*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 62419 ***

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NEW BOOKS AT EVERY LIBRARY.


SONS OF BELIAL. By WILLIAM WESTALL. 2 vols.

LILITH. By GEORGE MACDONALD. 1 vol.

THE PROFESSOR'S EXPERIMENT. By MRS. HUNGERFORD. 3 vols.

THE IMPRESSIONS OF AUREOLE. 1 vol.

DAGONET ABROAD. By GEORGE R. SIMS. 1 vol.

CLARENCE. By BRET HARTE. 1 vol.

OTHELLO'S OCCUPATION. By MARY ANDERSON. 1 vol.

HONOUR OF THIEVES. By C. J. CUTCLIFFE HYNE. 1 vol.

THE MACDONALD LASS. By SARAH TYTLER. 1 vol.

THE PRINCE OF BALKISTAN. By ALLEN UPWARD. 1 vol.

THE KING IN YELLOW. By ROBERT W. CHAMBERS. 1 vol.


LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY.




HEART OF OAK

VOL. III.




PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON




HEART OF OAK

A THREE-STRANDED YARN


BY

W. CLARK RUSSELL

AUTHOR OF
'THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR' 'THE PHANTOM DEATH'
'THE CONVICT SHIP' ETC.


[Illustration: Decoration]


IN THREE VOLUMES--VOL. III.


LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1895




CONTENTS

OF

THE THIRD VOLUME

CHAPTER                            PAGE
    XX. STARTLING NEWS                1

   XXI. MR. MOORE SAILS              27

  XXII. THE PHOTOGRAPHS              50

 XXIII. THE SHIP SEEN ON THE ICE     76

  XXIV. THE BRIG 'ALBATROSS'        100

   XXV. AT SEA AGAIN                128

  XXVI. THE ICE                     159

 XXVII. CORONATION ISLAND           185

XXVIII. MR. MOORE ENDS HIS STORY    217




HEART OF OAK




CHAPTER XX

STARTLING NEWS


Sir Mortimer received the news of the loss of the ship whilst he was in
Paris. He had sent his foreign address to the office in the Minories,
always hoping to hear from, or of, his daughter, and Mr. Butcher wrote
to him, unknown to me, and perhaps to Mr. Hobbs.

He at once came to London: he arrived in the afternoon. The bank was
closed and he drove to my rooms, where he found me. He was very pale
and looked ill, but whether he had disciplined his mind during his
journey, or was a person of more fortitude than I had imagined, his
behaviour was almost calm compared to what I had expected to find it on
our first meeting.

'When we surrendered her,' were almost his first words after holding me
by the hand and struggling as though with his tears, 'I had a feeling
we should never again meet. I ought not to have permitted her to take
so long a voyage. She was too delicate, her health was too poor, she
was too used to have comforts'--he could not proceed for some moments.
He then said, 'She was my only child. I am now alone in the world,'
and, casting himself into a chair, he hid his face and gave way.

'I will not believe there is no hope,' I exclaimed, and, sitting down
beside him, I repeated all that I had gathered from my talk with the
boatswain Wall, with whom I had conversed for above a couple of hours
on the previous day, having brought him to the bank by a letter and
taken him into a private room, where, with my father, I had closely
questioned him, getting all that his experiences as an old seaman could
reveal of the chances a shipwrecked company had in those seas where
Marie had been abandoned.

Sir Mortimer listened to me with passionate interest, dwelling upon
every syllable, catching me up if he did not clearly understand.
Sometimes his eyes brightened, as with a little struggle of hope, but
often he shook his head.

'Consider,' he exclaimed, 'the "Lady Emma" was dismasted July 2.' (I
had all necessary notes of dates and the like in my note-book.) 'The
crew left her on the fourth. This is October 5; you cannot believe that
the helpless hull has continued to float in such frightful seas as run
off Cape Horn all this while.'

'I don't say so. I don't dream it. God forbid, indeed; for that would
put an end to all chance of our ever seeing Marie again. But may we
not believe that she was fallen in with long ago?'

'Why have we not heard? There has been time!'

'No. Suppose the vessel that rescued them was proceeding to Australia.
We might need another three months to hear.'

'Oh, but think!' he exclaimed, 'a dismasted hull, utterly helpless; the
horrors and perils of ice close to, a wild sea continually running--she
has not the strength to meet such sufferings; they will have broken her
poor heart. Oh! Archie, she has been taken! She is dead! We shall never
see her again.'

He had made up his mind to this, and I daresay his comparative calmness
rose from his resolution to accept the worst at once. Though he knew
little or nothing about the sea, he could not listen to my version
of Wall's story without regarding the wreck of the 'Lady Emma' as
hopelessly complete as any in the maritime records. He said that the
mere circumstance of the 'Planter' cruising and finding nothing was of
itself a death-blow to hope.

'And what is there to hope for?' he exclaimed, rising and moving about
the room with something of feebleness. 'We are to wait; but for what?
This sort of waiting in grief breaks down the intellect--the mourner
goes mad. In my youth I knew a woman whose only son had been drowned
in a shipwreck. She would not believe it; she hoped on; and ten years
after his death saw her on the beach with her eyes fixed upon the sea,
gazing, with a joyous welcoming face, at the apparition of her child
whom, in her craziness, she beheld approaching her in a boat. Oh no!'
he cried with a sudden, most moving, passionate wringing of his hands,
'Marie has perished; she is lost to us! Why did not the good God hinder
me from sending her away? They told me that nothing could save her life
but a voyage, and I, who would have given my life for her, despatched
her to her death!'

I could not bear this, for I, too, was heartbroken. I grasped him by
the hands, and then he became silent, after looking in my face.

But still, as I have said, his behaviour throughout this meeting with
me, even when the first horror and shock of the news was renewed to
us both by this our first meeting, was calmer than I had expected. He
stayed in London that night, and next day accompanied me to the City,
where he had an interview with Mr. Butcher. We then drove to a street
out of the West India Dock Road, where Wall lodged.

The substance of Mr. Butcher's talk was that ships homeward bound from
the Australias frequently touched the latitude the hull had been left
in; there was, therefore, reason to hope that Captain Burke and the
ladies had been rescued by one of the many vessels which every year
were navigating those seas. He said he had spoken to several captains
of experience on the subject, also two or three underwriters of long
standing, and on the whole their opinion was, Burke and his companions
would be preserved.

Wall had nothing to add--no further conjectures to offer. He went
very fully into the story of the dismasting of the vessel and her
abandonment, and answered with intelligence the questions Sir Mortimer
put to him about Marie, how she looked, if she had picked up, if he
(Wall) considered she was strong enough to outlive the horrors and
sufferings of her situation, supposing the hull to be encountered
within a reasonable time--say a week--from the date of the men's
quitting her.

Sir Mortimer went to his home by the seaside next day. I promised to
visit him on the following Saturday, but fretting had done its work--I
was too ill to travel. I was ceaselessly haunted by the vision of
the hull, white with snow, brilliant with ice, clouded with the foam
of beating seas, wearily rolling with my dear one, with my Marie,
_alone_ in her. Somehow I could not think of her as associated with the
Burkes. She was the one, the solitary, figure in the gloomy interior of
that tempest-tossed fabric, as I witnessed the vision awake and in my
dreams. I was aware that Mrs. Burke had been a most devoted servant, a
faithful and honest nurse and friend to Marie, but I had got it into my
head that her husband had lost his reason, which would drain his wife's
sympathies from my sweetheart; and then, again, realising the misery
of a time spent in such a hulk, under such circumstances, I could not
suppose that poor Mrs. Burke would in her distraction take heed of more
outside her husband than the doom that every hour brought closer.

So the vision of that wreck was always present to the eye of
imagination, waking or sleeping, with one figure only in the maimed
and beaten fabric.

On the morning of October 20, I went to the bank, having resumed work
there two days before. My father had not arrived. I went into my
private room and sat down with a heart of loathing at sight of a pile
of letters which it would be my business to read and deal with.

I had hardly broken the first envelope when a clerk entered and said
that a Mr. Norman, an old customer of the bank, wished to see me. I
supposed he had called on business, and after reading the letter I
held, I opened the glass door and bade Mr. Norman step in.

He was a merchant doing business with Natal and Cape Colony. He at once
said, without offering to sit:

'I have not called on business, Mr. Moore. I heard of your trouble,
and grieve to find it but too visible in your face. This morning I
received a batch of South African newspapers, and met with an account,
which--I don't know, I'm sure--it may be ill-advised on my part----' He
broke off, and his hand went nervously to his side pocket.

I looked at him inquiringly, wondering what his Colonial newspaper
account was about.

'I think,' said he, his hand still nervously twitching at his
breast-pocket, 'that where sorrow is speculative the sooner expectation
is ended, one way or the other, the better. This may signify
nothing'--and now he produced a newspaper--'and yet it may tell
everything.'

He was proceeding; I extended my arm abruptly, feeling a sickness
at heart, for now imagination leaped to the very height of fear--I
believed I was to read something which would _prove_ that Marie and her
companions had perished.

But Mr. Norman must needs open the paper himself; and, in order to
find the passage, he required to put on his glasses. The piece of
intelligence in the journal ran thus:--

'_Cape Town, August 10. Arrival of the schooner "Emerald." A
strange discovery! Romantic action on the part of the captain!_ The
three-masted schooner "Emerald" arrived yesterday from the west
coast of South America. When in lat. 58° S., long. 48° W., the body
of a female was seen floating upon the water. Its appearance was so
lifelike that, the weather at the time being quiet, the captain ordered
a boat to be lowered, and the body was brought on board. The master
(Goldsmith), on inspecting the corpse, was convinced by its appearance
that it was the remains of the wife of a friend of his. She had been
bound round the Horn to join her husband at Monte Video. Feeling
persuaded of this he caused the body to be placed in a cask of spirits,
with a view to carrying it to Cape Town, his first port of call, that
it might have decent Christian interment; also that the husband should,
if his wife did actually prove to be missing, be able to procure the
exhumation of the corpse for identification.

'The body is described as that of one who in life must have been
singularly prepossessing and genteel in appearance; the hair is of a
dark amber or gold, the eyes of a light blue or grey, height about
5 ft. 6 in., of a figure that had apparently been full of grace and
beauty. No rings were on the hands. Captain Goldsmith conjectures that
the rings, including the wedding ring, slipped off the fingers through
shrinkage of the flesh by immersion. Owing to the condition of the
body, it has been found impossible to form an opinion as to the length
of time it was in the water; it is judged, however, from the appearance
of the clothes, which were in a fair state of preservation, that the
period could not have exceeded three days. The body was attired in
a thick serge dress, and a warm jacket, trimmed with a rich fur, of
which but a little remained. One garment only was marked: namely, with
the letter O, which Captain Goldsmith believes stands for Ollier, his
friend's name. The remains will be buried to-day. A romantic mystery
nevertheless survives, and it remains to be seen whether Captain
Goldsmith is right in his conjectures as to the identity of the poor
nameless remains of one who in life must have been "exceeding fair,"
found floating far south of the stormiest headland in the world.'

I read this very slowly, and when I had come to the last word I read
it all over again. Mr. Norman's eyes were fixed upon my face. I fell
into deep thought, and was silent for many minutes, with my gaze rooted
upon the paper. I then pulled out my pocket-book, in which I carried
the memoranda I had collected from Mr. Butcher and Wall, and compared
the date of the dismasting of the 'Lady Emma' with the date of the
discovery of the body. The 'Lady Emma' was dismasted July 2, the body
was seen and picked up on July 10; the situation of the 'Lady Emma'
when the crew abandoned her, according to the 'Planter's' log-book, was
lat. 58° 45´ S. and long. 45° 10´ W.; the body was picked up in lat.
58° S. long. 48° W.; the minutes and seconds, if any there were, were
probably omitted in the newspaper report, or Captain Goldsmith may have
given the situation in round numbers.

Be this as it may, there could be a difference of but a very few miles
between the spot where the body was found, and the spot where the hull
was deserted by the sailors.

'It is extraordinary!' I exclaimed, fetching a deep breath.

'I hope it may not prove conclusive news,' said Mr. Norman. 'But if
the body brought to Cape Town be that of the poor young lady, the fact
ought to be known to you if only to spare you from the heart-sickness
of deferred hope.'

'Dates and places correspond,' I exclaimed. 'The description is true.
She had dark amber hair. Her height might be as it is here stated.'

'And then there is the letter O,' said Mr. Norman, observing that I
paused.

'How am I to find out if among the clothes she took were such a dress
and jacket as the body was found clothed in?'

At this moment my father entered. He immediately observed that I was
deeply agitated, and glanced from me to Mr. Norman. The latter bowed,
then turned to me and, begging me to keep the newspaper, and to command
his services in any direction in which I could render them profitable,
withdrew.

I handed the paper to my father, who read the account with a face of
astonishment and dismay.

'Is it credible?' he cried. 'Is it a hoax, d'ee think? Or some story
vamped up, for--for--? But,' he cried, turning his glasses again upon
the paper, 'they name the ship and her captain, they give dates, they
say that the body was to be buried on that day,' looking at the date of
issue. 'Is it conceivable that a body would float, apparelled as this
woman's was?'

'If the story is no lie, then a body thus apparelled was found
floating,' I answered.

'You had better send the paper at once to Sir Mortimer,' said my father.

'I'll run down with it, but first I'll see Mr. Butcher and Wall. How am
I to find out if Marie had a serge dress and that sort of jacket?' I
reflected, and then said, 'Father, I must have the whole day, I cannot
work, I wish to satisfy myself by some inquiries before seeing Sir
Mortimer, and then I may resolve to go to the Cape.'

He gazed at me with mild astonishment, then put his hand caressingly
on my shoulder, and told me I should go where I pleased and do what I
liked; he advised me, however, not to act precipitately; the Cape was
a long way off! What good could I do there, even supposing the body
brought to Cape Town by the schooner should prove to be Marie?'

'What good? I must _know_; I must make _sure_! Supposing it is
Marie--but it might be another.'

'The body is buried.'

'Yes; but I would get an order for its exhumation. It was buried with a
view to disinterment should the man whose wife was to join him at Monte
Video arrive in Cape Town.'

I had heard Mrs. Burke talk of some of the shops Marie had completed
her outfit at. Her old nurse had herself attended her in most of
her shopping excursions before the sailing of the ship, and after
exchanging a few further sentences with my father, I left the bank,
called a cab, and was driven to a dressmaker's near Cavendish Square.

Here, however, I could not learn that Marie had ordered a serge dress;
but on inquiring at a shop in Regent Street, I discovered, with much
pains--they were very busy and very slow--that Miss Otway had, on a day
towards the close of March, purchased a jacket trimmed with fur; the
fur was described; and certainly the 'garment,' as the shopman called
it, corresponded with the brief description of the jacket that had been
found on the body of the woman.

I could recollect no other shops; but hoped that Sir Mortimer might be
able to tell me if a serge gown had been included in Marie's outfit.
This should have been, and no doubt was, known to Marie's maid. But the
girl, on the departure of Miss Otway, had gone, I had some recollection
of hearing, with a family to Germany.

In this same day I drove to the offices of Messrs. Butcher and Hobbs,
and had scarcely entered the place when Wall came in, greatly to my
satisfaction, as I particularly desired his opinion. Both partners were
present, and on my showing them the Cape newspaper they called Wall to
us and we thoroughly talked the matter over. To the seaman, who was
somewhat illiterate, I read and re-read the newspaper account.

'It's wonderful!' he exclaimed. 'Most sartinly it answers to the young
lady. I've heered of females lying afloat like that. 'Taint so long ago
that a woman was picked up alive arter washing about for thirty-six
hours on her back.'

'But how can the body be Miss Otway's?' said Mr. Butcher, 'if the
master of a schooner recognises it as a Mrs. Ollier's?'

'The coincidence would be quite too extraordinary,' said Mr. Hobbs.
'Mr. Moore,' he added, with one of his depressing bows, 'it would give
me far more pleasure to take a cheerful view; but consider--the body
of a lady is found floating much about the place where the hull was
abandoned; the description, as I understand, answers to that of Miss
Otway'--he said no more, but buried his hands in his pockets with a
very gloomy shake of the head.

Mr. Butcher, however, inclined to the belief that the body was the
person's the schooner's skipper took it to be. He wished to believe
Miss Otway alive; he was by no means for despairing; whilst they were
talking of this body, Miss Otway might be actually on her way home.
What did Wall think?

The honest seaman faltered; he saw that Mr. Butcher wished to cheer me
up, but there could be no doubt he was of Mr. Hobbs's mind. They were
all three agreed, however, that it was a puzzling, most wonderful thing.

'There's nothen for Mr. Moore to do,' said Wall, who, having been
admitted into this council, considered himself at liberty to talk out,
perhaps thinking he was expected to do so. 'Let him give the lady's
portrait to some respectable man who'll go by steam, afore it's too
late, and view the body and settle it.'

'To whose satisfaction?' inquired Mr Butcher, looking at me.

'Not to mine,' I exclaimed. 'I must decide with my own eyes.'

'In them warmer climates,' said Wall, 'ye've got to bear a hand in jobs
of that sort.'

Mr. Hobbs admonished the man with a frown.

'Surely, Mr. Moore,' exclaimed Mr. Butcher, 'you would be able to
identify the young lady by the wearing apparel they removed, and are,
of course, preserving at Cape Town?'

I told him I had ascertained that morning that a jacket answering to
the one found on the body had been sold to Miss Otway.

He looked very grave at this, and I saw Mr. Hobbs exchange a glance
with the seaman. Soon after this I thanked them for their sympathy and
patience, and took my leave. I could think of nothing but the story
of the body found at sea, and next morning went by an early train to
the little seaside town where Sir Mortimer lived. As I drove from the
station I passed by the ravine down which Marie and I had gone for
a stroll upon the long, hard platform of sands one afternoon in the
keen grey month that preceded the April she sailed in. It was October
now--six months later; what had happened between? The blue sea ran up
to the sky in a trembling, silken slope streaked with long gleams. I
remembered how Marie had checked me in our walk to look at a passing
sail, and how together we had watched the glimmering white square of
her fade like mist in the evening gloom. Many gulls wheeled over the
water. I saw them flying past the edge of the cliff, and remembered
how Marie had paused and looked up to admire the marvellous grace of
the windward flight of the birds then on the wing--perhaps those I now
caught a glimpse of. An ocean life of many months had stretched before
her, and whilst we walked I had noticed how she was letting the spirit
of the sea sink into her, finding in the coil of the breaker, in the
flight of the birds, in the shadowy distance of the horizon, a meaning
she had never before heeded, only, perhaps, that she might enter with
a little spirit into a scene of life from which I knew her very inmost
soul shrank.

Sir Mortimer was at home; he was in mourning. The sight of his sombre
figure and ashen countenance, of resigned but settled sorrow, startled
and even shocked me. It was like a confirmation of fear, an assurance
that Marie was dead and that hope must end. My visit was unexpected,
and whilst he welcomed me he held my hand and stood looking at me in a
posture of eager, sorrowful inquiry.

Presently, when we were seated, I pulled out the paper and pointed
to the story of the discovery. He was a high-bred, fine-looking old
gentleman, and I see him now as he sat holding his glasses to his eyes,
the paper trembling in his hand, and his face slowly taking what the
Scotch call a 'raised' look as he read. He turned, dropping his glasses
and letting the paper sink to his knee, and said in a voice a little
above a whisper:

'What is this?'

'What do you think?'

'You don't believe it was Marie?' he said.

'If we are to think _that_, she is dead to us!' I exclaimed. 'But if it
was not Marie, whose was the body that was picked up by the schooner
close to the spot where the hull had been abandoned?'

He stared at me, drew a deep breath, and referred again to the paper.

'Have you seen that seaman--the boatswain--I forget his name--upon
this?' he asked.

'Yes; and the two owners. But what can their opinion be worth? How
could their ideas help us, Sir Mortimer? Read the description of that
body, the dark amber hair, the looks which in life must have been those
of a refined----' I faltered, controlled myself, and went on: 'I have
discovered,' and I named the shop where I had obtained the information,
'that Marie's outfit included such another jacket as the body had on.
Can you remember if she took a serge dress with her?'

'Two or three,' he answered quickly. 'They were of dark blue. Two she
had. A third was added at Mrs. Burke's suggestion. What was the colour
of the dress described here?'

He looked; but no colour was named. I got up and paced about the room.

'I have made up my mind,' I exclaimed. 'I will go to the Cape. If it be
Marie--but I must make sure at all costs. The suspense, the waiting,
the not knowing whether she lies dead at Cape Town, whether she has
gone down in the hull, whether she has been rescued, carried to a
distant port, and is lying ill, so that months might elapse before
we should get news of her--all this I could not bear! I am already
half mad with the grief of it. I will go to Cape Town,' I cried, 'and
see with my own eyes, and settle expectation, so far as that body is
concerned, one way or another, for ever.'




CHAPTER XXI

MR. MOORE SAILS


I think, I will not be sure, that the date on which I returned to
London from this visit to Sir Mortimer was October 26. In the year 1860
sailing ships bound to the Australias and the East Indies frequently,
many of them regularly, touched at the Cape; small vessels, such
as brigs and barques, also traded to that colony. There was steam
communication, however, then. I believe the first of the steamers of
the Union Steamship Company was despatched three years earlier, namely,
in 1857.

Be this as it may, since steam was to be got I was resolved to have
nothing to do with what the sailor calls tacks and sheets. A sailing
ship might keep me four months upon the ocean in her struggles with
head winds and failing catspaws. On the other hand, the Cape, by steam,
was to be reached certainly within forty days. But having made up my
mind, I found there was no time to lose, that is, if I resolved on
steam; for, on reaching London, I learnt that the next Union steamer
was the 'Cambrian,' sailing from Southampton on November 6.

It was this obligation of despatch, perhaps, which hardened me in
my resolution. I meant to sail by the 'Cambrian' and there was no
leisure for hesitation, no time for second thought. Not, indeed,
that I was not passionately resolved; I had been so from the hour of
clearly understanding that I must proceed to the Cape and procure the
exhumation of the body if my mind was to be set at rest one way or
the other. I mean, if I had been obliged to wait a month, say, for a
sailing ship, I might have found myself troubled, my resolution a
little unsettled, by the counsels of friends.

My father, for example, fully sanctioned my going, but advised me to
consider how it would be with my memory if, when the coffin was opened,
I recognised the body as Marie's.

I answered I had thought over that, and knew it would prove a terrible
ordeal. But it must be worse with me if I stayed at home, never
stirring to find out if the body that lay in Cape Town cemetery was
indeed that of the girl I loved.

