‘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.