CHAPTER XIII

FIRE!

It blew fiercely all that night. A mountainous sea was rolling two hours after the first of the gale, amid which the _Countess Ida_ lay hove-to under a small storm trysail, making very heavy weather of it indeed. There was a deal to talk about, but no opportunity for conversing. Few were present at the dinner-table, though the sea then running was moderate in comparison with the sickening heights to which it swelled later on; and there was little more to be done throughout the meal than to hold on for dear life, to keep a keen weather-eye lifting upon one’s food, and to gaze speechlessly across the table at one another amid an uproar of howling hurricane, of roaring waters, of straining bulkheads, of a ceaseless clattering of crockery and other noisy articles, that rendered conversation sheerly impossible.

And you may add to all this a good deal of consternation amongst us passengers. I had seen some weather in my time, but never the like of such a tossing and plunging bout as this. There were moments, indeed, when one felt it high time to go to prayers: I mean when the ship would lie down on the slant of some prodigious surge until she was hanging by her keel off the slope with her broadside upon the water, as though it were the bottom of her. There were many heave-overs of this sort, every one of which was accompanied by half-stifled shrieks from the cabins, by the sounds of the crash of boxes, unlashed articles, chairs, movable commodities of all kinds rushing with lightning-speed to leeward. Heavy contributions had been made upon our nervous systems by the incidents of the day: the vicinity of the brig--the prospect of having our windpipes slit--the furious thunderstorm--the spectacle of the lightning-struck craft: and the stock of fortitude left amongst us was but slender for a manly and courageous encounter of such an experience as this night was to prove.

I vividly recall the appearance of the cuddy at eleven o’clock when the hurricane was nearing its height. The ship was hove-to on the starboard tack, and the lamps in the saloon would sometimes swing over to larboard till their globes appeared to rest against the upper deck. I had managed in some sort of parrot fashion to claw along the table to abreast of a swinging tray, where I mixed myself a glass of cold brandy grog, with which I slided down to a sofa on the lee-side; and there I sat looking up at the people to windward as at a row of figures in a gallery.

Heaven knows I was but little disposed to mirth; yet for the life of me I could not refrain from laughter at the miserable appearance presented by most of my fellow-passengers there assembled. Near to the cuddy front, on the windward seats, sat Mr. Johnson, with terror very visibly working in his white countenance. His eyes rolled frightfully to every unusually heavy stoop of the ship, and his long lean frame writhed in a manner ludicrous to see, in his efforts to keep himself from darting forwards. Near him was Mr. Emmett, who strove to hold himself propped by thrusting at the cushions with his hands, and forking out his legs like a pair of open compasses with the toes stuck into the carpet on the deck, as though he was a ballet dancer about to attempt a pirouette on those extremities. Little Mr. Saunders, who had thoughtlessly taken a seat on the weather side, sat with his short shanks swinging high off the deck in the last agonies, as one could see, of holding on. My eye was on him when he slided off the cushion to one of those dizzy heaves of the ship which might have made any man believe she was capsizing. He shot off the smooth leather like a bolt discharged from a cross-bow, and striking the deck, rolled over and over in the manner of a boy coming down a hill. There was nothing to arrest him; he passed under the table and arrived half-dead within a fathom of me; on which I edged along to his little figure and picked him up. He was not hurt, but was terribly frightened.

‘What shocking weather, to be sure!’ was all he said.

I put my glass of grog into the worthy little creature’s hand, and he thanked me with one of his long-faced, wistful looks, then applied the tumbler to his mouth and emptied it.

But to end all this: at three o’clock in the morning there was a sensible decrease in the gale. I had fallen asleep in the cuddy, and waking at that hour, and finding but one lamp dimly burning, and the interior deserted, I worked my way to the hatch, groped along to my cabin, and tumbled into my bunk, where I slept soundly till half-past eight. The sun was shining when I opened my eyes: the ship was plunging and rolling, but easily, and in a floating, launching manner, that proved her to be sailing along with the wind aft. Colledge was seated in his bunk with his legs over the edge, gazing at me meditatively.

‘Awake?’ he exclaimed.

‘Yes,’ said I.

‘Fine weather this morning, Dugdale. But preserve us, what a night we’ve come through, hey? D’ye remember talking of the _fun_ of a voyage? Yesterday was a humorous time certainly.’

