, ‘this is too grand and incomparable a spectacle to witness only in part. If we are to come off with our lives in this galleon, there,’ said I, pointing into the hold, ‘is the chance of a memory that I should bitterly reproach myself for not grasping and making the most of. Can you lower Miss Laura and myself into that hold on to that dry, smooth heap there, clear of where those figures lie?’
‘Why, yes, your honour, easy as lighting a pipe. William, fetch the chair, will ’ee, and overhaul the whip, and bring ’em along?’
The chair was procured, and a turn taken round the stump of the mainmast. I seated myself and was lowered, then down sank Laura and I lifted her out; a moment after the four seamen sprang from the edge of the hatch. Now indeed we could behold the glowing interior as it deserved to be seen. The galleon was apparently bulk-headed from her forecastle deck down to the keelson, and the fore hold, accessible doubtless by a hatch in the lower forecastle deck, was hidden from us. But aft the vault-like interior stretched in view to plumb with the poop deck, past which nothing of the after hold was to be seen; but the vessel’s great beam and such length of her as we commanded submitted a large area of illuminated wonders, and as you stood gazing around it made you feel as if you were under the sea, as if you had penetrated to the silent lighted hall of a dumb ocean god that was eyeing you, for all you knew, from some ambush of glittering green growth whither he had fled on your approach.
The irradiation was phosphoric, I was sure, by the hue and character of it, but how kindled I could not imagine; the water had sunk low; in the death-like stillness you could hear through the hatchway the sounds of it gushing on to the rocks from the perforations. It lay black with gleams of green fire upon it, deep down amid the billowy sheathing of shell under which we might be sure was secreted such of the cargo as had not been washed out of the vessel. Pendent from the upper deck was a very forest of multitudinous vegetation; the sides, far as the eye could pierce, were thickly covered; the writhings of the grave-like glow quickened the snake-shaped plants, the bulbous forms, the distended fingers as of gigantic hands, green outlines which the imagination easily wrought into the aspect of the heads of men and beasts and such wild sights as one traces in clouds; these writhings vitalised all such sights into an aspect of growing and increasing life; they seemed to stir uneasily, to mop and mow, to elongate and shrink.
‘It’s almost worth being cast away,’ cried Cutbill, ‘to see such a picter as this. Lord, now for a steamer to tow her into port! My precious eyes! what a fortune as a mere sightseeing job!’
‘If there’s treasure aboard there’s where it’ll lie stowed,’ cried Dowling, pointing aft; his figure with his long outstretched arm looking like a drawing in phosphorus. Indeed, in that astonishing light we all had a most unhuman, unearthly appearance. Laura’s[334] hair and skin were blended indistinguishably into a faint greenish outline, in the midst of which her violet eyes glowed black as her sister’s by lamplight. Suddenly I felt her hand tremble upon my arm.
‘I feel a little faint,’ she said softly; ‘the atmosphere here is oppressive—and then those——’ She averted her eyes in a shuddering way from the skeletons.
As she spoke the hatch was flashed into a dazzling blaze of sun-bright light.
‘Quick, lads,’ I cried, ‘or the storm will be on us! Hark, how near the thunder rattles!’
The detonation boomed through the hollow hold as though a broadside had been fired within half a mile of us by a line-of-battle ship.
‘There’s her ladyship a-singing out,’ exclaimed Finn; and sure enough we heard Lady Monson violently calling for her sister.
‘Heaven preserve us! I hope she hain’t been hurt by that flash,’ shouted Cutbill.
‘Up with us, now lads, before it is upon us!’ I cried.
Dowling, seizing the two ends of the whip, went up hand after hand, and in a few moments we were all on deck.
The dim hectic that was lingering in the atmosphere when we entered the hold was now gone; the evening had fallen on a sudden as dark as midnight: it was all as black as factory smoke away west and overhead, but a star still shone weak as a glow-worm in the east. A second flash of lightning, but this time afar, glanced out the figure of Lady Monson standing on the forecastle and calling to Laura.
‘She is not hurt!’ I exclaimed.
‘I am coming, Henrietta,’ said Laura.
‘I shall die if I am left alone here!’ cried Lady Monson. ‘I believed that that flash just now had struck me blind.’
‘Keep hold of my arm, Laura,’ said I, ‘and walk as if the deck were filled with snakes.’
We cautiously stepped the wild growths of the planks, rendered as dangerous as the holes outside of the rocks by the dusk, and approached Lady Monson.
‘May I conduct you to the cabin?’ said I.
‘I would rather remain here,’ she answered; but there was no longer the old note of imperious determination in her voice. In fact it was easy to see that she did not care to be alone when the[335] lightning was fierce and when a heavy storm of wet and wind was threatened.
‘Shall we take in this here sail, sir?’ cried Finn from the other side of the deck, ‘before it’s blown away?’
‘No; keep all fast, Finn,’ said I; ‘her ladyship desires to remain here.’
‘Are you going to stop with me, Laura?’ said Lady Monson.
‘Suffer me to answer for Miss Jennings,’ I exclaimed. ‘I make myself answerable for her health and comfort. I could not endure that she should be exposed when there is a safe and dry shelter within a biscuit-toss of us.’
Just then was a blinding leap of lightning; the electric spark seemed to flash sheer from the western confines to the eastern star, scoring the black firmament with a line of fire that was like the splitting of it. A mighty blast of thunder followed.
‘Hark!’ I cried, as the echoes of it went roaring and rolling into the distance. My ear had caught a rushing and hissing noise, and looking into the direction of the sea, over which the thick of the tempest was hanging, I saw what seemed a line of light approaching us.
‘Rain!’ I shouted, ‘flashing the phosphorescent water up into flame.’
‘No, sir, no!’ roared Cutbill; ‘it’s wind, sir, wind! ’Tis the boiling of the water that looks like fire.’
He was right. An instant’s listening enabled me to catch the yell of the squall sounding in the distance like a moaning sort of whistling through the seething of the ploughed and lacerated waters.
‘Laura, give me your hand,’ I cried. ‘Lady Monson, if you are coming——’
‘I will accompany you,’ she answered, and very nimbly, and much to my astonishment, she slipped her hand under my arm and clung to me. So! There was yet a little of the true woman remaining in her, and it would necessarily discover itself soonest in moments of terror.
The illuminated square of hatchway not only enabled us to avoid the ugly gap down which it was mighty easy to plump by mistake in the confusion of the blackness and in the bewilderment following upon the blinding playing of the lightning; it threw out a faint haze of light that went sifting into a considerable area over the main deck, so that we were able to make haste without risk; and after a few minutes of floundering, with an interval of groping when we came to the incline of shells which conducted to the quarter-deck, I succeeded in lodging the two ladies fairly in the shelter of the cabin, and not a moment too soon. We were scarce entered when a squall of terrific violence burst upon the little island. It took the galleon with a glare of lightning of noontide brilliance, a roar of thunder, and such a hurricane howling of wind that no tornado ever shrieked under the heavens more deafeningly.[336] One by one the men arrived. The lightning was so continuous that I could see their figures stealing along the deck, and they made for the cabin door by it as directly as though guided by a stretched hand-line.
‘Did you get in the sail?’ I cried to Finn.
‘Lord love ’ee, sir,’ he roared, ‘it fled to the first blast like a puff of baccy smoke.’
‘Hark to the sea a-getting up!’ said Dowling. ‘Here’s a breeze to start this old waggin. Stand by for a slide, says I. I wish them holes was plugged.’
‘Belay, you old owl,’ grumbled Cutbill hoarsely; ‘ain’t there blue lights enough here without you hanging of more out? There’ll be no sliding with this here hulk onless it’s to the bottom when it’s time for her to go.’
Nevertheless the sea had risen as if by magic. The swift heaping up of it was the stranger because there had been no preceding swell. The first of the squall had swept over a sheet of water polished as any mirror without a heave, as might have been seen by a glance at the island beach, where the edge of the ocean was scarce breathing. Now the shrilling and screaming of the wind was filled with the noise of ploughed and coiling surges dissolving in masses upon the rocks from which they recoiled with a horrible hissing and ringing sound. The continual electric play filled the cabin with light as it glittered upon the sail over the skylight above, or coloured the black square of the door with violet and green and golden brilliance. It was true tropic lightning, a heaven of racing flames, and the thunder a continuous roll, one burst following another till the explosions seemed blent into a uniform roar.
