“Now, you mark my words, sir, if we don’t have some very ugly weather after this,” observed Saunders, producing his tinder-box and lighting his pipe.
I walked to the skylight and took a squint at the barometer. It was still falling, and by this time the depression had assumed such proportions as to fully justify such an expectation as that entertained by the mate. I thought, therefore, that it might be only prudent to make some further preparation, and I accordingly gave orders to reef the foresail and fore-staysail. All this time it continued as dark as pitch, and so breathlessly calm that the helmsman, wishing to prick up the wicks of the binnacle-lamps, was able to do so in the open air, the only wind affecting the naked flame being the draught occasioned by the heavy roll of the schooner.
But this was not destined to last very long. Some ten minutes or a quarter of an hour after the second corposant had vanished we felt a faint movement in the atmosphere which caused our small spread of canvas to flap heavily once or twice; then came a puff of hot, damp air that lasted long enough to give the schooner steerage-way; and when this was on the point of dying, a scuffle of wind swept over us that careened the schooner to her bearings, and before she had recovered herself the true breeze was upon us, with a deep, weird, moaning sound that was inexpressibly dismal, and that somehow seemed to impart a feeling of dire foreboding to the listener. Not that there was anything in the least terrifying in the strength of the wind—far from it, indeed,—for it was no heavier than a double-reefed topsail breeze, to which the schooner stood up as stiff as a church, but there was a certain indescribable hollowness in the sound of it—that is the only fitting term I can find to apply—that was quite unlike anything that I had heard before, and that somehow seemed, in its weirdness, to indisputably forebode disaster.
The schooner was now forging through the water at a speed of some four knots, and looking well up into the wind, which had come out from the westward. As I have said, there was already a very heavy swell running, and upon the top of this a very steep, awkward sea soon began to make, so that within half an hour of the breeze striking us we were pitching bows under, and the decks to leeward were all afloat. By this time, too, it had become perfectly apparent that the wind was rapidly gaining strength; so rapidly, indeed, that about an hour after the first puff it came down upon us with all the fury of a squall, laying the schooner down to her rail, and causing her to plunge with fearful violence into the fast-rising sea. Within the next half-hour the wind had increased so greatly in strength that I began to think there really might be something in Saunders’s theory after all, and I was inwardly debating whether I should haul the fore-sheet to windward and heave the schooner to, or whether it would be better to up helm and run before it until the weather should moderate a bit, when a third corposant suddenly appeared, this time on the boom-foresail gaff-end.
“Now, sir,” remarked Saunders, “we shall soon know whether we’ve got the worst of the blow yet or not. If we have, that thing’ll shift higher up; but if we haven’t, it’ll come down like the others.”
I did not answer him, for I was at the moment straining my eyes into the blackness on the weather-bow, where I fancied I had caught, a second or two before, a deeper shadow. There were moments when I thought I saw it again, but so profound was the darkness that it really seemed absurd to suppose it possible to discern anything in it; to make sure, however, I sang out to the look-out men on the forecastle to keep their eyes wide open, and their answer came so sharp and prompt as to convince me that they were fully on the alert, and that I had allowed my imagination to deceive me. I therefore turned to Saunders with some remark upon my lips in reply to his, when I saw the corposant suddenly leave the gaff-end and go driving away to leeward on the wings of the gale. I naturally expected that it would almost immediately vanish, but it did not; on the contrary, it had all the appearance of having been arrested in its flight, for I saw it elongating and collapsing again, as it had done with the motion of the schooner, and it also appeared to me to be describing long arcs across the sky. For a moment I was puzzled to account for so strange a phenomenon, and then the explanation came to me in a flash. I had not been deceived when I believed I caught sight of a shadowy something sweeping athwart our bows. I had seen a ship, and there she was to leeward of us, with the corposant clinging to one of her spars. I had just time to give the order to bear up in pursuit, and to get the schooner before the wind, when the corposant seemed to settle down nearer to the water, and in another instant it had vanished.