I sprang out of bed. ‘Patience, my friend, patience!’ said I; ‘this trip will end, like everything else in our world.’

‘Ay, at the bottom of the sea, for all one is to know,’ he grumbled. ‘A rod of land before twenty thousand acres of shipboard, say I. By the way, you and Miss Temple looked very happy in each other’s company when I peeped out of the hatch yesterday to see what had become of her, at her aunt’s request.’

‘You should have risen through the deck a little earlier,’ said I. ‘Yon would have found her hanging.’

‘Hanging!’ he cried.

‘Oh, not by the neck,’ said I.

‘What did you do?’

‘I rescued her. I seized her by the waist and bore her gloriously to a hencoop.’

‘Did you put your arms round her waist?’ said he, staring at me.

‘I did,’ I exclaimed.

He looked a little gloomy. Then brightening in a fitful kind of way, he said: ‘Well, I suppose you _had_ to do it--a case of pure necessity, Dugdale?’

I closed one eye and smiled at him.

‘She’s a very fine woman,’ said he, gazing at me gloomily again. ‘I trust you have not been indiscreet enough to tell her that I am engaged to be married?’

‘Oh now, my dear Colledge, _don’t_ let us trifle--_don’t_ let us trifle!’ said I. ‘Scarcely have you escaped the risk of being boarded by pirates--the chance of being beheaded by some giant picaroon--of being struck dead by lightning--of foundering in this ship in the small-hours, when round with circus speed sweep your thoughts to the ladies again, and your mouth is filled with impassioned questions. Where’s your gratitude for these hairbreadth escapes?’ and being by this time in trim for my morning bath, I bolted out of the cabin, laughing loudly, and deaf to his shout of, ‘I say, though, _did_ you tell her that I was engaged?’

The ocean was a very grand sight. The wind still blew fresh, but as the ship was running with it, it seemed to come without much weight. The sea was flowing in long tall surges of an amazing richness and brilliance of blue, and far and near their foaming heads flashed out to the sunshine in a splendour of whiteness that contrasted most gloriously with the long dark slopes of unbroken water. From sea-line to sea-line the sky was overspread with clouds of majestic bulk and grandeur of swelling form, as white in parts as the foam which broke under them, and with many rainbows in their skirts, and a tender violet shading in the centre of them, that gave them as they soared above the horizon the look of brushing the very heads of the coursing seas. The Indiaman was thundering through it under whole topsails and topgallant-sails, rolling with the stateliness of a line-of-battle ship as she went, with a rhythmically recurring stoop of her ponderous bows till the water boiled to the line of her forecastle rail, and her deck forward looked to lie as flat as a spoon in the dazzling smother.

I saw Mr. Prance on the poop, and having had my bath, stepped aft to exchange a greeting with him.

‘The ship appears to have come safely out of last night’s mess,’ said I.

‘It was a real breeze,’ he answered; ‘nothing suffered but the maintopsail. The _Countess Ida’s_ a proper ship, Mr. Dugdale. Those who put her together made all allowances, even for her rats. There’s some craft I know would have strained themselves into mere baskets in last night’s popple. But there was not an inch more of water this morning in the _Countess’s_ well than will drain into her in twenty-four hours in a river.’

‘And the brig, Mr. Prance? I believe I and Miss Temple were the two who saw the last of her.’

‘No. Captain Keeling spied her as she swept under our stern,’ said he. ‘She was on fire; and by this time, I reckon her beautiful hull--and truly beautiful it was, Mr. Dugdale--will be represented somewhere around us here by a few charred fragments.’

‘Or,’ said I, ‘even supposing they managed to extinguish the fire, Mr. Prance, her one mast with most of its heavy hamper aloft was not going to stand the hurricane very long. So she’ll either be a few blackened staves, as you say, or a sheer hulk. And her people?’

‘Ah,’ exclaimed the chief mate, fetching a deep breath, ‘from eighty to a hundred of them I allow. There’s no boat put together by mortal hands could have lived last night. By heavens though, but it is enough to make a harlequin thoughtful to figure such a ship-load of souls as that brig carried hurried into mere carcases for the deep-sea dab to smell to and the wall-eyed cod of the Atlantic to nibble at.’

