Looking back to that unforgotten night, I have often wondered at the folly of calculations which had taken so little thought of Nature and allowed the temper of winds so small a place in all our reckonings. I confess that such an arbiter as storm and tempest never once was in my mind when I planned to search the northern parts of Cape Colony for an unknown ship and to follow that ship to her haven in the open Atlantic. When the gale broke upon us, a swift cyclonic tempest characteristic of the southern ocean and her humour, I perceived my folly and could but laugh sardonically. So near had we been to that day of discovery of which I had dreamed! And now we were but a shell of steel tossed impotently amidst a raging cataract of sounds, swept by a hail of spray, or carried blindly at the beck of winds. The ship we pursued appeared to have been lost altogether in the darkness. It became, for any but a trained sailor, almost a dangerous thing to remain upon the deck of the White Wings. The crash of the seas upon our plates was as the tremor of thunder about a house.
So for the hour we had failed. And who would dare to speak with confidence of the morrow?
CHAPTER X.
THE VISION OF THE SHIP.
Dr. Fabos Proposes to Visit the Azores.
I slept a little about midnight, being convinced that the night had written the last word of its story. The storm had not abated. A wild wind blew tempestuously from the south-east, and drove us before it as a leaf before a winter’s blast. Good ship as my yacht proved to be, she was like many turbined steamers, a wet boat in a gale and no friend to the landsman. We shipped heavy seas persistently, and drove our bull’s nose wildly into mountains of seething foam. Even the hardy crew complained of her; while my poor friend Timothy McShanus implored me, for the love of God, to throw him overboard.
“Was it for this I left the home of me fathers?” he asked me pitifully when I entered the cabin where he lay. “Is this the land of milk and honey to which ye would take me? Stop the ship, I tell ye, and put me ashore. Let me die among the naygroes. Kill me with laudanum. Man, I’ll thank ye to have done it. I’ll call ye the best friend that Timothy McShanus ever had.”
Poor fellow! His groans were in my ears when I fell to sleep. His was the voice which reproached me when I awoke. That would have been about three o’clock of the morning, I suppose. Dawn was breaking furtively in an ink-black sky. The swaying of a lamp in the gimbals, the swish of water against the cabin walls told me that the gale had somewhat abated. I asked McShanus if he had waked me, and he answered that the captain had been down to call me to the deck.
“Put Timothy McShanus ashore and let the naygroes devour him,” he said; and then, almost with tears in his eyes, “Man, the last of me has been given up. I’m no more than a hollow drum for sport to bate upon. Bury me where the shamrock grows. Say ’twas the ups and downs that did for this same McShanus.”
I spoke what cheer I could, and went on deck as the captain had asked me. Abel, the quartermaster, stood at the wheel, and all our officers were with Larry upon the bridge. The sea still ran high, but the wind had moderated. I perceived a sky that was black and thunderous to leeward, but clearing in the sun’s path. There were wonderful lights upon the raging waters—beams of gold and grey and green interweaved and superb in their weirdness. The waves ran high, but with less power in their assault; and though a fine rain was falling, the measure of it became less with every minute that passed. These things I observed almost as I stepped from the companion hatch. But it was not until I stood side by side with Captain Larry upon the bridge that I knew why he had summoned me.