'Suppose she is drowned,' I reasoned, 'I should not believe it for
months, perhaps years. No man could persuade me she was dead. Time
alone must convince me. But how long should I allow myself? Meanwhile I
must live in expectation. My life would be a torment of suspense. But
by going to the Cape I shall satisfy myself at once.'

'Yes,' said my father, 'but you will only be able to satisfy yourself
that Marie does not lie buried in Cape Town if, when the grave is
opened, the remains should prove another's.'

'It will satisfy me to know _that_, at all events,' I exclaimed.

'Will they let you exhume the body?'

This staggered me somewhat; but I replied I would take my chance of it.
The corpse had been brought to Cape Town, and there buried with a view
to identification. The case was extraordinary; and when the Colonial
authorities heard my story they would not refuse to let me disinter the
remains.

Several friends offered like objections. One suggested I should ask
that the clothes should be sent home, and submitted to the inspection
of those from whom Marie bought her outfit; the shopmen would know
their own wares. If they asserted the clothes had been sold by
them--had at any time passed through their hands--there would be
something solid to go upon; I could then sail for the Cape and confirm
by inspection what to most would pass as a foregone conclusion.

But my answer was, it was not very conceivable that those who held the
clothes would part with them; it was no case of suspected murder, so
as to admit of the introduction of the machinery of the law; moreover,
if I waited, the remains would become unrecognisable. It was already a
question how far the climate would admit of an identification of them.
The body arrived at the Cape August 10; this was the close of October.
December would have come before I landed; and December is the burning
midsummer of South Africa.

But herein, as in all the rest, I was prepared to take my chance. I
felt a secret reluctance in one direction only. It shocked me even in
imagination to think, if the remains _should_ prove Marie's, of the
memory I must return home with and be haunted by to my death-bed.

On November 5 I travelled to Southampton, and on the following day
embarked in the steamship 'Cambrian' for Cape Town. I had said good-bye
to my friends in London and went on board alone. Never did passenger
tread a ship's deck with heavier heart than I. The vessel was full of
bustle and confusion; she was taking out a large number of passengers
who, with their friends, filled her fore and aft, overflowing the
saloon, and crowding the raised deck or poop.

It is at such a time as this, and amid such a crowd as littered the
'Cambrian's' decks, that you learn what real loneliness is. I looked
around me and saw not one face I had ever met before. There was much
surging and elbowing of figures in the gangway, a constant dragging
here and there of baggage, shouts from the ship to the shore, from
the shore to the ship, with stewards dodging and shoving in and out,
officers of the steamer twinkling and flitting in the finery of the
merchant service.

I contrasted all this noise--threaded by strange groaning rumblings
down in the bowels of the metal keel, as though the giant, steam, lying
imprisoned, was beginning to mutter in his impatience and shake his
chains--with the peace on board the 'Lady Emma' when I mounted her side
with Marie and her father and Mrs. Burke. All was quiet there, the
masts pointed their crossed and knitted heights silent in the breeze
as a tree that sleeps in the dead calm of a summer's night; about
was spread a shining scene of river abounding in life and colour, in
gliding and in stately motion; but the ear was not vexed.

However, it would not be long before the 'Cambrian' was under way, and,
indeed, whilst I was seeing to my baggage in my berth, and taking a
view of the bedroom I was to sleep in for thirty-five or forty days, I
heard noises and felt a vibration which satisfied me we were about to
start.

The vessel was something less than nine hundred tons; she was fitted
with a saloon, on either hand of which went a range of sleeping berths,
and the amidships was filled with a long table. She was rigged as a
schooner, with a couple of yards on each mast, and sat with a promise
of swiftness in her posture, her bow being yacht-like and sharp,
dominant, that is, with a good spring, whilst the run of her vanished
in a very pretty mould of stern.

She would be laughed at now; side by side with the Cape white giantess
of to-day, thrashing from the top of the North Atlantic to the other
bottom of the South Atlantic in a trifle more than a fortnight, how
meanly would she show! even as a pinnace or steam launch in the shadow
of the man-of-war that owns her. No splendour of internal fittings;
nothing rememberable in the form of smoke-room or bath-room. And still
my heart swells with the memory of that little iron steamer, which long
since ceased, save as one of the countless spectres of the deep, the
true and only phantom ships of the sea.

It was a bleak, dark November day when we started; a strong wind blew,
and the sky was thick and near with rolling snow-clouds. We passed
along Southampton Water in a squall of sleet, and though imagination
was never an inactive quality in me, yet then, more keenly than at any
previous time, was I able to realise the significance of Wall's story
of the dismasted hull, the high foaming seas of the great ocean past
the Horn, the mountains of ice rocking their lofty summits in the smoke
of flying flakes.

It was blowing fresh in the open, clear of the Isle of Wight; the
little steamer pitched and sprang and made vile weather of the spiteful
snap of that November Channel surge. She drove the most of us to our
berths, and for four days I was a prisoner, stupidly sick and helpless.
Then I stepped forth feeling well again, and making my way on to the
poop found a fine day, a swelling sea, a rattling breeze astern, before
which the vessel, with bladder-like canvas swelling hard from her yards
and black funnel pouring smoke over the bows to the horizon ahead, was
bowling and rolling, with an occasional kick up astern which drove a
shock and vibration of exposed screw through the length of her.

Abreast on the right was a little ship under full sail braced sharp
up, tearing through the seas; the red flag of England stood like a
board at her mizzen peaks. She was apparently bound home. The water
swept in sheets from her steering stem, and every flash of the white
brine was magically spanned by a rainbow. She was painted black, and
to my land-going eye exactly resembled the 'Lady Emma,' though the
practised nautical glance would doubtless have witnessed plenty that
distinguished her from the other. I watched her with fascinated gaze,
and in deep melancholy, as she swept through the brilliant curls of
sea, clouding her path as she dived and scoring the rolling blue astern
of her with an arrow-like line of light.

Just such sailing as that had Marie described in the fragment of
journal we had received. She had named the sails, flung with dexterous
pen the very sheen of the lustrous rounds of canvas upon the vision of
the mind, painted the picture of the deck, the dark wet length of plank
gleaming along the sobbing scuppers at every roll, sailors hanging in
the rigging with marling-spikes and coils of small stuff, or stitching
on spaces of canvas in the sun, the mate walking the weather side of
the deck, her own dear self seated under a short awning talking with
her old nurse about the home she was leaving, about the countries
she was to visit. I caught my breath with a spasm and turned from the
beautiful picture.

We were a great number of passengers for so small a vessel. When
the fine weather came and the people got their stomachs, no more
hospitable scene at meal-time was ever afloat than that saloon of
over thirty years ago. There is plenty of finery at sea in this age;
but the picturesque is almost dead; it flourished then. Much of the
old Indiaman, the old Caper and South Spanier survived in the early
steamer. You found this in colours and fittings, and in rig; for, none
of us yet making cocksure of the cub of the engine-room, a fabric nigh
as spacious and wide as that of the sailing ship was reared to draw
from the wind the help the propeller might refuse.

This little steamer, too, would go along in an ambling way when it was
fine, like any large ship with the wind on the quarter, taking the wide
heaves of the deep in a procession of curtseys whilst she fanned the
sky with her squares of canvas. I see again the dinner-picture of a
fine afternoon: a row of well-dressed people filling the long table;
the captain bland and watchful at one end; someone trembling in brass
buttons at the other; the claret-coloured light of the setting sun
ripples in polished bulkhead and makes rubies of diamonds on moving
hands; every shadow sways with slow grace, and the large round cabin
windows deepen into dark blue, or glance out in crimson light as the
vessel softly rolls them from sea to sky.

My place at table was at top, on the captain's right: a seat of
distinction, but a matter of accident so far as I was concerned. The
commander of this steamer, to give the worthy skipper a sounding name,
was a kindly hearted seaman named Strutt, who had used the sea for many
years in sailing ships, and had much to tell about the ocean life. One
of the passengers was a retired shipmaster who, I understood, was
making the voyage to the Cape to seek some waterside berth in South
Africa; he was a Newcastle man and had been bred to the sea in the coal
trade; such was his contempt of steam he could find nothing in his rude
and quaint dialect vigorous enough to dress it in. He sat within three
or four of the captain on the left and they often argued, and their
speech was my diversion.

I remember one day, shortly before we made the island of Madeira, that
these two men got upon the subject of Polar expeditions. The captain
said that the discovery of the North Pole would be as important to
navigation and science as the discovery of America was to civilisation.
The other replied that the North Pole was of no use to any mortal man.
What was it? An imagination. Nothing you could see, or sit upon, or
lean against. At this a great many people laughed.

A middle-aged lady sitting at a little distance on my right begged that
the North Pole would not be mentioned; she had lost a promising nephew
in consequence of it. He had sailed in one of the expeditions and had
fallen into a deep hole beside the ship when she lay upon the ice, and,
marvellous to relate, though the body of the poor young man was not
discovered until six weeks afterwards, it was so perfectly fresh, the
face so lifelike, the colour on the cheeks so exactly as in health,
that all wondered he did not speak and smile.

'There's no perishing in ice,' said the retired shipmaster in a deep
voice, 'once dead, ye keep arle on. Sir John Franklin was to be found.
Nought was wanting but the right sort of men to look for him. He's
somewhere up there still, just as he died, poor chap, hard as a statue,
him and the rest of them, saving those they fed on.'

'What's the action of salt water on a body?' said an old gentleman
sitting five or six down on the opposite side.

'It drowns,' replied the retired shipmaster.

'I don't mean that,' said the other, 'does it preserve as ice does?'

'No, sir,' answered the shipmaster. 'The sea sarves a drowned sailor as
the crimps sarve the live ones. It strips him, and when he's naked it
tarns to and kicks and beats him till his mother wouldn't know whose
child it was.'

'Not always,' exclaimed the old gentleman with emphasis.

The retired shipmaster leaned forward to see him, but made no reply.

Then the captain, at the head of the table, exclaimed: 'I knew a man
years ago who had penetrated far north in a whaler. They were frozen
up for a spell, hard bound in white ice, with hills to the horizon,
till the season came and they broke adrift, the piece they were on
floated round a point and gave them the sight of a little barque
stranded on a slope, her topmast was standing, sails furled, everything
in its place--she looked as if she had gone ashore the day before.
They boarded her and found by her log and papers she had been in that
situation eight years. But that wasn't it,' said he with a glance down
the double line of listening faces turned his way, one of the most
eagerly attentive of which I observed was the old gentleman's. 'In the
cabin they found five frozen men, they looked to have died without a
groan one after the other, every man in the act of doing something,
none guessing that the forefinger of the grinning king was on his
heart. One sat with a pipe in his hand, another leaned on the table as
though he was meditating, a third lay back in his chair, his eyes on
the skylight as if he heard a noise on deck. That's what cold will do,'
said he.

Something at this point diverted the conversation, and the subject was
dropped.

When I left the table I went on deck; the west was still full of
warm splendour, the sea ran heaving in deep blue folds to an horizon
crystalline in the delicate sweep of it against the east, on whose
violet slope--that looked to thrill with the depth of its own hue as
the blue of the calm trembles under the eye--a large star was flashing.

I lighted a cigar, sunk in thought over the talk about the ice. If the
body should not prove Marie's, then, supposing the hull had got locked,
how long would she be able to support life in the bleak dark cabin? I
had often asked that of myself and of others. I asked it again now, and
whilst my mind ran upon the dinner talk Captain Robson, the old retired
Newcastle shipmaster, stepped up to me.

They did not allow you to smoke on the poop; I stood in what would
be called the gangway, and Captain Robson came along with a great
meerschaum pipe in his hand, stuffing the bowl with a queer kind of
granulated tobacco which he pulled out of a little sack.

'This is Zooloo mundungus,' said he with a hoarse, shouting laugh;
'I am learning to like it. They say it is arle a man can get on the
coast yon,' and he hove up three stout chins in a measured nod in the
direction of the sea over the bows.

'Are you going to take charge of a ship?' said I.

'I'm going to seek a job,' he answered.

'Were you long at sea, captain?'

'Ay, was I? Since I was twelve. D'ee ken,' said he, broadening his
accent for my entertainment, 'that I'm the original laddie of this
yarn: A boy was holding a candle in the North Sea for the skipper
whilst he overhauled his chart. "Eh, sir," says the boy, "if they did
but ken war we was at home!" "If we kenned oursells," says the skipper,
"I'd ne'er heed a dam!"'

'You seem to know a good deal about the ice,' said I.

'I knew too much about most things,' he answered, puffing. 'If you was
to turn to and pump out my mind, more'd come up than what the poets
call sparkling brine.'

He looked to right and left to observe if he was overheard, and I
guessed he was a wag who liked the laughter of many.

Just then four Italian emigrants began to sing together on the
forecastle; their voices swelled in a pleasing concert; the rude
harmonies of the engine-room, dim and deep, as interpretable as human
voices, so articulate was the metallic clangour, mingled with the music
the singers made without vexing the ear.

I listened, then looked at Captain Robson, whose round face was staring
deafly seawards.

'Captain,' said I, 'figure a dismasted hull in sixty degrees of south
latitude and nothing of land nearer than the South Shetlands. When she
was abandoned there was plenty of tall ice on the horizon in points,
on both bows and astern. What's to become of that wreck?'

'Are ye speaking of the "Lady Emma"?' said he.

I started and exclaimed, 'Oh, you've heard of her loss?'

'I've known Jim Hobbs, one of her owners, ever since he was a boy,' he
answered. 'A little while afore I left London I met him at a luncheon
party and we talked that loss o'er. Loss! Well, ye've not to call it
_that_ yet, neither. The skipper and two females remained aboard, Hobbs
told me. The crew was quick in desarting. There was twelve foot of
stump forrard, Hobbs said; they should have given the capt'n a chance.
With less than twelve foot of stump when I was a boy, good prizes have
been blowed under jury canvas into safety. But when steam came in,'
said he, turning to send a gaze of contempt at the funnel, 'the sailor
went out. Let the master of the "Lady Emma" have had a collier crew of
my time aboard, and they'd ha' made no more of the loss of all three
masts--twelve foot of stump and the bowsprit remaining, according to
Hobbs--than a dog of his tail.'

'What chance do you give the hull?' said I.

He viewed me with an arch lift of his eyebrows, as though his smile at
the instant were in _them_ only.

'I'll answer you as I answered Hobbs that same question,' said he,
after discharging a number of puffs; 'she'll be heard of again. I don't
care about the ice. Dismast your ship and she'll wash round an object.
I'm not speaking of a dead-be shore leagues long. Plant an iceberg
close aboard a hulk and she'll wallow clear. It's the height of spar,
the weight of rigging, plenty of surface of stowed sail for the wind
to shoulder, that keeps a vessel helpless in her drift when she's not
under command.'

'But if she strikes she's gone, masts or no masts.'

'She'll swim for her life. It's like striking out clear of your
clothes.'

'You give that hull a chance then, captain?'

'I give her this chance: first, as to the ice; she's a naked swimmer,
light as a cask, with the wind for a buffer 'twixt her and the ice,
and a backwash of sea which she'll make the most of. And then this: if
a whaler falls in with her and she's sound they'll tow her clear. She
was worth thirty-two thousand pounds, ship and cargo, when she left the
Thames. There's sights of grease, mon, in that money.'

He ended this talk by giving a loud laugh and walking a little way
forward, where he stood, pipe in hand, listening to a German Jew and
his wife who were singing a duet.




CHAPTER XXII

THE PHOTOGRAPHS


It was three or four days after this conversation with Captain Robson,
a soft, blue glowing afternoon, the sparkling heaves of water lifting
south along the course of the steamer, with a pearly feathering of the
salt foam going straight as the metals of a railway astern where, in
the distant blue air, hung the slowly dissolving shadow of the island
of Madeira quitted by us that morning.

Many had gone ashore; we were now a thin company aft, the poop and
saloon almost yacht-like with room and comparative privacy.

The name of the master of the steamer was Captain Strutt. I had been
having a short chat with Captain Robson on the quarter-deck whilst the
skipper of the steamer was on the bridge talking with the first mate; I
went slowly aft and got upon the poop, and whilst I was there, looking
over the side into the exquisitely pure liquid recess of ocean on the
port-beam, with some orange star of sail glowing in it, whilst all
between the burnished swell was working in glassy swathes rich with the
gleams of the splendour in the south-west, Captain Strutt joined me.

'Robson,' said he, with a face of amusement, 'is a comical old
gentleman. In my boyhood they called that sort of thing a sea-dog. It's
a dying type. The skipper who wears the hat of the London streets and
comes on deck in galoshes when the men are washing down, decays apace.
We should take a long look at Robson, for when he is gone we shall not
easily behold his like again.'

'His is a dry old mind,' said I, 'tough as sailor's beef, with the
pickle of his experiences.'

'He was telling me last night, Mr. Moore,' said the captain, 'that
you're interested in the loss of the "Lady Emma."'

'I have asked him, as a seaman, questions on the subject,' said I.

'I read the account of her being dismasted in one of the papers,' he
exclaimed. 'It was made a bad job of, I thought, by three people being
left aboard the hull, two of them women. D'ye ever see the "Shipping
Gazette"?'

'No.'

'In a number of it a week or two before we sailed, there was a strange
piece quoted out of a Cape paper.'

'A strange piece?' I exclaimed, scarcely understanding the expression.
'Had it anything to do with the "Lady Emma"?'

'Why, no,' he answered, leaning upon the rail and looking with a
seaman's level, steady gaze at the orange-coloured sail on the
horizon, talking carelessly, in evident intention to amuse me merely,
'a large three-masted schooner picked up the body of a woman much about
the parts where the hull of the "Lady Emma" was washing about. The
master took it to be the corpse of the wife of a friend of his, and put
it into brine or spirit to preserve it for Christian interment ashore.
A queer item of cargo, little relished by the jacks in the schooner, I
warrant ye! And yet handsomely done, too, on the part of the master, if
you think of it; for suppose one dear to you drowned, what would you
give that the remains should be buried with a memorial atop? That's
always the feeling along-shore, even amongst the humblest; they'll
offer pounds reward for the body. It's sentiment--and only to bury it
in earth after all; as if this,' said he, waving his hand, 'wasn't the
freshest, the most spacious, the most splendid of all cemeteries, every
white curl of sea a tombstone, and God's voice in the wind to keep ye
sleeping and comforted.'

I listened in silence, but intently.

'The schooner carried the body to the Cape,' he went on, 'where of
course it was promptly buried after they had photographed the poor
thing.'

'Did they photograph the body?' I exclaimed.

He whipped upon me quickly, struck by my tone, no doubt, and eyed me
keenly. He witnessed a change of face, and perhaps a sudden pallor, but
took no further notice, lightly saying:

'Yes, the body was photographed, and a couple of the pictures are
aboard.'

'In this steamer?'

He again looked at me; then, directing his eyes round the poop, said:

'Do you see that old gentleman sitting in the easy chair near the
skylight?'

It was the old gentleman who some days previously had asked Captain
Robson at the dinner table what was the action of salt water on a body,
to which the north-country skipper had drily answered, 'It drowns.'

'Has that man photographs of the body?' I exclaimed, staring at the old
gentleman with nervous tremors running through me, shaking the very
voice in my throat, so sudden and unexpected was this.

'I can tell you his story; he makes no secret of it,' said the captain.
'His name's Hoskins; he is Mrs. Ollier's father. He is going to the
Cape to make sure that the body's his child by opening the coffin,
if the authorities will permit it. But he's in no doubt; he showed
me the pictures; the master of the schooner, knowing him very well,
sent two by steamer. He says they're the portrait of his girl. She had
been stopping at Santiago with her sister, a married woman there; and
was bound round to Monte Video to join, or await the arrival of, her
husband, who sailed from the Thames in August in command of the ship
"York"--what's there in this?--Mr. Moore, I hope this matter----'

He began to stutter, and was full of concern, seeing me suddenly lean
against the rail, breathing hard with oppression with a face which I
might guess by my emotions alarmed him. But guessing that my agitation
would speedily take the eye of the many who were walking or sitting
about the deck, I asked, after pausing a minute to recover myself,
if I could be alone with him for a little while, on which he at once
conducted me to the chart room or some sort of interior dedicated to
him as commander, but not a bedroom, furnished with a horsehair couch,
a clock, and the several instruments and conveniences for navigating a
vessel.

He hooked the door, leaving it a little way open. Without preface I
told him that Miss Marie Otway, only daughter of Sir Mortimer Otway,
was my sweetheart; she had gone a voyage for her health in the 'Lady
Emma'; soon after the news of that ship having been dismasted reached
home, there arrived the extraordinary tale of the body of a woman
having been picked up in the latitude and longitude the hull was in
when abandoned by the crew; the description of the body, I told him,
was that of Miss Otway, and my only motive in making the voyage to the
Cape was to examine the remains, if the exhumation would be permitted.

He listened with deep interest and a countenance of cordial sympathy.

'Now, sir,' said he, 'I can understand your motive in questioning old
Captain Robson.'

'If the body be not Miss Otway I shall want to know what chance she's
had aboard that hull. Robson's an old sailor, and I've drawn a little
hope out of his talk, providing----'

'Well,' said he, gathering my meaning even from my pause, 'I should
say, sir, that a man would know his own child. Old Mr. Hoskins assured
me, whilst telling his story, with the tears standing in his eyes, that
the portrait sent him was the likeness of Mrs. Ollier, his daughter.
That being so, it's reasonable you should ask questions about the
wreck.'

'Would Mr. Hoskins show me those portraits, do you think?'

'Show them? Why, yes, sir. When he hears the story, he'll be glad to be
of use. If you'll stop here, I'll go and manage the matter out of hand
for you.'

I thanked him and he departed.

I continued alone for some time with my mind tormented by anxiety and
expectation. Though old Mr. Hoskins declared the portraits to be his
daughter's, yet he might very well be mistaken, too. I waited in dread.
The distress of expectation and suspense was complicated by the fear
that the action of the sea, the convulsion and agony of drowning, had
so wrought as to make a cheat of the face: to the old man it was to be
his child, and to me it was to plead dimly as Marie out of its shrunk,
ghastly looks! How should we decide then? Indeed, none might ever get
to certainly know _who_ it was, and I should go home fancying I had
viewed the face of my beloved in death, and fancying, too, for months
to come, that she had been rescued and, by the many strange crosses of
travel and adventure, detained, but that she was coming and I should
hear.

Thus I sat, my mind in anguish, starting up sometimes to pace the few
feet of charterhouse deck, then flinging myself down miserable and mad
with thought.

A canary suddenly sang loudly in a cage under the clock; in every plank
was the pulse of the engines, like a tingling of blood in veins; from
over the side came a note of stealthy hissing, subtly threading the
noises of the deck like someone in a theatre low hissing through the
voices of the actors.