‘Now, honestly, Mr. Prance--do you really believe there was anything of the pirate about that brig?’

‘Honestly, Mr. Dugdale, I do, sir; and I haven’t a shadow of a doubt that if the weather had taken any other turn, if a sailing breeze had sprung up, or the water had held smooth enough for a boating excursion, her people would have put us to our trumps with a good chance of their crippling us and plundering us, to say no more.’

Here the breakfast bell rang, and I rushed to the cabin to complete my toilet for the table.

There was no lack of talk this morning when the passengers had taken their places. The anxieties of the preceding day and night seemed only to have deepened the purple hue of old Keeling’s countenance, and his face showed like the north-west moon in a mist betwixt the tall points of his shirt collars, as he turned his skewered form from side to side answering questions, smirking to congratulations, and bowing to the ‘Good-morning, captain,’ showered upon him by the ladies. Mr. Johnson came to the table with a black eye, and Dr. Hemmeridge’s forehead was neatly inlaid with an immense strip of his own sticking-plaster, the effect in both cases of the gentlemen having fallen out of their bunks in the night. Colonel Bannister had sprained a wrist, and the pain made him unusually vindictive and aggressive in his remarks. The weather had not apparently served the ladies very kindly. Mrs. Hudson presented herself with her wig slightly awry, and her daughter looked as if she had not been to bed for a week. It was hard to realise, in fact, that the pale spiritless young lady with heavy violet eyes looking languidly through their long lashes, which deepened yet the dark shadow in the hollows under them, was the golden, flashful, laughing, coquettish young creature of the preceding morning.

I had made sure of a bow at least from Miss Temple; but I never once caught so much as a glance from her. Yet she was very easy and smiling in her occasional conversation with Colledge across the table. She alone of the women seemed to have suffered nothing from the violent usage of the night that was gone. In faultlessness of appearance, so far as her hair and attire and the like went, she might have stepped from her bedroom ashore after a couple of hours spent with her maid before a looking-glass. Not even a look for me, thought I! not even one of those cold swiftly fading smiles with which she would receive the greeting of a neighbour or a sentence from the captain!

I was stupid enough to feel piqued--to suffer from a fit of bad temper, in short, which came very near to landing me in an ugly quarrel with Mr. Johnson.

‘D’ye know, I rather wish _now_,’ said this journalist, addressing us generally at one end of the table, but with an air of caution, as though he did not desire the colonel to hear him, ‘that that brig yesterday _had_ attacked us. It would have furnished me with an opportunity for a very remarkable sea-description.’

‘Tut!’ said I, with a sneer; ‘before a man can describe he must see; and what would _you_ have seen?’

‘Seen, sir?’ he cried; ‘why, everything that might have happened, sir.’

‘Amongst the rats perhaps down in the hold. Nothing more to be seen _there_, unless it’s bilgewater.’

‘Goot!’ cried Mynheer Hemskirk. ‘It vould hov been vonny to combare Meester Shonson’s description mit der reeality.’

‘I will ask you not to question my courage,’ said Mr. Johnson, looking at me with a face whose paleness was not a little accentuated by his black eye. ‘I believe when it came to the scratch I should be found as good as another. _You_ would have fought, of course,’ he added, with a sarcastic sneer at me.

‘Yes; I would have fought then, just as I am ready to fight now,’ said I, looking at him.

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ exclaimed Mr. Prance, in a subdued reprimanding voice, ‘the ladies will be hearing you in a minute.’

‘You have been a sailor, Dugdale, you know,’ remarked Mr. Emmett in a satirical tone, ‘and might, therefore, have guessed yesterday that either the brig was a harmless trader, or that, supposing her to have been of a piratical nature, she would not attack us.’

‘And what then?’ cried I, eyeing him hotly.

‘Well,’ said he, with a foolish grin, ‘of course, under those circumstances, a large character for heroism might be earned very cheaply indeed.’

