Chapter Twenty Six.
Despair!
“How hot it be, Master Bob!” said Dick, when the sun had climbed so high that he seemed right overhead, sending down his rays vertically and making it so warm that the boys began to perspire, while they were tormented with thirst. “I be parched wi’ drout and could swaller a gallon o’ spring wutter if I hed the chance!”
“I say, let us have a swim,” suggested Bob. “I’ve heard it will relieve a person suffering from thirst; and, besides, I believe it will do us both good and freshen us up.”
“All right, Master Bob,” said Dick somewhat hesitatingly, in reply to this proposition. “But, ain’t it deep here?”
“Deep! What does that matter?” replied Bob lightly. “Why, Dick, you silly fellow, you forget we always used to swim out every morning into deep water. Ah, I forget, I forget! Oh,—mother, my mother!”
The poor boy broke down utterly again at this point, it having suddenly flashed across his memory that his former swims from the beach were things of the past; and that he might never see his mother or any of the home folk again.
No, never, ah, never again!
Dick, however, once more comforted him, ceasing to dwell on his own pangs of thirst; although the lad’s tongue had swollen to such a size that it seemed too big for his mouth, and his lips were all parched and cracked.
A little later, when Bob had become more composed again, his idea of a battle was carried out, the boys making use of their solitary rope, the end of the broken forestay that was hanging from the bowsprit, to climb back into the boat after they had had a dip alongside.
They were not able to swim far, being incapable of much exertion; but the plunge alone and the immersion in the water while holding to the rope’s-end refreshed them greatly, making them feel stronger, in addition to allaying their burning thirst.
Still, when this great longing was quenched, they were tortured with hunger, Dick actually tearing off one of the soles of his boots and setting to work gnawing it.
Bob kept up his spirits so far as to make fun of this, chaffing his companion and saying that he preferred the way in which the Captain served up his soles to Dick’s!
“Ah,” said the other in reply, “I wonder what the good Cap’en ’ud think if he seed us now?”
“Why, that we were two unfortunate fellows!” replied Bob, becoming grave again in an instant. “I’m sure he would pity us from the bottom of his heart!”
Thus the long day wore on; although, it seemed as if it would never end!
However, when night came round again, they wished they had yet the day; it was so dark, so dreary, so eerie, pitching and rolling about there, carried hither and thither as the tide listed, with never a vista of the wished-for land, with never a sound but the sobbing sea.
Yet, it was wonderful how the boys encouraged each other to bear up and be hopeful, in spite of everything.
Whenever, in the early morning previously and during the day in their respective sufferings, one or the other grew despondent Dick cheered Bob and Bob cheered Dick, as the case might be.
Then, somehow or other, the principal portion of the cheering-up work was borne by Dick; the very brightness and look of everything, even while he noticed them, seeming to have the effect of depressing Bob’s spirits by some unknown association or connection with those at home.
At night, however, it was Bob’s turn to sustain the drooping courage of Dick, who, like most country-bred lads, was intensely superstitious, fancying the darkness to swarm with ghosts and goblins, who were on the watch to devour him; the boy, while bearing up bravely against palpable privations and open dangers, staring them in the face, from which grown men would have quailed, was now affected by silly fears which a baby would have blushed to own!
All through the wearisome hours of the dragging night, whose minutes were as iron and hours like lead, he was constantly starting up in nervous terror; the moan of the sea, the cry of some belated sea-gull, the plunge of a fish in the water, nay even the creaking of the boat’s own timbers, with each and all of which Dick was perfectly familiar, alike arousing his frenzied alarm.
It was, “Lawks, Master Bob! what be this now?” throughout the terrible interval that elapsed between the fading of the twilight on the one day and sunrise on the next. “Lor’, what’s that?”
And, that next day!
The boys were weaker then, for very nearly eight-and-forty hours had elapsed since they had been on board the cutter; forty-eight hours without food, without any regular sleep, without any real rest even, as their attention was always kept on the alert, while, all the time, the peril they were in was sufficient alone to have crushed their every energy!
Hope, undying hope that had kept them up so long, now left them at last. Who could hope against such continual disappointment, with ships all around them sometimes and yet never a one to come near where they floated and drifted and gave way to their despair?
Towards the evening of this day Dick got very weak.
Strange to say, although brought up in the country and accustomed, probably, all his early life, at any rate, to exposure and hard living, Dick was not able to bear up against their present sufferings by any means so well as Bob, who, on this third night of their being adrift, was yet full of vitality!
It was in vain for him, though, to try and reanimate Dick, who, hopeless, and almost helpless, lay down in the bottom of the boat, only asking to be left alone to die.
“I’m a-dying, Master Bob,” he gasped out faintly, when Bob tried to raise him up. “Let me be; let me be!”
“Dying, nonsense,” repeated Bob, pretending to joke about it; though, truth to say, he felt in little joking mood then, being almost as weak as his companion. “You are worth twenty dead men yet, as the old Captain would say!”
But, in spite of all his encouraging words, Dick grew gradually weaker and weaker; until, towards midnight, his breathing became so very faint that Bob could hardly feel it, though kneeling down close beside him and with his face touching that of poor Dick.
“I’m a-dying—Master Bob,” he whispered, in such low accents that Bob had to bend down his ear close to his mouth to hear what he said. “I bees—a-dying—Mas-ter—Bob. I knows—I—be! I—hears—the—h’angels—a-flapping on their wings! I knows they be a-coming—for—me! God—bless—’ee, Mas-ter—Bob! Ah, if—’ee—ever—get—’shore—’gain—tell—Cap’—I—didn’t—mean—no—’arm!”
Soon after faltering out these broken words, Dick fell back insensible in the bottom of the boat.
“Oh, Dick, poor Dick, good Dick!” sobbed out Bob, throwing himself down beside him on the floor of the boat’s little cabin and bursting into an agony of tears. “It is I who have killed you. But for me, you would never have been here at all! Poor, brave Dick, you saved my life, and in return I’ve killed you!”
The torture of mind in which he now was on seeing, as he thought, Dick dead before him, coupled with all he had already gone through, but of which he had taken little heed while he had his comrade to console, now coming together affected Bob’s mind.
He began to wander in delirium, imagining himself not only safe ashore, but in his London home, amid all the surroundings to which he had been accustomed before coming to Southsea and to this sad extremity.
He thought it was Sunday and that he was going to church with his mother and Nell; and that he was late, as usual, and they were calling him to hurry.
“I’m coming, I’m coming!” he screamed out in such a shrill voice, attenuated by famine, as hardly to be recognised as human, so shrill that it startled the sea-gulls hovering over the boat. “I’m coming! There’s lots of time, the bells are ringing still! The bells are ringing, I hear them!—Ring—ring—ring—I—hear—I hear—I—”
Then he, too, lost consciousness and fell, like a log, insensible, across the body of poor Dick; the far-off bell which he had fancied to be ringing miles and miles distant from where the boat was floating in the Channel, being the last echo that sounded in his ears as he fainted away.
But, there was reason in his madness.
A bell was ringing; and ringing too realistically not to be real!