In about twenty minutes the captain arrived with Mr. Hoskins. He
brought the old gentleman in and hooked the door ajar.

Mr. Hoskins was a fresh-coloured old man, white bearded, with intensely
black eye brows curling like moustaches over his glittering black
eyes; he was dressed in black. I had observed in him a patient way of
looking, of speaking; his voice was a little tremulous with time--he
was probably sixty-five years of age.

He held a large envelope which, on entering, he put down on top of his
hat, and making me a bow slowly, he exclaimed, in the broken tones of
his years:

'It is truly extraordinary, sir, that you and I should be going to the
Cape on the same errand, in the same ship.'

'Truly indeed,' I answered. 'The captain has told you my story?' and
here I looked at Captain Strutt, who answered 'Yes. Those are the
portraits,' and he pointed to the envelope.

I glanced at the package as at a sheet or veil which conceals a face
you love which your heart shrinks from beholding in death.

'She's not your young lady, sir,' said Mr. Hoskins, slowly extending
his arm to take up the envelope. 'She is my daughter. My niece
instantly recognised the likeness.'

He sighed heavily, seating himself with a slow movement, whilst he put
the envelope upon his knee to draw a spectacle case from his pocket.
Meanwhile he spoke:

'She was twenty-four years of age and had been married three years. Her
husband took her to Santiago and left her there with her sister. She
was to have joined him at Monte Video--but you have heard, sir, you
have heard?'

I bowed, trembling with impatience, and still cold at heart, spite of
his words, with the dread that had been mine since I heard of those
photographs. He put on his spectacles, and, laying his hand upon the
envelope upon his knee, looked at me with magnified eyes.

'It is very wonderful,' said he, 'that your young lady should have been
left in a wreck close to the place where my poor child's body was met
with.'

Captain Strutt, with a sudden fidget of his whole figure, said, 'Mr.
Hoskins, will you show Mr. Moore the portraits?'

But the old gentleman must first look at them himself. He pulled them
out and surveyed them with a countenance of mourning, one in either
hand, his underlip working garrulously, and again and again he sighed,
till, lifting my eyes from the portraits to his face, I saw that his
cheeks were wet. Then, but with one of his patient gestures, he put the
pictures together and extended them to me.

I looked first at one, then at the other; the likenesses were not
Marie. I could allow for the changes caused by drowning, by immersion,
by the month-long action of spirits or brine; and still, with a wild
throb of joy that half choked me, I saw that the likenesses were not
Marie.

They were two dreadful portraits of one face, dreadful to look upon;
one in profile, the other full, the body manifestingly having been
turned to confront the camera. The whiteness of the face in the
pictures was as shocking a part as any: the cheeks were so sunk you
would have thought she had sucked in her breath, with horrid scorn,
a living woman, when the lens of the instrument was turned upon her.
They had swept her hair off her brow for a clear view of the face; I
supposed it was pale hair by the look of it, but it was not Marie's--it
was not grown low on the forehead as hers was; the eyebrows were not
hers--they were too thick; the ears were too large for Marie's, and,
which convinced me absolutely, the shape of the nose was not my dear
one's; no wasting by the action of rolling water, no shrinkage by long
immersion, whether in brine or spirits, could work any structural
change in the nose.

I have those dreadful photographs in my mind's eye now, I cannot
express their ghastliness. It was not only the forehead rendered naked
by the manner in which the hair had been swept back by the artist, nor
a more terrible sort of blindness in the droop and rigidity of the
upper lids than anything to be imagined in death's cold glazing of the
balls of vision, nor the meaninglessness in the look of the mouth,
as though it had been some wild man's carving of a grin on an idol,
neither human nor yet of the beast most sickening. The deep and subtle
horror I found in that face was there through fancy of the terrific
ocean solitude it had floated in, the icy surge that had tossed it, the
pitiless stars which had looked down upon it, the roaring blasts of
sleet and hail which had thundered over it.

I put the pictures together with a shudder and a face contorted by the
pain and imaginations of the sight, and in silence handed them to Mr.
Hoskins. Both men waited for me to speak. I stopped to fetch a few
breaths, then said:

'This poor girl is not Miss Otway.'

'She is my daughter!' exclaimed the old man, again holding up the
pictures to view them. 'Oh, my poor child!'

The canary began to sing loudly; the silencing of it enabled Captain
Strutt to turn his back upon us. It was indeed moving to see that old
man with his wet cheeks and talking inarticulate underlip, looking at
the two portraits. He placed them in his pocket after a minute or two,
then, pulling off his glasses, smiled faintly at me and said:

'The grief is mine, you see, sir.'

'And still mine, Mr. Hoskins,' I replied. 'Since that is your child
you certainly know where she is, and therefore what has become of her;
but what can any man tell of Miss Otway? She was dear to me, aye,
even as _she_ was to you,' said I, pointing to the breast of his coat
where the pictures lay. 'We were to have been married--oh, pray think,
sir! the news they brought home, the last news of her, told me of her
as abandoned with two companions in a dismasted hull in the wildest
ocean in the world--amongst the ice--heavenly God!' I cried, springing
to my feet, am I to believe her as that poor girl is--but never to
know--never to be sure that it was so--that it is so?'

And now I know that the sight of those portraits had wrenched me to
the very soul, by speaking of Marie as she _might_ be. This, with the
reaction; for it was not my sweetheart who lay at Cape Town. I had
felt an instant's joy on the discovery; that was past and it was as
before--black uncertainty troubled and thick with a hundred shapeless
fears and fancies.

'It's a great pity,' said Captain Strutt bluntly, 'that you didn't know
Mr. Hoskins had those pictures. You could have gone ashore at Madeira
and got home some time before we arrive at the Cape.'

'Pray what may have convinced you that my poor girl, as described in
the papers, was Miss Otway?' said Mr. Hoskins.

I gave him all the reasons: the description, tallying feature by
feature, point by point in hair, stature, refinement of features and
the like; the letter O on the garment; the serge dress and fur-trimmed
jacket. The old gentleman lifted his hands and his gaze with one of his
patient gestures and look, now of surprise.

'It is more than remarkable,' he cried; 'it exceeds belief.'

'Your daughter was married and therefore wore a wedding ring,' said
Captain Strutt. 'That ring's commonly a tight fit.'

'It was no doubt as Captain Goldsmith wrote,' said Mr. Hoskins, 'the
water shrivelled the fingers and the ring slipped off.'

'Miss Otway wore rings,' said I; 'the lady had none. Therefore its
having no rings proves nothing. Plunge your warm living hand into
ice-cold water, and your tightest ring will wonderfully slacken.'

'True,' said Captain Strutt. 'And still, Mr. Moore, if I was in your
place, I shouldn't rest satisfied with the evidence of those portraits.'

'Oh, but Mr. Hoskins and I are agreed,' said I. 'He recognises his
child and I know that it is not Miss Otway.'

'It's my intention to exhume the remains--a sorrowful task--if they'll
grant me permission,' said Mr. Hoskins. 'Since you _must_ now proceed
to the Cape, then, if it would satisfy you to look into the coffin when
it is opened, you will be very welcome, sir.'

I thanked him, adding, however, that I could not be more satisfied
than I was. And so, after some further conversation, we quitted the
captain's private room.

I might have supposed this discovery of the body not being Marie--and I
was as convinced of it as though I positively knew she was alive--would
have comforted me, helped something towards the cheering of my spirits;
instead, I seemed in my heart as much depressed as if the portrait of
the dead girl had been hers. This was because, had I known she was
dead, the worst would have been reached. But now I was to make a weary
journey to the Cape to no imaginable purpose. I was to linger there
till a returning steamer sailed, then measure all these leagues of
water afresh, to arrive home as ignorant of her fate as though I had
never set foot out of London.

During the rest of the passage, which was absolutely uneventful, I
held much aloof from the people; I was too low-spirited to join in
their conversation and amusements; I begged the captain and Mr. Hoskins
to allow my trouble to remain their secret, and they very faithfully
obliged me. Captain Strutt would often pace the deck for half an hour
at my side, and in such quiet walks our talk nearly always concerned
the 'Lady Emma.' He by no means gave me the encouragement I had got
from old Robson; he told me honestly that it was as likely as not the
three had been taken off the wreck, but advised me not to hope too much
in that way after I returned to England, 'because,' said he, 'the news
of such a rescue is bound to come to hand soon; things are not as they
were forty years ago; you have the telegraph and the steamer and the
newspaper. They were wrecked in July,' said he. 'If it was my business,
I'd allow eight months, then, hearing nothing, I'd give them up.'

He flatly differed from old Robson's notion of the comparative safety
of a dismasted hull amongst icebergs. 'How,' he exclaimed, in a grave
wondering voice, 'could any sailorman talk such stuff? It's like his
prejudice against the North Pole. What's to hinder a dismasted vessel
from being flung against ice, and hammered to pieces? I don't talk to
dispirit you, sir, but my reasoning is, if a loss must be a loss, then
for God's sake let it be made and have done.'

The 'Cambrian' entered Table Bay, December 13. It was early in the
morning, but the sun was already high, and when I went on deck and
looked around me, I beheld as flashing and noble a scene of blue water
and mountain as this earth has to show. The atmosphere was brimful of
white and even splendour, so that the azure of the sky looked cold in
it. Wonderful to my eyes was the sight of a gale of wind so local in
its fury that freshing confines of the torn water, curved like a line
of beach, this side being smooth and glittering, softly fanned with a
little air out of the west, where the white light was so lustrous that
the leaning sails of the Malay boats flickered in it with a look of
frosted silver.

Afar, and marvellously clear cut in their hundred miles of distance,
loomed a range of lofty mountains; the fierce wind was blowing out of a
glorious white mist which veiled, with falling and ascending draperies
of vapour, the greater bulk of the tawny mass on the right; but so
marvellously brilliant was the atmosphere through which the gale was
rushing, the sense of distance vanished, the huge steep lifting and
disappearing in its splendour of mist, drew close, I saw the curves
of the cloofs, every wrinkle of broken rock, and patches of the bush,
though it was all miles off and high in air. The white houses spread
like toys of ivory to the base; and the wide waters of the bay, full
of the gleam of the brushing westerly air, and rushing in froth under
the shriek and lash of the gale, where the breast of blue rounded to
the town, were framed by a sparkling snow-white beach, past which the
swelling country showed in reds and greens till the sight died upon the
phantom blue of distant heights.

There were no docks in those days, nor can I recollect that they had
begun to build the breakwater. We brought up in the splendid weather
outside the thrashing storm, but it seemed we were to be kept aboard
till the south-easter had blown itself out. Many ships, a few very
large and fine, lay straining at their anchors, some within and some
without that spray-white sheet of foul weather. I stood at the rail
looking at a little barque which lay within easy hail of the voice; Mr.
Baynton, chief officer of the 'Cambrian' approached to look at a boat
that lay close under alongside. But his seaman's eye went quickly to
the barque, and turning to me, he said:

'That's what they call a spouter.'

'A whaler?'

'Yes. She looks it, sir. See the boats at her cranes. What sort of
daylight filters through those greasy grimy scuttles in her side, I
wonder? She is an American, and draws decently; three years out by the
looks of her, fresh from parts where its always too hot or always too
cold, and with how many barrels aboard, ha! It's said no seaman thinks
anything of a man as a sailor who's learnt his trade in a greaser.
For my part I look upon 'em with respect and admiration. What Jack of
us all sees the like of their seafaring? Let alone the weather, and
that touches the extremes. What magnificent work in boats! what nerve
and determination! To think of one of those egg-shells,' said he,
nodding at the boats at the whaler's cranes, 'being in tow of a rushing
mountain of stinking black flesh, shooting blood and brine sky high,
every thrash of the tail a Niagara drench of rearing white water--ha!'

He sucked in his cheeks, blew them out again in a low whistle of
admiration, and walked off.

I did not land till four o'clock in the afternoon. Mr. Hoskins, when we
parted, put his card into my hand, with an address at Cape Town upon
it, and begged me to let him know the house I put up at, that he might
communicate in case I should think proper to confirm the revelation of
the photographs by an inspection of the remains.




CHAPTER XXIII

THE SHIP SEEN ON THE ICE


I was advised against the two or three bad hotels in Cape Town, and
whilst in the ship had obtained the address of a boarding-house. It was
a comfortable big Dutch-built house, low, without chimneys; it stood
in a garden full of moon-lilies, and many lovely flowers, the fairest
of them scentless. Here I found a colonel from India for his health, a
Dutch couple, and one or two others. From the stoep of this house you
saw the grand mass of Table Mountain, seemingly close to; the shadow
of its noble bulk seemed to fill the heavens and swell with sensible,
usurping presence into the far reaches of the country. I had travelled
in mountainous parts in Europe, but never before witnessed such a
tyrannous domination as this. The colossal ramparts caught up the whole
prospect whilst you looked in a swinging sweep of their length, till
'twas all mountain with the steam-like vapour shredding away from the
boiling whiteness atop, and the houses clustering into the base like
things of life shuddering back into the giant refuge.

Such were the fantastic notions I got of the thing as I sat, cigar in
mouth, on the stoep of the boarding-house on the first night of my
arrival. The full moon was shining over the bay. I saw through the
trees a space of the silvered waters, with the black figures and lines
of ships anchored in the trembling glow, spotting it with their riding
lights. The breeze was falling in sighs down the steep and troubling
the vegetation into the shedding of some perfume upon the night air;
the tinkling of the crickets spread low, like a noise of fairy bells,
over the land, surging up in the warm, damp breeze and dying. I heard
a band of music in the distance, but the mountain shone upon by the
moon and now radiant at the summit with snow-white mist, looked the
tranquility of its great face into the night, and the peace of its
sublime silence dwelt like a spirit everywhere, to the very height of
the stars, down to the waters trembling under the moon.

This rest was grateful and exquisitely refreshing after the ceaseless
motions of the ship and the senseless chatter of the engine-room. And
yet, though I was but just arrived, I now, after my first meal ashore
for many days, sat alone, considering what I should do.

I had learnt at table there were ships in the bay homeward bound,
also I was aware and had been long aware that I must wait a month
for the next Union steamer to England. I could not, however, bring
myself to endure the prospect of _sailing_ home. The voyage by steam
had already proved unendurably long; and now I might take shipping
under a topsail, make a passage of two months to the line, lie in a
month-long trance upon the burnished swathes of the molten silver swell
of the Doldrums, then wish myself dead in six weeks of tempest to the
Scillies, with a long flounder up Channel to round off all.

Therefore, on this the first night of my arrival at Cape Town, I
resolved to return by steam, taking anything in that way which might
come from the Indies, or, failing that, then the monthly Union steamer.

The colonel came out of the house with a long cheroot in his mouth, and
sat down by my side. He was a man with bland manners, and a sarcastic
voice. He talked contemptuously of Cape Town and its people, and cursed
the indisposition that had driven him into such a barbarous hole,
where you were distempered by bad cooks, poisoned by dreadful smells,
maddened by the horns of the coloured costermongers. I was in no temper
to hear him and was glad when he got up and strolled off.

Here was I, thousands of miles from home--for what purpose? I was no
nearer to Marie! Would she ever be heard of? Was she alive? I looked up
at the full moon and asked of God if its splendour rested anywhere upon
her.

But then--but then--and my heart ached again as I reflected; it was
in July that her ship was dismasted and last heard of, and this was
December, almost the middle of it--five whole months! And the hard part
was that I should have to live through another interminable period of
expectation before reaching home, where alone I must hope to get news.
Why, even whilst I sat there, with the two Atlantics between England
and me, she might have arrived, or they might have got news that she
was coming, and thus was I sure to go on thinking and hoping until I
returned--when they would tell me they had heard nothing!

My thoughts went but seldom and lightly to the body of the girl who
was resting in her grave somewhere past those trees yonder. _She_ was
not Marie. I'd look upon her if the coffin was lifted and Hoskins
invited me; but _she_ was not Marie! The wonder and pity of her to my
mind now that I had seen the photographs lay in the coincidence of her
discovery, and in the ghastly vision of her floating figure--so young
and fair as she had been--a fancy of ocean loneliness I could somehow
realise better _here_ than at sea, maybe because of the height the
lofty shadow of the mountain sent the stars to, its blotting presence
widening the scene of heaven by exciting imagination of the magnitude
of the hidden slope going over and past it to Agulhas and to where the
ice was.

After this, for two or three days, I went about alone, struggling with
a mood of depression that discoloured everything I beheld. It robbed
all grace of freshness from the beauty and the splendour of the sights
which lay about me. My favourite haunt was the waterside, where I'd
stand watching the Atlantic comber form, huge and polished, out of the
silken swell, arching and rushing onwards in a sparkling bravery of
foam and sunlight; but my thoughts were always with Marie, and again
and again I'd catch myself sighing as I brought my eyes away from the
remote blue distance pass Robben Island.

It was on the fourth day of my arrival, in the afternoon, that
strolling slowly under the shade of an umbrella from that part of the
waterside close to where the docks now are, I met the colonel who
lodged with me in the boarding-house. He turned from gazing at the bay
under the sharp of his hand, and approached me.

'Were you ever aboard a whaler?' he asked.

'Never,' I answered.

'That ship yonder's a whaler,' said he pointing.

'Yes, I know,' I replied. 'I had a good look at her from the side of
the steamer--we lay within a biscuit-toss.'

'I went aboard of her this morning,' said he, causing me to stop by
halting and looking towards the vessel as though he would have me
observe her whilst he talked. 'She is well worth a visit. Half of
her crew are Kanakas, and the remainder Yankees, and a wild, queer,
hairy lot they are. The captain's a Quaker, a strange, tall, formal
fellow, buttoned up, lean and yellow, and thee's and thou's you; most
unlike a seaman of any I ever saw. He was very civil though, mighty
communicative. I sat an hour in his little cabin and 'twas as good as
going awhaling to hear him. Such an array of harpoons and lances, decks
dark with the mess of blubber boiling--'trying out' the captain called
it. If you want to agreeably pass an hour and forget that you're in a
land of smells and noise, visit her.'

I answered it was probable I would do so.

'Not that she's a nosegay,' said he, with a short, sarcastic laugh,
'but there's nothing Malay in the odour, nothing Dutch. The captain
related an odd incident that happened whilst he was off the Horn, a bit
south of it I think.'

Here he stepped out and I strolled by his side, pricking my ears, for
there was a magic in the name of Cape Horn that never failed to arrest
my attention.

'She'd been fishing in the South Seas and finding no quarry was coming
into this ocean. She was running before a strong gale of wind off--I
forget the name of the island; it lies south of the Horn. The land,
coated with ice, stretched along their starboard beam; the captain had
no notion he was so close in. He was looking at the land through his
telescope when, in a sudden flaw that thinned the weather out into
a momentary brilliance, he caught sight of a large dismasted ship
upright on her keel upon a huge projection of ice that fell sheer to
the wash of the surf. He reckons the height of cliff on which that hull
was poised about thirty feet. How devilish odd! You can figure ships in
many situations, but how in ghosts are they going to cradle themselves
on an elevation of thirty or forty feet?'

When he said this I stopped dead; a fancy then, at that instant,
flashed into me in pang after pang as though every drop of blood in my
veins was living fire. It brought me to a stand just as if I had been
paralysed, or struck by lightning.

Presently looking at him and rather gasping than speaking, I said:

'A dismasted ship, was it? On an island south of the Horn, did he say?
Why, my God, I wonder--I wonder----'

'What's the matter? What's there in this to---- I hope I---- Catch hold
of my arm!' exclaimed the colonel, staring at me with astonishment.
'What's it--sunstroke? Not under your umbrella?'

And he directed his aquiline nose and keen blue eyes right up into the
sky; then put his arm through mine, and we walked slowly, he meanwhile
surveying me askant with every mark of amazement.

After going a little way, during which I thought I should be unable to
command my tongue or collect my wits, so heart-staggering had been that
leap of fancy in me, I said:

'You have given me an extraordinary piece of news. I am deeply
interested in a ship that was abandoned in a dismasted state in the
neighbourhood of the Horn.'

'By gad! then,' said he, halting me with a violent, nervous pull at my
arm, 'you had better go aboard and get a description at first hand, for
the whaler's here to refresh only; she's been in the bay a fortnight
and sails to-morrow.'

Without exchanging a word I walked, almost ran, to the waterside.

A number of boats lay rippling close in to the beach. A couple of Malay
or Africander boatmen seeing me coming jumped into one of the little
craft, and in a few minutes I was being rowed in the direction of the
whaler.

It was about half-past four o'clock in the afternoon; the light of
the high South African midsummer sun fell on the water in a blaze
that made one think of a sky-wide bolt of flame; the scorching heat
steamed to the face off the surface in tingling red-hot needles; there
was not a breath of air; along the polished surface, breathing with
the swell of the sea, slipped the small thunder of the distant surf.
We drew close to the whaler and I read her name upon her counter 'Sea
Queen, Nantucket.' Her sides were blistered and honeycombed with heat
and conflict; her cabin scuttles or windows, in a row of three above
her green sheathing, stared in their dirt blearedly across the water,
like the eyes of a blind man; a number of seamen of several dyes of
complexion and queerly attired overhung the bulwark rails.

She was a little ship of about four hundred tons and looked to be
dropping to pieces with use, so deeply was she seamed, so ill were her
masts stayed, so rusty and pale was her rigging, so worn and ragged the
complexion and suggestion of the canvas heaped clumsily and negligently
bound. When the boat was alongside I looked up at a copper-coloured
face covered with black prickles of hair, and asked if the captain was
aboard.

'Ay,' was the answer.

'I wish to see him on very particular business,' said I.

The man stared stupidly and lounged off.

'You gittee on board, boss,' said one of the boatmen. 'You hab welcome
allee same as other gents,'

I took the man's advice, and putting my foot on to the shelf or
projection of main channels, sprang and gained the deck in a jump from
the bulwark rail.

There were probably twenty men lounging forward in every imaginable
posture, smoking and talking; they were black and yellow and some were
of the white man's bronze, long-haired, beards goat-shaped, the figure
of them striking, with grass hats, dungaree trousers, brown shanks,
and shirts of several dyes exposing their furry breasts. They took no
notice of me whatever. The decks were dark with dirt: insufferably
heaped up with caboose, boats, casks, pumps, and some midship
arrangement for boiling blubber. A smell of greese hung cold and nasty
in the atmosphere.

