There was some gunpowder aboard, but where Caudel had stowed it I did not know. However, five minutes after he had left me, and whilst I was sitting by the side of my sweetheart, who still slept, the gun was discharged. It sent a small shock through the little fabric, as though she had gently touched ground, or run into some floating object, but the report, blending with the commotion of the seas and bell-like ringing, and wolfish howlings of the wind, penetrated the deck in a note so dull that Grace never stirred. Ten or twelve times was this little cannon discharged at intervals of five and ten minutes, and I could hear the occasional rush of a rocket, like a giant hissing in wrath, sounding through the stormy uproar.
Tragical noises to harken to, believe me! communicating a significance dark as death, to the now ceaseless pulsing of the pump, to the blows of the sea against the yacht's bow, and to every giddy rise and fall of the labouring little structure amid the hills and valleys of that savage Channel sea.
CHAPTER VII
THE CARTHUSIAN
From time to time, I would creep up into the companion, always in the hopes of finding the lights of a ship close to, but nothing came of our rockets, whilst I doubt if the little blast the quarter-deck pop-gun delivered was audible half a mile away to windward. But though the night remained a horrible black shadow—the blacker for the phantasmal sheets of foam which defined, without illuminating it, the wind about this time—somewhere between four and five o'clock—had greatly moderated. Yet at dawn it was blowing hard still, with an iron-grey, freckled sea rolling hollow and confusedly, and a near horizon thick with mist.
There was nothing in sight. The yacht looked deplorably sodden and wrecked as she pitched and wallowed in the cold, desolate, ashen atmosphere of that daybreak. The men, too, wore the air of castaway mariners, fagged, salt-whitened, pinched; and their faces, even the boy's, looked aged with anxiety.
I called to Caudel. He approached me slowly, as a man might walk after a swim that has nearly spent him.
"Here is another day, Caudel. What is to be done?"
"What can be done, sir?" answered the poor fellow, with the irritation of exhaustion and of anxiety but little removed from despair. "We must go on pumping for our lives, and pray to the Lord that we may be picked up."