Johnson lay back in his chair to deliver himself of a noisy laugh. His seat was a fixed revolving contrivance, and its one socketed leg might have been injured during the night. Be this as it may, on the journalist flinging himself back with a loud applauding ‘Ha! ha!’ of his friend Emmett’s satiric hit at me, the chair broke, and backward he went with it with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other. Old Keeling started to his feet; the stewards came in a rush to the prostrate man. Those ladies who were near gathered their gowns about them as they watched him plunging in his efforts to extricate himself from the chair, in which his hips were in some manner jammed. For my part, having breakfasted, and being half suffocated with laughter, I was glad enough to run away out on deck. Indeed, the disaster had cooled my temper, and this occurrence was something to be thankful for, since one thing was leading to another, and, for all one could tell, the journalist and I might have come to blows as we sat side by side.

He and Emmett cut me for the rest of the day. My own temper was sulky for the most part. I spent the whole of the morning on the forecastle, smoking pipe after pipe in the ‘eyes’ of the ship, yarning in a fragmentary way with the boatswain, who invented excuses to come into the ‘head’ to indulge in a brief chat with me, whilst by his postures and motions he contrived to wear an air of business to the gaze that might be watching from the poop.

I would not own to myself that the sullen cast of my temper that day was due to Miss Temple; but secretly I was quite conscious that my mood was owing to her, and the mere perception of this was a new vexation to me. For what was this young lady to me? What could signify her coolness, her insolence, her cold and cutting disregard of me? We had barely exchanged a dozen words since we left the Thames. Though my admiration of her fine figure, her haughty face, her dark, tragic, passionate eyes was extravagantly great, it was hidden; she had not divined it; and she was therefore without the influence over my moods and emotions which she might have possessed had I known that she was conscious how deeply she fascinated me. She would not even give me a chance to thoroughly dislike her. The heart cannot steer a middle course with such a woman as she. Had her behaviour enabled me to hate her, I should have felt easy; but her conduct was of the marble-like quality of her features, hard and polished, and too slippery for the passions to set a footing upon. ‘Pshaw!’ thought I again and again, as I viciously hammered the ashes out of the bowl of my pipe on the forecastle rail, ‘am not I an idiot to be thinking of yonder woman in this fashion, musing upon her, speculating about her--a person who is absolutely as much a stranger to me as any fine lady driving past me in a London Park!’ Yet would I repeatedly catch myself stealing peeps at her from under the arch of the courses, hidden as I was right forward in the ship’s bows, while she was pacing the length of the poop with Mr. Colledge, or standing awhile to hold a conversation with her aunt and Captain Keeling, the nobility of her figure and the chilling lofty dignity of her bearing distinctly visible to me all that way off, and strongly defining her amongst the rest of the people who wavered and straggled about the deck.

The wind lightened towards noon; the fine sailing breeze failed us, and sank into a small air off the larboard beam; the swell of the sea went down, but the colour of the brine was still the same rich sparkling blue of the early morning. I had never seen so deeply pure and beautiful a tint in the ocean in these parallels. It made one think of the Cape Horn latitudes, with the white sun wheeling low, and a gleam of ice in the distant sapphire south. The great masses of cream-soft rainbow-tinctured cloud melted out, and at two o’clock in the afternoon it was a true equinoctial day, and the Indiaman a hot tropic picture, awnings spread, the pitch softening betwixt the seams, a sort of bluish steamy haze lazily floating off the line of her bulwark rail, through which the dim sea-limit showed in a sultry sinuous horizon. The ship rippled through it, clothed to her trucks with cloths that shone with the silver whiteness of stars to the hot noontide effulgence. The ayahs lolled about the quarter-deck, and John Chinaman sat upon a carronade fretting the baby he held into squeals of laughter and temper by tossing to. The old sow grunted with a grave grubbing noise under the long-boat, and fore and aft every cock in the ship was swelling his throat with defiant fine-weather crowings.

It was somewhere about three bells that evening--half-past seven o’clock--that I was standing with Mr. Prance at the brass rail that protected the break of the poop, the pair of us leaning upon it, watching a grinning hairy fellow capering in a hornpipe a little abaft the stowed anchor on the forecastle. The one-eyed ape which we had rescued, and which by this time was grown a favourite amongst the seamen, sat low in the foreshrouds, watching the dancing sailor--an odd bit of colour for the picture of the fore-part of the ship, clothed as he was in a red jacket and a cap like an inverted flower-pot, the tassel of it drooping to his empty socket. It was a most perfect ocean evening, the west glowing gloriously with a scarlet sunset, the sea tenderly heaving, a soft warm breathing of air holding the lighter sails aloft quiet. All the passengers were on deck saving Miss Temple, who was playing the piano to herself in the cuddy. In the recess just under me were three or four smokers; and the voice of Mr. Hodder waxing warm in some argument with Mynheer Peter Hemskirk, entered with unpleasant disturbing emphasis into the tender concert of sounds produced by the fiddlers forward, the occasional laughter of the seamen, the tinkling in the saloon, the voices of the ladies aft, the gentle rippling of water alongside, combining, and softened by distance and the vastness amid which the ship floated, into a sort of music.