I faced aft, and was moving that way when a tall figure rose through
the deck from under a sort of wooden hood which yawned at the wheel. I
instantly guessed him the captain by the colonel's description; he was
lean and hollow, with high cheek bones and a clean shaven face, yellow
as any of his men forward, buttoned up in an old frock coat, and he
wore a grey wideawake, the brim turned down. His eye came to me without
any expression of interest; I judged by his manner his ship had been
much visited.

I went straight up to him, and lifting my cap asked him if he was the
master of this barque.

'I am,' he replied, with the usual American drawl.

'I have come off,' said I, 'to speak with you on a matter of the
deepest interest to myself. I just now met a gentleman who told me that
south of the Horn you sighted a large hull, high and dry upon the ice.
Last July a ship named the "Lady Emma" was dismasted and abandoned by
her crew who left three people aboard: the men quitted her much about
the spot where you sighted the wreck. One of the people remaining in
her was Captain Burke, her commander; the others were his wife and
a young lady named Miss Otway. I was engaged to be married to that
young lady, sir, and came here, having arrived from England on the
thirteenth, believing that a body which had been found at sea and
brought to Cape Town was Miss Otway's. It is not so. The remains are
not hers. God knows but that, if the hull you sighted be the "Lady
Emma," the three may be living--aboard--in a hopeless state! Will you
tell me all you can recollect of her appearance and situation?'

In speaking I had insensibly worked myself up, and ended with my voice
broken by agitation. He looked me steadily in the face, and when I had
ended, after a minute's silence, said:

'Friend, follow me into the cabin, and I'll tell thee all I know.'

He led me down a narrow staircase with a little brown, gloomy interior,
whose equipment, glorious as was the day outside, was barely revealed
by the light that struggled through the frame of dirty glass overhead.
The shaft of mizzenmast pierced the deck and was ringed by a number of
polished harpoons which glanced in the gloom with the blue gleam of the
razor. A squab square table was set in the midst of this cabin, and on
either hand it was a locker, rugged and jagged, as though generations
of whalemen had cut up plug tobacco upon the lid.

The captain told me to sit down, and with a stride or two of his long
legs vanished inside a small berth abaft the mizzenmast. He reappeared,
holding a volume which proved to be his log-book: this he placed upon
the table and sat down in front of it.

'What might thy name be?' he asked whilst he turned the leaves of the
book.

'Mr. Moore,' I answered.

He fastened his eyes on the page, and after reading awhile, said:

'We sighted the ship on the ice on the morning of October 13. It had
been blowing a hard gale all through the night, but it slackened down
airly in the morning and we put her before it; but so high a sea was
running that had I seen that thar hull full of men I could have done
nothing for them.' He ran his finger along the page and continued: 'The
latitude in which that wreck lies is 60° and the longitude--I'm giving
it thee by thy Greenwich time--will be 45° 28´ W.'

I pulled out my note-book and entered these figures.

'Though,' he went on, 'she looks to be lying on ice, it's land that
cradles her. It's what's marked down as Coronation Island, and's the
westermost of the South Orkneys. She lies plain in sight of the sea,
onless the ice since then has come together and blocked her out.'

'Did you get a good view of her?'

'Ho, yes; I had her clear for ten minutes, watching for smoke for a
signal; and I then gave the glass to the mate, who likewise looked till
the run of the land hid her.'

'Will you describe her as you remember her?'

'Ho, yes. She was black, a lump of a ship she looked; wal, I daresay
all seven hundred tons. What was the burthen of thy vessel, Mr. Moore?'

'Six hundred,' I answered.

'Ho, wal, we was a good ways off, and that thar hull might as wal be
six as seven hundred tons.'

'Was she clean dismasted?'

'Clean?--wal, my mate arterwards said there was a stump of foremast
standing. I didn't observe it.'

'But it must be the ship--the "Lady Emma" herself!' I cried, almost
shouting in my excitement. 'When her masts went over the side, twelve
feet of the foremast remained.'

He nodded gravely; but his long, hollow, yellow face reflected nothing
of my emotion, no more than had he been a sheep.

'Did you see nothing whatever to hint at there being life on board?' I
exclaimed.

'Nothin',' he answered; 'she hung betwixt thirty and forty foot high
above the wash of the sea, on a big ledge of ice, with the white cliffs
going up behind her. Haow she so perched herself beats all my going
a-fishing; onless the ice jerked her up into it, for when them bergs
are took with convulsions their tricks are queerer than their shapes by
su'thin', and that's a fact.'

'You saw nothing to hint at life on board?' I repeated.

He shook his head with solemn emphasis.

'Your mate saw nothing?'

Again he wagged his head.

'Captain, tell me--you are an old hand--could people support life in
that craft as she lies there, supposing her to have been stranded
since July last?'

'No, I reckon.'

'But would not the people on seeing your ship pass have made a smoke,
have shown some signal, that you could report life as helpless there
since you could not rescue it?'

'Wal,' he answered, 'supposing folks aboard, thee's not to reckon
they'd be always keeping a look-out. It's mighty cold down thar, an'
they'll be mostly sitting under hatches, an' if they've been thar since
July, as thee says, they'll have growed a little tired, I guess, by
this here time of watching for su'thin' to happen.'

'Is she accessible?'

'Haow?'

'Is she to be got at by the people of a ship sighting her, or sent to
her?'

'There was a mighty biling of water all along under where she was,' he
answered. 'Thee'd need a quiet day; but quiet days are to be had, bar
the swell. Folks have landed afore and they'll land again. Ho, yes! If
thy friends are locked up in that thar hull, they're to be got out of
her.'

'Suppose her there since July; will you believe she has been boarded
and the people released?'

'Why,' he answered, 'if she's been lying fair and square, clear in
sight as she now is, since that month thee names, it's more'n likely
the folks are out of her. But no vessel was ever put by herself in the
situation of that craft. I reckon she's been worked up into it arter
having lain ice-locked, which may sinnify that for months she's been
hid, so that for all we're to know that thar hull may have been the
first that passed close in with the island since the ice broke away and
exposed her.'

I listened with a feverish passion of attention, devouring every
syllable his drawling tongue dropped.

'Have you a chart of that island?' I asked.

He nodded gravely and stood up.

'I'm temperance aft, here,' said he. 'I can offer thee nothing stronger
than lemonade.'

I was too violently agitated to thank him decently, and stuttering out
an awkward acknowledgment, begged him again to let me see the chart of
the island. He took the log-book with him to his berth, and returning,
spread before me a chart representing a considerable expanse of the
seas off the Horn. My sight was now used to the gloom; when he put his
finger upon the place where he had seen the wreck I bent close, and
observed that he indicated an indent in the tracing marked Palmer's Bay.

I entered this in my note-book and asked if he would sell the chart.
He couldn't spare it, he said, but added I might easily furnish myself
with what I wanted in that way at Cape Town.

My spirits were in such a tumult, my heart beat so wildly, the pulses
of my head throbbed so, there was so much feverish confusion of mind
and brain, I could scarcely rally my wits to the task of further
questioning him; I seemed, indeed, scarcely able to understand him. I
cannot express my amazement, the emotions that swelled my heart. 'Twas
as sure as that I lived that the hull seen by this man was the 'Lady
Emma,' and even whilst I bent over the chart, whilst I lifted up my
eyes to look at him, the thought of the measureless distance at which
the wreck lay, of Marie perhaps being at this very time alive in her;
then the imagination of her having been rescued long since, then the
fancy of the hull as a huge coffin in which my dear one lay frozen
and dead; all this, I say, worked in me like a madness; I was beside
myself, and I pored upon the chart panting, the sweat streaming from my
brows, my hands cold as stone.




CHAPTER XXIV

THE BRIG 'ALBATROSS'


I remained, nevertheless, in the cabin of the whaler until the captain
grew impatient and showed signs of wishing to be rid of me, on which I
thanked him, shook hands, and was rowed ashore.

I drove to the boarding-house and there found the following letter--


    'Mowbray: December 17, 1860.

    'Mr. Hoskins' compliments to Mr. Moore. He has obtained leave to
    open the grave and will, with Mr. Moore's permission, call for him
    in a closed carriage at five o'clock to-morrow afternoon.'


This gave a new turn to my thoughts. My first humour was to decline
the invitation. It was not Marie who lay in that grave, and I did
not like the thought of the memory the sight would create. But after
reflecting awhile, I resolved to attend, a glance would give sinews to
the confirmation of the pictures. Sir Mortimer would also wish that I
should take every measure to satisfy myself as to the identity of the
remains.

Having written an answer, I went downstairs and sent it to the post by
a servant, by which hour dinner was ready and I took my place. Five
of us were at table, including the lady of the house, who carved. The
colonel sitting opposite me almost immediately asked what news I had
got of the ship seen on the ice. I had made up my mind to talk, partly
because it did me good to do so, partly because I never could tell what
hints and news might follow upon free speech.

I answered that the dismasted hull the captain of the whaler had seen
was the 'Lady Emma.'

'Does he think there are people locked up in her?' cried the colonel
with excitement.

A Dutch gentleman (I will call him Pollak) who sat next him inquired
with civil curiosity what we were talking about. On which I put down
my knife and fork and plainly related the story of the voyage of Marie
Otway for her health, the dismasting of the ship, her abandonment by
the sailors, the reason of my visiting the Cape, and I told him how I
knew by the photographs that the body which had been brought to Cape
Town was not Marie's; but I said nothing about the opening of her
grave; I judged that Mr. Hoskins would not be pleased to find a gaping
crowd in the cemetery at such a time.

They listened to me with deep attention. All saving the colonel had
heard of the arrival of the schooner with the body; indeed--which
was extraordinary--the Dutch gentleman was one of a few who had been
present when the remains were taken out of the cask. I had passed
several hours a day since my arrival in this man's company, and now
learnt for the first time that he had seen the body.

It was no season, however, for questioning him, and the conversation of
the table went to the wreck seen by the captain of the whaler.

All could have observed in my manner that I was deeply stirred; I could
scarcely eat; I felt thirst only. The colonel talked fluently, but not
serviceably; but I listened with kindness, for I was grateful to him
for the accident of this astonishing discovery.

After dinner I went on to the stoep to breathe the fresh air and smoke
and think; I hoped that the others, remarking the state of my mind,
would leave me alone; they did so; the colonel, the Dutch gentleman,
and two others, who arrived after dinner, drinking coffee at a table at
the other end of the verandah. Their conversation flowed in a low hum,
but that it concerned the topic we talked over at dinner I knew by the
occasional looks one or another directed my way.

At last the Dutch gentleman, Mr. Pollak, came from his party and,
pulling a chair to my side, seated himself. He said, speaking with an
excellent English accent:

'I have thought as I saw the body you would wish me to describe it. It
was not to be spoken of at table.'

'The photographs were ghastly pictures,' said I.

'Ach, Gott!' he cried, with such a roll of his eyes under the
lids as made them balls of porcelain. 'But how should anyone--the
handsomest--appear who was five weeks in spirits after having been
drowned and lifted out of the sea? And still her hair was long and
fair, and fine, and there was a shadow of beauty in the mask of her
face--all saw it. It breathed like a perfume from a dead flower.'

'She was not Miss Otway,' said I.

He described every feature, and I continued to shake my head.

'No, no,' said I, 'she is not Miss Otway. The girl I want is in that
ship on the ice; yet--is she there?'

'Well, it must be found out,' said he.

'I shall go about it to-morrow.'

'Mr. Moore,' said he, after a short silence, 'you are a stranger in
Cape Town. I have many friends. If I can be useful, you will, I beg,
command me.'

I thanked him and said I had brought a few letters of introduction,
but, conceiving the purpose of my visit ended when I viewed the
photographs, I had called nowhere. I slightly referred to my position
in London--that is, as a partner in my father's bank--and added that
the manager of a South African bank, whose headquarters were in Cape
Town, had been a senior clerk in my father's office, but that I had not
visited him.

'Would not the British admiral who is at St. Simon's Town,' said he,
'send out a ship of war to search for the wreck?'

I replied quickly, 'No, I must go myself,' and added, 'You may not have
had experience in the ways of British officials.'

He smiled and answered. 'The admiral might give you leave to go in the
ship he sent.'

'I can tell you exactly how it would be,' said I. 'I go to the admiral
and the admiral demands the log-book of the whaler. The whaler has
sailed, the admiral requires full particulars of the wreck before
despatching one of his ships to a perilous part of the world; full
particulars can be obtained only in London. By the time the British
admiral sees his way the hull, when sought, has disappeared.'

He smiled again, stroking his chin.

'When I left the whaler,' said I, finding it eased my heart to talk,
and pleased with his plain sympathy, 'I had formed a resolution. It
may be, sir, that you are able to help me in it.'

He bowed.

'I intend at once--that is, to-morrow, if to-morrow will provide me
with the opportunity--to hire a vessel and sail for Coronation Island
as promptly as she can be equipped and victualled.'

'Ah,' he exclaimed, 'that looks like business. It will be expensive----'

I interrupted him with an exclamation.

'Yes,' he exclaimed, a little ruefully, 'that should not be thought
of; it will be a marvellous, noble thing to save the life of your
young lady and her companions. How can I help, now?--let me see. I am
acquainted with most of the leading merchants here; I believe that my
friend Mr. Vanderbyl is expecting a consignment from our Australian
port. Perhaps the vessel has arrived. I will inquire. If it is the same
brig that was here last spring she will be the very boat for you. Her
name is the "Albatross." Did you observe a brig painted white amongst
the shipping when you went on board the whaler?'

'I did not.'

'If she comes with the same captain and can be hired, he will be your
man; Captain Christopher Cliffe, a little clever, honest, sober sailor.
I know him very well. He was second mate of a ship I sailed to England
in. Well, I will inquire and see what is to be done, and you also will
inquire. But the "Albatross" is your ship, sir--a clipper. She slides
like a knife through the sea, and should put you abreast of the hull as
quickly as steam.'

'But she is not yet arrived.'

'She is due.'

'She will need time to discharge her cargo?'

'If she is in the Bay,' said he, 'she should be able to sail with you
in a fortnight, and that is as quick as gold itself shall let you be in
this climate.'

I was excited by his praise of the brig, and, standing up, I asked him
to accompany me to the waterside, and search the Bay with his sight for
her. But he had an engagement, so I stepped forth alone, there still
remaining a long evening of daylight.

I made my way to the same place I had embarked from that afternoon,
and looking at the scene of Bay which glowed like the sky with the
evening splendour, stretching out from my feet, and brimming into gold
trembling into purple to the white beach abreast, which ran in a curve
flashing like light against the lip of the brine, I counted no less
than twenty-two ships riding to their anchors: vessels of all rigs and
of several nationalities, and, as though heaven were on my side in this
time of trial and grief, I saw what I guessed was the vessel I was
here to look for. She lay, curiously enough, immediately astern of
the whaler--a milk-white figure, slightly swaying on the satin-smooth
heave, with wet green gleams trembling along her as she lifted her
metal sheathing.

I said to a coloured waterman who stood near, pointing to the brig:

'What brig is that, do you know?'

He answered immediately, 'De "Albatross," boss!'

'Ha!'

'From Sydney, boss.'

'When did she arrive?'

'Two yastardays, boss.'

But it was not wonderful she should have escaped my observation; in
going and coming from the whaler I had thought of nothing but what I
was to hear and what I had heard; and earlier my sight, often as it
wandered to the shipping, never paused to distinguish.

I saw no more of my Dutch friend till next morning, when, at eleven
o'clock, whilst I was making ready to drive into the town and inquire
about the brig 'Albatross,' a servant knocked on the door, and said Mr.
Pollak was below with another and wished to see me. I at once descended.

His companion was a little man, almost a dwarf; his nose was as long
as Punch's, his mouth much like that puppet's, wide and thin, with
the look of a smirk in the curl of the lips at either extremity; he
wore little slips of grey whiskers; his eyes were deep sunk, grey and
kindly, and he blinked them with a nervous fury when he dodged a sort
of sea-bow on Mr. Pollak introducing him. He was almost bald, and was
perhaps fifty-five years of age, much curved in the back, his shanks
slightly arching out. Mr. Pollak called him Captain Christopher Cliffe,
and introduced him as master and part-owner of the brig 'Albatross.'

'I know,' said the worthy Dutchman, 'that time is precious to you. I
am glad we have found you in. I cannot stay. But I will leave Captain
Cliffe behind me to talk with you.'

And picking up his hat he nodded and went out.

I asked the little man if Mr. Pollak had told him my story.

'Enough,' he answered, 'to make me understand there is reason to hurry.'

'The whaler "Sea Queen,"' said I, 'lying just ahead of you----'

'She sailed this morning,' he interrupted.

'She sighted a hull high and dry on the ice of Coronation Island,
New Orkneys,' said I, pulling out my note-book to give him the date.
'That hull, when she was made a raft of by the loss of her masts, was
abandoned by the crew in latitude 58° 45´ south, longitude 45° 10´
west. Three people were left in her--one of them a young lady, dearer
to me than my heart's blood. The "Lady Emma" is as surely the hull
that was seen by the Yankee as that you who hear me are alive.'

'You think to find the people still locked up in her?' said he,
blinking and snapping his lips with many convulsive grimaces.

'I mean to find that out. Is your brig for hire?'

'Ay.'

'When will she be ready?'

'I hope to have the remaining cargo out of her by Monday next; she's
then at your service.'

'Have you a crew?'

'I'll get a good 'un when you're ready, sir.'

'What's the tonnage of the vessel?'

'One hundred and seventy register.'

'What'll be the cost?'

'Thirty shillings per ton a month, we finding everything, or fifteen
shillings per ton a month and you finding everything.'

I put down the figures, and said, 'How long is it going to take the
brig to arrive off the island?'

He talked a little to himself, blinking and grimacing absurdly, and
replied, 'Call it a month.'

'I should like to see the brig, Captain Cliffe.'

'At once, if you will, sir.'

I sent for a cab and we drove to the waterside. He talked freely when
he was out of the house and driving. I found something very honest and
diverting in this little man's looks and manner of speech. He had an
amazingly brisk and nimble mind, I thought; I got at that in a very
little while. He went behind my questions, fetched a number of new
possibilities for hope to feed on out of the scheme of the search, and
heartened me vastly by his clear view and statement of my wishes and
plans--that is, he said that the hull sighted by the whaler was beyond
all question the wreck of the 'Lady Emma'; everything tallied--colour
of sides, situation, time, down to the very stump of foremast. Then,
since three were abandoned in her, why shouldn't they still be aboard?
Of course it was my duty, he said, to sail right away. Who wouldn't, to
deliver his young lady out of such a scene of horror? But humanity was
in it too. The hull was to be searched for and overhauled, and I was
quite right in reckoning that if I left that job to the British Admiral
the hulk would have disappeared, or the people inside have perished
into statues of ice, before the official mind had settled what to do.

'Not unlikely,' said he as we drove along, 'the parties have been taken
out; sealers and whalers are constantly moving about those waters; but
we aren't to think of that. If they're gone, so much the better, for
then they're safe elsewhere; but it's your business to consider that
they're still there and to fetch 'em.'

Thus we talked, and as we rowed to the brig we continued to chat, he
entering very fully into the cost and character of the equipment we
should require, the time we should occupy, supposing them alive in
the hull, whether we returned with them to the Cape or headed for the
nearest South American port.

My spirits rose under the influence of this man's conversation. His
practical mind put everything so clearly that in imagination, even
whilst we made for the brig, I had realised my hopes--I had rescued
Marie and her companions--we were proceeding home!

The brig did not show so milk-white when close to as from the beach;
rusty blood-like stains lay dried in scars under the bolt heads
and other metal projections, but her figure gained in beauty when
approached. I am no sailor, but when I ran my eye over her moulded
shape, observed her keen entry, the swan-like curve of her run lifting
to an elliptical stern, with a swell of white side that made me think
of a polished heave of sea, I would have wagered there were few swifter
vessels of her rig and tonnage then afloat. A lighter or something of
that sort was alongside receiving cargo; a man in a cloth cap and half
Wellington boots was perched on the rail close to where the cargo was
going over the side; he made notes with a pencil in a little book;
three or four coloured men were winding at a winch. I had caught,
whilst in the boat, the clinking noise of the pawls slipping over the
sheet-calm water in a sort of music that wanted but the accompaniment
of a hurricane lung or two to furnish out a fine ocean concert. The man
on the rail touched his cap when we gained the deck.

'That's my mate, Mr. Bland,' said Captain Cliffe. 'He's a good seaman.
I can recommend him.'

I sent a glance of curiosity at the sailor, guessing if I hired this
brig he would go with us; he had the face of a sheep, dark eyes set far
back close against his ears, a thick black beard, and a weather-tanned
skin, filled with the holes of small-pox. An ugly man indeed! Yet
you saw honesty and intelligence like a light of good humour in the
expression of him.

Captain Cliffe took me round the decks of the little craft first of
all. I had no eye for points of marine equipment, yet noticed a smart
little galley with red tiles on the floor, a seat athwartships, and a
small array of saucepans, kettles, and the like, all very clean. The
windlass looked small, so roomy was the forecastle. The captain then
took me aft to the companion, which was painted green, trotting by my
side, of the height of a boy, from time to time looking up into my face
to observe if I was pleased.

I halted in the companion and asked how many boats he carried; he
answered two, and pointed to a long-boat stowed near the galley,
this side of it, and then to the water astern, where a small boat was
floating.

'We ought,' said I, 'to go well provided with boats of an exact form
and strength for passing through the breach of the sea. The waves
break heavily under the hull, the whaling captain said, and we must be
prepared for a high surf the whole length of the coast.'

'You're quite right, sir,' said the little man. 'But if we come to
terms you've only got to commission me, and whatever's needful I'll
see to. For instance, there's a height of ice cliff, and grappling
irons 'll be wanted. And we should carry a few lengths of rope ladder.
It isn't as though we had to find her. We _know_ she's high and dry.
Make the worst of it and call it fifty feet above the wash. That's
sure unless the ice had shifted her. And we've got to be provided with
machinery for entering.'

Thus speaking he descended and I followed.

The companion steps were almost up and down; on the right, at the
bottom of the ladder, was a sleeping berth, a sort of cupboard with
a sliding door like a smacksman's bedroom; on the left was the main
cabin, a larger interior than I expected to see. It was well lighted
by a frame of windows overhead and round scuttles in the walls, and
furnished with a table, locker seats, and a few camp stools. Forward
was a brightly polished brass fireplace. Three small berths were
bulkheaded off this living room, one of which the captain told me was
a sail and boatswain's locker, and the other a bread and store locker;
'but we can clear 'em out,' said he, 'when they come to be wanted.'

