CHAPTER XXVI.
THE HURRICANE.
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“’Twas off the Wash––the sun went down––the sea looked black and grim, For stormy clouds with murky fleece were mustering at the brim; Titanic shades! enormous gloom! as if the solid night Of Erebus rose suddenly to seize upon the light! It was a time for mariners to bear a wary eye, With such a dark conspiracy between the sea and sky!” |
Past a September noon. The great canopy of dark, murky clouds fell lower and lower, until they nearly touched the earth, wrapping as in a blanket the single cocoa-nut-tree on the crag, and shutting out the light and air of heaven as they settled over the noxious lagoon, the mangrove thickets, and pure inlet. The sea-birds came screaming in from seaward, fluttering their wide-spread wings in the sultry atmosphere, and alighting on the smooth rocks, where they furled their pinions and put their heads together. The flying-fish no longer skimmed over the waves, and the dolphin and shark sank deep down in the blue water, or lay still and quiet beside the coral groves. The rolling, swelling ocean of the tropic, with its glassy, greasy surface unruffled by the faintest air, rolled heavily on until it struck the coral ledge, when, with a dull, heavy roar, it broke over in creamy foam, and came sluggishly in to the sandy beach. There the tiny waves lashed the shelly strand, and all was still again. No sun; no breeze; and even the birds, and serpents, and insects gasped for breath. The fish below the sea, the animated nature above, and the very leaves and vines of the forests and thickets knew what was brewing in the great vacuum around.
Slowly and painfully the man in the chapel regained his feet, and with the child by the hand, moved on to the farthest corner by the rude altar, where he sank down again, and, clasping the boy to his heart, waited in breathless awe. As if the powder and flames had not done their destructive work, the wrath of heaven was to be poured out over the devoted den of the pirates.
Then came a bellowing roar as a current of wind swept over the sea, cutting a pathway in the blue water, and scooping it up in an impalpable mist, hurrying on to the low beach of the island, and tearing the sand and shells up in heaps––and then a lull. Now, as if all the demons of winds had let loose their cavernous lungs from the 167 four quarters of the earth, and like the shocks of artillery, volley upon volley, came the hurricane. The sea became one boiling, seething, hissing surface of foam, pressed and flattened by the weight of the tempest, which laid the black rocks bare on the ledge, and drove the water into both mouths of the inlet, until, with a crashing shock, it met in the basin, and broke over and over the cove, and high up the wall of rocks on the other side. Two or three streams of whirlwind meeting, too, over the island, drove the lagoon hither and thither, catching up the white pond-lilies by their long stems, twisting off the dense thickets of mangroves by the roots, burrowing holes in the sandy beds of the cactus, and shearing off their flat, thorny leaves and needle points by the acre together; then a rushing whirl around the cocoa-nuts, bowing their tufted tops at first till they nearly touched the earth, when, the stout trunks snapping like glass, they would go pitching and tossing from base to crown, careering and dancing aloft, borne away with sand and mangrove, cactus, flowers, and sticks, into the flying clouds before the hurricane. Then another lull; and from the opposite direction again thundered the terrible breath of the demons, sweeping thousands of sea-birds, with broken pinions, screaming amid the gale, hurling them against the crag, stripping the feathers from their crushed carcasses, and in a moment burying them a foot deep in clouds of sand. No more pauses or lulls now in the hurtling tempest; but with a steady, tremendous roar, which made the earth tremble, the rocks quake, and laid every vestige of vegetation flat to the ground, it came on mightier and mightier, and fiercer and fiercer, with black masses of never-ending clouds sweeping close down like dark midnight, as if heaven and earth had come together. All through the gloomy day and through the night this elemental war, with its legions of careering demons, continued to lash the sea and smite the land; until, as if satiated with vengeance, the clouds belched forth in red lightning, vomiting out peal upon peal of awful thunder as a parting salute, and then, moderating down to a hard gale from another quarter, broke away. The blue sky appeared, and the glorious sun once more came up in his majesty over the distant hills of Cuba.
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE VIRGIN MARY.
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“A weary weed, tossed to and fro, Drearily drenched in the ocean brine, Soaring high and sinking low, Lashed along without will of mine; Sport of the spoom of the surging sea; Flung on the foam, afar and near, Mark my manifold mystery–– Growth and grace in their place appear.” |
With the boy clasped to his heart, the doctor sat beside the altar of the chapel during all the direful strife without, shielding his little charge from the clouds of fine sand and rubbish that every few minutes came swirling within the temple, dashing the padre’s candlesticks into battered lumps of brass on the pavement, and tearing to atoms the votive offerings hung around the walls by the pirates. But, as if in mercy to the trustful souls lying there, the Virgin Mary still looked down in sweet pity upon them, and the little chapel stood unharmed.