I was in the midst of a pleasant yarn with Mr. Prance, whilst we hung over the rail, half watching the jigging chap forward, and half listening to each other. He was recounting some of his early experiences at sea, with a hint in his manner of lapsing anon into a sentimental mood on his lighting upon the name of a girl whom he had been betrothed to.

All on a sudden the music forward ceased. The fiddler that was working away upon the booms jumped up and peered downwards in the posture of a man snuffling up some strange smell. The fellow who was dancing came to a halt and looked too, walking to the forecastle edge and inclining his ear towards the fore-hatch, as it seemed. He stared round to the crowd of his shipmates who had been watching him, and said something, and a body of them came to where he was and stood gazing. The weather clew of the mainsail being lifted, all that happened forward lay plain in sight to those who were aft.

‘What is wrong there?’ exclaimed Mr. Prance abruptly, breaking off from what he was saying, and sending one of his falcon looks at the forecastle. ‘The pose of that fiddling chap might make one believe he was tasting cholera somewhere about.’

A boatswain’s mate came down the forecastle ladder and went to the fore-hatch, where he paused. Then, with a glance aft, he came right along to the quarter-deck with hurried steps, and mounted the poop ladder, coming to a stand when his head was on a level with the upper deck.

‘What is it?’ cried Mr. Prance.

The fellow answered in a low voice, audible only to the chief officer and myself: ‘There’s a smell of fire forwards, sir, and a sound as of some one knocking inside of the hatch.’

‘A smell of fire!’ ejaculated the mate; and swiftly, though preserving his quiet bearing, he descended to the quarter-deck and walked forward.

I had long ago made myself free of all parts of the ship, and guessed, therefore, that, my following in the wake of the mate would attract no attention, nor give significance to a business which might prove a false alarm. By the time he had reached the hatch, I was at his side. The boatswain and sailmaker came out of their cabins, a number of seamen quitted the forecastle to join us, and the rest gathered at the edge of the raised deck, looking down. The fore-hatch was a great square protected by a cover that was to be lifted in pieces. A tarpaulin was stretched over it with battening irons to keep it fixed, for this was a hatch there was seldom or never any occasion to enter at sea, the cargo in all probability coming flush to it.

I had scarcely stood a moment in the atmosphere of this hatch, when I became sensible of a faint smell as of burning, yet too subtle to be detected by a nostril that was not particularly keen. As I was sniffing to make sure, there came a hollow, dull noise of knocking, distinct, and unmistakably produced by some one immediately under the hatch striking at it with a heavy instrument. Mr. Prance hung in the wind for a second or two snuffling and hearkening with the countenance of one who discredits his senses.

‘Why’ he exclaimed, ‘there _is_ somebody below, and--and’---- Here he sniffed up hard with much too much energy, methought, to enable him to taste the faint fumes. ‘Carpenter,’ he exclaimed to the withered old Scotchman who made one of the crowd of onlookers, ‘get this hatch stripped and the cover lifted--quickly, but _quietly_, if you please.’

He looked sternly round upon the men; and then sent a hurried glance aft, where stood Captain Keeling in the spot we had just vacated, with Mrs. Radcliffe on his arm.

The battens were nimbly drawn, the tarpaulin thrown aside, and some seamen stooped to raise the hatch cover. A few seconds were expended in prising and manœuvring, in the midst of which the knocking was repeated with a note of violence in it, accompanied by a general start and a growl of wonder from all hands.

‘Heave!’ cried the carpenter, and up came the cover, followed by a small cloud of blue smoke, and immediately after by the figure of the hideous sailor Crabb, who sprang from off the top of a layer of white-wood cases with a loud curse and a horrible fit of coughing.