CHAPTER XI.
It is a truism nowadays, in this age of travelling, that you see a great deal more of people in a few weeks on board ship at sea together than you would see in a few years of that vacant calling and dining and attending crushes which we ordinarily speak of as society. Nora Dupuy and the two Hawthorns certainly saw a great deal more of Dr Whitaker during their three weeks on board the Severn than they would ever have seen of him in three years of England or of Trinidad. Nora had had the young man’s acquaintance thrust upon her by circumstances, to be sure; but as the Hawthorns sat and talked a great deal with him, she was compelled to do so likewise, and she had too much good feeling to let him see very markedly her innate prejudice against his colour. Besides, she admitted even to herself that Dr Whitaker, for a brown man, was really a very gentlemanly, well-informed person—quite an exceptional mulatto, in fact, and as such, to be admitted to the position of a gentleman by courtesy, much as Gulliver was excepted by the Houyhnhnms from the same category of utter reprobation as the ordinary Yahoos of their own country.
Most of the voyage was as decently calm as any one can reasonably expect from the North Atlantic. There were the usual episodes of flying-fish and Mother Carey’s chickens, and the usual excitement of a daily sweepstake on the length of the ship’s run; but, on the whole, the only distinct landmarks of time for the entire three weeks between Southampton and St Thomas were breakfast, luncheon, dinner, and bedtime. The North Atlantic, whatever novelists may say, is not a romantic stretch of ocean; and in spite of prepossessions to the contrary, a ship at sea is not at all a convenient place for the free exercise of the noble art of flirting. It lacks the needful opportunities for retirement from the full blaze of public observation to shy corners; it is far too exposed, and on the whole too unstable also. Altogether, the voyage was mostly a monotonous one, which is equivalent to saying that it was safe and comfortable; for the only possible break in the ordinary routine of a sea-passage must necessarily be a fire on board or a collision with a rival steamer. However, about two days out from St Thomas, there came a little relief from the tedium of the daily situation; and the relief assumed the unpleasant form of a genuine wild West Indian hurricane.
Nora had never before seen anything like it; or, at any rate, if she had, she had clean forgotten all about it. Though the captain had declared it was ‘too soon’ for hurricanes, this was, in fact, a very fine tropical tornado of the very fiercest and yeastiest description. About two o’clock in the afternoon, the passengers were all sitting out on deck, when the sea, till then a dead calm, began to be faintly ruffled by little whiffs and spurts of wind, which raised here and there tiny patches of wavelets, scarcely perceptible to the blunt vision of the unaccustomed landsman. But the experienced eye of a sailor could read in it at once a malignant hint of the coming tempest. Presently, the breeze freshened with extraordinary rapidity, and before five o’clock, the cyclone had burst upon them in all its violence. The rush of a mighty gale was heard through the rigging, swaying and bending the masts like sapling willows before the autumn breezes. The waves, lashed into fury by the fierce and fitful gusts of wind, broke ever and anon over the side of the vessel; and the big Severn tossed about helplessly before the frantic tempest like the veriest cockboat in an angry sea upon a northern ocean. Of course, at the first note of serious danger, the passengers were all ordered below to the saloon, where they sat in mute suspense, the women pale and trembling, the men trying to look as if they cared very little about it, while the great ship rolled and tossed and pitched and creaked and rattled in all her groaning timbers beneath the mad frenzy of that terrific commotion.
Just as they were being turned off the decks to be penned up down-stairs like so many helpless sheep in the lower cabin, Nora Dupuy, who had been standing with the Hawthorns and Dr Whitaker, watching the huge and ever-increasing waves bursting madly over the side of the vessel, happened to drop her shawl at starting on to the deck beside the companion-ladder. At that very moment, a bigger sea than any they had yet encountered broke with shivering force against the broadside of the steamer, and swept across the deck in a drowning flood as though it would carry everything bodily before it. ‘Make haste, there!’ the captain called out imperatively.—‘Steward, send ’em all down below, this minute. I shouldn’t be surprised if before night we were to have a capful of nasty weather.’
But even as he spoke, the wave, which had caught Nora’s shawl and driven it over to the leeward side, now in its reflux sucked it back again swiftly to windward, and left it lying all wet and matted against the gunwale in a mass of disorder. Dr Whitaker jumped after it instinctively, and tried to catch it before another wave could carry it overboard altogether. ‘Oh, pray, don’t trouble about it,’ Nora cried, in hasty deprecation. ‘It isn’t worth it. Take care, or you’ll get wet through and through yourself before you know it!’
‘The man’s a fool,’ the unceremonious captain called out bluntly from his perch above. ‘Get wet indeed! If another sea like that strikes the ship, it’ll wash him clean overboard.—Come back, sir; I tell you, come back! No one but a sailor can keep his feet properly against the force of a sea like that one!’