I was satisfied, and then and there resolved to hire this brig and sail
quickly for that far-off ice-clad island. I sat down on one of the
lockers and asked the captain to take pen and paper, and we talked
about what would be required, making notes, and reckoning up the
expenses till I bethought me of my engagement with Mr. Hoskins. And
with reluctance and a hearty handshake took my leave.

I was rowed ashore, and on the way to the boarding-house called at
the bank whose manager had been my father's clerk. He was astonished
and delighted to see me; he had known me, indeed, ever since I was an
Eton schoolboy. I had no time on this occasion to enter fully into the
cause of my being at the Cape; my immediate purpose was served when he
assured me that I was welcome to draw upon the bank to the amount I
wanted.

At five o'clock Mr. Hoskins drove up to the boarding-house, and we at
once started for the cemetery. He was alone in a closed carriage, and
was dressed in mourning as deep as man's apparel will express grief.
I, too, had been careful to clothe myself in black. I had not seen
Mr. Hoskins since the arrival of the 'Cambrian,' and his voice and
presence carried me on board again, renewed the quiet incidents of
the passage, and returned me in imagination to Southampton on that
memorable day of my departure. He was pale and melancholy, and his
spirits seemed depressed with thought of the distressing ceremony we
were bent upon.

'I am sorry now,' said he as he drove along, 'that I solicited
permission to inspect the remains. The photographs were perfectly
convincing, and still I felt it--I feel it--my duty to make as sure
as opportunity admits. Captain Oilier will expect me to tell him all
that it was in my power to learn. Nor, perhaps, should I feel perfectly
satisfied to erect the monument I intend for my poor child without
looking into her coffin to see that it is she herself who will be under
it.'

I answered that this melancholy undertaking was even less needful to me
than to him; but that, like himself, I saw the necessity of confirming
my own opinion by every possible testimony, for the peace of my own
heart as well as for the satisfaction of Miss Otway's father.

We then talked of my chances of finding Marie in the hull upon the
island, and I told him how I had hired the brig 'Albatross' and
intended myself to sail in her as soon as she discharged her cargo
and was ready for sea, which I hoped would be about the close of the
following week.

I saw little of the scenery we were driven by; we passed a number of
gigantic aloes on the roadside; the hard-blue mountains, towering into
the heavens with keenly cut skylines, with great spaces of their sides
lustrous with the trembling and delicate foliage of the silver tree,
wound with us as we wound, or shadowed us as we drove; they were an
eternal presence, like the cloudless blue over them.

Whilst Mr. Hoskins was telling me how he contrived to obtain an order
for the exhumation of the remains, we arrived at the cemetery where we
alighted, and my companion conducted me to the grave whose situation
he was exactly acquainted with. A number of persons were beside the
grave, two were sextons armed with mattocks, or spades, the others were
strangers and remained so to me; but one, I believe, was a medical man,
and another a government official. They raised their hats to us, and
after the exchange of a few commonplace greetings, decorously attuned,
the diggers went to work.

The body had lain in this grave since August--four months. The heat
thrilled in a sort of surging wave that closed upon the respiration
with a sense of suffocation whilst we stood watching the diggers. I
shuddered at the idea of looking. I had come to Cape Town conceiving
that this body was Marie's, I now knew it was not hers; nevertheless,
I guessed that the aspect of the dead face, at rest and out of sight
under the cleaving spades, must become a memory that would be
inseparably associated with Marie's image, whether I was to behold her
again or not, and my spirits shrunk as I stood watching.

The soil was red, and the diggers turned it cheerily. Mr. Hoskins
talked in a low tone apart with one of the strangers; that man was
probably an undertaker or connected with the firm of buriers. Many rich
strange flowers and plants glowed like jewels or glanced like snow upon
or about the graves round about; it was a big tract of ground, all the
sculptures, and monuments of several sorts showing at a distance sharp
as carvings in ivory through the hot rare blue atmosphere.

The group of us were the only living occupants of that field of
sleepers. Doubtless the order had gone forth for all to be excluded
till the coffin had been reburied. They came to it at last; it was
raised with some trouble, a plain black box, and placed upon the edge
of the grave, and without an instant's loss of time the person with
whom Mr. Hoskins had been conversing, unscrewed the lid--and we looked.

I had expected to behold something that was to shock the sight, and
create a memory of pain and disgust; instead, there lay before us,
her head pillowed, her arms peacefully crossed, the form of a young
woman whose face, through chymic changes explicable only by the pen
of science, had filled and freshened in complexion to an aspect
easily supportable by the most nervous or sensitive eye. The flesh
was discoloured; in the pictures it had shown as an ulcerous ghastly
white; but here, in this coffin, the face was far more defined and
distinguishable in lineament, I may even add in expression, than in the
photographs. I could almost understand my Dutch friend's reference to a
shadow of beauty lurking in this dead mask of countenance. The hair was
very fair, and beautifully abundant, but it was not the hair of Marie,
the hands were not Marie's. Now that I looked upon her I observed that
she resembled Marie to a less degree even than the pictures expressed
the likeness. I shook my head and drew back a pace, covering my face,
the sight was pitiful--I could not bear to look beyond a moment or two.
I thought of that form in the loneliness of the ocean off the Horn,
and then again I was agitated by a violent reaction in my spirits; for
though I had been certain it would not prove Marie, yet I knew not
what I was to behold either, what tragic, heart-subduing surprise that
coffin might have in store for me, and I shrunk back, shaking my head
and hiding my face.

Mr. Hoskins viewed the remains in silence, then sobbed, and I looked
at him. Our eyes met across the coffin, and exclaiming, 'It is my
daughter, Mr. Moore! It is Charlotte; the wife of Captain Henry
Ollier,' he sank upon his knees and folded his hands in prayer beside
his child.




CHAPTER XXV

AT SEA AGAIN


I had arrived at Cape Town on December 13, and on the 26th of the same
month the colonial brig 'Albatross' lay in Table Bay, waiting for me to
go aboard in order to sail. This was surely what the shipowners would
call 'prompt despatch'!

On the morning of the 26th I said good-bye to my friends in the
boarding-house and drove to one of the jetties where Captain Cliffe
awaited me. I was accompanied by the colonel and Mr. Pollak. A
considerable crowd had assembled to see me embark; the story had leaked
out; it was in the papers that I had come to the Cape to identify the
body brought from sea by the 'Emerald,' and that, being satisfied it
was not that of the girl I was in search of, I was going to the New
Orkneys in the hope of finding her locked up in a wreck described as
corresponding in every material detail with the hull of the 'Lady Emma.'

It was an extraordinary romance; Mr. Pollak had assured me that
all Cape Town was talking about it. For the first time in my life
I was made to understand the inconvenience and discomfort of
publicity. A number of ladies were in the crowd, and they thrust most
unceremoniously forward to catch sight of me. When I got into the boat
the crowd good-naturedly cheered; I did not feel easy till the oars
were dipping and the boat under way, for the crowd was bringing others,
and as we rowed from the jetty I saw some men and women running towards
the water.

Mr. Pollak and the colonel went on board with me. It was a rich glowing
day, a number of white steam-like clouds were circling above Cape
Town, but low over the water, brushing it into a wide sheet of rippling
blue splendour, a hot fresh breeze was blowing; it swept straight down
the Bay, with a brassy light in the air that made you think of the wind
as coloured by the yellow glares of the sandy land it had travelled
across.

Mr. Pollak had on several occasions visited the brig; the colonel
had not before viewed her close; he was greatly pleased and hummed a
tune approvingly as he accompanied me about the decks. One detail of
furniture, his own suggestion, he lingered over; it was a bright brass
cannon mounted on the quarter-deck.

'He'll do for you!' he exclaimed, slapping the breech of the piece.
'That should fetch an echo loud enough to awaken the dead.'

A little further aft stood a mortar, with its round mouth gaping at the
sky.

'What's that for?' asked the colonel. 'Isn't the gun noisy enough to
alarm 'em if they're aboard?'

'It is my idea,' said Mr. Pollak. 'Suppose it should be impossible to
scale the slope and reach the ship; _here_ is an engine that will throw
you a ball and line which anyone on board may catch and pull ladders up
by.'

'Good!' exclaimed the colonel.

We then examined the two fresh boats which Captain Cliffe had
purchased on my behalf; they were large, strong, handsome whale-boats,
strengthened by iron beams or girders under the thwarts; and made
lifeboats of by a quantity of cork fenders carefully laced or otherwise
seamed along the sides.

'These,' said I, 'together with rope ladders hooked for scaling, and
grappling irons, form my machinery.'

'It is all you will need,' said Mr. Pollak, 'and I am sure everyone
must pray that God will bless and prosper your noble voyage.'

I took the worthy Dutchman's hand and thanked him with a silent grip.

At that moment the windlass began to clank; immediately a hoarse voice
bawled out a song whose burthen was caught and flung in thunder into
the air by the seven or eight hearts who bowed and rose at the windlass
handles.

'Come, Mr. Pollak; come, colonel,' I exclaimed; 'there's time for a
bumper.'

I called to the captain to send aft the lad who was to wait upon us in
the cabin, and descended with my friends. A magnum of champagne was
opened, and we filled and drank to the voyage. I obliged Captain Cliffe
to come down and drink. He cried through the skylight that he durst not
leave the deck for above three minutes; I told him to come, and the two
gentlemen toasted the little man, who delivered, with several grimaces,
a brief sailorly speech, full of hope, then rushed on deck.

I bade Mr. Pollak good-bye with a full heart. The colonel followed him
into the boat, which put off, and then hung by on her oars to watch us.
At this time the anchor was off the ground, and the crew were making
sail on the brig, whose bowsprit, with a white pinion of jib swelling
from it, was rounding, finger-like, in a slow, pointing way for the
open; the sheep-faced mate stood on the forecastle shouting orders;
a sailor was at the wheel; Captain Cliffe crossed the deck from left
to right, looking up and around, moving swiftly, a doll of a man,
grimacing and blinking at every pause in his nimble trot.

Some of the ships round about had got our tale, I fancy, or at least
the scent of our errand; since from most of them we were watched by
many heads above the rail. Presently the brig's stern was to the wind,
her topsails filled, the lighter sails glanced wing-shaped to the
yard-arms to the drag of the gear; I waved my hat from the quarter
to my two friends, and they flourished a last farewell. My voyage,
strange as any that had ever been undertaken in this world, was begun!

We were the only ship at that time leaving the Bay, and I think our
lonely going must have given a certain majesty and nobleness to the
figure of the vessel in the eyes of those who watched us, with the
significance of her dangerous, surprising, romantic mission going along
with her. I don't know what my own sensations were: I was sensible
perhaps of a little triumph of spirits at this getting away so quickly,
and then there was the feeling that I was in action, that no time was
being lost; and yet there was a heaviness at my heart too, the chill of
doubt, a frosty dread that the errand would prove profitless, and that
if God suffered me to return home it must be as a mourner for Marie.

But we were sailing through a wide, shining scene of commanding beauty,
lofty and gloriously coloured, and the influence of it, I don't doubt,
rescued me from the dark mood imagination might have raised. The breeze
blew hot, but the sweetness of flowers and fruit was in it, and the
scent of the land was brisk with the salt of the sea. In a very little
while the seamen had clothed the brig from the main-royal yard to the
waterways, and as she floated onwards, _now_ slightly curtseying to a
small breathing of swell, the mountains went with her, and the ships
astern closed into clusters past the tail of our mirror-bright line of
wake. The mountains towered on our left; Cape Town vanished, and we
softly drove with a noise of fountains on either hand past rich curves
of shore on whose margin the huge Atlantic comber formed and fell in
snowstorms with white houses beyond the foam like models in ivory
shining amid the greenery.

And all the time we were alone! _This_ was the wonderful feature of our
departure. I could not see the smallest boat in motion. The water was
like a great lonely lake, and the silence on the face of the mountains
was in the wind, in a presence that seemed to _compel_ isolation for
us, hushing all life off the face of the bay down to where the ships
were lying too far off to trouble the sense of solitude.

The crew were now occupied in coiling away the rigging and clearing up
the decks, and I had an opportunity of viewing them. All were white
men; there were eight, together with a cook and a boy to wait upon
us aft, making with captain and mate twelve of a company, which was
plenty. Cliffe had told me he would not ship a certificated second
mate; the man who went as boatswain would relieve the mate and stand
a watch. That man was a wiry, middle-aged seaman; he wore a spread of
grey whisker scissors-trimmed, close to his face, and dark eager eyes
which he rolled quickly as a monkey; he sang out briskly, and sprang
about the decks. Little Captain Cliffe, observing that I watched the
man, came and stood beside me and spoke up softly to my ear:

'I engaged that chap because of his knowledge of the ice. He told me he
was seven years whaling in the Pacific and Southern oceans. He is the
most wonderful jumper I ever heard of.'

'So old as he is?'

'Forty-five or thereabouts. Men of that sort soon lose the reckoning of
their birth. I don't allow their mothers ever enter 'em. They're always
the age that suits 'em to be. But look what a life it is, sir! the iron
it will put into a young 'un's hair! the kinks it'll run into a young
'un's back! All the hard life and the bad food works out through a
man's pores after a few years, bows him down, and hardens in his face
with a crust of years. He's a marvellous jumper that, sir. Tell ye what
he did--and it astonished me--there was a horse and trap standing
close beside where we were talking. He turns on a sudden and sings out,
"Captain, did yer ever see this done?" and putting his feet together
and clenching his fists he bent his knees, let go of the ground like
and shot as a bolt, clearing the horse till you could see half the
length of his own legs of blue sky 'twixt his feet and the animal's
back.'

He gazed up at me, blinking and grinning, and added, 'I allow, should
it come to any awkward climbing jobs, we'll find that covey handy.'

I lingered a little to watch the brig and the coast. The swell was
coming straight out of the wide sea, but the breeze still followed
fiery and splendid with the light of that land; the little ship bowed
softly; the long heave under the bows did not stop her; she floated
with erect spars, her yards square, the canvas breathing like human
breasts as her bowsprit rose and fell; yet a glance astern showed me
she was already whitening the water.

At every look, the high land, purple and hard in that noontide
brilliance, yielded new features. It was towering now on to Hont Bay,
with a trend which made a mighty shoulder of it as it sounded towards
Simon's Town and the Cape of Good Hope: the towering terraces were on
our port quarter with Robben Island to starboard, and ahead was the
glittering breast of the Atlantic with the sea-line hard-carved against
the faint silvery blue. I looked for a sail, but nothing broke that
measureless run of horizon; the junction of air and water had a wild
loveliness, indescribable, thanks perhaps to the violet of the brine
that washed the light azure; though the fear and mystery of beauty I
found in it then doubtless came of the thought of what lay hidden from
me hundreds of leagues deep beyond that slope of airy silver. Had we
been a ship of ancient explorers the field of ocean could not have
shown more barren than my eyes, exploring its recesses under the sharp
of my hand, found it.

Some seamen came aft to spread an awning. They eyed me askew; of course
they knew the brig's mission, and perhaps thought me a little mad;
but it would be all one to them; there is worse to be suffered at sea
than a cruise off the Horn in the midsummer of this side on such wages
as they had signed for, in a tight well-built brig. In fact, they
rolled about their work with a sort of rollicking carriage that made
one reckon they had entered upon the voyage with jolly hearts as on a
yachting jaunt, secure from all danger and dirt of cargo; only it was
as likely they'd come on board a little merry with Jack's custom of
farewell.

I now went below to see to my berth and arrange my traps; but came to a
halt at the cabin table, to lean upon it and think. This interior was
wholly unlike the 'Lady Emma's'; yet the skylight, the lockers, and
several trifling details of cabin furniture brought to my recollection
that day in the Thames when I had said good-bye to Marie in her cabin,
alone. What had been her sufferings since? If she was in the hull she
had been imprisoned at this date for five months, and by the time we
got to her six! For six months she would have been locked up in a
motionless hulk, high perched upon a savage island, heavily faced with
ice, with a thunder of surf far down for ever in her ear, and always
the same white, desolate, fierce prospect of frozen cliffs and rolling
ocean. Would it not have killed her? I clasped my hands in the torment
of the thought. Should I be making this voyage to a remote ice-girt
island merely to enter the wreck and behold the remains of my Marie as
I had looked into that coffin in Cape Town beholding another?

I passed into my own berth, a small but comfortable box, and after
busying myself for half an hour, during which I had recalled my mind
to something of its former composure, I re-entered the cabin and found
the table laid for dinner. The little sea parlour looked cheerful with
this hospitable setting. The heel of a windsail buzzed in the skylight.
There had happened a little shift of wind whilst I was below, for the
brig leaned over and I heard a smart hissing--the seething of foam
sliding past; it was as cooling a noise as the sound of a hard shower
of rain on a dusty August day at home.

I stepped on deck to take a look; the land was melting into a vast roll
of shadow astern and on the port quarter, filming down to the Cape end;
the breeze hung steady, only it came fresher, more fiery and sparkling
out here in the wide ocean, we had changed our course by two or three
points, bringing it somewhat abaft the beam; I saw no cloud, nothing
but a glad race of flashing bright blue seas ridging from an horizon
that rose into a dome of untarnished blue in the midst of which was
the sun, making a dazzling plain of a great surface of water in the
north.

Captain Cliffe came to the compass-stand whilst I stood looking at the
card; I felt his little blinking eyes were upon me when my sight went
to the hollow canvas, and to the sea-smoke that from time to time blew
away in little puffs from off the lee bow when the brig stooped with a
sheering plunge shouldering a knoll of the blue brine into a long roar
of foam.

'This is good sailing,' said I.

'It beats steam anyhow,' said he, turning to look at the race of wake
astern.

'What's the speed?'

'Nine,' he answered with a convulsive grimace of triumph, 'and I
understand they never could get more than seven out of the steamer you
came out in.'

The mate walked in the gangway; I saw but one man forward. The captain
told me the crew were at dinner. But whilst I stood first one man and
then another came up through a little hole in the fore part of the
brig, and in a few minutes half a dozen of them were sprawling and
lounging in the shadows the canvas made upon the forecastle, smoking,
but scarcely speaking for heat and loathing of movement.

I could not forbear a smile when I reflected that to all intents
and purposes I was veritably the owner of this white brig sweeping
south-west, and the master of those people yonder. What would my
prosaic friends of the City think of such an adventure as this I was
upon? But put Marie by my side, or bid me know for a God's-truth that
she was safe, and I'd have sworn there was nothing in this wide world
of delights comparable with such sailing as this. Sickness had been
cured by the 'Cambrian.' The heave of the deck, the slant of the hull,
the feel of the speeding of the fabric of white cloud through the
sun-bright gushing of wind were as a buoyancy of spirits; you did not
heed them, yet they worked like wine in the blood. I wanted but peace
at my heart, the tranquility of conviction, to have tasted a perfect
happiness in this glorious Cape noon of flashing ocean, of rushing brig
and wind filled with the music of the strands.

My reverie was disturbed--for Cliffe stood silent by my side--by the
sight of the boy coming along with the cabin dinner, and presently the
captain and I were seated at table.

This was my first meal aboard, and I often laugh silently when memory
returns me the image of my little skipper sitting behind a roast fowl,
blinking and stretching his lips at it, then rising and lurching over
it, being too short to carve it sitting. He saw amusement in my face,
for on beginning to eat he said he often lamented that he had come
in at the tail end of his family when nearly all the height had been
served out. He was the last born, and arrived when not very many
inches were left. He had a brother six foot high, and his mother was
a big woman. He told me that he once dined with a company of people
when the Queen's health was proposed and everyone stood. His neighbour
requested him to stand up as the Queen's health was being drunk. He
answered he _was_ up. These were the sort of mortifications, he said,
to which little men were subjected.

After a bit, talking always as I now did on the subject of the 'Lady
Emma' and our chances of finding Miss Otway alive in the wreck, I asked
if the boatswain of the brig--that jumping seaman who had been whaling
seven years--had ever sighted the New Orkneys?

'I didn't think of asking,' he answered, 'but I'll soon find out, sir.'

'Would you object to his coming here?'

'This is your ship, Mr. Moore.'

'I'd like to ask him some questions.'

He at once told the boy who waited on us to send Bodkin aft. In a
few minutes the man came; by this time we had dined, but the captain
lingered to hear what this boatswain had to say before he went on deck
to send the mate to his dinner.

'I've been telling this gentleman,' said the captain, leaning his
little figure against a stanchion and discharging a whole broadside of
grimaces at Bodkin, who stood staring at us and around him, astonished
at the summons, 'that you've been a-whaling seven years in the Pacific
and Southern Ocean.'

Here Bodkin lifted his hand to his forehead in the seaman's salute to
me.

'Know anything of the New Orkneys?' said the captain with nervous
abruptness like the briskness of a bird.

'Well, sir, bin off 'em again and again.'

'Sit down,' said I. 'Boy, give Mr. Bodkin a glass of sherry.'

Bodkin put down his cap and sat; he had evidently been called from
some heavy work, and his face and hairy arms bare to the elbows, and
his well-baked throat naked to the iron-grey hairs upon his chest,
shone with sweat. He took the glass and tipped down the wine.

I then said, 'Do you know that we're sailing to the New Orkneys?'

'Oh, yes. I signed for that run.'

'Is our errand known to you?'

'It's to search for a wreck, ain't it, sir?'

'A wreck with live people in it,' said Captain Cliffe. 'I made that
clear, didn't I?'

'Then I hope we shan't find 'em,' said Bodkin.

'What!' shouted Cliffe with a hideous face.

'For their own sakes. Who'd lock a dog up there?' said the man, running
the length of his wet bare arm along his streaming forehead ''Tain't
imagined here, with the pitch 'twixt the seams like suet, and the
paint-work blistering into scabs. I've been off the larger of them
islands five times. Yer wouldn't know 'em from icebergs, 'cept for here
and there a piece of naked black rock showing where ice hadn't formed
or snow couldn't keep a hold of.'

'Could a boat land?' I exclaimed, scarcely bearing to hear him when he
talked like that.

'Why yes, sir. This time of the year--watching a smooth--'tain't always
what they calls weather down there; but it's b---- cold.'

'Were ye ever ashore on them islands?' inquired the captain.

'No, sir.'

'Did your ship send a boat ashore?' I asked.

'The last time I was off them rocks a boat was sent and she came back
again; they was nearly capsized, and that was all they did.'

'Describe the land,' said I.

His recollection, however, was not very clear. He talked of tall
ice cliffs and of a huge dim mountain far inland; and of peaks and
projections showing and disappearing amidst storms of snow.

'Is there much ice about the island?' said I.

'Plenty,' he answered. 'The biggest berg I ever see in all my life was
close in with that land, third time I wur off it.'

