My Danish Sweetheart: A Novel. Volume 1 of 3 Read online

  CHAPTER VI.

  CAPTAIN NIELSEN.

  Captain Nielsen, was veritably corpse-like in aspect viewed by the coldgray iron light sifting through the little windows out of thespray-shrouded air. The unnatural brightness of his eyes painfullydefined the attenuation of his face, and the sickly, parchment-likecomplexion of his skin. He extended his hand, but could hardly find timeto deliver a greeting, so violent was his hurry to receive hisdaughter's report. He shook his head when he heard that histopgallant-mast and jibbooms were wrecked, and passionately exclaimed inDanish, on his daughter telling him of the increase of water in thehold.

  'She must be taking it in from below,' he then cried in English. 'Shehas strained herself. Should this continue, what is to be done? She willneed to be constantly pumped--and ah, my God! you are but two.'

  'Yes, Captain,' cried I, incensed that he should appear to have nothoughts but for his ship; 'but if you do not insist upon your daughtertaking some rest there will be but one, long before this gale has blownitself out.'

  'Oh, my dear, it is so!' he exclaimed, looking at her on a sudden withimpassioned concern. 'Mr. Tregarthen is right. You will sink under yourefforts. Your dear heart will break. Rest now--rest, my beloved child! Icommand you to rest! You must go below: you must lie in your own cabin.This good gentleman is about--he will sit with me and go forth andreport. The _Anine_ tends herself, and there is nothing in human skillto help her outside what she can herself do.'

  'But we must not starve, father,' she answered: 'let us first breakfast,as best we can, and then I will go below.'

  She left the cabin and promptly returned, bringing with her the remainsof the cold meat we had supped off, some biscuit, and a bottle of redwine. Her father drank a little of the wine and ate a morsel ofbiscuit; indeed, food seemed to excite a loathing in him. I saw thatHelga eyed him piteously, but she did not press him to eat: it might bethat she had experience of his stubbornness. She said, in a soft aside,to me: 'His appetite is leaving him, and how can I tempt him without themeans of cooking? Does not he look very ill this morning?'

  'It is worry, added to rheumatic pains,' said I: 'we must get him ashoreas soon as possible, where he can be nursed in comfort.'

  But though these words flowed readily, out of my sympathy with the poor,brave, suffering girl, they were assuredly not in correspondence with mysecret feelings. It was not only I was certain that Captain Nielsen layin his cot a dying man; the roaring of the wind, the beating of the seaagainst the barque, the wild extravagant leapings and divings, theperception that water was draining into the hold, and that there werebut two of us--and one of those two a girl--to work the pumps, made amockery to my heart of my reference to the Captain getting ashore andbeing nursed there.

  We sat in that slanting and leaping interior with plates on our knees.The girl feigned to eat; her head drooped with weariness, yet I noticedthat she would force a cheerful note into the replies she made to herfather's ceaseless feverish questions. When we had ended our meal, sheleft us to go below to her cabin; but before leaving she asked me, witheyes full of tender pleading, to keep her father's heart up, to make thebest of such reports as I might have to give him after going out to takea look round; and she told me that he would need his physic at such andsuch a time, and so lingered, dwelling upon him and glancing at him; andthen she went out in a hurry with one hand upon her breast, yet not soswiftly but that I could see her eyes were swimming.

  'There is a barometer in the cabin,' said Captain Nielsen; 'will youtell me how the mercury stands?'

  The glass was fixed to the bulkhead outside. I returned and gave him thereading.

  ''Tis a little rise!' he cried, with his unnaturally bright eyes eagerlyfastened upon me.

  I would not tell him that it was not so--that the mercury, indeed, stoodat the level I had observed on the preceding day in my glass in thelifeboat house.

  'Fierce weather of this sort,' said I, 'soon exhausts itself.'

  He continued to stare at me, but now with an air of musing that somewhatsoftened the painful brilliant intentness of his regard.

  'I pray God,' said he, 'that this weather may speedily enable us toobtain help, for I fear that if I am not treated I shall get very low,perhaps die. I am ill--yet what is my malady? This rheumatism is asudden seizure. I could walk when at Cuxhaven.'

