CHAPTER XII

A STORM OF WIND

The atmosphere now took a deeper tinge of gloom. Thunder had followed the blaze of lightning in the west, low, distant, but continuous, like a rapid succession of the batteries of several ships of war heard from afar; and as the echoes of this ominous growling swept to our ears over the glass-smooth heave of the swell, the fresh dye of gloom came into the day and made an evening darkness of the afternoon.

The noise of the thunder had been like calling a hush upon the ship. The men hung in silent groups along the decks; motionless at the wheel was the tall form of a powerful sailor gripping the spokes with an iron clutch that was scarcely to be shaken by the frequent hard drag of the tiller-gear to the kick of the rudder; the seamen stationed at the guns aft stood with folded arms or hands carelessly thrust into their pockets gazing at the brig, or, with the impatient looks of sailors kept idly waiting on deck during their watch below, directing glances at the horizon or the sky, as though in search of some sign of wind. The three mates continued to overhang the rail near the captain, who walked the length of a plank to and fro with a telescope under his arm, which he would sometimes level at the brig, afterwards addressing his officers in a low voice.

All the ladies were below; but shortly after Mr. Johnson had left me, Miss Temple came on deck and went to the side to look at the stranger, and there lingered, with her gaze upon the western sky, over which the lightning was now running in fluid lines, a cascading of fiery streaks with a frequent dull opening blaze low down, which the heads of the swell would catch and mirror as though it were an instant gleam of sunset. Had she condescended to glance my way, I should have joined her. She loitered a while, and then left the deck; and at the same moment the second-mate came forward to the break of the poop and called out an order for the foresail and mizzen topsail to be furled and the foretopsail to be close reefed.

‘Very unpleasant state of suspense this,’ said little Mr. Saunders, stealing to my side and looking up into my face.

‘Very,’ I answered; ‘but it seems as if the weather was to extinguish our anxiety as regards the brig.’

‘Yes,’ said he. ‘I heard the captain tell Mr. Prance that he believes there is a gale of wind behind that storm yonder. Gracious me! what a very vivid flash. Hark! it nears us quickly.’

There was a rattling peal of thunder now, a long volleying roar of it, and a few large drops of rain fell. Mr. Cocker stood at the rail with a telescope in his hand. He busily watched the men up aloft, sometimes letting fly an order to the boatswain in a voice that went past the ear like a stone from a sling. A large drop of rain splashed upon Mr. Saunders’s nose.

‘It’s about to burst, I think,’ said he, looking straight up into the heavens with his modest yearning eyes. ‘I shall go below;’ and down trotted the little creature.

‘Mr. Cocker,’ said I, ‘lend me your glass for an instant, will you?’ I pointed it at the brig. ‘Yes,’ I exclaimed, talking to the second-mate with the telescope at my eye; ‘I believe I was not mistaken. Full of men, indeed! Phew! Why, there are hands enough upon her yards to furnish out the complement of a fifty-gun frigate.’

It was indeed as I said. They were furling all canvas upon the stranger, intending apparently to let her meet what was to come with a small storm foretrysail, which I could see a crowd of seamen bending and making ready for setting. Her fore and topsail yards were loaded with men swarming like bees along the thin delicate lines of spars, and even as I watched, the canvas they were rolling up melted away into slender streaks of white. In the cross-trees of both masts, and higher yet on the yards above, and in the tops also, were a number of men busily employed in sending down the royal, skysail, and topgallant yards and housing the topgallant masts. There looked to me to be at least a hundred of a crew to the vessel.

You found something almost ghastly and absolutely startling in the sharp distinctness of the little fabric rolling against the thunder-black skies behind her, and upon the long, malignant, greenish-hued swell in which the plunging lightning was sparkling as though the water were crackling with phosphoric fires. Dark as the atmosphere was with the deep shadow of storm, the brig stood out to the eye visible to the minutest detail the sight could reach to, plunging heavily under her naked spars, with her wet black sides darting out the mirrored flame of the lightning flashes with as clear a dazzle as glass or polished brass would throw.

‘The number of her crew witnesses to her character,’ said I, returning the telescope to Mr. Cocker.

‘Oh, there is no doubt of her,’ he exclaimed; ‘the captain’s an old hand, and twigged her speedily.’