Lady Monson had seated herself on Laura’s mattress. My dear girl and I reposed upon a roll of the sail; the men had flung themselves down, one leaning his head upon his elbow, another Lascar fashion, a third sitting upright with his arms folded. There were no wonders in this cabin as in the hold, no marvellous and beautiful conformations, self-luminous as one might say, and making a greenish moonlight radiance of their own. Yet the interior seemed the wilder to the imagination for its very nakedness, for the austere desolation of it as it glanced out to the levin brand to its castle-shaped confines. It forced fancy to do its own work, to revitalise it with the ghostly shapes of beings that in life had filled it, to regarnish it with the feudal furniture of its age. I was heartily thankful that the two skeletons had been turned out. By every flash I could see Lady Monson’s black eyes roaming wildly, and though I might have counted upon Laura’s spirit whilst I was by her side and held her hand, I could have reckoned with equal assurance upon some wretched distracting display in her sister, had the two embracing skeletons remained in yonder corner to serve as a moral for the motive of this voyage, to be witnessed by the illumination of the lightning, and to add a horror of their own to the[337] sound of the thunder, to the fierce crying of the wind, and to the boiling of the beating seas.
‘I say, Finn,’ I shouted to him, ‘here’s the wind before the rain, my friend—you were mistaken.’
‘My sight ain’t what it was, sir,’ he answered.
‘It’s a commotion to blow something along in sight of us,’ said Cutbill.
‘Wonder if that there hold’s lighted up every night like that?’ said Head; ‘enough to make a man think that there must be sperrits aboard who trims their inwisible lamps when it comes on dark.’
‘Sorry I ain’t got my green spectacles with me,’ said Cutbill; ‘if you was to put them on, mate, you’d see them sperrits dancing.’
‘Proper sort of ball-room, though, ain’t it, miss?’ exclaimed Finn, addressing Laura.
‘How touching,’ said Dowling, who I could see by the lightning pulling out his whiskers as if trimming himself, ‘for them skellingtons to go on a-loving of one another for all these years! Supposing they was husband and wife: then if they was living they’d ha’ given up clinging to each other a long time ago.’
Cutbill hove a curse at him under his breath, but the man did not seem to hear.
‘It’s curious,’ continued this sea philosopher in a salt, thick voice that seemed not a little appropriate to the strong fish-like, marine, drowned smell of this interior, ‘they should go on a-showing of affection which they’d sicken at if they was coated with flesh.’
‘Pray hold your tongue!’ said Lady Monson. ‘Captain Finn, please request that sailor to be silent.’
‘Told ’ee so,’ I heard Cutbill growl; ‘always a-sticking of that hoof of yourn into the wrong biling.’
Scarce had this been muttered when all on a sudden the squall ceased; there fell a black, dead calm; no more lightning played, not a murmur of thunder sounded; there was nothing to be heard but the roar of the near surf upon the beach and the creaming of seas off the huge area of the angry waters. In its way this sudden cessation, this abrupt, this instant hush on high, was more terrifying than the wildest outbreak of tempest. The lightning had been so continuous that in a manner we had grown used to it, and we had been able to see one another’s faces by it whilst we conversed as though by some lamp that waned and then waxed brilliant to its revolutions. Now we sat plunged in impenetrable blackness, whilst we sat hearkening, to use an Irishism, to the incredible silence of the atmosphere. Not the faintest loom of the galleon could be distinguished through the open door; yet the sheen of the mystic illumination in her hold hovered like a faint green mist over the hatch and dimly touched a little space of the marine growths round about.
‘What’s a-going to happen now?’ cried Finn; but I did not know that he had left the cabin until I heard him calling from the outside, ‘My eye, your honour, here it comes; a shower this time.’
I groped my way out, feeling down with my outstretched hands one of the men who was groping to the door also. The stagnant air was as thick as the fumes of brimstone and oppressively hot. It made one gasp after coming out of the cabin, where it was kept almost cool somehow by the strong weedy and salt-water smell that haunted it. I looked over the rail and saw the sea at the distance of about half a mile away from us, flaming as though it were an ocean of brandy on fire, only that the head of the luminous appearance had as straight a line to the eye as the horizon. But I could now observe how phosphorescent was the sea that, whilst tranquil, had hung a lustreless shadow by marking the vivid flashes of light in the white smother of the froth down in the gloom of the beach and the sharp darting gleams beyond.
I groped back to the cabin, followed by the others, found Laura by the shadow her figure made upon the dim glimmer of the sail and seated myself beside her. Then plump fell the rain. It was just a sheet of descending water, and spite of the fossilised decks being thickened by marine verdure, the hull echoed to the downpour with a noise as distracting and deafening as a goods train passing at full speed close alongside. But the wonder of that rain lay not so much in its weight as in its being electric. It came down black, but it sparkled on striking the decks as though every drop exploded in a blaze. I never witnessed such a sight before, and confess that I was never so frightened by anything in all my life.
‘Why, it’s raining lightning!’ called Head.
‘The vessel will be set on fire!’ cried Lady Monson.
‘Nothen to be afraid of, my lady,’ shouted Cutbill; ‘these fiery falls are common down here. I’ve been rolling up the maintop-garnsail in rain of this sort in the Bay of Bengal when ye’d ha’ thought that the ship had been put together out of lighted brimstone; every rope a streak of flame, and the ocean below as if old Davy Jones was entertaining his friends with a game of snapdragon.’
It was, no doubt, as Cutbill had said; but then there was not only the sight of the fire flashing out along the length of the vessel as far as the doorway permitted the eye to follow the deck, to the roaring, ebony, perpendicular discharge of the clouds; there was the tremendous thought of our being perched on the head of a newly-formed volcanic rock, that had leapt into existence on such another night as this. Suppose it sank under us! Here were all necessary conditions of atmosphere, at least, to justify dread of such a thing. Would the ship float? Was she buoyant enough to tear her keel from the rock and outlive the whirlpool or gulf which might follow the descent of a mountain of lava of whose dimen[339]sions it was impossible to form a conception? But she had six holes in her; and then, again, there was still plenty of water in the hold, whose volume must already have been further increased—rapidly and greatly increased—by the cataract that fell in a straight line to the broad yawn of the uprooted hatch.
My consternation was, indeed, so great that I could not speak. I felt Laura press my hand, as though the dew in the palm of it and the tremor of my fingers were hints sufficient to her of the sudden desperate fit of nervousness that possessed me; but I could not find my tongue. Figure being out in a horrible thunderstorm, miles from all shelter, and seized by an overmastering apprehension that the next or the next flash will strike you dead! My torment of mind was of this sort. I philosophised to myself in vain. There was nothing in the consideration that others shared my danger—most often a source of wonderful comfort to a person in peril—that I could but die once, that there were harder deaths than drowning, and the like, to restore me my self-possession. I was unnerved and in a panic of terror, fired afresh by the fearful fancy that had entered my brain on the preceding night of this head of rock gaping and letting us down to God knows what depth. All the time I was feeling with a hideous, nervous intensity with feet, fibres, and instincts for any faint premonitory jar or thrill in the hull to announce that this island was getting under way for the bottom again.
I believe that the electric rain had a deal to do with the insufferable distress of my mind at that time, for when it ceased—with the same startling suddenness that had marked the drop of the wind—I rallied as though to a huge bumper of brandy. My hands were wringing wet, yet cold as though lifted from a bucket of water; the perspiration poured down my face, but my nerves had returned to me.
‘What now is to be the next act of this wild play?’ said I.
‘A breeze of wind, your honour,’ cried Finn out of the black gap of the door; and sure enough I felt the grateful blowing of air cooled by the wet.