  In as cheerful a voice as I could assume, I begged him to consider thathis mind might have much to do with those bodily sensations which madehim feel ill.

  'It may be so, it may be so,' he exclaimed, with a sad smile offaltering hope. 'I wish to live. I am not an old man. It will be hard ifmy time is to come soon. It is Helga--it is Helga,' he muttered,pressing his brow with his thin hand. I was about to speak. 'Howwearisome,' he broke out, 'is this ceaseless tossing! I ran away to sea;it was my own doing. I had my childish dreams--strange and beautifulfancies of foreign countries--and I ran away;' he went on in a ramblingmanner like one thinking aloud. 'And yet I love the old ocean, though itis serving me cruelly now. It has fed me--it has held me to itsbreast--and my nourishment and life have come from it.' He started, and,bringing his eyes away from the upper deck on which they had been fixedwhile he spoke, he cried, 'Sir, you are a stranger to me, but you are anEnglishman of heroic heart, and you will forgive me. Should I die, andshould God be pleased to spare you and my child, will you protect heruntil she has safely returned to her friends at Kolding? She will bealone in any part of the world until she is there, and if I am assuredthat she will have the generous compassion of your heart with her, aguardian to take my place until she reaches Kolding, it will make meeasy in my ending, let the stroke come when it will.'

  'I came to this ship to save your lives,' I answered. 'I hope to be aninstrument yet of helping to save them. Trust me to do your bidding, ifit were only for my admiration of your daughter's heroic qualities. Butdo not speak of dying, Captain Nielsen----'

  He interrupted me. 'There is my dear friend Pastor Blicker of Kolding,and there is Pastor Jansen of Skandrup. They are good and gentleChristian men, who will receive Helga, and stand by her and soothe herand counsel her as to my little property--ah, my little property!' hecried. 'If this vessel founders, what have I?'

  'Pray,' said I, with the idea of quietly coaxing his mind into a morecheerful mood, 'what is so seriously wrong with you, Captain, that youshould lie there gloomily foreboding your death? Such rheumatism asyours is not very quick to kill.'

  'I was long dangerously ill of a fever in the West Indies,' he answered,'and it left a vital organ weak. The mischief is here, I fear,' said he,touching his right side above his hip. 'I felt very ill at Cuxhaven; butthis voyage was to be made; I am too poor a man to suffer my health toforfeit the money that is to be got by it. Hark! what was that?'

  He leaned his head over the cot, straining his hearing with a nervousfluttering of his emaciated fingers. It was miserable to see how whitethe skin of his sunken cheeks showed against the whiteness of thecanvas of his cot.

  'I heard nothing,' I answered.

  'It was the noise of a blow,' he exclaimed. 'Pray go and see if anythingis wrong,' he added, speaking out of his habit of giving orders, andwith a peremptoriness that forced a smile from me as I went to the door.

  I made my way through the house on to the deck, and looked about me, butit was the same scene to stare at and hearken to that I had viewedbefore: the same thunder and shriek of wind, the same clouding of theforward part of the barque in foam, the same miserable dismal picture ofwater flashing from bulwark to bulwark, of high green frothing seastowering past the line of the rail as the vessel swung in a smother ofseething yeast into the trough.

  I caught sight of a long hencoop abaft the structure in which thesailors had lived, with the red gleam of a cockscomb betwixt a couple ofthe bars, and guessing that the wretched inmates must, by this time, bein sore need of food and water, I very cautiously made my way to thecoop, holding on by something at every step. The coop was, indeed, fullof poultry, but all lay drowned.

 
I returned to the deck-house and mounted on top of it, where I should beable to obtain a good view of as much of the ocean as was exposed, andwhere also I should be out of the wet which, on the main deck, rolledwith weight enough at times to sweep a man off his legs. The roof of thehouse, if I may so term it, was above the rail, and the whole fury ofthe gale swept across it. I never could have guessed at thehurricane-force of the wind while standing on the deck beneath. It wasimpossible to face it; if I glanced but one instant to windward my eyesseemed to be blown into my head.