'Suppose the hull of a ship was on a ledge of ice, thirty or forty
feet above the wash of the sea; she was lying plain in sight of the
ocean'--I named the date on which the skipper of the whaler 'Sea Queen'
had passed her--'would you expect to find her still exposed, lying in
full view?'

He looked at me with a working mind, his words being too few to help
him quickly; then said, turning his eyes upon the captain:

'All things considered, I allow it's more'n likely she'd be smothered
up.'

'What's to smother her?' cried Captain Cliffe.

'The congregating of bergs,' answered the other.

'Is that all ye know of ice?' exclaimed the little man. 'Haven't you
heard that ice fetches away from the main and works north this time o'
year?'

'I'm asked a question,' said the man with a note of sullenness in his
voice, 'and I'm expected, I suppose, for to speak the truth, being sent
for. All I know is there's nothen so shifting as ice, and therefore
nothen so smothering.'

'But the hull's ashore on an island,' I exclaimed.

'That's not going to stop the ice from a-blocking of her out,' he
answered.

'I'm afraid you won't get much encouragement out of this man,' said
Captain Cliffe, turning and grimacing at me.

'Yer see, sir,' said Bodkin, directing a languishing look at the
decanter of sherry in the hands of the boy as he went to the pantry,
''tain't only the chance of that there hull being hobscurified by the
congregating of ice right in front of her; she lies under slifts which
are constantly a-going to pieces and tumbling down in thundering lumps.'

'Then,' said I, 'I take it, Mr. Bodkin, that you, who have had plenty
of experience of the ice down south, give me little reason to hope that
we shall find the wreck whole or the people abandoned in her alive?'

He rolled his monkey eyes briskly at this, fretting first one cropped
grey whisker and then the other with the palm of his hand.

'I allow,' he answered after a silence, during which little Captain
Cliffe viewed him as sternly as his nervous distorting affection
permitted, 'that your chance is as good as any chance at sea hever can
be. But I don't mind saying,' he added, standing up, catching hold of
his cap and revolving it, 'that our number is agin your luck.'

'What's that?' exclaimed the captain.

'Let the gent count us. There's thirteen souls.'

'Go forward,' said the captain, 'and get on with your work.'

The man, with a civil flourish of his hand to his brow, left the cabin.

'There's no fool like Jack fool,' said Captain Cliffe.

I confess, however, that when I reckoned up to myself the number
of people on board and made No. 13, I felt a little uneasy. I said
nothing to the captain, but the thing weighed upon me. It was perfectly
natural that at such a time I should be superstitious; certainly a
good omen would have heartened me: why, then, should not so unlucky a
circumstance as that of thirteen forming the number of us in the brig
prove depressing? I was so weak in this way that I had serious thoughts
of ordering Cliffe to tranship one of the men at the first chance that
offered. Also, the boatswain Bodkin's description of the island, his
talk of the cliffs, of ice-splitting and thundering down in blocks,
worried me by exciting new apprehensions. I was sorry I had sent for
the man. I had come from the deck to my dinner in tolerably good
spirits, and when I returned on deck I felt as melancholy as ever I had
been in my gloomiest hour aboard the 'Cambrian.'

The mood lasted for the remainder of the day, so that, spite of
the noble sailing breeze, this, my first start in search of Marie,
seemed as inauspicious as though the scheme had failed in the first
breath of it. But after a long chat with Cliffe in the evening I grew
cheerfuller. The sun was sinking in splendour: the dark blue sea ran in
frothing lines; the brig was sailing swiftly, heeling down and smoking
onwards as though, like something living, she blew the breath of life
in steam from the nostrils of her hawsepipes as she fled. Every hour of
such progress shortened the term of expectation; all might yet be well;
I could not but reflect that, until the worst was known, the best might
most rationally be hoped for. I had come to Cape Town thinking to find
my sweetheart dead; it was not she that lay there. Though we should
board the wreck and find nobody in her, still I should have a right to
believe that the three had been rescued, and perhaps at that very time
were at home in safety.

Thus I reasoned with myself after my talk with Cliffe in the evening
and was somewhat easier at heart, which indeed in this whistling
evening, merry with progress, spacious with the splendour of the
setting sun, and the distance of the eastern seaboard faintly flushed,
might have been at rest but for the gloom of the silly superstition of
thirteen!

About this time, a little before it fell dark, whilst looking towards
the forecastle where most of the crew were smoking and talking, I saw a
man come out of the hatch, hugging something to his breast. The sailors
jumped up and pressed around him. Hands were outstretched to what the
fellow held, and I heard some laughter. Cliffe was below. The mate
Bland was walking near me abreast of the skylight. He bawled out:

'What have you there, my lads?'

On which the boatswain Bodkin, snatching the object from the hold of
the man, held it high, shouting:

'Here's good luck to the brig "Albatross;" and now there's fourteen all
told.'

I started, and saw it was a cat he held. It was black as coal.

'Bring it here,' I cried.

He came, the others grinning as they stood in a huddle looking aft. It
was a young cat, and it mewed as the man approached with it. Cliffe
came on deck at that moment.

'Where was it found?' I asked, stroking the thing as it lay mewing in
Bodkin's hands.

'In one of the men's hammocks, sir.'

'It's a cat!' exclaimed Cliffe with a grimace. 'Who brought it aboard?'

'No man owns to it,' responded Bodkin.

'But who would bring it aboard if it wasn't its own legs, Mr. Moore?'
said Cliffe, turning to me. 'D'ye know I'd ask for no better stroke of
luck in all my seafaring days than this same beast's presence,' and he
advanced his little hand and tickled the cat's head.

'There's fourteen of us now, sir,' said Bodkin, with a darting roll of
his eyes.

'Fourteen and a stroke of luck besides, eh?' said I with a foolish
laugh of good spirits spite of myself.

'Go and give it something to eat and see that it don't jump
overboard,' said Captain Cliffe; and whilst the boatswain walked
forward handling the cat tenderly enough and talking to it, the little
skipper with a snap of his eyes and a voice of conviction exclaimed:
'That cat's squared the yards, Mr. Moore. We shall find the wreck, sir,
and do your business.'




CHAPTER XXVI

THE ICE


On the morning of January 29, 1861, Captain Cliffe at dinner told me
that our position by dead reckoning--he had not been able to obtain an
observation for two days--was latitude 58° 30´ S., longitude 45° W. I
pulled out my note-book on hearing this and started violently.

'Good God, Cliffe!' cried I, 'do you know that we are within a mile or
two of the place where the "Lady Emma" was abandoned by her crew?'

'Is that so?' said the little man after a pause, closing his knife and
fork. 'But it's true all the same: I'll back my runs for the last two
days, log-reckoned as they are, right, longitude and latitude, within
ten mile.'

It was bitterly cold, and when I had come below so dense a fog overhung
the sea that the main-yard was out of sight from the wheel. The brig
was lying hove to under small canvas, a large smooth Cape Horn swell
was running out of the sallow thickness, and the little vessel was
rolling horribly, falling into the hollows and swinging to the summits,
now on her beam ends, now on a level keel, now with a dip forward that
seemed to make her all stern, now with a drop aft that shook the cabin
with a hollow roar, every motion being so abrupt, and exaggerated, that
it was almost impossible to walk, to stand, even to eat, the plate
flying from your hand, whilst the boy waited with a broken head through
a fall down the companion ladder.

We had passed several icebergs on the previous day, during a very thick
morning and afternoon, when the sky had been dark with driving cloud,
and the strong wind white with snow, and throughout the night a sharp
look-out had been kept for ice; but since daybreak it had been as dense
as it was now with an awful silence all round: nothing had once broken
the amazing, oppressive stillness upon that sea, sallow as the fog,
labouring in volumes of brine soundlessly, saving a strange, fierce
noise of blowing heard close upon the bow, though nothing was to be
seen there. Cliffe said it was a whale, and I might have guessed that
by the sight of the boatswain Bodkin springing with an amazing jump
into the fore-shrouds, and leaning away from the ratline he grasped
with pricked ears, staring as out of love for his old sport into the
choking wool the breathless air was filled with.

I was as anxious and restless on account of the ice as any man aboard,
though I was no sailor: Cliffe had said it didn't follow, though a
hurricane blew, that the smother would clear. I knew that ice must be
about: for still we had headed south after passing many bergs, and if
wind came and gave us a drift without clearing the ocean for us, we
might be foul of an ice mountain ere the mass of it was fairly shaped
to the sight within toss of a man's cap.

But I forgot our situation for awhile when Cliffe told me where we were
and I looked into my note-book. Deep love, deep grief, consecrated to
my heart this scene and place of silent hills of water. Here the 'Lady
Emma' had been abandoned; here, if the horizon had been visible, then,
within the compass of it Marie had been left with her two companions in
a dismasted hull amid such floating ice as during the past few days I
had gazed at with fear and amazement: from this point the three in that
mere raft of ship had drifted--the vessel on to the ice of Coronation
Island; that, undoubtedly, she had been seen, described, reported,
but her inmates--had they been taken out of her? Or were they frozen
corpses in her? Or were they living, within reach of a day or two's
sail from the place of ocean Cliffe had found us in that day?

A fire glowed in the little brass grate. The cabin was snug and warm
enough with the companion doors closed; but I speedily grew restless
after Cliffe had gone on deck. I asked the mate when he came down to
dinner how the weather looked.

'Thick as muck, sir.'

'Any signs of wind, Bland?'

'None. But there's no trusting the next minute.'

'Any ice near us, think you?'

'The boatswain's been a snuffling and says he can hear the noise of the
beating of water. Nary man else do, though. Them whalemen are so clever
they can thread needles with their toes. They can smell grease in a
field of grass.'

Here he began to munch, and I let him eat.

I put on a thick coat and went on deck. The brig's arrest on the
smoke-thickened water, when one thought that if it would but clear and
the sun flood the south with the sparkling splendour of the South Afric
parallels from the mastheads of the brig the loom of the huge dim hill
past the cliff where the hull was lying might be seen--this, I say, was
maddening. I never could have imagined so dense a fog out of London. It
was thick as soup, of a sort of dirty yellow, as though charged with
the soot of a city of factories. The dripping wet of it froze as it
gathered, and our shrouds were swollen with the glazing, as much of the
brig as could be seen was beautiful and novel with fantasies of ice.
The topsail clapped in the blankness overhead like shells exploding
there: but you could not see it. That was the only noise saving an
occasional long sobbing wash of water when the brig heeled straining
from the yearning send of the swell.

I held by a backstay, Cliffe standing beside me, and rolled my eyes
around the sallow blindness, till all of a moment I heard a very faint
moan like the noise of a sea running into a cave: it sounded afar, and
yet not far either, as though something stood between the cause of it
and us.

Cliffe heard nothing, though he grimaced in the direction I indicated,
and dropped his head on his shoulder to hearken.

About this time the mate came up from his dinner. I asked him to
listen, suspecting that the noise I had heard was the sound of sea upon
ice. After a pretty good spell of silence the three of us listening
with all our might, Bland said:

'Sometimes if ice is near and can't be smelt or seen, it may be heard.
If you fire off this gun,' said he, putting his hand upon the brass
piece, 'and ice is by, it'll answer.'

'Try it,' said I.

He promptly went below and returned with the necessary ammunition;
where our powder was kept I never inquired. He and Cliffe loaded the
gun, the skipper snapping grimace after grimace with nervous excitement.

'Are you all ready?' said I.

Bland said 'Yes,' and then shouted to the men forward to stand by to
listen for an echo and note its bearings. The forms of the seamen
loomed in mere smudges in the fog as they lurched to the rolling
bulwarks to hearken.

'Fire!' cried I.

The piece blazed and thundered, lighting up the fog like a volcanic
upheaval with a wild crimson glare as though it was the night itself
the powder flashed against. But stunning as the roar was, it was not so
deafening but that I, for one, caught an echo stinging back through the
thickness on the starboard hand like a slap of tall becalmed topsail
against a mast.

'Hear it?' shouted a voice forward.

'We were answered yonder,' I cried, pointing.

'Ship ahoy!' at that instant came in a hoarse but clear, thin, far
voice out of the blankness on the port bow.

'Good God, we are hailed!' cried Cliffe. 'Bland, answer. Your lungs
have got more carrying power than mine.'

'Hallo!' shouted Bland, going to the side in a spring, and sending his
voice in the direction of the hail in a deep, roaring, melancholy note.

'What ship's that?' came back distinct but remote, so wonderful was the
hush, so burnished the swell. We made answer, and then roared Bland:

'What ship's that?'

'The "Helen MacGregor" of Hull, twenty months out. What's wrong with
you, that you're firing guns?'

'All's right with us,' bawled Bland. 'Any ice about, d'ye know?'

'Not used my eyes since daybreak,' echoed the far, thin, hoarse voice.

It was strange to hear it, to look into the thickness and see nothing,
to know that a ship was there, and listen to a man talking on her! But
conversation all that way off was not to be kept up long.

After remaining twenty minutes on deck I felt the cold so severely that
I returned to the cabin. After I had been below about half an hour the
brig heeled sharply on a slant of swell without recovery as before,
whence I guessed it had come on to blow suddenly. In fact, I might have
known it by the noise of feet overhead and the gushing and hissing of
water in motion, shouldered off in foam. I wrapped myself up and went
on deck and found the brig lying down close hauled under the canvas she
had been brought-to with early in the morning--a reefed maintopsail
and foresail; she was looking up for a tall, black, full-rigged ship
that was lying with her topsail to the mast on the weather bow as
though waiting for us.

The scene of ocean was wonderfully grand at this hour: it was not
blowing hard, yet the wind out of the heads off the ridges it made,
and the swell was rolling now in furrows of foam. The fog was broken
up and sailing off in compact masses with the wide white-lived heave
of sea gleaming and glancing through the foundations of vapour, till
you looked to see the stuff rock as though afloat. Lanes and openings
stretched in all directions, and I did not know where to direct my eyes
first, so noble, wild, and startling was the picture of that tall black
ship showing in a wide, clear space, her canvas waving in squares of
light in the framing of the sallow smother, whilst on the starboard
quarter hung a stately incomparable spectacle of iceberg, a giant mass,
the height vaster to the imagination because the fog showed you bits
of it only--in one place marble white cliffs staring through a passage
of vapour, a little further on, a gray pinnacle piercing the stuff
which streamed off it like torn rag. And now I could hear, but faintly,
the noise of the sea breaking along its base.

We had passed a good deal of ice during the week; but this was the
place where the 'Lady Emma' was abandoned; that white vapour-clothed
mountain took a significance none other had. I thought of it as ice
that had been seen by Marie's own eyes. It was as a revelation, too,
of the savage, forbidding, tremendous scene of desolation the brig was
bound to, with myself in her, dreaming, hoping, praying to Almighty God
I should find my sweetheart in the hull alive.

Many large white and grey birds flew out of the vapour into the
openings; they glanced against the marble-like abrupt and vanished. In
the midst of a wide flaw right abeam to port, another tall berg was
floating. It, too, was a sight of terror and awful beauty, with a look
as of frozen foam about the brows of it where the fog was flying, the
vapour whitening out to the shadow of the ice as though moon-smitten,
whilst low down on the right arched a piece of marvellous architecture,
like a Titanic Gothic doorway, through which every swell of the sea
flashed, bursting into a terrible fury and dazzling brightness of foam.

I looked on in silence, keeping the shelter of the companion, whilst
the brig under her little show of cloths broke her way to windward,
helped by the tall black ship whose drift was towards us. After some
waiting we were within hailing distance. She was just such another
whaler as the 'Sea Queen,' but bigger by a couple of hundred tons, worn
and weedy, rolling dark decks at us with a glimpse of a black-roofed
galley and smoking chimney. She was rich with ice device: fathoms of
thick crystal hung from her tops, catheads, bowsprit and quarters; a
dull light sank down her glass-like rigging as she swayed. A crowd
of men viewed us over her rail, and a man stood awaiting us beside
the mizzen rigging, an arm wrapping a backstay, and his figure like a
bear's with fur to his heels.

'What southing are you from?' shouted Cliffe, who, dwarf as he was to
the sight, had something bugle-like in the clear, small penetrating
note of his throat's delivery.

'Sixty-one, sighting Elephant Island. Nothing to the south'ard of it,'
shouted back the man in the bear-like coat.

'Been off the South Orkneys?' cried Cliffe.

'Just caught a sight of the north-west point of Coronation Island?
'Twas blowing hard, and the weather coming on thick,' answered the
other.

The two vessels rolled at a distance apart not wider than a wide
street: each man's voice rang through the wind in distinct syllables
spite of the splashing and groaning sounds and the howling and
whistling aloft when the brig's spars sheared to windward on the slope
of the sea. When I heard the whaleman speak of Coronation Island, I
thought my heart had stopped. I wanted to speak, but could not.

'How was the ice?' bawled Cliffe.

'Plentiful to the south'ard and west'ard.'

'How was the ice about the New Orkneys?'

'More'n ye'll want if you're bound there,' was the answer.

'D'ye know that land?'

'Ay' was the answer that was accompanied by a significant ironical
flourish of the arm.

'Where's a man's chance of getting ashore?'

The whaleman seemed to address another, probably the mate, who stood a
little distance from him.

'There's some landing-places on the south side,' he presently called.
'There's shelter there from the westerly winds. But you must see to
your ship, for the ice is plentiful and dangerous.'

'The wreck lies on the north side of the island,' I called to Cliffe.

'Is there no landing on the north of the island?' shouted the little
fellow.

The other answered, but the words were lost in a sudden blast or squall
of wind which blew betwixt our masts in a shriek like a locomotive's.
A moment later I saw the skipper of the whaler, as I presumed the
bear-coated man to be, motioning to his crew and heard him, but
faintly, shouting; thereupon the ship's topsail-yard was swung: the man
brandished his fist in a farewell to us, and whilst we still lay as
though hove, with the weather leech-rope of our band of topsail shaking
at every smoking plunge of the brig's head, the ship heeled over, and
gathering way, broke the seas off her lee bow with glaring heaps, and
melted into a swollen smudge in the heart of a body of vapour when our
crew were trimming sail for the course to the New Orkneys.

The rolling ocean, sallow still, was thick in many places with fog. We
saw now that ice lay all about us. There was scarce an opening in the
vaporous folds that was not filled with a berg near or distant, a dull,
pale, motionless mass; the vast island that had been off our starboard
quarter when the wind broke up the thickness, we had now brought on to
our port bow, and were slowly passing; its loom was more like a blue
shadow of land in the dull yellow light of that Antarctic afternoon,
summer as it was, than ice: yet it was a vast berg stretching west
and east: its westermost point was nearest and hung like a mass of
foreland, wild with the vapour that flew smoking off its face and
points, and with the leap of the surf at its base in lofty columns of
foam, whose heads the wind swept off in clouds.

I stood beside Cliffe under the shelter of a large square of canvas
in the main rigging: oilskinned figures watched on the forecastle; we
drove very slowly; the running rigging had been seen to and carefully
coiled down ready for instant handling should a sudden cry from the
forecastle compel a shift of helm. I saw many birds flying in the
hollow seas, and turning to mark the bearings of a small berg which had
come and gone and come again on the starboard bow, I observed slowly
swinging past about a half-acre of the giant kelp of this part of the
world, a huge seaweed, glancing black in the whiteness of the froth,
and hissing like shingle as the salt shot through it.

'Now that we are under way again,' I exclaimed, 'I am realising that
the end of this cruise is at hand.'

'Were it all clear water and fine weather,' answered the little man,
'we should be off the island by noon to-morrow.'

'What distance do you reckon it?'

'Eighty miles.'

'That ship we have just spoken makes me believe the hull has been
sighted again and again.'

'Why, perhaps so,' he answered, 'but not of necessity.'

'She was off the island, close enough to see the rocks.'

'And who's to say that she's not the first that's been off that land
this six months--close in with the coast, I mean? Depend upon it,
Mr. Moore,' he went on with his face full of earnestness betwixt his
grimaces, 'you're doing the right thing for your own peace of mind, and
in the cause of humanity....'

'Oh, it goes higher than humanity, man, higher than humanity,' I
interrupted.

'In finding out for yourself,' he continued, 'whether the hull's the
wreck of the "Lady Emma," and whether the captain, and his wife, and
your young lady are still aboard----'

'By heaven, yes, then!' I exclaimed; 'Only to think of her as _being_
on board, and perishing there for the want of my coming to her help!
Whether she's there or not, Cliffe, it was the right thing to do, as
you say, and even in that thought I find a sort of comfort. Shall you
heave-to when it comes on dark?'

'I'm for shoving on, sir, but we'll take no risks.'

'None, though the job of heaving the land into view should fill another
month.'

And still expectation and excitement so worked in me, I felt ill with
the conflict. I was up and down ceaselessly till the dusk blackened
the scene out. The cold drove me below, restlessness forced me above
again. It was always the same picture, the rolling and plunging figure
of the brig, gleaming with barbs, and spears, and motionless pennons
of ice: the glare of her band of topsail dingy against the ice beyond
as she swung it through the howling sweep of wind: the quick dazzle
of froth recoiling in thunder from the thrust of the bows: the large
grey swell coursed by the breaking surge, and to right and left, and
ahead and astern, the shadows and clear shapes of ice, some with brows
in the flying scud, some table-like and flashing like sunlight as the
seas charged them and burst, one showing a hatchet-like edge till our
rolling brig, opened it into a coast of marble that vanished in a haze
of mist and spray.

Happily, after it had been dark about an hour, the brig still blowing
forward under reefed topsail and foresail, whilst I sat in the cabin
warming myself, drinking some hot brandy and water, but always with
ears straining to catch a cry on deck, Cliffe came below, and gave me
the good news of a shift of wind into the north-west, with a scanting
of it, and a plenty of starlight, and the Southern Cross looking almost
upright.

'What does that signify?' said I.

'Nothing,' he answered with a cheerful grimace. 'Except, that as the
Southern Cross is upright at midnight on one day only in the year, the
sight of it almost on end now is interesting.'

'When is it actually upright?'

'On March 26.'

'D'ye know, Cliffe,' said I, getting up, meaning to take a look round,
'that it's comforted me sometimes to think of that symbol of God
overhanging these waters. It should be a sight to freshen a man's faith
in a time of distress.'

'Strange to find it hung up down here where they're all heathens,' said
Cliffe.

'Much ice?'

'No more than there was, sir.'