The weight of rain had wonderfully deadened the sea, and the surf that a little while ago broke with passion and fury now beat the rocks with a subdued and sulky roaring sound. It had clarified to the westwards somewhat, the dusk was of a thinner and finer sort there, with a look of wind in the texture of the darkness; but it continued a black night, with no other relief to the eye than the pale preternatural haze of light in the square of the main-hatch and the occasional vivid flash of phosphor out at sea. But the wind swept up rapidly, and within a quarter of an hour of the first of its breezing it was blowing hard upon a whole gale; the old galleon hummed to it as though she had all her rigging aloft. In an incredibly short time the sea was making clean breaches over the island, rendering the blackness hoary with a look of snow squalls as it slung its sheets of thrilling and throbbing and hissing[340] spume high into the dark sweep of the gale. One saw the difference between this sort of weather and the night on which the ‘Bride’ had struck. Then the heaviest of the surf left a clear space of rock; but there were times now when the smother came boiling to the very bends of the galleon, striking her till you felt her tremble with huge quivering upheavals of froth over and into her; and it was like being at sea to look over the side and witness the white madness of water raging and beating on either hand. Every now and again a prodigious height of steam-like spray would go yelling up with the sound of a giantess’s scream into the flying darkness from some pipe-like conduit in the porous rock. These columns of water were so luminous with fire, so white with the crystalline smoke into which they were converted by the incalculable weight of the sea sweeping into the apertures, that, dark as it was, one saw them instantly and clearly. They soared with hurricane speed in a straight line, then were arched by the gale like a palm; and if ever the wind brought the falling torrent to our decks the stonified ship shook to the mighty discharge as though the point of land on which she lay were being rent by the force of flame and thunder which created it.
We sat in the cabin in total darkness. It made our condition unspeakably dreadful to be without light. We had tinder-boxes, but there was nothing to set fire to, nothing that would steadily flame and enable us to see; nor was there any prospect now of our being able to make a flare should we catch a glimpse of a ship, for what before would have made a fine bonfire was soaked through. It was up to a man’s knees on the main-deck, and the cabin would have been flooded but for the sharp spring or rise of the planks from the poop front to the stern. Such darkness as we sat in was like being blind. There was nothing to be seen through the door but pale clouds of spray flying through the air. Just the faintest outline of our figures upon the white ground of the sail was visible, but so dim, so indeterminable as to seem but a mere cheat of the fancy. A lamp or a candle would have rendered our condition less intolerable. The men could then have made shift to bring some sherry and provisions from the forecastle; the mere toying with food would have served to kill the time. We could have looked upon one another as we conversed, but the blackness of that interior was so profound that it weighed down upon us like the very spirit of dumbness itself. I have often since wondered whether men who are trapped in the bottom of a mine and lie waiting in the blackness there for deliverance—I have often wondered, I say, how long such poor fellows continue to talk to one another. The intervals of silence, I am sure, must rapidly grow greater and greater. There is something in intense darkness in a time of peril that seems to eat all the heart and courage out of a man. The voice appears to fall dead in the opacity as a stone vanishes when hurled at snow.
Cutbill and Finn did their best to keep up our hearts. They[341] spoke of the certainty of this wind bringing a ship along with it. What should we have done without this galleon? they asked; but for the shelter it provided us with we should have been swept like smoke by the seas off the rocks. There was no fear, they said, of the old hooker not holding together. She was bound into one piece by the brine that had made a stone of her, and by the coating of shells, and if all ships afloat were as staunch as she was there would be an end of underwriting and drowned sailors would be few.
I helped in such talk and did my best, but our spirits could not continue to make headway against the blackness that was rendered yet more subduing by the uproar without, and by our being unable to imagine from moment to moment what was next to happen.
By-and-by the men stretched themselves upon the sail and slept. I passed my arm round Laura’s waist and brought her head to my shoulder, and after a little her regular breathing let me know that she was asleep. Lady Monson was close to us, but she might have been on the forecastle for all that I could distinguish of her. Whether she sat or reclined, whether she slumbered or was wide awake throughout, I could not imagine. She never once spoke. At times my head would nod, but as regularly would I start into wakefulness afresh to the heavy fall of a sheet of water splashing into the main-deck, or to some sudden shock of the blow of a sea either against the galleon’s side or upon the near rock. Nobody had suggested keeping a look-out. Indeed, had ships been passing us every five minutes we could have done nothing.
It was probably about two o’clock in the morning when the gale abated. The wind fell swiftly, as it mostly does in those parallels; a star shone in the black square of the door; the pouring and boiling of waters about us ceased, and the sounds of the sea sank away into the distance of the beach. I should have stepped on deck to take a look round but for Laura, who slumbered stirlessly and most reposefully upon my shoulder, supported by my arm, and I had not the heart to disturb the sweet girl by quitting her. Added to this, I could guess by looking through the doorway that it was still too black to see anything spite of the glance of starlight, and even though I should discern some pallid vision of a running ship, there was nothing dry enough to signal her with. So, being dog-tired, I let drop my chin, and was presently in as deep a sleep as the soundest slumberer of them all.
Deep and deathlike indeed must have been my repose, for somehow I was sensible of being stormily shaken even whilst my wits were still locked up in sleep.
‘Why, Mr. Monson, sir,’ roared Finn in my ear, ‘ye ain’t so sleepy, I hope, as not to care to git away. Hallo, I say, hallo!’
‘Father of mercy, what is it now?’ I cried, terrified in my dazed condition by his bull-like voice.
‘Why, sir,’ he answered, ‘there’s a barque just off the island.[342] She’s seen our signals, and ’s slipping close in with hands at the maintops’l brace.’
‘Ha!’ said I, and I sprang to my feet.
Finn rushed out again. I had been the last of the sleepers apparently, and was the only occupant of the cabin. The sun was risen, but, as I might suppose by his light, he had scarce floated yet to three or four times the height of his diameter. The doorway framed a silvery blue heaven, and the wondrous vegetation of the deck sparkled in fifty gorgeous dyes, streaming wet after the night, and every blob of moisture was jewel-coloured by the particular splendour it rested upon. I darted on to the quarter-deck, looked wildly towards the forecastle, then perceived that my companions had gathered upon the poop. Laura came running to me, heedless of the perilous deck, pointing and speechless, her eyes radiant. There was a long swell washing from the westwards, but to the eastwards of the island the water ran away smooth like the short wake of a great ship, till the shouldering welter swept to it again; and there where the blue heave was, with the sun’s dazzle a little away to the right, was a small barque slightly leaning from the pleasant morning breeze, and sliding slowly but crisply through it with a delicate lift of foam to the ruddy gleam of her sheathing, and her canvas glistening sunwards, bright as the cloths of a pleasure vessel.
‘That’s what we’ve been awaiting for!’ shouted Finn.
I came to a dead halt, looking at the barque with Laura hanging on my arm. There was a fellow in the mainchains swinging a leadline, but it was plain that the weight fell to the full scope without result. Then on a sudden round came the maintopsail yard to us with a flattening in of the cotton white cloths from the folds of the course to the airy film of the tiny sky-sail.
‘Forward, Head! forward, Dowling, as if the devil were in chase of ’ee,’ bawled Finn, ‘and get that whip rove and the chair made fast.’
The men ran to the work. Cutbill was following them.
‘No, William,’ cried Finn; ‘stop where ’ee are a minute. The shipwreck t’other night ain’t left me my old woice. Hist! there’s a chap hailing us.’
‘What island’s that, and who are you and what manner of craft is that you’re aboard of?’ came from the rail of the barque’s quarter-deck in a thin, reed-like, but distinctly audible voice.
Cutbill roared back, ‘We’re the surwiwors of the schooner-yacht ‘Bride,’ cast away three nights ago. Will you take us off, sir?’
‘How many are there of you?’
‘Seven, including two ladies.’
‘Five, Mr. Cutbill, tell ’em,’ shouted Dowling from the forecastle; ‘me and Head stops here.’
‘Have you a boat?’ came from the barque.
‘No, sir,’ roared Cutbill.
‘I’ll send one. Make ready to come along.’