  I had not gained that elevation above a minute when I heard a sharprattling aloft, and, looking upwards, I perceived that the main royalhad blown loose. For the space of a breath or two it made the rattlingnoise that had called my attention to it, then the whole bladder-likebody of it was swept in a flash away from the yard, and nothing remainedbut a whip or two streaming straight out like white hair from the spar.A moment later the maintopgallantsail, that had been, no doubt, hastilyand badly furled, was blown out of the gaskets. I thought to see it goas the royal had, but while I watched, waiting for the flight of therags of it down into the leeward gloom of the sky, the mast snapped offat the cap at the instant of the sail bursting and disappearing like agush of mist, and down fell the whole mass of hamper to a little belowthe stay, under which it madly swung, held by its gear.

  This disaster, comparatively trifling as it was, gave the whole fabric amost melancholy, wrecked look. It affected me in a manner I should nothave thought possible in one who knew so much about the sea andshipwreck as I. It impressed me as an omen of approaching dissolution.'What, in God's name, can save us?' I remember thinking, as I brought myeyes away from the two broken masts, swinging and spearing high up underthe smoke-coloured, compacted, apparently stirless heaps of vapourstretching from sea-line to sea-line. 'What put together by mortal handscan go on resisting this ceaseless, tremendous beating?' and as I thusthought the vessel, with a wild sweep of her bow, smote a giant surgerushing laterally at her, and a whole green sea broke roaring over theforecastle, making every timber in her tremble with a volcanic thrill,and entirely submerging the forepart in white waters, out of which shesoared with a score of cataracts flying in smoke from her sides.

  I looked for the flag that Helga and I had half-masted a little whilebefore; it had as utterly disappeared from betwixt its toggles as thoughthe bunting had been ripped up and down by a knife. As I was in the actof dragging myself along to the ladder to go below, I spied a sort ofsmudge oozing out of the iron-hued thickness past the head of a greatsea whose arching peak was like a snow-clad hill. I crouched down tosteady myself, and presently what I had at first thought to be some darkshadow of cloud upon the near horizon grew into the proportions of alarge ship, running dead before the gale under a narrow band ofmain-topsail.

  She was heading to pass under our stern, and rapidly drew out, and in afew minutes I had her clear--clean and bright as a new painting againstthe background of shadow, along whose dingy, misty base the ocean linewas washing in flickering green heights. She was a large steam frigate,clearly a foreigner, for I do not know that our country had a ship ofthe kind afloat at the time. She had a white band broken by ports, andthe black and gleaming defences of her bulwarks were crowned with stowedhammocks. Her topgallant-masts were housed, and the large cross-treesand huge black tops and wide spread of shrouds gave her a wonderfullyheavy, massive ship-of-war look aloft. The band of close-reefedmain-topsail had the glare of foam as it swung majestically from onesea-line to the other, slowly swaying across the dark and stoopingheaven with a noble and solemn rhythm of movement. I never could haveimagined a sight to more wholly fascinate my gaze. Always crouching low,I watched her under the shelter of my hands locked upon my brow. Ibeheld nothing living aboard of her. She came along as though informedby some spirit and government of her own. As her great stem sank to thefigure-head, there arose a magnificent boiling, a mountainous cloud offroth on either bow of her, and the roar of those riven seas seemed toadd a deeper tone of thunder to the gale. All was taut aboard--everyrope like a ruled line--different, indeed, from our torn and wrecked andtrailing appearance on high! She swept past within a quarter of a mileof us, and what pen could convey the incredible power suggested by thatgreat fabric as her stern lifted to the curl of the enormous Atlanticsurge, and the whole ship rushed forward on the hurling froth of the seawith an electric velocity that brought the very heart into one's throat.

  She was a mere smudge again--this time to leeward--in a few minutes. Icould only stare at her. Our flag had blown away, I was without power tosignal, and, even if I had been able to communicate our condition ofdistress, what help could she have offered? What could she have done forus in such a sea as was now running? Yet the mere sight of her hadheartened me. She made me feel that help could never be wanting in anocean so ploughed by keels as the Atlantic.