‘The weather will put an end to her, I expect,’ said I. ‘Very lucky for us, Mr. Cocker. A large crew of ruffians and six guns of a side, not to mention a twenty-four pounder in the bows, and cutlasses and small arms in galore, hardly form a joke. It is easy to figure the beauty, that sails, I daresay, three feet to our one, quietly sheering alongside and throwing seventy or eighty of her children aboard, dark-skinned assassins, armed to the teeth, reeking of garlic. Well, hang me, Mr. Cocker, if I didn’t believe that the times of those gentry had passed some years ago.’

His lips were moving to answer me, but there was a wide and blinding flash of lightning at that instant that set the heavens on fire, immediately followed by a crash of thunder as deafening as though a first-rate had blown up close aboard us. Yet again the scowl of the clouds deepened in darkness, and the brig grew vague on a sudden in the gloom of the storm.

‘There comes the rain!’ cried Mr. Cocker, pointing to a line of greyish shadow with a look of steam boiling up as it were from the base of it. It drew creeping slowly on to the brig, and its perpendicular fall made one think of it as of a vast sheet of water up above overflowing and cataracting sheer down over the edge of a cloud.

‘There is no wind there,’ said I; ‘it is a regular Irishman’s hurricane, right up and down. But here goes for a waterproof.’

I trundled below for a suit of rubber clothes, being too anxious to observe what was to happen to choose to leave the deck. All the passengers were congregated in the cuddy, and the lightning, as it glittered in the port-holes and skylights, flashed up their faces in the gloomy atmosphere, making them look a pale and trembling crowd. The colonel was pacing the deck near the piano. Miss Hudson leaned against her mother with her hands over her eyes. If ever there came a brighter flash than usual, one lady or another would scream. Colledge and Miss Temple sat over a draught-board; but I could not gather, from the hurried glance I threw over the people as I passed through them, that they were playing. I equipped myself from head to foot in waterproofs and came again into the saloon on my way to the poop.

‘Are you going on deck, Dugdale?’ cried Mr. Johnson, shouting aloud, to render his voice audible above the continuous cannonading of the thunder.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘You will be struck dead, sir,’ called out Mrs. Hudson.

‘I have half a mind to join you,’ said Mr. Emmett, jumping up with a wild look at the skylight: ‘it’s simply beastly down here.’

‘Hark to that!’ bawled the colonel; ‘there’s a shower for you!’

The wall of rain had reached us. For a minute before it struck the ship you could hear it hissing upon the sea like twenty locomotives blowing off steam; then plump! came the cataract on to our decks. Had every drop been a brick, the noise could not have been more astounding. One couldn’t hear the thunder for the roaring of the fall of water and hailstones, though the deep and awful note of the electric storm was in it to add to its tremendous sound. The darkness was now so heavy in the cuddy, that in the intervals of the lightning the faces of the people were scarce distinguishable. Amid the distracting noises of the thunder, of the breathless storm of hail and rain, of the water cascading off the decks overboard in a furious gushing and seething, arose the chorus of a number of seamen on the quarter-deck hauling upon the maintopsail halliards there, with the piercing chirruping of the boatswain’s pipe and hoarse orders delivered overhead from the poop.

‘Where’s the steward?’ bawled the colonel in his loudest tones. ‘Confound it, are we to be left in total blackness here? Why don’t some one light the lamps?’

‘Are you coming on deck, Mr. Emmett?’ I cried; but he had sunk back on his seat with his arms folded and his head bowed; and obtaining no reply, I walked to the companion steps, receiving, as I passed Miss Temple, a half interrogative glance from her, which made me look again in readiness to answer the question that seemed to hover on her lips. But her eyes instantly dropped, and the next instant she had turned to say something to her aunt, who was on a sofa behind her; so, rounding on my heel, up I went into the smoking wet.

There was nothing to be seen but rain--such a sheet of it as one must explore the latitudes we were in to parallel. The lightning flashed amidst it incessantly, and every line of the falling water sparkled like glowing wire in dazzling hues of crimson and of violet alternating. I waited under the shelter of the companion cover till the first weight of all this rain and hail should have passed. Through the haze of moisture that rose like steam off the decks to the cataractal swamping I could discern the figure of old Keeling looking like a soaked scarecrow, the fine-weather hat upon his head reduced to pulp and hanging about his ears like a rotten fig. The fellow at the wheel stood like a statue amid the drenching downpour; but the men who had been stationed at the guns were gone.