Lady Monson was the first of us to press forward to the forecastle. The main-deck was ankle deep, but we splashed through it like a pack of racing children and gained the fore-end of the galleon without misadventure. I was mad with impatience, and all being ready with the whip and chair I plumped Laura most unceremoniously into the seat, caught hold of the line over her head, and down we were lowered. Up then soared the empty chair and out swung her ladyship, who plunged into my arms and came very near to throwing me in her eagerness to leap out before the rocks were within reach of her feet.
‘Now,’ said I, ‘the men can manage for themselves,’ and with that I seized hold of Lady Monson’s hand, grasped Laura by the arm, and away we trudged to the beach off which the barque was lying. I was still so newly awakened from a very stupor of slumber that I moved and thought as though in a dream. Yet my wits were sufficiently collected to enable me to keep a bright look-out for holes. Again and again I secretly heaped curses upon the hindrance of this porous surface, for it forced us into deviations which seemed to make a league of a distance that would have been but a few minutes’ walk on reasonable soil. The energy of our strides forbade speech; we could only breathe, and what little mind this sudden chance of deliverance had left us we had to exclusively devote to the pitfalls.
They had lowered a boat aboard the barque by the time that we arrived at the water’s edge, breathless, and the three of us staring with a feverish greediness, a thirsty, frantic desire, I may say, which ocean peril, of all earthly dangers, paints with most perfection upon the eye. She was a good-sized boat of a whaling pattern, sharp at both ends, pulled by three men who peered continuously over their shoulders as they rowed, and steered by a small man in a blue jacket and a broad-brimmed straw hat. By the time she was close in the others had joined us. I had heard much heated talk amongst them as they came down from the galleon, springing over the holes and wells, and Finn at once said to me:
‘What d’ee think, your honour? here’s Head and Dowling gone mad! They say there’s bullion to be met with in that hulk up there, and they mean to stop with her till they’ve got it.’
‘Nonsense!’ I exclaimed.
‘By the ’Tarnal, then, Mr. Monson,’ cried Dowling, ‘there’s no leaving with me yet. Here’s a chance that ain’t going to happen more’n once to a sailor-man.’
‘Ashore there!’ came from the little chap at the tiller of the boat; ‘what sort of beach have you got for grounding?’
‘Pumice-stone, sir,’ answered Finn.
‘Don’t like it,’ said the little fellow with a shake of his head. ‘Is it steep to?’
‘He ought to be able to see by looking over the side,’ grumbled Finn; then aloud, ‘Slopes as gradual as the calf of a man’s leg.’
‘Well, then, you won’t mind wading,’ said the little fellow.
‘Cutbill, Finn,’ I cried, ‘carry her ladyship, will you? Dowling or Head, come and lend me a hand to convey Miss Jennings.’
The little fool obliged us to wade waist high by keeping off, so confoundedly anxious was he to keep his keel clear of the ground. However, we easily got the ladies into the boat; then Cutbill, Finn, and I gripped the gunwale and rolled inboards; but Dowling coolly waded shorewards again to where Head was standing.
‘Aren’t you two men coming?’ cried the little fellow, who afterwards proved to be the second mate of the barque, a doll of a man with bright eyes, diminutive features, red beard, and hands and feet of the size of a boy of ten.
‘No, sir,’ answered Dowling; ‘there’s treasure in that there craft, and my mate and me’s going to stop to overhaul the cargo.’
The three seamen belonging to the boat stared on hearing this, instantly pricking up their ears with sailors’ sympathy and fastening devouring eyes on the galleon.
‘They have no reason to believe there is treasure,’ I cried; ‘it is a mere idle hope on their part. Exhort them to come, sir. They stand to perish if they are left here.’
‘Now, then, don’t keep us waiting, my lads,’ exclaimed the second mate.
‘We mean to stop here,’ responded Head decisively.
‘But have you any provisions?’
‘Enough washed out of the yacht to sarve our tarn,’ answered Dowling; ‘but we should be glad of another cask of fresh water.’
‘Well, you’ll not get that,’ answered the second mate; ‘our own stock’s not over-plentiful. Now, once more, are ye coming?’
They shook their heads, and in a careless, reckless manner Head half-swung his back upon us.
‘Give way!’ cried the second mate.
‘But it’s like helping them to commit suicide, Finn,’ I exclaimed.
‘They ought to be seized and forced into the boat,’ said Lady Monson, looking with a shudder at the galleon.
‘They’ve got a notion there’s money in that there hulk,’ exclaimed Finn, ‘and they’ll stick to her till they satisfies themselves one way or the other.’
‘Small fear of them not being taken off when they’re ready to go,’ said the mate, staring hard at Lady Monson and then at Laura; ‘that island’s a novelty which’ll bring every ship that heaves her masthead within sight of it running down to have a look at. Volcanic, eh? And that shell-covered arrangement up there rose along with it?’
‘Ay,’ said Finn.
‘Well,’ said the little second mate, ‘why shouldn’t she have[345] treasure, aboard? She has the look of one of them plate ships you read of.’
‘I’d take my chance with them two sailors,’ said the fellow who was pulling the bow oar.
‘So would I,’ said the man next to him.
The stroke gazed yearningly through the hair over his eyes.
The sea of the preceding night had cleared the beach of every vestige of the yacht; all the fragments which had littered the rocks were gone. As we drew out from the island it took in the brilliant sunshine the complexion of marble, and the wondrous old galleon lying on top sparkled delicately with many tints as our point of view was varied by the stroke of the oars. The resolution of the two men vexed and grieved me beyond all expression; but what was to be done? My spirit shrank at the mere thought of their determination when I reflected upon the damp, dark, ocean-smelling cabin, the luminous hold, the two skeletons, the vegetation and shells, whose novelty, wonder, glory seemed to carry the structure out of all human sympathy, as though it were the product of a form of existence whose creations were not to be met with under the stars. We drew rapidly to the barque. She was an exceedingly handsome model, painted green, rigged with a masterly eye to accurate adjustment down to the most trivial detail.
‘What’s her name, sir?’ asked Finn.
‘The “Star of Peace,”’ answered the second mate.
‘Homeward bound, I hope, sir?’ says Cutbill.
‘Ay,’ said the little man, grinning, ‘and long enough about it too. Sixty-one days from Melbourne as it is.’
Finn whistled; Laura looked at the mate on hearing him say that the ship was from Melbourne.
‘Oars!’ A boathook caught the accommodation ladder and we gained the deck. The captain of the barque stood in the gangway to receive us; he was a Scotchman with a slow, kind, thoughtful face, grey hair that showed like wire on end with thickness and stubbornness as he lifted his straw hat to the ladies. His grey, keen, seawardly eye rapidly took stock of us. I briefly related our story.
‘I remember the “Bride,” sir,’ he said. ‘She was owned by Sir Wilfrid Monson, who married Miss Jennings of Melbourne.’
‘This is Lady Monson,’ I said; ‘her sister, too, Miss Jennings.’
‘Indeed!’ he exclaimed, with a sort of slow surprise giving a little animation to his speech. ‘I have the honour of being acquainted with Mr. Jennings. He came on board this vessel three days before we sailed along with a gentleman, Mr. Hanbury’—Laura slightly nodded—‘to whom a portion of the freight belongs. I see the likeness now,’ he added, looking with admiration at Lady Monson.
She glowed crimson, and turned with a haughty step to the rail to conceal her face.
‘I have always heard this world was a small one, captain,’ said I, ‘small enough, thank God, to enable your ship to fall in with that rock there. To what port are you bound?’
‘London, sir. There are a couple of cabins at your service. There are no females aboard,’ looking at Laura and running his eye over her dress with a glance on to Lady Monson; ‘I judge ye were cast away in little more than what you stood up in?’
‘By the way, Laura,’ said I, ‘we ought not to leave your box of odds and ends behind us.’
‘Oh, no; bring off everything,’ exclaimed the captain. ‘I’ll send the boat ashore.’