  I crawled down on to the quarter-deck, and returned to the Captain'scabin. The poor man at once fell with feverish eagerness to questioningme. I told him honestly that the maintopgallant-mast had carried awaywhile I was on deck, but that there was nothing else wrong that I coulddistinguish; that the barque was still making a noble fight, thoughthere were times when the seas broke very fiercely and dangerously overthe forecastle.

  He wagged his head with a gesture of distress, crying: 'So it is! so itis! One spar after another, and thus may we go to pieces!'

  I told him of the great steam frigate that had passed, but to this pieceof news he listened with a vacant look, and apparently could think ofnothing but his spars. He asked in a childish, fretful way how longHelga had been below, and I answered him stoutly, 'Not nearly longenough for sleep.'

  'Ay,' cried he, 'but the barque needs to be pumped, sir.'

  'Your daughter will work the better for rest,' said I; and then lookingat my watch, I found it was time to give him his physic.

  He exclaimed, looking at the wineglass, 'There is no virtue in thisstuff! The sufferer can make but one use of it.' And, still preserving amanner of curious childishness, he emptied the contents of the glassover the edge of his cot on to the deck, and, as he swung, lay watchingthe mess of it on the floor with a smile. I guessed that expostulationwould be fruitless, and, indeed, having but very little faith myself inany sort of physic, I secretly applauded his behaviour.

  I sat down upon the locker, and leaning my back against the bulkhead,endeavoured, by conversation, to bring a cheerful look to hiscountenance; but his mood of depression was not to be conquered. Attimes he would ramble a little, quote passages from Danish plays in hisnative tongue, then pause with his head on one side, as though waitingfor me to applaud what he forgot I did not understand.

  'How fine is this from "Palnatoke"!' he would cry, or, 'Hark to thisfrom that noble performance "Hacon Yarl"! Ah, it is England alone canmatch Oehlenschlaeger.'

  I could only watch him mutely. Then he would break away to bewail hisspars again, and to cry out that Helga would be left penniless, would bea poor beggar-girl, if his ship foundered.

  'But is not the _Anine_ insured?' said I.

  'Yes,' he answered; 'but not by me. I was obliged to borrow money uponher, and she is insured by the man who lent me the money.'

  'But you have an interest in the cargo, Captain Nielsen?'

  'Ay,' cried he, 'and that I insured; but what will it be worth to mypoor little Helga?' And he hid his face in his hands and rocked himself.

  However, he presently grew somewhat composed, and certainly morerational, and after awhile I found myself talking about Tintrenale, myhome and associations, my lifeboat excursions, and the like; and then weconversed upon the course that was to be adopted should the weathermoderate and find us still afloat. 'We should be able to do nothing,' hesaid, 'without assistance from a passing ship,' in the sense ofobtaining a few sailors to work the barque; or a steamer might comealong that would be willing to give us a tow.

  'The Land's End cannot be far off,' said he.

  'No,' said I, 'not if this gale means to drop to-da
y. But it will be farenough off if it is to go on blowing.'

  He inquired what I made the drift to be, and then calculated that theEnglish coast would now be bearing about east-north-east, sixty milesdistant. 'Let the wind chop round,' cried he, with a gleam in his sunkeneye, 'and you and Helga would have the _Anine_ in the Channel beforemidnight.'

  We continued to talk in this strain, and he seemed to forget thewretchedness of our situation; then suddenly he called out to know thetime, abruptly breaking away from what he was saying.

  'Hard upon eleven o'clock,' said I.

  'This will not do!' he cried. 'The barque, as we talk, is filling underour feet. The well should be sounded. Helga must be called. I beseechyou to call Helga,' he repeated nervously, smiting the side of his cotwith his clenched hand. 'Ah, God!' he added, 'that I should be withoutthe power to move!'

  'I will sound the well,' said I. 'Should I find an increase, I willarouse your daughter.'

  'Go, I beg of you!' he cried, in high notes. 'The barque seems sodden tome. She does not lift and fall as she did.'

  I guessed this to be imagination; but the mere fancy of such a thingbeing true frightened me also, and I hastily went out. I dried the rodand chalked it as Helga had, and, watching my chance, dropped it, andfound five inches of water above the level our last spell at the pumphad left in the hold. I was greatly startled, and to make sure that myfirst cast was right, I sounded a second time, and sure enough the rodshowed five inches, as before. I hastened with the news to the Captain.