I went on deck. The dusk of the night was hard and clear, and I
observed a keen blue in the trembling gleam of many of the stars. But
though there was no wet in the air, I had never felt the cold so
bitter as on this night. The sight of the nearer of the ice mountains
in the gloom under the light of the stars was marvellously fine and
awful; some shone with a light of their own; it was the snow upon them,
I suppose, that made that sheen. I noticed, however, that though the
sea was covered with these faint and pallid masses, there was plenty of
sea-room in the lanes and highways they made. A startling and alarming
part was the crackling and crashing noises which came from them, and
shortly before I was driven below by the cold, an island on the port
quarter, wan as a cloud touched by a corner of moon, vanished; it may
have shown in another shape by daylight; it had overset and perhaps
rose flat and invisible in that light. But the spectacle was wonderful:
it made a deep impression on me. Cliffe who saw it bid me listen, and
sure enough after a little there came slanting through the wind such a
prodigious noise of hissing and seething that, but for knowing what
made it, you would have looked in its direction for the foaming waters
of a sudden gale.

There was to be little rest for the crew that night. Cliffe informed me
the men had been told that all hands would have to stand by throughout
the dark hours, ready to jump to the first call if the brig was to
remain a brig. A seaman was stationed on each bow: a third aloft on the
foreyard: the mate and the boatswain were to relieve each other every
two hours in keeping a look-out on the forecastle. A man was stationed
aft ready in a breath to help at the helm. The galley fire was kept
burning all night, and hot coffee, and at longer intervals small drams
of rum, were served out to the crew.

The chief peril lay in the smaller blocks of ice floating on the water;
they were hard to see before they were dangerously close to; and yet,
comparatively small as they were, any one of them was big enough to
knock a hole in the brig's bottom, and founder her out of hand.

Right through the night we held on. At first the cries of 'Ice ahead,'
'Ice on the port bow,' 'Starboard your helm,' and the like, alarmed me;
but I presently got used to them, nor indeed were they so frequent as
to be terrifying; once only, that is, in my hearing, was a cry raised
as for life or death in a sudden passion or panic; then it was an
immense flat ragged-edged piece of ice under the bow; a swift turn of
the helm sent the brig clear, giving us a sight of the stuff alongside,
and the brave little ship ploughed her way onwards.

Happily, it was midsummer, and the night comparatively short. The dawn
was fair and rosy, and the sun rose upon a dark blue sea, frothing far
as the eye could pierce, and magnificent with ice. I cannot express
the gorgeous scene of colour that sunrise called into being. In all
directions the ice lay in a hundred shapes, some of the islands
sparkling like prisms; I beheld floating cities of porcelain, enormous
shapes in alabaster, figures of marble, monstrous and grotesque as
those huge forms of rock which stand in a congregation of Titans at the
base of some of the precipitous heights of Table Bay.

But though there was plenty of ice in the south, there was an abundance
of room too for our passage; the mate came down from the fore royal
yard with a telescope slung on his back and said he saw no barrier; he
thought, but would not then swear, he could make out a faint shadow
of land. If he was right, then the mountain that centres Coronation
Island was in sight! The breeze was fresh out of the north-west, with
a high following sea, and soon after the sun was risen and Cliffe had
taken a long look round, he ordered sail to be made. The foretopsail
was loosed, reefs shaken out, and cloths piled upon the little vessel
to the topgallant yards; _then_, like something alive and released, the
little ship fled southwards.




CHAPTER XXVII

CORONATION ISLAND


But it was not till next day that we had the land in view, and then
it was ten o'clock on February morning, making it a few days above a
month since we had sailed out of Table Bay. As on the previous day,
so on this, the sun shone brightly, with even some comfort of warmth
in its light. Many great clouds of a milk-white softness were sailing
into the east; the wind was fresh out of the west, but though the
sea ran briskly, with a shrewd vapour of salt in the shrill fling of
the frothing curls, it was not a hollow sea; it rolled the brig in
stately measures, but she was now under small sail, the ice being very
plentiful and the sea crowded with bergs of all sizes, whilst right
ahead were tall cliffs of ice backed by a blue shadow of mountain
rising into a silver faintness where the eternal snows upon it sparkled
and died out from the sight in the deep blue.

I was beside myself with excitement and wretched with distress of
expectation, dread, and hope. That height of white cliff right ahead,
broken in the foreground by pale floating islands, its face discoloured
in places as though the ice that masked the rock had broken from the
black and savage rampart, was Coronation Island, and on the port bow,
looming distant but immense, were the mountains of Laurie Island.

Our anchors were at the cathead, ready for letting go in case of sudden
need; the men hung about on the look-out for ice, ready in an instant
to trim sail. We were sailing towards the island through an avenue of
bergs: clear water sparkled from the thrust of our stem to the very
wash of the distant surf, with no other obstructions than here and
there a lump of the crystal stuff lifting sullenly with the swell,
flashing gloriously, and so proclaiming itself to the sight when the
sunbeam smote the foam that poured off it.

A chart of the islands lay upon the skylight, and every few minutes I
would be dropping the telescope to look at the chart, to gather from
the tracing the point of coast we were heading for. The whaleman had
said that the wreck lay on a ledge in Palmer's Bay, and Cliffe and
I were agreed that that large indent was between the two towering
shadows, to the right of the taller peak that soared a thousand feet
higher than Table Mountain.

The icebergs obstructed the view. The line of coast was studded with
them: yet every moment I was sinking my sight through the lenses into
each opening betwixt the bergs. The brig's progress under her small
canvas was about four knots and a half; I'd glanced for a moment at
some stately frozen pile majestically rocking and slowly veering by,
then put my eye to the glass afresh. My very soul was now loathing the
sight of the ice. The largest of the islands was no longer an object
of splendour and sublimity, but of horror and heart-weariness, charged
with a spirit of desolation that subdued me to a sort of numbness of
mind if I looked long: it seemed to stonefy the very principle of life
in me, as though there was a horrid magic in its bald white stare to
look a man into craziness, and emptiness, and into its own frozen
lifelessness.

But now, as we approached, the features of the land began to steal
out into a brilliant keenness wherever there was space for them to
show betwixt the floating ice, and on a sudden, whilst I was looking
through the glass, the motion of the brig slided a seaborne hill away
to the left, and exposed a front of cliff that lay with a shadow upon
it as though it was a sort of ravine, at the foot of which, though I
instantly guessed it would lift to some height above the sea as we got
nearer, lay a black speck. I looked again, and cried out wild with
excitement:

'Cliffe, I have the hull! I have the hull!'

The little man came headlong to my side, and put his grimacing face to
the telescope.

'Yes! I see it, I have it!' he shouted. 'Just as reported--high above
the wash--fair in the heart of the Bay. It'll be all plain sailing now.
Lor, but there ought to be no difficulty in boarding her.'

He returned the glass to me: I levelled it afresh at the instant that
the corner of a big heap of berg floated right into the field of vision.

It needed another hour of careful sailing to expose the hull anew: then
through the glass I saw her clearly. She lay, a large black hulk of
ship, upon a projection of ice that was at least thirty feet above the
sea. I made out her bowsprit, and the stump of her foremast. The cliffs
soared sheer and abrupt at the back of her to a great height. Even at
that distance it was not hard to guess that, after having stranded, she
had been lifted by some earthquake dislocation of ice into the posture
she rested in. Suppose the sea clear, she must have been visible to
passing ships for leagues.

The seamen were congregated in the bows, leaning over the rail, Bodkin
amongst them pointing eagerly. The mate roared to them to keep a bright
look-out, they then scattered, but the sight of that wreck had brought
them heedlessly together as one man. Cliffe's glass was not a powerful
one, yet the hull in the lens lay within half a mile, and I saw her
plainly. She had her head towards the cliffs, and sat very nearly upon
a level keel. A great portion of her starboard bulwarks were gone. She
was a mass of ice under her stern: looked to be fixed there to her bed
of white pillars. The sun shot sparkles into her as we advanced, and
still she showed black, as though the ice that coated her was as glass.
Nothing moved: I strained my vision till my brain reeled and the object
swung in the glass and was eclipsed: Cliffe looked, he saw no smoke nor
signs of life any more than I.

'If there's anyone alive aboard her,' said he, 'now's our time for
letting them know we're here.'

'Right,' I answered, speaking with my teeth almost set; 'do what you
will, Cliffe; do what is for the best.'

He called to Bland and a man, and they fetched a number of blank
charges for the cannon. The little skipper left the gun to the mate's
handling, himself taking charge of the brig, which needed exquisite
watching and management, so crowded was the water here with loose ice.

'Let fly fast as you can load, Mr. Bland,' said the captain; 'fire six
rounds.'

As he spoke came a cry from the forecastle: 'Lie close under the port
bow, sir!'

Thus was it, thus had it been, saving that now the pack stuff had
thickened perilously.

The gun was fired; it made a noble thunder, and roared in dying echoes
from near ice crag to ice crag. Again it was fired, yet again; all this
while the brig was rolling forwards with her helm going up and down to
the cries from the forecastle and to the gestures of the little captain.

I stood at a backstay with a levelled glass steadied against it, and
in the moment of the third explosion I saw smoke rise feathering from
the deck of the hull; still watching, my breath so thick and difficult
it was as though a hand was upon my throat, I marked that the smoke
thickened; but I could not see the red of the flame, nor the figure of
the person feeding it. I daresay I was as white as any corpse when I
stepped over to the captain and, putting the glass into his hand, said:
'There is life there.'

'There's smoke arising from that wreck,' shouted someone forward.

'We're here for _some_ purpose, then, anyway,' cried Cliffe with
a small oath, letting fall the glass to his side with the most
extravagant grimace I had ever beheld in him.

One saw the smoke easily now with the naked eye; it rose black against
the whiteness past it, curled featherwise, and blew scattering against
the face of the cliff. I levelled the glass again and saw the figure of
a man walking toward the stump of the foremast; I watched him; in a few
moments a square of colour rose to the summit of the mutilated spar,
where it blew steadily; it was a large English ensign, Jack down.

Bland let fly a fourth gun.

'Stop it!' roared Cliffe, 'we are seen! Hoist the ensign and dip it
thrice.'

The colour soared to the trysail gaff end; it blew out large on the
bight of the halliards when it was dipped, and was easily within the
observation of the man on the hull. When I looked through the glass
once more I saw a second figure; it was upon the hull's quarter, where
the rail or bulwarks rose to a height that hindered me from perceiving
how it was clad. I asked Cliffe to look; he steadied the glass, and
answered with a snap of his whole face, and a voice high-pitched with
delight:

'As God's my hope, Mr. Moore, it's a woman!'

The glass so shook in my hands that I could not use it; I took a few
turns, then looked again. The figure watched us from the same place,
but I could not tell whether it was a man or a woman. If it was a
woman, then it might be Mrs. Burke. I wanted three figures to make
_sure_ of Marie; I saw but two; where was the third?

I strained my sight at the telescope with a heart of fever, half
strangled by conflicting passions.

The figure that had hoisted the colour went to the side of the other,
and they both stood watching, nothing visible of them above their
waists. It was blowing a fresh breeze, and before this time Cliffe had
taken in certain canvas; I think the brig was under topsails only, the
foresail hauled up and hanging in its gear; the vessel drove slowly
with an occasional crackling noise of ice along her sides when she
sheared through some thin sludge stuff you could not see till you
were in it; fortunately the drift ice that had threatened a thick
surface just now had loosened here and tossed scattered; as we advanced
moreover, we found that the icebergs which had looked to sit close in
with the coast rode with a good offing; the sea was covered with these
floating islands off that part of the island marked Foul Point; the
eastern horizon was also like a terrace of ice, but the face of the
cliffs from Foul Point down to where the land rounded into Lewthwaite
Strait was fairly open.

All this while the sun shone brightly and with warmth. The sea streamed
in a glorious dye of violet; we rolled slowly onwards till we were
within about three-quarters of a mile of the coast and right abreast of
the wreck. The helm was then put down; the main topsail laid aback; the
gun again fired, and the ensign dipped. It was now about noon.

By this time I had made out that one of the figures was a woman; I saw
but two persons. Who the woman was I could not tell, fierce as had
been the struggle of my vision to resolve the glimmer of her face into
lineaments.

When the brig had been brought to a stand, Cliffe called a council.
We had ample sea room. The nearest floating ice lay about a quarter
of a mile distant on the port quarter; the smaller blocks were not
numerous, nor was there weight of sea to make them dangerous. All along
the base of the ice-clad cliffs the water was pouring in a thunder of
boiling surf; it was not the breakers but the great breathing swell
of this mighty ocean which worked all that noise and fury along the
cliffs' foot. The white brine sometimes shot twenty feet high, though
it blew but a moderate fresh breeze, and the surge ran small.

Cliffe, myself, Bland, and the boatswain Bodkin came together at the
companion hatch to consider. We had swept with the glass the line of
coast from the beach under the hull to as far as we could see on the
right, and beheld nothing but lofty coils of frothing combers raging
in surf; there was no chance for a boat anywhere _that_ way. The left
presented a like scene, saving that there was a point in Palmer's Bay
that, cruising eastwards, shut out the view of perhaps a quarter of a
mile of the water it enclosed. Upon that point our eyes were fastened.

'We must lower a boat,' said Cliffe, 'and find out how the land lies
past that arm of land.'

'It's the only sheltered bit along the whole boiling, I allow,' said
Bland.

Bodkin, putting down the telescope, exclaimed:

'She lies about forty feet high above the wash. The ice is broke and
irregular from the water to where she sits, and I reckon a man might
walk upon it if there's a landing-place round the point. But I won't
swear to it till I'm close in. Ice is deceitful stuff. Capt'n, there'll
be nothen to say till we've taken a look round. 'Tis certain there's to
be no getting at the hull from the bottom of the height she rests on,
even if the boat could land there.'

'Then lower away, Mr. Bland, as quickly as possible, and be off and
back with a report, that we may make up our minds what to do before it
falls dark.'

Whilst some hands were getting one of the whale-boats over, others were
busy with the deep-sea lead: but we were away, pulling for the shore,
before they sounded. I went in the boat, taking the telescope with me.
She was a five-oared boat; Bodkin pulled stroke; one of our smartest
seamen was in the bows. The fellows bent their backs, and the buoyant
little craft, swift of model with the whale-hunter's lines, flashed
over the blue ridges; often I sought to bring the glass to bear upon
the two figures watching us; to no purpose. The mate would not let me
stand up, and I put down the telescope in despair.

'That vessel,' said the mate, 'never berthed herself like that. She's
been chucked right up by the ice, and 'twas sudden too, bet yer heart,
Bodkin.'

The picture grew amazing as we advanced. The cliffs behind the hull
rose to about two hundred feet; I call them cliffs, they were a solid,
precipitous, rugged face of ice, how deeply sheathing the black rock
of the island no man could tell: the whole stretch of land resembled a
gigantic iceberg. The hull lay upon a huge block, the top about forty
feet high; it projected in a wide ledge, then fell sheer. You might
know it had been snapped from some parent monster by the smooth side it
showed to the sea, so clean cut to the eye, it might have been done by
the chisel and hammer of a giant big as the blue shadow of mountains
beyond.

My eyes were fixed on the wreck, and on the figures standing at her
bulwark rail. Now again I tried to bring the telescope to bear: the
jumping of the boat made the effort useless. All in a minute one of
the figures sprang on to the bulwark; flourished his arms, and then
motioned frantically towards the part of the bay concealed by the curve
of the ice.

'Hail him, in God's name!' I cried. 'Try him with your voice, Mr.
Bland.'

The mate stood up and roared, the full volume of his lungs trumpeting
into the inshore wind like a soldier's call, the sweep and lift of the
whale-boat to the summit of a large swell helping.

'How many are there of you?'

'Two,' came back the answer, dull through the roar of the surf but
distinguishable.

'Who is the other?'

The men were now resting on their oars, the boat sinking and lifting in
the sea that was great and hollow for so small a fabric; we were within
a pistol-shot of the base of the cliff on which the hull sat, but so
high perched was the craft, so bewrapped the two people, I could not
make out their faces. The man held up his hand as though he had not
heard.

The mate roared again, 'Who is the other?'

'A young lady.'

'Is it Miss Otway?'

He brandished an assent, and his figure stiffened in a posture of
amazement.

'Is that her alongside of you?'

Again the figure flourished an affirmative.

'Then here's Mr. Moore come to take her home,' thundered the mate.

When he said _that_, Marie--for it was she--leaned forward: she was
motionless whilst you might have counted twenty; she then stretched
out her arms. I pulled off my hat and flourished it, that she might
know me among the crowd we made in that boat, then lifted up my hands
to her. But even had my voice possessed Bland's carrying power I could
not have called. There, high above, upon the rail of the wreck, flanked
by towering walls of ice, stood, with arms outstretched in appeal to
me, the figure of my beloved. I had thought to find her dead--she was
there; I had thought to find her lying in an African grave--and there,
on that high-poised wreck she stood in silent appeal. For weeks and
weeks I had been mourning for her, asking of God that I might behold
her, seeing her in my dreams, a frozen corpse upon the deck of that
hull there: and now she stood up yonder, alive, full in sight.

The boiling of the surf ran a maddening noise of thunder round the bay.
But one saw what the man, whoever he might be, had frantically pointed
to. The water was smooth from the end of the point to away round for
some hundreds of paces. The sea could not get at the frozen beach
there: it flashed at the point, and recoiled in clouds.

'Put me ashore,' I exclaimed, 'I can climb those crags. Look how they
wind to the ledge: Bodkin will help me. I must go on board that wreck.'

'Sit down, I beg, sir,' exclaimed the mate, catching me by the arm as I
toppled half-delirious. 'Tumbling overboard's an easy job. Your eyes
deceive you; you could no more climb those rocks than jump ashore from
where you sit. What d'ye say, Bodkin?'

The man had already and quickly made up his mind. He glanced at the
fall of crags of headlong abruptness in places, huge and nodding, yet
so blending in their whiteness with the whiteness they stood out on
as to cheat the unpractised eye with an appearance of easy road-way,
and answered firmly, 'There's no mortal legs and arms as is a-going to
carry a man to the wreck by them rocks.'

'Why did the man motion to that landing-place?' I said.

The mate turned his sheep-eyed face round the bay, and answered, 'He
didn't know who we were. He was afraid that boiling,' said he, pointing
to the surf, 'would drive us away.'

'How is the wreck to be entered?' I asked, looking up and waving my
hat, and then again stretching forth my arms.

'It's a sailor's job. Have no fear. We'll get 'em out of that,'
answered the mate, and standing up he hailed the man. The other
flourished his arm. 'We're here to take you off,' bellowed Bland, 'and
we'll do it. Don't take any notice of our leaving you. It won't be for
long. D'ye hear me?'

'Ay, ay!' came the answer, feebly through the ceaseless thunder.

It tore my heart to look up at the wreck, as we pulled away, and
see Marie there, sundered from me by that curse of roaring foam,
inaccessible, to be come at only by patience, naval skill, efforts
which might have to be again and again repeated, always perilous.
I cannot express how marvellously strange this ice-ramparted bay
looked, with that wreck cradled on high, like a huge model in glass,
tinted black, smoke lifting still cloudily from her deck, and the red
inverted flag streaming like a square of fire against the marble white
beyond. Many large pieces of ice floated in this sweep of water: but
they showed plain, and the boat went securely. One piece was almost a
berg: a miniature island. Here and there the sea broke over it. It was
almost in the middle of the bay, and exactly abreast of the wreck. I
observed that Mr. Bland ran his eye curiously over it as we pulled past.

Who was the man on the hull that had answered us? He was not Captain
Burke. My sight had not distinguished his face, yet I should have known
him by his voice had he been Burke. Three had been left, so Wall the
boatswain reported: Burke and his wife, and Miss Otway; I saw but two.
The man had said there were two only: one was Marie: where were the
others, and who was that stranger?

We arrived alongside the brig, and with little difficulty I got aboard.
The pull had occupied so short a while there had been scarce time to
talk: but in any case the hurry and wildness of my spirits, my deep
agitation, amazement and delight, mingled with dark wonder and jealous
alarm, must have held me mute.

Cliffe impatiently awaited us: Bland and Bodkin came on board, leaving
the men in the boat. Bland immediately said:

'We must get them out with a cradle. There's no other way.'

'No landing, then, round that point there?' said Cliffe.

'Ay, sir, but the rocks are not to be climbed by anything wanting hoofs
and horns.'

'Who are they?'

'One's the young lady,' said the mate.

Cliffe spun round and stretched his hand to me.

'I do congratulate you,' he cried, convulsing his countenance. 'It's a
noble errand nobly rounded off. Hurrah!' and in a sudden ecstasy he
pulled off his hat and whirled it three or four times over his head. He
then cried, 'But two only? The third ain't dead, I hope?'

'Captain Burke and his wife are not there,' said I.

He grimaced at me, and said, 'Who's the man, then? But asking questions
won't get them out of it. What d'ye propose?'

As he spoke he whipped out his watch: as it lay in his hand I saw the
hour; the time was two, we had therefore a long afternoon of daylight
before us.

'We must take the mortar in the boat and communicate with it,' answered
Bland. 'There's a big piece of ice to anchor the boat to,' said he,
pointing to the lump I had observed him look at. 'We shall want a
cradle.'

'A cask 'll answer,' said Cliffe.

'Better have both boats in the water,' said Bland.

They exchanged further remarks to this effect, but I was no sailor
and could not follow them. No time, however, was lost. In less than
half-an-hour both boats were alongside, rising and falling singly
under the lee of the brig. In one boat was the mortar, with a complete
apparatus of gear and cradle for connection with the wreck. The cradle
consisted of a large cask cleverly slung, and so contrived as to
slide along a line when the rope attached to it was pulled. We were
nobly favoured by the weather. The send of the swell was as steady as
the tick of a clock: the seas ran short and small, with a rich sunny
feathering of foam that made a wonder of the ice, so tropic was it with
the blue overhead where floated a few large white clouds of a coppery
effulgence of swollen breast.

We got away by a quarter to three, one boat in tow of the other; the
wind and seas helped us, and we quickly entered the bay. We were of the
same number as before, and the same people. We drove with lifted oars
to the former talking place, and Bland hailed the man, and, with his
loudest roar, told him we were going to fire the end of a line to the
wreck and send him a tackle by it for a cradle. Did he understand?

The man responded with a peculiar flourish of his arm, and Bland
instantly said to me, 'He is a sailor.'

I had no eyes save for Marie. She had showed on a sudden at the rail
on the quarter as we entered the bay, and stood as still as a statue
watching us. Before Bland hailed I kissed my hand and flourished my hat
to her, and extended my arms; and she then stretched her hands, lifting
them immediately afterwards.

The surf held us several hundreds of feet away from the beach: the
hull stood about forty feet above; no cry I was capable of could have
reached her through the noise of the trembling combers; but the wind,
however, was brilliant, and Marie's form stood clear cut against the
white background; nevertheless, I could not distinguish her features.

