“D’ee know when it’ll be low water, sir?” asked Joe Slag of the captain, when the ship gave one of her upward heaves and rasped her timbers again on the sides of the cave.
“Not for three hours yet, but it’s falling. I expect there will be less sea on in a short time. If the ship holds together we may yet be saved.”
There was a murmured “thank God” at these words. Then Bob Massey expressed some fear that there might be a danger of striking the rocks underneath before low water.
“I wish it was the risin’ tide,” he said, and the words took his mind back, like a flash of lightning, to the time when he used them in a very different sense. Then all was peace, hope, sunshine, and his bride was sitting like a good angel beside him, with a sweet smile on her fair face. Now, something like darkness visible, showed him his poor wife—still beside him, thank God—but clinging to his arm with looks of terror amounting almost to despair. “What a contrast!” he thought, and for the first time a feeling of rebellion arose in his mind.
“There’s no use o’ sittin’ here to be drowned like rats,” he cried, starting up. “I’ll go on deck an’ take a cast o’ the lead, an’ see what chances we have.”
“No, you won’t, Bob,” cried Nellie, throwing her arms firmly round him. “There’s big stones falling all about the deck yet. Don’t you hear them?”
As if to corroborate her words, a piece of rock nearly half a ton in weight fell on the sky-light at that moment, crashed completely through it, through the table below, and even sank into the cabin floor. Fortunately, no one was hurt, though Slag had a narrow escape, but that worthy was not easily intimidated. He rose up, and, saying that, “it was as well to be killed on deck doin’ somethin’ as in the cabin doin’ nothin’,” was about to ascend the ladder when Dr Hayward suddenly entered, all wet and dishevelled, and with blood trickling down his face.
“No use going up just now, Joe,” he said, as he sat down beside his wife, and permitted her to tie a kerchief round his head. “Only a slight wound, Eva, got while taking soundings. I find that there are sixteen fathoms of water under us, and, although I couldn’t see my hand held up before my face, I managed to make out by the flash of a match, which burned for a moment before being blown out, that the sides of the cave are quite perpendicular, not the smallest ledge to stand on. The tide, however, is ebbing fast, and the water in the cave calming, so that if no bad leak has been made by all this thumping we may yet be saved. Our only chance is to stick to the ship.”
While he was speaking the vessel again surged violently against one side of the cave, and another of the huge masses of rock that were brought down by the swaying masts came crashing on the deck.
“There is no bad leak as yet,” said the captain, re-entering the cabin, which he had quitted for the purpose of sounding the well. “If we can keep afloat for an hour or two we may be able to use the boats. Just now it would be useless to attempt launching them.”