It was arranged that Finn should fetch the box and make a final effort to persuade the two men to come off. The captain of the barque laughed when I told him of the fellows’ resolution, and seemed to make little of it. ‘If they’ve got a notion there’s treasure there, sir,’ he exclaimed, ‘you’ll not move ’em. I know Jack’s nature. He’d follow old Nick if he believed he’d take him to where there were dollars. Ships enough’ll be coming in sight of that rock. I don’t fear for the men’s safety.’
‘But it is a volcanic creation, captain. It may vanish just as it rose, in a flash.’
‘Ha!’ cried he, sucking in his breath, ‘my word! But I should never have thought of that. Better try and coax those men off,’ he exclaimed, walking to the rail and putting his head over and addressing Finn who had entered the boat.
‘I’ll do my best, sir,’ answered Finn, and shoved off.
‘Now, ladies and gentlemen,’ said the captain, returning to us, ‘will you step below that we may see how you’re to be made comfortable?’
After the galleon the cabin of a smack would have been sheer Paradise. Here was a breezy, plain, substantial homely interior. The sunshine brilliantly flooded it, the eastern splendour of water rippled in lines of light upon the bulkheads; the hot morning breeze gushed humming through the skylight into it. The captain led us to a couple of berths forward of the state cabin, and the first object I witnessed was my face reflected in a looking-glass. Heavens! what a contrast to the Pall Mall exquisite of a few months before! Unshaven, sunblackened, unbrushed, unwashed; my linen dark, my clothes expressing every feature of shipwreck in rents, stains, and the like; I needed but a few further grimy embellishments to have passed to admiration as a back alley sailor. The captain’s name was Richardson; he seemed fascinated by Lady Monson, called for his servant or steward, bade him procure at once every convenience of hot water, towels, hair-brushes and the like; continued to congratulate himself upon having been the means of delivering the daughters of Mr. Jennings of Melbourne from a situation of distress and peril, and so warmed up to the occasion, but slowly as the kettle boils, that I easily saw there was small fear of Laura and her sister not being made as thoroughly[347] comfortable as the accommodation supplied by the barque would permit.
I was too anxious, however, about the fellows on the island to linger below, and went on deck, leaving Captain Richardson talking to the ladies, protesting in hearty Scotch accents his anxiety to serve them to the utmost of his ability, questioning the steward about sheets and blankets, bidding him likewise tell the cook to make haste with the breakfast, asking Lady Monson if she drank tea or coffee, and so on and so on. The boat was off the island and Finn ashore, coming down from the galleon to the beach with Laura’s box slung betwixt him and Dowling, whilst Head trudged close behind. Then there was a long talk; I could see Finn pointing to the hulk and then to the barque, flourishing his arms and emphatically nodding at one or the other as he addressed them. Cutbill stood in the gangway looking on.
‘I hope the captain will prevail upon them to leave that place,’ said I to him.
‘He won’t, sir,’ answered Cutbill; ‘and blowed if I don’t feel now, Mr. Monson, as if I’d made a mistake in leaving it myself!’
Here the mate of the barque stepped up to me—an immense man, even bigger than Cutbill, in a long white coat with side pockets so vast that one might have thought that he could have stowed the little second mate away in one of them.
‘Do those chaps think that there’s plunder to be found aboard that effigy?’ he asked in a voice rendered unutterably hoarse and harsh by probably years of roaring out in foul weather, supplemented by rum and the natural gift of a deep note.
‘Don’t know about plunder, sir,’ answered Cutbill, ‘but they reckon there may be chests of plate and bullion stowed away aft.’
‘Stowed away in their eye!’ growled the mate. ‘Where did she come from?’
‘The bottom of the sea, sir.’
‘An old galleon,’ said he, cocking his eye at her, ‘and a volcanic burst up,’ he continued. ‘Well, I don’t know, if so be she’s a galleon, likely as not those chaps are right. Why, they thought nothing in the days she belonged to in stowing a matter of six or seven millions of dollars in the lazarettes of craft of that kind.’
‘By the Lord, Mr. Monson,’ burst out Cutbill, ‘I must go ashore, sir! I feel I’m a-doing wrong in being here!’
‘You’ll have to swim then,’ said the mate drily, ‘for that boat is meant for our davits when she comes alongside, and it will then be time to trim sail.’
At that moment I observed Finn shaking the two sailors by the hand. He then entered the boat and made for the barque, whilst Head and Dowling walked slowly up to the galleon and sat down in the shade of her under her counter, whence they continued to watch us.
‘It’s no good, Mr. Monson, sir,’ said Finn, as he came clambering[348] and panting over the side; ‘they call it a gold mine, and there’s no persuading of ’em to leave it.’
‘Up with this boat,’ roared the mate; ‘stand by to round in on those topsail braces.’
The boat soared to her davits, the milk-white squares of canvas on the main went floating onwards into full bosoms; the barque, bowing to the swell, broke the flashing water into trembling lines; slowly, almost imperceptibly, that marble-looking hump of rock with its glittering centre-piece stole away upon the quarter, its solitude somehow making the ocean look as wide again as it was. Laura came on deck and stood by my side.
‘Oh, Charles!’ she exclaimed, ‘we have left the poor fellows behind, then?’
‘They refuse to leave. Observe Cutbill,’ said I, pointing to the huge figure of the honest tar as he lay over the rail, his face knotted up with conflicting emotions, whilst his expression was rendered spasmodic by his manner of gnawing upon a quid that stood in his cheek. ‘He is lamenting the loss of a princely income, and would have returned to the island could he have got a boat. Mark Finn, too; with what a mixture of thirstiness and misgiving does he stare!’
‘The poor creatures are waving to us,’ said Laura.
Instantly throughout the barque there was a general flourishing of arms and Scotch caps and straw hats. We lingered watching them till the island looked to be no more than a small blue cloud floating low upon the water.
‘Poor Wilfrid!’ suddenly exclaimed Laura, and her eyes dimmed with tears.
‘It has been a hard time for you, dear one!’ I exclaimed, ‘but the end of the black chapter is reached, let us believe. See! here comes the captain’s man with a tray of good things. But I must positively shave before I can sit down to breakfast, if there is a razor on board to borrow.’
We walked together to the companion hatch, but even there we lingered a little with our eyes dwelling upon that distant azure film which seemed now to be fainting out as though it were a wreath of sea-mist that was being fast devoured by the sun.
Our passage home was extraordinarily long. It took us seventy-five days to arrive at the English Channel from the latitude of the volcanic island. The captain thought himself under a spell, and swore that he believed his barque was to be made a ‘Flying Dutchman’ of. Yet she was a clipper keel, moulded in exquisite con[349]formity with all theories of swiftness in sailing, and when a fresh and favourable wind blew she ate through it as though with the iron bite of a powerful steamer. But had she spread the canvas of a ‘Royal George’ over the hull of a racing yacht she could have done nothing in the face of the dead calms and light baffling breezes which held us motionless or sent us sliding southwards for days and days. Scarce had we struck soundings indeed—that is to say, hardly had we entered the mouth of the English Channel—when a whole gale of wind blew down upon us from the eastward, and grove us a third of the distance across to the shores of the United States.
How bitterly sick I grew of this time I cannot express. I had lost everything that I had brought with me in the wreck of the ‘Bride,’ and was entirely dependent upon the kindness of the captain and the mates for a supply of the few wants I absolutely required. One lent me a shirt, another a pair of socks, a third a razor, and so on, but it was a miserable existence. A few weeks of it I should have found supportable by comparing the life with the horrors we had been delivered from; but as time went on gratitude languished, the sense of contrast lost something of its edge; I abhorred the recollection of the galleon, yet it really seemed as though we had merely exchanged one form of imprisonment for another; as if old ocean indeed were suffering us to amuse ourselves with a dream of escape, as a cat humours a mouse in that way, to drop with a spring upon us ultimately when she had sickened the patience out of our souls.
