An Ocean Tragedy

by William Clark Russell

He crossed to the other side of the deck and paced it alone. Miss Jennings was too much dejected by all this, by the excitement of the time, by nervousness, grief, anxiety, to converse; nor, indeed, was my mood a very sociable one. I procured a chair for her, and, presently found myself alone, as Wilfrid was, wishing from the very bottom of my heart that Colonel Hope-Kennedy was hanged, her ladyship in a lunatic asylum, and myself in my old West End haunts again, though somehow a misgiving as to the accuracy of this last desire visited me on a sudden with the glance I just then happened to cast at Miss Laura, who sat with her hands folded upon her lap, her head bowed in a posture of meditation that took an indescribable character of pathos from the expression on her sweet face.

It was now a little after ten o’clock. Crimp, who was pacing near me that Wilfrid might have the whole range of the weather quarterdeck to himself, suddenly rumbled out, ‘Here comes the wind at last!’ The stern of the yacht was still upon the north, where, at the very verge of the waters which sluggishly heaved like molten lead under the dark canopy of vapour that overhung them, the sea was roughening and whitening to the whipping of wind which looked at that distance to be coming along in a straight line, though as it approached us I witnessed a strange effect of long fibrine feelers sweeping out of the hoarse and rushing ridges of foam which were seething towards us—like darting livid tongues of creatures hidden in the yeast behind tipped with froth that made one think of the slender stem of a vessel ripping through the surface. In a few minutes the boiling popple was all about us, hissing to our counter with a shriek of wind which flashed with such spite into the great space of mainsail and the whole spread of square topsail that the yacht for a moment was bowed down to her ways, fair as it took her on her quarter. An instant she lay so, then came surging back to an almost level deck with her rigging alive as with the ringing of bells, took a sudden plunge forward, throwing from either bow a mass of creaming sea the summit of which went spinning like a snowstorm ahead of her, then gathering impulse in a long, floating, launching plunge as it were, she went sliding through it faster and faster yet till she had a wake like a millrace in chase of her.

It was a scene full of the life and spirit and reality of the ocean after the spell of sulky calm with its dingy northern heaving of water and its haze of weak, moist sunlight in the south and east. Finn to the first of the blast came on deck and fell a-bawling, the sailors sprang from rope to rope with lively heartiness, the slack running gear blew out in semicircles, which with the curve of the canvas and the lean of the masts as the yacht swept forward with the brine boiling high along her, gave a wild, expectant, headlong look to the whole rushing fabric, something indeed to make one fancy that the spirit of her owner, the expression of whose face had her own strained, eager, rushing air, so to speak, had passed into and vitalised her—mere structure of timber as she was—into passionate human yearnings.

CHAPTER XVIII.
IS SHE THE ‘SHARK’?

It was not to prove a gale, though it would have been hard to guess what lay behind that dirty jumble of white and livid terraces which had been stealthily creeping all the morning zenithwards. The clouds scattered to the rush of the wind, the sun with a brightened disk leapt from one flying vaporous edge to another, dazzling out the snows of the dissolving seas till the eye reeled from the glare of the brilliant foam and the sharp and lovely sparkle of the pure dark blue between. Indeed, before long the wind steadied down into a noble sailing breeze with a piebald sky of warm and cheerful weather steadily swinging into the south-east, as though the whole heaven revolved from one quarter to another like a panorama on a cylinder. Wilfrid looked his wishes, but said nothing. He hung apart in a fashion that was the same as telling me to keep off, nor had he anything to say to Miss Jennings. Finn easily interpreting his master’s face, piled cloths on the yacht till it seemed as though another rag would blow the whole lofty white fabric of canvas, tapering spar, and rigging clean over the bows. We fled along in thunder, and to every curtsey of the vessel’s head the water recoiled in a roar of spume as far as the jibboom end, to speed aft as fast, you would have thought, as the eye could follow it, the swell washing to the counter as if to help her.

We held on in this way for some time, when suddenly Wilfrid, who had come to a stand at the weather rail and was looking ahead, bawled with the note of a shriek in his voice, ‘Look!’ and out sprang his long arm pointing directly on a line with our bowsprit.

‘Ay, there she is, sure enough!’ cried I, as I caught sight, to a floating lift of the deck at that moment, of the pearlish gleam of canvas of a milky brilliance slanting past the soft whiteness of a head of sea against the marble look of the sky there, where the sun-touched clouds were going down to the ocean edge in a crowd with a vein of violet here and there amongst them. I glanced at Wilfrid, not knowing what sort of mood this first glimpse of the yacht would put into him, but there was no alteration of face. His countenance had set into an iron hard expression; methought resolution could never show more grimly stubborn. Miss Jennings came to the side to look.

‘There is little to be seen as yet,’ said I to her, ‘but we shall be heaving her hull up very soon. She is taking it quietly.’