I had not been a minute in the hatchway when the heavens seemed to be split open to the very heart of their depths by a flash of lightning, followed in the space of the beat of a heart by a shock of thunder that seemed to happen immediately over our mastheads--a most soul-subduing crash, if ever there was one! and as if by magic, the rain ceased, and the atmosphere sensibly brightened. There was a great noise of shrieking in the cuddy, and half blinded, and pretty handsomely dazed by that terrible blast of lightning and the thunder-clap which had followed, I crept down the steps with my pulse beating hard in my ears to see what had happened, scarce knowing but that some one had been struck and perhaps killed.

‘What is it?’ I shouted to the colonel, who stood at the foot of the ladder.

‘Only Mrs. Hudson in hysterics,’ he roared; on hearing which I went up again, being in no temper to make one of the nervous company below.

The swell had flattened; all to starboard there was an oozing as of daylight into the breathless thickness, with ugly hump-shaped masses of black vapour defining themselves up in the ugly sallow smother in a sort of writhing way, as though they were coming together in a jumble; but to port it was as black as thunder, an inky slope hoary with rain, with lightning spitting and zigzagging all over it. I went to the rail, where stood Mr. Cocker with his clothes full of water.

‘A pretty little shower!’ said I.

‘Very,’ he answered, with his face showing of a bleached look like the flesh of a washerwoman’s hand. ‘A plague on this sort of work, say I! This serge shrinks consumedly when drenched, and my trousers will be up to my knees to-morrow morning--three pounds ten as good as washed out of a man’s pocket.’

‘Where’s your glass, Mr. Cocker?’

‘In that hencoop there,’ said he.

I pulled out and directed it at the dim blotch of brig that had caught my eye stealing out of the wet dusk like the phantom of a ship.

‘By my great-grandfather’s wig!’ cried I with a start. ‘So! no fear _now_ of being boarded. Our windpipes are safe for the present. Look for yourself, Mr. Cocker.’

He ogled her an instant, then bawled to the skipper, who was speaking to Mr. Prance.

‘The brig’s been struck, sir! Her mainmast is over the side.’

In very truth it was as he declared. I whipped the glass out of his hand for another look, and, sure enough, could clearly distinguish a whole lumber of wreckage lifting to the roll of the subdued swell alongside the swaying hull of the brig. Her foremast and topmast stood intact to the cross-trees, but abaft she was as completely denuded as if a chopper had been laid to the foot of the mast. The mess is not to be described. I could make out that a length of her bulwark was crushed flat, and the black lines of shrouds and gear went snaking overboard like so many serpents wriggling out of the hatches into the water. But the gloom was too deep to suffer me to see what her people were doing.

I went to the companion way and called down to Colonel Bannister.

‘Halloa? What now? Who wants _me_?’ he shouted.

‘Tell the ladies, colonel,’ I sung down, ‘that the brig has been struck by lightning, and that our safety, so far as _she_ is concerned, is assured.’

I heard him roar out the news as I went to the side again, and a moment after up rushed the whole body of passengers to see for themselves. The decks were full of water, but nobody seemed to mind that. The ladies came splashing through it to the rail, some of them taking terrified peeps at the mass of winking blackness settling away down in the east, and dodging the play of lightning, as it were, with a sort of involuntary ducking of their heads and lifting of their fingers to their eyes.

Old Keeling cried out: ‘Ladies, be good enough to take my advice and return to the cabin. We shall be having a strong blow of wind coming along in a few minutes.’

‘Gott, she iss on fire!’ here shouted Hemskirk, pointing directly at the brig with a fat forefinger, whilst with the other hand he kept a binocular glass glued to his eyes.

‘Is it so then, sir!’ cried Mr. Prance to the skipper; ‘there is smoke rising from her fore-hatch.’

Mr. Cocker had replaced his telescope in the hencoop; I jumped for it, and in a trice had the lenses bearing upon the brig. There was an appearance of smoke, a thin bluish haze of it, as though mounting from a newly kindled bonfire, slowly going spirally into the motionless air; but almost at the instant of my first looking I thought I could witness something of a ruddy tinge flashing for a breath into this smoke, as if to a sudden leap of flame. Though the brig lay at the same distance that had separated her from us throughout the afternoon, the shrouded and heaped-up vaporous wall of firmament beyond her seemed to heave her as close again to us as she really was; and now quite easily by the aid of the glass I could see her decks as she rolled them our way dark with her people, many of them hacking and hewing at her rigging, as though to clear away the wreckage; others seemingly passing buckets along; others, again, running wildly and as it might seem aimlessly about, whilst with the regularity of a swing in action the beautifully moulded hull rolled quietly from side to side with a rhythmic oscillation of her one mast upon which the fragment of white trysail filled and hollowed as it beat the air, starting out upon the eye with a very ghastliness of pallor as it swelled to its cotton-like hue out of the shadow of its incurving, and hovered like some butterfly over the hideous dusky green of the swell.