Nora and the few other passengers who had still remained on deck stood trembling under shelter of the glazed-in companion-ladder, wondering whether the rash mulatto would really carry out his foolhardy endeavour to recover the wrapper. The sailor stood by, ready to batten down the hatches as soon as the deck was fairly cleared, and waiting impatiently for the last lingerer. But Dr Whitaker took not the slightest notice of captain or sailor, and merely glanced back at Nora with a quiet smile, as if to reassure her of his perfect safety. He stood by the gunwale, just clutching at the shawl, in the very act of recovering it, when a second sea, still more violent than the last, struck the ship once more full on the side, and swept the mulatto helplessly before it right across the quarter-deck. It dashed him with terrific force against the bulwarks on the opposite side; and for a moment, Nora gave a scream of terror, imagining it would carry him overboard with its sudden flood. The next second, the ship righted itself, and they saw the young doctor rising to his feet once more, bruised and dripping, but still not seriously or visibly injured. The sea had washed the shawl once more out of his grasp, with the force of the shock; and instead of rushing back to the shelter of the ladder, he tried even now to recover it a second time from the windward side, where the recoil had again capriciously carried it. ‘The shawl, the shawl!’ he cried excitedly, gliding once more across the wet and slippery decks as she lurched anew, in the foolish effort to catch the worthless wrapper.
‘Confound the man!’ the captain roared from his place on the bridge. ‘Does he think the Company’s going to lose a passenger’s life for nothing, just to satisfy his absurd politeness!—Go down, sir—go down, this minute, I tell you; or else, by jingo, if you don’t, I shall have you put in irons at once for the rest of the voyage.’
The mulatto looked up at him with a smile and nodded cheerfully. He held up his left hand proudly above his head, with the dripping shawl now waving in his grasp like a much bedraggled banner, while with his right he gripped a rope firmly and steadily, to hold his own against the next approaching billow. In a second, the big sea was over him once more; and till the huge wall of water had swept its way across the entire breadth of the vessel, Nora and Marian couldn’t discover whether it had dashed him bodily overboard or left him still standing by the windward gunwale. There was a pause of suspense while one might count twenty; and then, as the vessel rolled once more to port, Dr Whitaker’s tall figure could be seen, still erect and grasping the cable, with the shawl triumphantly flourished, even so, in his disengaged hand. The next instant, he was over at the ladder, and had placed the wet and soaking wrapper back in the hands of its original possessor.
‘Dr Whitaker,’ Nora cried to him, half laughing and half pale with terror, ‘I’m very angry with you. You had no right to imperil your life like that for nothing better than a bit of a wrapper. It was awfully wrong of you; and I’ll never wear the shawl again as long as I live, now that you’ve brought it back to me at the risk of drowning.’
The mulatto, smiling unconcernedly in spite of his wetting, bowed a little bow of quiet acquiescence. ‘I’m glad to think, Miss Dupuy,’ he replied in a low voice, ‘that you regard my life as so well worth preserving.—But did you ever before in all your days see anything so glorious as those monstrous billows!’
Nora bit her lip tacitly, and answered nothing for a brief moment. Then she added merely: ‘Thank you for your kindness,’ in a constrained voice, and turned below into the crowded dining saloon. Dr Whitaker did not rejoin them; he went back to his own stateroom, to put on some dry clothes after his foolhardy adventure, and think of Nora’s eyes in the solitude of his cabin.
There is no position in life more helplessly feeble for grown-up men and women than that of people battened down in a ship at sea in the midst of a great and dangerous tempest. On deck, the captain and the officers, cut off from all communication with below, know how the storm is going and how the ship is weathering it; but the unconscious passengers in their crowded quarters, treated like children by the rough seafaring men, can only sit below in hopeless ignorance, waiting to learn the fate in store for them when the tempest wills it. And indeed, the hurricane that night was quite enough to make even strong men feel their own utter and abject powerlessness. From the moment they were all battened down in the big saloon, after the first fresh squall, the storm burst in upon them in real earnest with terrific and ever-increasing violence. The wind howled and whistled fiercely through the ropes and rigging. The ship bounced now on to the steep crest of a swelling billow; now wallowed helplessly in the deep trough that intervened between each and its mad successor. The sea seemed to dash in upon the side every second with redoubled intensity, sweeping through the scupper holes with a roar like thunder. The waves crashed down upon the battened skylights in blinding deluges. Every now and then, they could hear the cracking of a big timber—some spar or boom torn off from the masts, like rotten branches from a dead tree, by the mighty force of the irresistible cyclone. Whirling and roaring and sputtering and rattling and creaking, the storm raged on for hour after hour; and the pale and frightened women, sitting huddled together in little groups on the crimson velvet cushions of the stuffy saloon, looked at one another in silent awe, clasping each other’s hands with bloodless fingers, by way of companionship in their mute terror. From time to time, they could just overhear, in the lulls between the great gusts, the captain’s loud voice shouting out inaudible directions to the sailors overhead; and the engineer’s bell was rung over and over again, with bewildering frequency, to stop her, back her, ease her, steady her, or put her head once more bravely against the face of the ever-shifting and shattering storm.