I need not say that Lady Monson made the worst of everything. She had to share a cabin with her sister, and to that extent, therefore, was associated with her, but her behaviour to Laura, as to me, was cold, haughty, disdainful. She froze herself from head to foot, gave us a wide berth when on deck, would break away abruptly if one or the other of us endeavoured to engage her in conversation, and was as much alone as she could possibly contrive to be. It is hard to say whether she disliked me more than her sister. Yet I could not but feel sorry for her, heartily as I hated her. What was her future to be? What had life in store for one whose memory was charged as hers was? Laura tried hard to find out what her intentions were, what plans she had formed, but to no purpose. But then it was likely that the woman had not made out any programme for herself.
Both she and my darling were desperately put to it for the want of apparel. Each had but the dress she stood in, for Laura’s box had contained little more than under-linen. They had arrived on board the barque without covering for their heads; but this was remedied by the second mate presenting Laura with a new straw hat, and later on we heard through Finn that one of the crew had a new grass hat in his chest which he desired to present to Lady Monson. I see her ladyship now in that sailor’s hat, over which she tied a long brown veil that had come ashore upon the[350] island in Laura’s box. I witness again the fiery gleam of her black eyes penetrating the thin covering. I behold the captain, with his slow Scotch gaze following her majestic figure as she glides lonely to and fro the deck, seldom daring to address her, and rapidly averting his glance when she chanced to round her face towards him on a sudden. And I see Laura, too, sweet as a poet’s fancy I would sometimes think, in the mate’s straw hat, perched on top of her golden hair, a sailor’s half-fathom of ribbon floating from it down her back, her violet eyes lovely once more with their old tender glow, and with the smiles which sparkled in them and with the love which deepened their hue as she let me look into them.
She had soon regained her health and spirits. I never would have believed that two women born of the same parents could be so absolutely dissimilar as these sisters. Laura made no trouble of anything. She ate the plain cabin food as though she heartily enjoyed it; cooled me down when I was slowly growing mad over some loathsome pause of calm; made light of the embarrassing slenderness of her wardrobe. She had always one answer: ‘This is not the galleon, Charles. We’re bound to England. You must be patient, my dear.’
I remember once saying to her, ‘Your dress is very shabby, my pet. It no longer sits to your figure as it did. It shows like shipwrecked raiment. Salt-water stains are very abundant; and your elbow cannot be long before it peeps out. How, then, is it that I find you more engaging, more lovely, more adorable in this castaway attire than ever I thought you aboard the “Bride,” where probably you had a dozen dresses to wear?’
‘Mere prejudice,’ she answered, laughing and blushing. ‘You will outgrow many opinions of this kind.’
‘No! But don’t you see what a moral shipwreck enables you to point to your sex, Laura?’ said I. ‘Girls will half-ruin their fathers, and wives almost beggar their husbands, for dress. They clothe themselves for men. No doubt you consider yourself wholly dependent for two-thirds of your charms upon dress. All women think thus—the young and the old, the beautiful and the—others. But what is the truth? You become divine in proportion as you grow ragged!’
‘When I am your wife you will not wish that I shall be divine only on the merits of rags,’ said she.
‘Well, my dear,’ said I, ‘old ocean has given me one hint concerning you. Should time ever despoil you of a single charm there is the remedy of shipwreck. We will endeavour to get cast away again.’
Thus idly would we talk away the days. No ship ever before held such a pair of spoonies, I dare swear, spite of the traditions of the East India Company. But sweet as our shipboard intercourse was, our arrival in England threatened delays and difficulties. First of all she declared that she could not dream of marrying without her father’s consent. This was, no doubt, as it should be, and surely I could not love her the less for being a good daughter.[351] But the consent of a man who lived in Melbourne, and who had to be addressed from England, signified, in those ambling times, the delay of hard upon a year.
‘A year, Laura!’ I cried on one occasion whilst debating this subject; ‘think of it! With the chance, perhaps, of your father’s reply miscarrying.’
She sighed. ‘Yes, it is a long time. Oh, if Melbourne were only in Europe. Yet it cannot be helped, Charles.’
‘But, my heart’s delight,’ I exclaimed, ‘Why should not we get married first and then write for your father’s consent?’
No; she must have her papa’s sanction.
‘All right, birdie,’ said I; ‘anyhow you will remain in England till you hear from him, and so we shall be together.’
‘It might shorten the time,’ she said with a little blush and a timid glance at me under the droop of her eyelids, ‘if you and I sailed to Melbourne.’
‘It would, my precious!’ I answered; ‘but suppose on your introducing me your father should object?’
‘Oh no, Charles, he will not object,’ she exclaimed with a confident shake of the head.
‘In fact then, Laura,’ said I, ‘you are sure your papa will sanction our marriage?’
‘Quite sure, dear.’
‘Then would it not come to the same thing if we got married on our arrival in England?’
This was good logic, but it achieved nothing for me, and since I saw that her father’s sanction would contribute to the happiness of her married life I never again attempted to reason with her on the subject.
At last, one morning we found ourselves in the English Channel, bowling over the green ridges of it before a strong south-westerly wind, and within fifty hours of making the Lizard Light the brave little barque ‘Star of Peace’ was being warped to her berth in the East India Docks. Down to that very moment, incredible as it may seem, Lady Monson had given neither her sister nor myself the vaguest hint of what she intended to do. As we stood waiting to step ashore she arrived on deck and, approaching Laura, exclaimed,
‘Mr. Monson, I presume, will escort you to an hotel.’
‘Won’t you accompany us, Henrietta?’ her sister asked.
‘No, I choose to be independent. I shall go to such and such an hotel,’ and she named the house at which she had stopped with Colonel Hope-Kennedy when she arrived in London on her way to Southampton. ‘You can address me there, or call upon me, Laura. I have not yet decided on any steps. In all probability I shall return to Melbourne, but not at present.’
She extended her hand coldly to her sister and gave me a haughty bow. Laura bit her lips to restrain her tears, but her pride was stung; disgust and amazement too fell cool upon her grief.
The last I ever saw of Lady Monson was as she passed along the quay towards the dockyard gates. As she paced forward, stately, slow, her carriage queenly and easy as though, sumptuously clothed and in the full pride of her beauty, she trod the floor of a ball-room, the scores of sailors, labourers, loafers who thronged the decks, turned, to a man, to stare after her. A strange and striking figure indeed she made, habited in the dress which she wore when the ‘Shark’ foundered, and which, as you may suppose, by this time showed very much like the end of a long voyage. The brown veil concealed her features and to a certain degree qualified the outlandish appearance of the sailor’s grass hat upon her head.
‘So!’ said I as she disappeared, ‘and now, Laura, it is for you and me to go ashore.’
We bade a cordial farewell to Captain Richardson and his mates and to Finn and Cutbill, both of whom promised to call upon me. I had the address of the owner of the vessel, and told the skipper that next day I would communicate with the office and defray whatever expenses we had put the ship to. I further took the addresses of the captain and his mates that I might send them some token of my gratitude for our deliverance and for the many kindnesses they had done us during the long and tedious passage.
A few hours later I had comfortably lodged Laura in a snug private hotel within an easy walk of my lodgings, to which I forthwith repaired and took possession of afresh with such an emotion of bewilderment excited in me by the familiar rooms, and by the feeling that I was once more in London, with no more runaway wives to chase, no more Dutchmen to fire into, no more duels to assist in, no more volcanic rocks to split upon, and no more galleons to sleep in, that I felt like a man just awakened from some wild and vivid dream whose impressions continue so acute that the familiar objects his eyes open upon seem as phantasms that must presently fade. My first act was to send a milliner and a dressmaker to Laura, and to see in other ways to her immediate requirements; my next to address a letter to Wilfrid’s solicitors, in which I acquainted them with the loss of the ‘Bride’ and the death of my cousin. Whom else to write to at once about the poor fellow I did not know. I asked after his infant, and requested them to tell me if the child was still with the lady with whom my cousin had placed it before leaving England. I added that I should be pleased to see one of the partners and relate the full story of the voyage, the object of which I could not doubt Wilfrid had informed them of before sailing.