I replaced the telescope.

‘Here comes the wind!’ I heard Mr. Cocker sing out.

‘Ladies,’ cried old Keeling, ‘let me beg of you to step below.’

Most of them complied, but a few lingered, staring with curiosity at the coming weather. I watched it with amazement, for never before had I seen a storm of wind coming down upon a ship in a sort of wall. One saw the line of it in a ridge of foam whose extremities were lost in the gloom on either hand. It was of a glass-like smoothness all in front of it, and not a breath of air was to be felt when the stormy hissing of it was loud in our ears as it came sweeping up, the clouds on high darting to right and left, and a paler faintness, as of increasing daylight, coming into the air along with it. The bull-like notes of Mr. Prance rang from the poop through the ship.

‘Stand by maintopsail halliards--foretopsail sheets--foretopmast staysail down-haul.’

The wind struck the brig. My eye was upon her, and she disappeared in the shrieking whirl of flying spume as you extinguish a reflection in a mirror by breathing upon the glass. A minute later it was upon us. It smote the Indiaman right abeam, and down she lay in a seething and hissing flatness of boiling waters, stooping yet and yet, till the line of the topgallant bulwark rail looked to be flush with the furious yeasty smother. There were two men at the helm holding the wheel jammed hard over. I swung to a belaying pin on the weather rail, and the poop deck went down from me to leeward at an angle that made one’s eyes reel in the head to look along it. There was a true hurricane note in the bellowing of the wind on high under the rush and disparting of the maddened clouds, and the first flash of it between our masts was as the passage of a score of locomotives racing by at express speed and shrieking as they went.

I was waiting to see what the ship meant to do, when the weather maintopsail sheet parted, though a treble-reefed sail, with a sound like another clap of thunder, and in a moment the canvas was flogging away from the yard in ribands, with Mr. Cocker shouting at the top of his voice, and a crowd of seamen tumbling and capsizing about the main deck to the officer’s orders to haul upon the clewlines. It was at that instant, amidst all this prodigious hallabaloo, that I caught sight of Miss Temple to leeward of the mizzen mast holding on to some gear that was belayed at the foot of the mast. As my gaze rested on her, the rope she grasped either overhauled itself or was detached from the pin, and she swung out to leeward. There were hencoops and rails and the mizzen shrouds to save her from going overboard; but there was nothing to prevent her from breaking a limb, or even her neck, if she let go. Though my legs yet preserved something of their old seafaring nimbleness, the slope of the deck made desperate work for them. Yet the girl must be reached, and at once. She did not appear to have sense enough to lower herself down the rope till her feet touched, in which posture she might have hung with safety. She maintained her first clutch of the gear, and swung above the deck to the height of some two, perhaps three feet. Keeling, who was clinging to the weather vang, did not seem to see her. The helmsmen grinding at the wheel heeded nothing but their business. Mr. Prance and the second officer clawing at the brass rail at the break of the poop, leaned to windward, with their eyes on the streaming rags of the maintopsail shouting commands.

There was only one means of arriving at the girl with any approach to swiftness. I dropped on to the deck, and went down upon my knees with my head to windward, and worked my way stern first in that attitude to the line of lee hencoops, along which I made shift to travel half jammed by my own weight against the bars of the coops, until, coming abreast of the girl, I got upon my legs, and firmly planting my left foot against the bottom of the row of boxes in which the fowls were immured, and leaning on my right leg in a fencing posture, I put my arms round her waist and told her to let go. She did so at once, as likely as not because she could hold on no longer. The weight of her noble figure was rather more than I had bargained for. I had thought to hold her fairly off the deck and ease her away, whilst in my arms, down to the hencoop behind, on which she could sit; but she was too much for me. I was forced to let her feet touch the planks, where, losing her balance, she threw her arm round my neck to save herself from falling. The next moment I was lodged upon the hencoop, she on my knee, and her arms still enclosing my head; but this was only for a breath or two. It was easy to lift her to my side, and there she sat, her fine face dark with blushes, and her eyes sparkling with alarm and confusion and twenty other passions and emotions, whilst the curve of her bosom rose and fell with hysteric swiftness.