The boat, with the other in tow, now pulled for the lee of the large
mass of ice that lay floating abreast of the wreck. The water swung
foamless and quiet under the shelter of this block. A couple of men
jumped out, and between them carried an anchor to some near crevice, in
which they half sank it. Thus were the boats solidly secured.

The mortar was then loaded: I saw the man on the wreck turn as though
addressing Marie, who immediately withdrew and disappeared. When all
was ready, Bland with many wild gestures and flourishes signalled to
the man to stand by. Our seamen were deeply interested and greatly
excited, particularly Bodkin, who had the handling of the mortar.

'Fire!' roared Bland.

The uncouth piece exploded in flame and smoke. Coil after coil of the
heap of small stuff of the thickness of lead-line standing beside it
flew off into the air.

'He has it!' bawled a man.

'Pay out now, pay out!' cried Bland. 'Light out handsomely, my lads. It
may come as too much dead weight for one man, which'll be a bad job if
winch is froze.'

'It's for his life, and _that's_ a three-manpower, aye, though yare
should be just out of horspital too,' exclaimed a seaman.

'Pay out. Ease him all you can, lads,' shouted the mate.

The man had got hold of the end of the line, and was dragging it
inboard hand over hand, bringing to him as he hauled the end of a stout
rope, to which a little block was attached with a line rove through
it. This was the gear the mate was calling upon the seamen to pay out
handsomely. He was but one man to three, and the tackle and rope must
needs grow heavier and heavier as its smoking steaming up-curving
bight lengthened. I watched almost breathless; if the man's strength
failed before his end of the rope came to his hand what should we do?
We could not assist. Now indeed I saw it would be impossible for any
one of us to scale those rugged crystal boulders and cavernous ruins of
ice which yet from the level of the water painted a practicable ascent
from the sheltered curve of the bay where the sea was silent.

Foot by foot the sailors veered out the gear, and hand over hand, with
admirable endurance and patient courage, the man on the wreck hauled
the stuff in: till on a sudden one of our men called out, 'The lady's
helping,' and I caught a glimpse of Marie past the man, dragging as he
dragged.

'It's all right!' after a long pause, exclaimed Bland, letting out his
words in the note of a deep-chested sigh of relief, and a hearty cheer
sprang from the lips of the seamen.

'He knows what to do. He's a sailor!' cried Bodkin.

He had vanished behind the bulwarks, but quickly reappeared signalling
to us with a flourish, whilst Marie stood as before, motionless,
watching.

'Now get it taut, for God's sake!' cried the mate. 'In with the slack.'

The men toiled on, and dragged till the bight of the rope was clear of
the water: the gear then described a curve from the stump of fore-mast
to the boat.

'Now clap on the watch tackle.'

A machinery of blocks and lines was applied to the rope, which tautened
to the strain till the mate cried 'Belay! If we don't mind our eye we
shall start the wreck!'

Then swiftly, but without hurry or confusion, the empty cask was got
over the bow and slung to a bowling or traveller.

'Haul out!' cried the mate, and nimbly, with quick steady pulls, the
cask was run up the rope. It travelled smoothly. The man sprang on to
the bulwark rail and received it, and, putting his hand on the edge of
it, jumped in.

'By thunder, no, then! The lady first, or you stop there!' groaned the
mate, his face suddenly dark with disgust and temper, and the others
looked along the rope to the cask with frowns eloquent of curses. But
in a moment the man got out, and I said, 'He was testing it.'

We now saw him, in the sharp white light the air was brimful of, help
Marie on to the rail: he put his hands under her arms, and carefully
sank her into the cask; then, pulling off his cap, flourished a signal
of 'all's ready' to us. Instantly, one end of the line was slackened
away whilst the other end was hauled upon, and the cask travelled
towards us.

'Stand by to lift the lady out,' bawled the mate, whilst the cask was
still coming. 'Into the bows two of you. Mr. Moore, you'll keep your
seat, I beg sir, till the lady's in the boat.'

The cask came sliding to the drag of the line down to the very stern
of the boat: there it was water-borne, and began to roll and leap with
the boat: but strong hands were ready, and in a minute Marie was lifted
over the gunwale, brought right aft, and seated beside me.




CHAPTER XXVIII

MR. MOORE ENDS HIS STORY


I took her by the hands and looked her in the face, and brought her
to my heart, and a sob shook me as I kissed her. For some moments she
merely pronounced my name, straining from my grasp to look at me.
There was something wild in the light of her soft eyes then. Maybe the
passions and sensations which in a sudden surprise of meeting would
have forced us into transports had abated; we had long both known that
we were near to each other, she that I had come to rescue her, I that
she was alive on that wreck up there. But for all that, and as long
as they were bringing the man from the wreck, it remained a sort of
unreality, a mission too marvellous to have been fulfilled, a hope
too daring, too defiant of death itself and all the terrors of this
barbarous, savage scene, to have been humanly possible.

A wonder, too, lay in her beauty and healthful looks. My imaginations
of her state, now as lying in her coffin at Cape Town, now as dead
of the cold in that same wreck we had brought her from, had coloured
to me a ghastly portrait of my memory of her; or, even when figuring
her alive in the hull, I conceived her bloodless, gaunt, sunk-eyed, a
sad, heart-sickening spectre of herself. Instead I found her fairer,
healthier, plumper by a hundredfold than she had shown when she left
England. She was dressed in furs: her hat was a turban of sealskin; her
hair was a little wild, but its dishevelment was a grace.

When at last I began to speak to her, it was in mere ejaculation, a
babble of joy and devotion--that I should have got her;--that I should
be holding her after months of fearing and of believing that she was
dead; that God should have directed me through thousands of leagues
of sea to this lonely scene of ice; and so on, and so on; whilst her
speech was little more than exclamation too. For, put yourself in our
place and judge how it would go with your heart, and tongue, till use
had softened amazement and incredulity, sobering the flow of feeling
into a gentle language of passion and pleasure.

Meanwhile they were bringing the man to the boat. The cask travelled
safely to the bows: he sprang out with the assistance of a man's hand,
and then stood on a thwart looking about him for a minute with a face
of ecstasy.

Now it was I grew a bit rational, and said to Marie:

'Who is he?'

'Mr. Selby. His conduct has been noble. Oh, Archie, his manly treatment
of me, his patient care, the encouragement, the encouragement!'

'Jump on to the ice there, two of you, and get that anchor,' sung out
Mr. Bland.

'Where's Captain Burke?' I said.

'He was drowned months ago--months ago.'

'And his wife?'

'I found her frozen to death and dragged her into the ship's kitchen
and watched beside her, and then I was alone in that wreck in a heavy,
rolling ocean for a week till he came,' and she looked towards Selby,
'sent by God, for without him--alone up there--oh, think, Archie!'

As she said this she put her hands together and her face whitened like
the ice; her eyes rolled their pupils out of sight, and with a little
moan she fainted.

I held and pillowed her, groping for and finding a flask of brandy in
my pockets. She continued in a dead faint until, the anchor having been
got, the boats were clear of the bay close in with the brig.

Selby sat in the bows. I never addressed him: I could think of nothing
but the lifeless figure I clasped. She came to just as we drew
alongside the vessel, and my gratitude, when she fetched a breath, and
opened her eyes, was scarcely less than that I had felt when I knew
she was on board the wreck. In truth, so fixed was her trance, I had
believed her dead.

She was helped over the side by Cliffe and others. The brig showed a
low side when the gangway was unshipped, and Marie was handed on deck
easily and without risk. I followed. She was very weak, yet could walk
leaning on my arm, and thus supporting her I took her into the cabin.
Then it was I strained her to my heart again, kissing her, blessing
her, thanking God for suffering me to discover and rescue her.

It would be idle to set down what now passed between us in this
first half-hour of our being alone. Our hurry of speech, the tender
interruption of caresses was as a printed page broken into sentences
without sequence. Looks will give continuity to meaning when the tongue
is still, but how to describe those passages of eloquent silence?

We had both of us a thousand things to ask and answer, and often we'd
break off to gaze at each other, scarce realising even yet that we
were together, and that the end of my heaven-directed quest was come.
By the time we had settled down into sober talk, sitting hand in hand
in front of the glowing brass stove, whilst the boy in obedience to my
orders was preparing the table for dinner, it was about five o'clock;
they had got way upon the brig; she was heeling over, and I guessed
that Cliffe was pressing her, getting every inch of northing that was
to be clawed out of the bow surge whilst it was daylight. The afternoon
was glowing with more than tropic splendour; indeed, never had I
observed such mellow richness of glory under the line, or north or
south of 23° as I had noticed in this Antarctic sunshine whilst in the
bay. But however delivered--whispered at times--sometimes interrupted
by tears, by sudden impassioned embraces, as though nothing even now
could be true but the presence and reality of the long months of her
imprisonment; but however brokenly uttered, I say her story was known,
and her relation persuaded me that in the person of Mr. Selby lived
one of the finest characters that ever graced the manliest of all the
callings. My love, my joy--though my spirits seemed to know no other
passions whilst I held her and looked at her--did not extinguish in me
for long whilst we conversed the cold dark dread that lurked in the
thought of her having been locked up with Selby for months. But whilst
I listened the jealous fear, the gloomy dislike for the extraordinary
association vanished. My heart grew hot with admiration and gratitude.
She told me of her joy at the sight of him, when, after being alone
for a week in the dismasted hull of the 'Lady Emma' with no other
companion on board than the dead body of Mrs. Burke, she groped her way
from her berth to the cabin and found him lying asleep on a locker. She
told me how he had comforted her and raised her spirits by every hope
that a sailor could invent. She instanced many fine subtle, delicate
traits of conduct; I was impressed by the refinement and native
exquisite breeding of the man whilst I listened to her. I witnessed
the gentleman, the nobleman of nature's own handiwork, in all she told
me of him. Without his inspiring companionship her spirits would have
sunk, her heart must have broken. He fetched and carried, cooked, and
toiled for her comfort; he devised a dozen schemes to divert her. Every
day he promised that a ship would come to take them off. He never lost
heart. Often he would sing with a sailor's notion of brightening her
melancholy.

No one intruded upon us, saving the boy; but our talk was not to be
overheard by him, sitting as we did close together beside the fire. And
all the while I was admiring the improved sweetness of her looks, the
plumpness of her cheeks and throat, the firmer, clearer tones of her
voice, and what shone to my sight as a soft gay light of health in her
eyes.

'Is it the ice,' said I, 'that has worked this miracle of change in
you? Or were you looking even better than you now do before your
shipwreck?'

'I cannot tell how I look,' she answered. 'What I have suffered I know.'

She talked of the Burkes, and wept when she spoke of her old nurse. She
said she believed Captain Burke committed suicide; his end was sudden;
he did not need to go upon the bowsprit to hang up the lantern--a
height of foremast stood; he went on a dangerous errand, she thought,
meaning to die, and his getting his wife to accompany him into the
bows might have signified no more than lunatic cunning.

Whilst we conversed the boy came down and asked if he should put dinner
upon the table. We had forgotten time in talking and I jumped up and
took Marie to my berth, which was to be resigned to her. I then went on
deck to make Mr. Selby's acquaintance and to bring him into the cabin
to dinner.

The wind was on the beam, a steady pouring breeze, and the heeling brig
was washing onwards, but warily and under little canvas; I had been
misled by the angle of the deck. The ice rode lofty and glaring about
us on all sides in huge groups; and masses of the stuff littered the
ocean directly in our path; the utmost vigilance was needful.

I stood a moment in the companion-way, looking at the island we were
leaving astern. It was already some miles distant, and the wreck
invisible. The far inland mountain hung solemn and sublime in the blue
air with the majestic loneliness of it. You thought of it as lifting
its height at the extreme end of the world, and the melting of its
shimmering peak into the silver azure was such a blending as made the
shadow seem as high as the heavens themselves.

Cliffe stood in earnest talk with Selby. I regarded the man awhile
before he saw me. He was dressed in the plain clothes of his calling;
doubtless he made good his wants out of Captain Burke's wardrobe; he
was rather short and very broad-shouldered; his hair was black, and of
a true cast-away man's length, falling and curling in plenty down upon
his back as though it had been a woman's; he was of a sallow complexion
and newly bearded as though used to shave when all was well.

When I went to him with my hands outstretched, he faced me with a
smile, and then it was I saw a wonderful spirit of goodness and
kindness in his countenance. I had never before witnessed a man's
nature so plainly pictured in his looks. I will not admit that I was
prejudiced in his favour by what Marie had told me and found a soul
of candour and good humour where perhaps I should otherwise have seen
nothing but an average sailorly countenance. No matter what the causes
which should have brought this man and me acquainted; let me have met
him how, when, where you will, one glance would have persuaded me that
he was a heart of oak. You saw a manly simplicity and gentleness in
every line. His eyes looked at you full, yet gently, with a charming,
winning frankness; his smile was a grace, there was something sweet in
it: and yet he was by no means good looking. His face was overcharged
by the length of its aquiline nose. His mouth, too, was out of
proportion, his eyes were something too deep set and close together to
please; nevertheless when he turned, smiling to receive me, I found a
beauty in his looks that was far above all gift of flesh.

I held him by both hands, but in what terms I thanked him for his
goodness to Miss Otway I'll not set down, because they must needs look
cold and insufficient, when in reality the tribute lay in that part
that cannot be communicated on paper, I mean in the tone of voice, the
expression of countenance, the clinging pressure of the hands.

He said, 'It's been a bad time for her, sir. The beginning was the
hardest. That week when she was alone, washing about here, much where
we now are, in the winter time when it was nearly all night, and nobody
else aboard but the corpse of Mrs. Burke, would have killed a lady of
less spirit.'

I broke in by asking him to step below with me. Cliffe said he would
remain on deck and watch the brig. I took notice that as in making
for the island, so now, a keen look-out was being kept. Hands were
stationed in the bows and on the foreyard; the rigging lay ready for
instant use. Two men were at the wheel.

Selby stopped and looked at the island astern. The whole soul of the
man seemed to rush into his face as he gazed, colouring it with memory
and a passion of gratitude and pathetic joy. He breathed deep and said.
'Thank God, I've seen the end of it! Seven months is it, sir? The
sufferings of the sea will make a year of a week. It seems as long as a
lifetime.'

He sighed again, or rather fetched a breath as of relief and ease of
heart, and followed me into the cabin.

Whilst we waited for Marie, he explained how it came about that the
hull was shelved forty feet above the wash.

He said when she first took the ice she was beaten a considerable
distance by blow upon blow of foamless swell, rolling into the shelter
out of the heavy weather beyond; she lay on her bilge. He could not
express the misery they suffered from the angle her posture sloped
her into; till, early one night, a noise of thunder roared through
the cabin as though the whole island was splitting to pieces; shock
followed shock. These volcanic throes went on for hours. He expected
every moment that the hull would be crushed to powder. Sometimes they
felt the fabric under their feet swept upwards. It was pitch dark on
deck; nothing was to be seen; but the uproar of splitting ice was at
moments deafening. He said he could compare it to nothing but to being
in a boat betwixt two line-of-battle ships when they were firing their
whole broadside artillery at each other.

It might have been about four o'clock when the hellish commotion ceased
as abruptly as it had commenced; at this hour the hull was, as she had
been for some time, resting on an almost level keel. At break of day
he went on deck, and was amazed to find the sea lying open, but at a
considerable distance below; the great ice peninsula whose bay had been
the salvation of the hull had broken away and become a majestic island,
nodding stately upon a high sea about a quarter of a mile distant. The
wreck rested upon a wide ledge with a sheer fall of ice, smooth as
though chiselled, to the wash of the surf. How it had befallen he could
not tell. Perception had lain entirely in sensation and bearing.

When Marie came out of her berth I was struck afresh by her improved
looks. I turned to Selby and said:

'This lady sailed for her health. Such distresses, such trials of mind
and body as she has suffered, should pinch the face as fire wastes wax,
and she looks so much better that her father will scarcely know her!'

'I told Mr. Moore,' she said, 'that I don't know how I may look, but
that I am alive and with him again,' said she, stealing her hand into
mine, 'is wholly owing to you.' Then raising her voice, heated into
a higher clearness by emotion, she exclaimed, 'In the presence and
hearing of my betrothed, I thank you with my heart of hearts for all
your goodness to me, for your hundred acts of noble unselfishness, for
the splendid courage and faith which supported us both through the
awful time that is now ended.'

He bowed to her in silence.

'Mr. Selby,' said I, grasping him by the hand, then putting my other
upon his, and so holding him, 'Miss Otway has spoken her gratitude; my
own I have already attempted to express. The profession of the sea has
produced some splendid characters; but it seems to me that you are one
of the finest compliments that nature ever paid to your calling.'

'I thank you for your kind words, sir,' he said, with colour and
embarrassment, 'and for yours, Miss Otway. I felt very sorry for you
when I found you alone on that dismasted hulk, and I swore to myself I
would so act that, come what might, if you were spared, you should be
able to say of me, He was a man.'

I could have hugged him!

We seated ourselves and all our talk ran upon the hull, and upon my own
adventures. I particularly noticed Selby's respectful manner to Marie.
_That_ was as satisfying to every instinct within me as though I had
shared their imprisonment. It was not a thing he just put on; it sat
with the unconscious ease of an old and fixed habit. I heard it in his
voice, I marked it in his manner of attention when she spoke; in twenty
subtle ways it was expressed as something abiding; it was, in short,
the man's, the seaman's, and the gentleman's recognition of her claims
as a woman and of her station; I knew it had been with him from the
beginning, and I loved him from that moment with a heart unshadowed by
the faintest anxiety or misgiving.

I asked him how they had managed for food.

'The hold was full of good things, sir,' he answered. 'We did not stint
ourselves, Miss Otway,' said he, smiling.

'Mr. Selby cooks charmingly,' said Marie. 'I shall never forget the
delicious dishes of broth you used to make for me.'

'The ship's cargo,' said he, 'consisted of a quantity of articles of
potted food with drink enough in stout, brandy, and whiskey to fill the
half of London with uproar and murder.'

'We had biscuits as big as bricks,' said Marie. 'I used to make bread
and milk with them.'

'Milk!' I ejaculated.

'Preserved milk, sir,' said Selby. 'I found some hundredweights of the
stuff.'

'But your fuel?' said I.

'There was about twelve ton of coal in the forepeak when we got on the
ice,' he answered. 'I never reckoned upon a long stay, the young lady
was to be kept warm, and I was a bit extravagant at the start. Then
as the days passed and nothing came along, I began to stint, with the
result that I've left about half the stock behind.'

'Did nothing heave in sight?'

'Oh, yes, sir; but never close in. I must have consumed half the cargo
of theatrical scenery, and pounds worth of patent fuel and India-rubber
in burning flares at night and making smokes by day. I reckon the smoke
was taken for something in the volcanic line. For a long time the ice
hid us from the sea. The island whose rupture threw us aloft drifted
away and gave us a clear view for a bit, but others came cruising along
with the stream of the tide, if it was not the wind that brought them,
and one moored itself right abreast--grounded, I allow--it stuck so
long.

'The whaler that reported you,' said I, 'was close in enough to get a
good sight of the wreck.'

'I did not see her,' he answered. 'I must have been below when she
passed.'

'It was cruelly cold, Archie,' said Marie. 'Weeks would pass without my
going on deck. Oh, how I loathed the sight of those cliffs of ice! And
then the ceaseless boiling of the surf.'

'I caulked the cabin into a middling warm living room,' said Selby,
'yet the cold would creep through. Water that had been boiled and left
to stand on the table within the sphere of the heat of the stove, as I
could have sworn, would take a mask of ice. I cleared the cabin to give
Miss Otway walking room. The exercise helped her. It gave her a little
spirit as well as warmth. I didn't care to see her sit drooping hour
after hour beside that little stove.'

'At such times you sang?' said I.

'Well, coming below after taking a look round, and seeing her like
that, I'd tune up my pipes, certainly,' he answered. 'It was unpleasant
to have to keep on answering her question with a "No, there's nothing
in sight."'

Thus ran our talk, and again and again whilst we conversed, I'd see
Marie stealing looks around her of delight and amazement, and often
when our gaze met, an expression of solemn joy would light up her face.
For months she had lived in the cabin of a motionless ship; now the
life of the ocean was in the fabric, whose deck her foot rested on. She
was as one who had been called from the grave to renew life, and love,
and health. It was a miracle, and I saw the marvelling of her spirit in
her eyes whenever she looked at me.

'I'll go and take a look round,' said Selby. 'I hope Captain Cliffe
will make me useful.'

He rose, respectfully bowed to us, and went on deck.

I drew Marie to the stove and sat beside her. From time to time as
we talked, we heard the sharp warning cries of the look-out men on
deck re-echoed by Cliffe and the mate aft, accompanied sometimes by
a hurried tread of feet when the braces were handled. But we were
together, too happy, too much engrossed, to heed what passed above.
Through the hum of our talk--our continuous talk--for how much had
we to tell each other?--ran the shrill sound of salt water seething;
the boy came below to take some dinner on deck to Captain Cliffe. He
then cleared the table, and Marie and I were alone again. The sunshine
blazed red upon the skylight, faded slowly, the glass grew grey, then
blackened, and a star flashed in a cabin window as a reel of the brier
brought the bright spark with a leap into the orifice.

'I remember,' Marie said, 'when I found Mrs. Burke lying dead on
the deck of the hull, that I fell upon my knees in the agony of my
distress and terror, and cried out that I was alone, asking what
I should do--what I should do? And now I am with you,' she cried,
throwing her arms round my neck and sobbing slightly. 'But what a time
has lain between!'

       *       *       *       *       *

At this point Mr. Moore ends his narrative; he doubtless considered
that the interest of _his_ strand of the story ceased at the rescue of
his sweetheart.

It had been arranged that the brig should return to the Cape of Good
Hope, whatever might be the issue of her search; the little vessel,
with ceaseless vigilance, was navigated clear of the ice into open
waters, and under warmer skies, and thanks to strong westerly winds
which chased her day after day, she anchored in Table Bay in a little
more than three weeks from the hour of hoisting in her boats and making
sail from Coronation Island. The lovers' reception at Cape Town was a
memorable incident, and is still talked of by old people there. They
stayed until Miss Otway had provided herself with a wardrobe, then
embarked in a Union steamer and safely arrived at Southampton on the
morning of May 1, 1861.

Mr. Selby was presented by Sir Mortimer Otway and the banking firm of
Moore, Son & Duncan, with an interest in a ship of thirteen hundred
and forty tons, amounting to half her value, and four months after his
arrival in England, he sailed in command of her on her second voyage to
Bombay.


THE END


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[Illustration: Decoration]

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 62419 ***