  'I knew it! I feared it!' he cried, his voice shrill with a very ecstasyof hurry, anxiety, and sense of helplessness that worked in him. 'CallHelga!--lose not an instant--run, I beg you will run!'

  'But run where?' cried I. 'Where does the girl sleep?'

  'Go down the hatchway in the deck-house,' he shouted in shrill accents,as though bent upon putting into this moment the whole of his remainingslender stock of vitality. 'There are four cabins under this deck. Hersis the aftermost one on the starboard side. Don't delay! If she does notinstantly answer, enter and arouse her.' And as I sped from the cabin Iheard him crying that he knew by the motions of the ship she wasfilling rapidly, and that she would go down on a sudden like lead.

  It was a black, square trap of hatchway into which I looked a momentbefore putting my legs over. There was a short flight of almostperpendicular steps conducting to the lower deck. On my descending Ifound the place so dark that I was forced to halt till my eyes shouldgrow used to the obscurity. There was a disagreeable smell of cargo downhere, and such a heart-shaking uproar of straining timbers, of creakingbulkheads, of the thumps of seas, and the muffled, yearning roar of thegiant waters sweeping under the vessel, that for a little while I stoodas one utterly bewildered.

  Soon, however, I managed to distinguish outlines, and, with outstretchedhands and wary legs, made my way to the cabin Captain Nielsen hadindicated, and beat upon the door. There was no response. I beat again,listening, scarcely thinking, perhaps, that the girl would require avoice as keen as a boatswain's pipe to thread the soul-confounding andbrain-muddling clamour in this after-deck of the storm-beaten barque.'He bade me enter,' thought I, 'and enter I must if the girl is to bearoused;' and I turned the handle of the door and walked in.

  Helga lay, attired as she had left the deck, in an upper bunk, throughthe porthole of which the daylight, bright with the foam, came and wentupon her face as the vessel at one moment buried the thick glass of thescuttle in the green blindness of the sea, and then lifted it weepingand gleaming into the air. Her head was pillowed on her arm; her hair inthe weak light showed as though touched by a dull beam of the sun. Hereyes were sealed--their long lashes put a delicate shading under them;her white face wore a sweet expression of happy serenity, and I couldbelieve that some glad vision was present to her. Her lips were partedin the expression of a smile.

  There was a feeling in me as of profanity in this intrusion, and ofwrongdoing in the obligation forced upon me of waking her from apeaceful, pleasant, all-important repose to face the bitter hardshipsand necessities of that time of tempest. But for my single pair of armsthe pump was too much, and she must be aroused. I lightly put my handupon hers, and her smile was instantly more defined, as though myaction were coincident with some phase of her dream. I pressed her hand;she sighed deeply, looked at me, and instantly sat up with a littlefrown of confusion.

  'Your father begged me to enter and arouse you,' said I. 'I was unableto make you hear by knocking. I have sounded the well, and there is anincrease of five inches.'

  'Ah!' she exclaimed, and sprang lightly out of her bunk.

  In silence and with amazing despatch, seeing that a few seconds beforeshe was in a deep sleep, she put on her sea-helmet, whipped ahandkerchief round her neck, and was leading the way to the hatch onbuoyant feet.

  On gaining the deck I discovered that the wrecked appearance of the shipaloft had been greatly heightened during my absence below by theforetopsail having been blown into rags. It was a single sail, and thefew long strips of it which remained blowing out horizontally from theyards, stiff as crowbars, gave an indescribable character of forlornnessto the fabric. Helga glanced aloft, and immediately perceived that themaintopgallant-mast had been wrecked, but said nothing, and in a minutethe pair of us were hard at work.

  I let go the brake only when my companion was too exhausted to continue;but now, on sounding the well, we found that our labours had notdecreased the water to the same extent as heretofore. It was impossible,however, to converse out of shelter; moreover, a fresh danger attendedexposure on deck, for, in addition to the wild sweeping of green seasforward, to the indescribably violent motions of the barque, whichthreatened to break our heads or our limbs for us, to fling us bruisedand senseless against the bulwarks if we relaxed for a moment our holdof what was next us--in addition to this, I say, there was now thedeadly menace of the topgallant-mast, with its weight of yards, fiercelyswinging and beating right over our heads, and poised there by theslender filaments of its rigging, which might part and let the wholemass fall at any moment.