I spent the evening with Laura. All her talk was about what she was to do until she had heard from her father, to whom she told me she had written a long letter within an hour after her arrival at the hotel, ‘so as to lose no time, Charles.’ She had no relations in England, scarcely an acquaintance for the matter of that; with whom was she to live then? Even had Lady Monson[353] settled down in a house she was not a person with whom I could have desired the girl I was affianced to to be long and intimately associated. The notion of her returning to Australia alone was not to be entertained. There seemed nothing then for it but for me to overhaul the list of my connections, to make experiments in the direction of relations, and endeavour to find a home for her with one or another of them until there should some day arrive a mail from Australia giving me leave to take her to my heart.
Well, it was next morning that I had finished breakfast and was sitting musing over a fire with a newspaper on my knee. My mind was full of the past. I remember looking round me almost incredulously with eyes that still found the familiar furniture of my room unreal and indeed almost impossible, listening with ears that could scarcely accept as actual the transformation of the roar and beat and wash of the seas into the steady hum of ceaseless traffic in the great London roadway into which the street I occupied opened. Years had elapsed, it seemed, since that night when my servant had ushered in my cousin, and I saw in fancy the wild roll of his eyes round the apartment, the crazy flourish of his hands, his posture as he sank his head upon the table battling with his sobbing breath.
I was disturbed by a smart knock at the door. ‘Come in.’ The landlord entered; a thin, iron-grey, soft-voiced man, who had for many years been butler in an earl’s family, and who had retired and started a lodging-house on discovering that he had married a woman of genius in the shape of a cook.
‘There’s a person below named Muffin would like to see you, sir.’
I stared at him as if he were mad.
‘Muffin!’ I whispered.
‘That was the name he gave, sir,’ he exclaimed, astonished by my amazement.
‘Muffin!’ I repeated, scarce crediting my hearing; ‘describe him, Mr. Cork.’
‘A clean, yellow-faced man, sir, hair of a coal-blackness, looks down when he speaks, sir, seems a bit shaky in the ankles; a gentleman’s servant, I should say, sir.’
‘Show him up, Mr. Cork!’ I exclaimed, doubting the description as I had the name, so impossible did it seem that this person could be Wilfrid’s valet.
In a few moments the door was opened, and in stepped Muffin!—the Muffin of the ‘Bride,’ Muffin the ventriloquist, Muffin the whipped and ducked, and, as I could have solemnly sworn, Muffin the drowned! He stood before me with the old familiar crook of the left knee, holding his hat with both hands against his stomach, his head drooped, his lips twisted into their familiar grin of obsequious apology. His yellow face shone, his hair was as lustrous as the back of a rook; he wore large loose black-kid gloves, and he was attired in a brand new suit of black cloth. I know nothing in the way of shocks severer for the moment, that tells more startlingly[354] upon the whole nervous system, than the meeting with a man whom one has for months and months believed dead. I was unable to speak for some moments. I shrank back in my chair when he entered, and in that posture eyed him whilst he stood looking downwards, smiling and suggesting in his attitude respectful regret for taking the liberty of intruding.
‘Well,’ said I, fetching a deep breath, ‘and so you are Muffin indeed, eh? Well, well. Why, man, I could have sworn we left you a corpse floating close to a volcanic island near the equator.’
‘So I suppose, sir!’ he exclaimed, ‘but I am thankful to say, sir, that I was not drowned.’
I motioned him to sit; he put his hat under the chair, crossed his legs, and clasped his hands over his knee. A sudden reaction of feeling, supplemented by his strange appearance, produced a fit of laughter in me. The image of his radish-shaped form, half naked, quivering down the ranks of the seamen, with Cutbill grotesquely apparelled compelling him to keep time, recurred to me.
‘You seem resolved that I shall believe in ghosts, Muffin,’ said I; ‘and pray how came you to learn that I was saved from the wreck, that I had returned to England, was here in these lodgings, in short, where I only arrived yesterday?’
‘Sir Wilfrid received a letter from his solicitors this morning, sir, enclosing your letter to them.’
‘Sir Wilfrid!’ I shouted; ‘is he alive?’
‘Oh yes, sir, and very much better both in body and mind, I’m ’appy to say, sir. He would have called on you himself, sir, but he’s suffering from an attack of gout in his left foot, and has been obliged to keep his bed for two days.’
I jumped from my chair and fell to pacing the room to work off by locomotion something of the amazement that threatened to addle my brains.
‘Wilfrid alive!’ I muttered. ‘What will Laura say to all this? Muffin,’ I cried, rounding upon him, ‘what you are telling me is a miracle! a thing beyond all credibility. Why, we saw the yacht go to pieces! nearly the whole mass of her in fragments came ashore, along with four or five dead bodies. How, in heaven’s name, did Sir Wilfrid escape?’
He responded by telling me the story. Johnson, the man who had died upon the island, was perfectly right in saying that he believed a number of men had rushed to one of the boats shortly after the yacht had struck. I myself remember being felled by a gang of people flying aft in the blackness. Muffin was one of them. The white water over the side enabled them to see what they were about. The boat, a noble structure, of a lifeboat’s quality of buoyancy, was successfully lowered, seven men got into her, one of whom was Muffin. The yacht was then fast breaking up. The men, to escape being pounded to pieces by the battering rams of the wreckage hurled on every curl of sea, headed out from the[355] island, straining their hearts at the oars; but they were again and again beaten back. There were but five oars, and Muffin and one of the seamen having nothing to do sat crouching in the stern-sheets. Suddenly a figure showed close alongside crying loudly for help; Muffin grasped him by the hair of his head, the other fellow leaned over, and between them they dragged the man in. It was my cousin! By dint of sustained and mad plying of oars they drew the boat clear of the wreckage, bringing the white line of the thunderous surf on the island beach upon their quarter; they then gave the stern of the little fabric to the wind and seas and fled forwards like smoke, and when the dawn broke they were miles out of sight of the rock. A day and a night of dead calm followed; they were without food or water, and their outlook was horrible; but at sunrise on the third day they spied the gleam of a sail, towards which they rowed, and before the darkness fell they were safely on board a large English brig bound to Bristol.
Such was Muffin’s story. He said that Sir Wilfrid, on being told it was Muffin who had rescued him, promised to take him back into his service on reaching England. He added that my cousin had entirely lost the craze that had possessed him concerning his bulk and stature. The yacht on going to pieces had liberated him, and with his sudden and startling enlargement his mad fancy entirely passed away. So that poor old Jacob Crimp came very near the truth when he had suggested to me that my cousin’s senses might be recovered by a great fright.
Muffin asked me the names of the others who were saved. I told him who they were.
‘And Mr. Cutbill wasn’t drowned, sir?’ said he.
‘No,’ I replied.
‘And Captain Finn is saved too. I’m so glad, sir.’
But the rogue gave me a look that clearly signified he was very sorry indeed.
An hour later I was sitting by my cousin’s bedside. He was stopping at an hotel near Charing Cross. I will say nothing of the warmth of our meeting. The tears were in my eyes as I grasped and retained his hand. He was perfectly rational, had a more sensible look in his face than I had ever witnessed in it, and his memory was as clear as my own. It seemed to me that the shock of shipwreck had worked wonders in him, though to be sure strong traces of congenital weakness were still visible in the quivering eyelids, the occasional, irrelevant, loud laugh, the boyish eagerness of manner, with now and again the passing shadow of a darkening humour. For a long time we seemed able to talk of nothing but the wreck of the ‘Bride’ and of our several experiences. I very delicately and vaguely referred to the delusion that had imprisoned him in his cabin, but his stare of surprise advised me that he had no recollection whatever of his craze, and it was like a warning to me to instantly quit the subject. He told me that Muffin had behaved with a touching devotion to him whilst they were in the[356] boat, pillowing his head when he slept, cooling his hot brow with water, sheltering him from the heat of the sun by standing behind him with his jacket outstretched to the nature of a little awning. He asked tenderly after Laura, and made many inquiries after the men who had been saved, bidding me tell Finn, should he visit me, to call upon him, that he might obtain the names and addresses of the survivors, and enable them to replace the effects they had lost, by the foundering of the yacht.
‘You do not ask after your wife, Wilfrid,’ said I, a little nervously.