‘What a very ridiculous position! It serves me right. I should have taken the captain’s advice. I should have gone below.’

This was all my haughty companion condescended to say. Not a syllable of thanks--not a glance of softness to reward me! However, to be reasonable, she could have scarcely been audible had she attempted more words. Even to catch the few sentences she uttered I had to strain my ear to the movement of her lips, off which the wind clipped her speech with a silencing yell.

There had been but little in the thunder of the storm, which still showed livid over the eastern horizon, that surpassed the wild and prodigious roaring of this first outfly of the hurricane. The ship continued to lie down to the fierce sweep of the wind at the angle she had reached to--it was as good or bad, indeed, as being on her beam ends--and Miss Temple and I were forced to keep our seats upon the hencoop, no more able to crawl up the deck to where the companion hatch was than had it been a slope of polished ice. This maybe was what she meant by ‘the ridiculousness of her position.’ The captain, standing to windward, was sending ominous looks at the band of the foretopsail and at the foretopmaststay-sail, the cloths of which continued miraculously to hold. There was too much wind for the sea to rise suddenly; indeed, the weight of the blast had smoothed down what remains of swell the rain and hail had left; the ocean was a level surface of foam, out of which the tempest of wind was tearing up whole snowstorms of flakes of spume, which flew over the ship in clouds that whitened out into a sort of dazzle, as though sun touched, as they flew in their throbbing masses athwart the leaden sky which poured across the sea over the ship’s bows in rags and trailing lengths and gyrating coils of sooty vapour.

‘Look!’ I shouted to Miss Temple, and pointed over our stern, where, out of the flying faintness and thickness of spray, the figure of the brig was at that instant forming itself.

I sprang upon the hencoop, the better to see, grasping the mizzen shrouds for support.

‘Shall I give you a hoist?’ I cried to the girl.

Her curiosity was too strong; the flying brig--a fleeting vision of the object which had filled us with alarm and suspense throughout the day, was a wonder to be witnessed at such a time as that at any cost. Her lips parted in the word yes to the howl of the gale, and in a moment I had her up alongside of me, my arm through hers, securely gripping and supporting her, and the pair of us gazing breathlessly at the sight astern.

With her single mast rising to the topmast cross-trees, the yards square, the remains of the trysail streaming like white hair from gaff and boltrope, the brig swept under our stern, shooting sheer athwart, seething smoothly as a sleigh over a level plain of snow, and rushing before the wind straight as the flight of an arrow. A coil of thick black smoke, whose base was reddened by sudden tongues of fire, blew over her bow, and coloured the atmosphere into which she rushed with a complexion of thunder. It seemed to rise from the fore-hatch, and it fled straight off the deck. I caught a sight of crowds of men forward and aft, with a couple of fellows leaping into the fore-rigging as the brig rushed by, to gesticulate to us. But the vision came and went in a few breaths like an object seen by lightning. So dense was the gale with spray, that there was scarcely a cable’s length of opening round about us. The brig showed and was gone! a phantasm, with the white waters pouring over her spritsail yard as she rushed through it, and no more of her was to be noted by the eye during the headlong swiftness of her plunge from one wall of spindrift into another, than the delicate lines of her rigging supporting the foremast, the bowsprit vanishing in a cloud of smoke, blowing ahead of her, a length of white deck, a flash of skylight glass, the glimmer, so to speak, of some score of faces turned our way.

‘She is on fire,’ I cried in Miss Temple’s ear: ‘she carries a doomed crew into that thickness!’

She moved, as if to resume her seat, and very carefully I got her on to the hencoop again.

But the first terrific spite of the gale was now gone, and the squab form of the Indiaman lifting a little out of the seething cauldron in which she lay with her main-deck rail flush with the yeasty surface, was beginning slowly to pay off. Her decks gradually grew level, and presently she was right before the wind, with the howl of it at her taffrail, and her huge bows heaping up the white sea till the leaps of the summits were at either cathead.

Mr. Colledge’s face showed in the companion-way.

‘Oh, there you are, Miss Temple!’ he roared. ‘Mrs. Radcliffe is firmly persuaded you have been blown overboard.’

She rose, but sat again, for the wind was too strong for her. Friend Colledge himself seemed pinned by the weight of it in the hatch.

‘We may be able to manage it between us,’ I shouted; and passing my arm through hers, I drove the pair of us to windward, and got her on to the companion ladder, down which she went.