  We entered the deck-house, and paused for a little while in itscomparative silence and stagnation to exchange a few words.

  'The water is gaining upon the ship, Mr. Tregarthen,' said Helga.

  'I fear so,' I answered.

  'If it should increase beyond the control of the pumps, what is to bedone?' she asked. 'We are without boats.'

  'What _can_ be done?' cried I. 'We shall have to make some desperatethrust for life--contrive something out of the hencoop--sparebooms--whatever is to be found.'

  'What chance--what chance have we in such a sea as this?' she exclaimed,clasping her hands and looking up at me with eyes large with emotion,though I found nothing of fear in the shining of them or in the workingof her pale face.

  I had no answer to make. Indeed, it put a sort of feeling into the bloodlike madness itself even to _talk_ of a raft, with the sound in our earsof the sea that was raging outside.

  'And then there is my father,' she continued, 'helpless--unable tomove--how is he to be rescued? I would lose my life to save his. Butwhat is to be done if this gale continues?'

  'His experience should be of use to us,' said I. 'Let us go and talkwith him.'

  She opened the door of the berth, halted, stared a minute, then turnedto me with her forefinger upon her lip. I peered, and found the poor manfast asleep. I believed at first that he was dead, so still he lay, soeasy was his countenance, so white too; but after watching a moment, Ispied his breast rising and falling. Helga drew close and stood viewinghim. A strange and moving sight was that swinging cot--the revelation ofthe deathlike head within, the swaying boyish figure of the daughtergazing with eyes of love, pity, distress at the sleeping, haggard face,as it came and went.

  She sat down beside me. 'I shall lose him soon,' said she. 'But what iskilling him? He was white and poorly yesterday; but not ill as he isnow.'

  It would have been idle to attempt any sort of encouragement.
The truthwas as plain to her as to me. I could find nothing better to say thanthat the gale might cease suddenly, that a large steam-frigate hadpassed us a little while before, that some vessel was sure to heave intosight when the weather moderated, and that meanwhile our efforts mustbe directed to keeping the vessel afloat. I could not again talk of theraft; it was enough to feel the sickening tossing of the ship under usto render the thought of _that_ remedy for our state horrible andhopeless.

  The time slowly passed. It was drawing on to one o'clock. I went on deckto examine the helm and to judge of the weather; then sounded the well,but found no material increase of water. The barque, however, wasrolling so furiously that it was almost impossible to get a correctcast. Before re-entering the house, I sent a look round from the shelterof the weather-bulwark, to observe what materials were to be obtainedfor a raft should the weather suffer us to launch such a thing, and thebarque founder spite of our toil. There was a number of spare boomssecurely lashed on top of the seamen's deck-house and galley, and these,with the hencoop and hatch-covers, and the little casks or scuttle-buttsout of which the men drank would provide us with what we needed. But thecontemplation of death itself was not so dreadful to me as the prospectwhich this fancy of a raft opened. I hung crouching under the lee of thetall bulwark, gnawing my lip as thought after thought arose in me, anddigging my finger-nails into the palms of my hands. The suddenness of itall! The being this time yesterday safe ashore, without the dimmestimagination of what was to come--the anguish of my poor old mother--theperishing, as I did not doubt, of my brave comrades of thelifeboat--then, this vessel slowly taking in water, dying as it were byinches, and as doomed as though Hell's curse were upon her, unless thegale should cease and help come!

  I could not bear it. I started to my feet with a sense of madness uponme, with a wild and dreadful desire in me to show mercy to myself byplunging and by silencing the delirious fancies of my brain in the widesweep of seething waters that rushed from the very line of the rail ofthe barque as she leaned to her beam-ends in the thunderous trough ofthat instant. It was a sort of hysteria that did not last; yet might Ihave found temptation and time in the swift passage of it to havedestroyed myself, but for God's hand upon me, as I choose to believe,and to be ever thankful for.