‘Oh, you told me she was saved,’ he answered languidly; then after a pause he added, ‘Where is she?’
‘She refused to accompany her sister,’ said I; ‘she loves independence. She has gone alone to such and such an hotel, where I presume she is still to be found.’
His face flushed to the name of that hotel; he instantly remembered. He bent his eyes downwards and said as if to himself,
‘Yes, she is of those who return to their vomit.’
‘What are your plans?’ said I.
‘As regards Lady Monson, do you mean?’
‘Well, she is still your wife, and what concerns her concerns you, I suppose, more or less.’
‘I shall not meddle with her,’ said he, making a horrible grimace to an involuntary twitch of his gouty foot; ‘she can do what she pleases.’
‘She talks of returning to Australia.’
‘Let her go,’ said he.
And this, thought I, is the issue of your wild pursuit of her! Had he but waited a few months, disgust and aversion would have grown strong in him. He would have been guiltless of shedding the blood of a fellow-creature—he would have preserved his noble yacht—but then, to be sure, I should probably never have met Laura!
His eye was upon me while I mused a little in silence.
‘My solicitors advise proceedings in the Divorce Court,’ said he, ‘but I say no. I certainly should never try my hand at marriage again, and therefore a divorce would serve no end of my own. But it might answer her purpose very well indeed; it would free her, and I do not intend that she shall have her liberty.’
‘You will have to maintain her.’
‘Oh, my solicitors will see to that,’ he answered with a curious smile.
‘Wilf,’ said I, ‘she may fall very low, and then, when nobody, else will have anything more to do with her, she will return to you as your lawful wife, and play the devil with your peace and good name.’
‘I am not going to free her,’ said he snappishly.
‘Do you mean to make any stay in London?’ said I.
‘I am waiting till the gout leaves me,’ he answered, ‘and shall[357] then go abroad. I have been recommended to do so. It is pretty sure to come to the ears of Colonel Hope-Kennedy’s friends that I shot him in a duel. He was a widower and childless, but he has a sister, a Lady Guthrie, who adored the ground he trod on and thought him the noblest creature in the universe. My solicitors advise me not to wait until I am charged with the fellow’s death, and so I am going abroad.’
‘Humph,’ said I; ‘and how am I to be dealt with as an accessory?’
‘Pooh!’ he exclaimed, ‘one never hears of seconds being charged.’
‘You will take baby with you, I presume?’
He answered no. During his absence a cousin of his had lost her husband, a colonel in India. She had arrived in England with two grown-up daughters, and was so poor that she had asked Wilfrid to help her. He had arranged that she and the girls should occupy his seat in the North and take charge of his child. This in fact had been settled, and Mrs. Conway and her daughters were now installed at Sherburne Abbey. On hearing this it instantly suggested itself to me that Mrs. Conway would provide Laura with the very home that she needed until we heard from Mr. Jennings. Wilfrid of course acquiesced; he was delighted; he loved Laura as a sister, and his little one would be doubly guarded whilst she was with it. So here was a prompt and happy end to what had really threatened to prove a source of perplexity, and indeed in some senses a real difficulty.
And now to end this narrative. A fortnight later Wilfrid went abroad to travel, as he said, in Italy and the South of France, and with him proceeded Mr. Muffin. During that fortnight Laura and I were frequently with him, but it was only on the day previous to his departure that he mentioned his wife’s name. In a careless voice and offhand manner he asked if we had heard of her, but neither of us could give him any news. We had not chosen to learn by calling if she continued at the hotel to which she had gone on her arrival. She had not written to her sister, nor had she communicated with Wilfrid’s solicitors. However, about a fortnight after I had returned to London from the North, whither I had escorted Laura, there came a letter to my lodgings addressed to my sweetheart. I guessed the handwriting to be Lady Monson’s. I forwarded it to Laura, who returned it to me. It was a cold intimation of her ladyship’s intention to sail in such and such a vessel to Melbourne on the Monday following, so that when I read the missive she had been four days on her way. For my part I was heartily glad to know that she was out of England.
Soon after my arrival I sent a description of the volcanic island and the galleon on top of it to a naval publication of the period. It was widely reprinted and excited much attention and brought me many letters. But for that article I believe I should have heard no more of Dowling and Head. It chanced, however, that[358] my account of the island was republished in a West Indian journal, and I think it was about five months after my return to this country that I received a letter from the master of a vessel dated at the Havannas and addressed to me at the office of the journal in which my narrative had been published. This man, it seems, having sighted the rock about three weeks after we had got away from it in the ‘Star of Peace,’ hauled in close to have a good look at an uncharted spot that was full of the deadliest menace to vessels, and observed signals being made to him from what he was afterwards informed was the hull of a fossilised ship. He sent a boat and brought off two men, who, it is needless to say, were Dowling and Head. They very frankly related their story, told the master of the vessel how they were survivors of the schooner-yacht ‘Bride,’ and how they had declined to leave the island because of their expectation of meeting with treasure aboard that strange old ship of weeds and shells. Day after day they had toiled in her, but to no purpose. They broke into the piles of shells, but found nothing save rottenness within, remains of what might have been cargo but of a character utterly indistinguishable. There was not a ha’p’orth of money or treasure; so there was an end of the poor fellows’ princely dreams. They were received on board and worked their passage to Rio, where they left the ship, which then proceeded to the Havannas.
There can be little doubt that shortly after this the volcanic rock subsided and vanished off the surface of the sea, after the usual manner of these desperate creations. The editor of the naval journal received several copies of logs kept by ships which had traversed the part of the ocean where the island had sprung up, and it was gathered, after a careful comparison of these memoranda, that the rock must have disappeared very shortly after Dowling and Head had been taken off it, for the log-book of a vessel named the ‘Martha Robinson’ showed that three days later she had passed over the exact spot where the island had stood and all was clear sea.
My time of waiting for the hand of Laura was not to prove so long as I had feared. Very unexpectedly one morning I received a letter from my darling from the Abbey. Her father had arrived on the preceding day. She could scarcely believe her ears when a servant came to tell her that Mr. Jennings had called and was waiting to see her. Of course he had not received her letter. He had taken it into his head to visit England, both his daughters being there, mainly with the intention of taking Laura back with him when he returned. He was almost broken-hearted, so Laura wrote, when she told him about Lady Monson. However, he was in England, and after waiting a few days so as to give him time to recover the dreadful shock caused him by the news of his daughter’s behaviour, I went down to Westmoreland, was introduced to the old gentleman, and found him a bluff, hearty, plain-spoken man. He told me he could settle twenty thousand pounds upon his child,[359] and seemed very well satisfied to hear that I was not without a pretty little income of my own. He approached the subject of insanity with a bluntness that somewhat disconcerted me. I assured him that so far as I could possibly imagine I was not mad, that my cousin’s craziness came from a source which did not concern me in the least degree. He was pleased afterwards to tell Laura that he could see by my eye that my intellect was as sound as a bell; an observation upon which I thought I had some right to compliment myself, for to be suspected of being ‘wanting’ is often to involuntarily and unconsciously look so, and I must say that whilst Mr. Jennings and I talked about Wilfrid’s craziness and where it came from, he regarded me with a keenness that was at times not a little embarrassing.
Laura and I had been married two years when we heard of Lady Monson. Mr. Jennings had returned to Australia, but in one or two letters we had received from him he never mentioned Henrietta’s name. Then came a missive in deep mourning. Lady Monson was dead. She had been received into the Roman Catholic Church, so wrote the father in a letter whose every sentence seemed as though he wrote with a pen dipped in his tears. She had, apparently, given up all thoughts of this world and devoted her days and nights to ministering to the poor. One day she returned to her home looking ill; two nights later she was delirious. She broke from the grasp of her attendants and marched with stately step, singing in her rich contralto voice as she went, to an upper chamber that had been Laura’s bedroom, where, planting herself before a mirror, she fell to brushing her rich and beautiful hair, singing all the while, till on a sudden she fell with a shriek to the ground, was carried back to her bed, and two hours later lay a corpse.
The End