Hour after hour went by slowly, and still nobody stirred from the hushed saloon. At eleven, all lights were usually put out, with Spartan severity; but this night, in consideration of the hurricane, the stewards left them burning still: they didn’t know when they might be wanted for prayers, if the ship should begin to show signs of sudden foundering. So the passengers sat on still in the saloon together, till four o’clock began to bring back the daylight again with a lurid glare away to eastward. Then the first fury of the hurricane began to abate a little—a very little; and the seas crashed a trifle less frequently against the thick and solid plate-glass of the sealed skylights. Edward at last persuaded Marian and Nora to go down to their staterooms and try to snatch a short spell of sleep. The danger was over now, he said, and they might fairly venture to recover a bit from the long terror of that awful night.
As they went staggering feebly along the unsteady corridors below, lighted by the dim lamps as yet unextinguished, they happened to pass the door of a stateroom whence, to their great surprise, in the midst of that terrible awe-inspiring hurricane, the notes of a violin could be distinctly heard, mingling strangely in a weird harmony with the groaning of the wind and the ominous creaking of the overstrained and rumbling timbers. The sounds were not those of a regular piece of studied music; they were mere fitful bars and stray snatches of tempestuous melody, that imitated and registered the inarticulate music of the whirlwind itself even as it passed wildly before them. Nora paused a moment beside the half-open door. ‘Why,’ she whispered to Marian in an awestruck undertone, clutching convulsively at the hand-rail to steady herself, ‘it must be Dr Whitaker. He’s actually playing his violin to himself in the midst of all this awful uproar!’
‘It is,’ Edward Hawthorn answered confidently. ‘I know his stateroom—that’s the number.’
He pushed the half-open door a little farther ajar, and peeped inside with sudden curiosity. There on the bunk sat the mulatto doctor, unmoved amid the awful horse-play of the careering elements, with his violin in his hands, and a little piece of paper ruled with pencilled music-lines pinned up roughly against the wall of the cabin beside him. He started and laughed a little at the sudden apparition of Edward Hawthorn’s head within the doorway. ‘Ah,’ he said, pointing to a few scratchy pencil-marks on the little piece of ruled paper, ‘you see, Mr Hawthorn, I couldn’t sleep, and so I’ve been amusing myself with a fit of composing. I’m catching some fresh ideas for a piece from the tearing wind and the hubbub of the breakers. Isn’t it grand, the music of the storm! I shall work it up by-and-by, no doubt, into a little hurricane symphony.—Listen, here—listen.’ And he drew his bow rapidly across the strings with skilful fingers, and brought forth from the violin some few bars of a strangely wild and storm-like melody, that seemed to have caught the very spirit of the terrible tornado still raging everywhere so madly around them.
‘Has the man no feelings,’ Nora exclaimed with a shudder to Marian, outside, ‘that he can play his fiddle in this storm, like Nero or somebody when Rome was burning!’
‘I think,’ Marian said, with a little sigh, ‘he has some stronger overpowering feeling underneath, that makes him think nothing of the hurricane or anything else, but keeps him wrapped up entirely in its own circle.’
Next day, when the sea had gone down somewhat, and the passengers had begun to struggle up on deck one by one with pallid faces, Dr Whitaker made his appearance once more, clothed and in his right mind, and handed Nora a little roll of manuscript music. Nora took it and glanced carelessly at the first page. She started when she saw it was inscribed in a round and careful copper-plate hand—‘To Miss Dupuy.—Hurricane Symphony. By W. Clarkson Whitaker, M.B., Mus. Bac.’ Nora read hastily through the first few bars—the soughing and freshening of the wind in its earlier gusts, before the actual tempest had yet swept wildly over them—and murmured half aloud: ‘It looks very pretty—very fine, I mean. I should like some day to hear you play it.’
‘If you would permit me to prefix your name to the piece when it’s published in London,’ the mulatto doctor said with an anxious air—‘just as I’ve prefixed it there at the head of the title-page—I should be very deeply obliged and grateful to you.’
Nora hesitated a moment. A brown man! Her name on the first page of his printed music! What would people say in Trinidad? And yet, what excuse could she give for answering no? She pretended for a while to be catching back her veil, that the wind blew about her face and hair, to gain time for consideration; then she said with a smile of apology: ‘It would look so conceited of me, you know—wouldn’t it, Dr Whitaker? as if I were setting myself up to be some great one, to whom people were expected to dedicate music.’
The mulatto’s face fell a little with obvious disappointment; but he answered quietly: ‘As you will, Miss Dupuy. It was somewhat presumptuous of me, perhaps, to think you would accept a dedication from me on so short an acquaintance.’
Nora’s cheeks coloured quickly as she replied with a hasty voice: ‘O no, Dr Whitaker; I didn’t mean that—indeed, I didn’t. It’s very kind of you to think of putting my name to your beautiful music. If you look at it that way, I shall ask you as a personal favour to print that very dedication upon it when you get it published in London.’
Dr Whitaker’s eye lighted up with unexpected pleasure, and he answered, ‘Thank you,’ slowly and softly. But Nora said to herself in her own heart: ‘Goodness gracious, now, just out of politeness to this clever brown man, and because I hadn’t strength of mind to say no to him, I’ve gone and put my foot in it terribly. What on earth will papa say about it when he comes to hear of it! I must try and keep the piece away from him. This is the sort of thing that’s sure to happen to one when one once begins knowing brown people!’
(To be continued.)