‘Hark!’ I cried, as the echoes of it went roaring and rolling into the distance. My ear had caught a rushing and hissing noise, and looking into the direction of the sea, over which the thick of the tempest was hanging, I saw what seemed a line of light approaching us.
‘Rain!’ I shouted, ‘flashing the phosphorescent water up into flame.’
‘No, sir, no!’ roared Cutbill; ‘it’s wind, sir, wind! ’Tis the boiling of the water that looks like fire.’
He was right. An instant’s listening enabled me to catch the yell of the squall sounding in the distance like a moaning sort of whistling through the seething of the ploughed and lacerated waters.
‘Laura, give me your hand,’ I cried. ‘Lady Monson, if you are coming——’
‘I will accompany you,’ she answered, and very nimbly, and much to my astonishment, she slipped her hand under my arm and clung to me. So! There was yet a little of the true woman remaining in her, and it would necessarily discover itself soonest in moments of terror.
The illuminated square of hatchway not only enabled us to avoid the ugly gap down which it was mighty easy to plump by mistake in the confusion of the blackness and in the bewilderment following upon the blinding playing of the lightning; it threw out a faint haze of light that went sifting into a considerable area over the main deck, so that we were able to make haste without risk; and after a few minutes of floundering, with an interval of groping when we came to the incline of shells which conducted to the quarter-deck, I succeeded in lodging the two ladies fairly in the shelter of the cabin, and not a moment too soon. We were scarce entered when a squall of terrific violence burst upon the little island. It took the galleon with a glare of lightning of noontide brilliance, a roar of thunder, and such a hurricane howling of wind that no tornado ever shrieked under the heavens more deafeningly. One by one the men arrived. The lightning was so continuous that I could see their figures stealing along the deck, and they made for the cabin door by it as directly as though guided by a stretched hand-line.
‘Did you get in the sail?’ I cried to Finn.
‘Lord love ’ee, sir,’ he roared, ‘it fled to the first blast like a puff of baccy smoke.’
‘Hark to the sea a-getting up!’ said Dowling. ‘Here’s a breeze to start this old waggin. Stand by for a slide, says I. I wish them holes was plugged.’