I quietly shook my head.
'Well, the sea has used you handsomely, anyway,' said she. 'I dare say Sir Mortimer is at this minute wondering where you are. How he and Mr. Moore will have pored over the map of the world, to be sure. But little can they guess where you are this very day. This is the terrible Horn your father was so afraid of for your sake. It's not so cold, is it? And yet we are further south than it is customary for ships to venture. What would Sir Mortimer think of such a sight as you saw to-day—that great iceberg, I mean? Fancy such an object floating just opposite your house. What a fortune for the boatmen!'
Just then I heard a shouting on deck; it came dulled through the planks, yet I caught a sharp, fierce note of instant need in it. A minute later the ship leaned down to an outfly of wind that seemed of hurricane force. I heard the thunder of the storm, and saw the lee cabin windows drowned in the green brine, whilst the weather ports winked like blinded eyes with the sudden lashing of foam. My chair gave way, and with a shock I fell with it and rolled down the deck, and for some moments lay helpless, astonished, terrified to the last degree, but unhurt.
Mrs. Burke clung to a stanchion, and I feared, whilst I watched her stout form swinging off it, to see her let go, lest she should flash down upon me and break my neck or maim me for life with her weight. I could not imagine what was happening save that a sudden hurricane had struck the ship and thrown her on her beam ends. She lay as though capsized, with a horrible roaring, pounding thunderous noise of water on the weather side of her, and frightful sounds in her hold, threaded with dim notes of rending, as though sails were flogging in rags, or masts going over the sides.
I managed to get on my knees, and in that posture remained a minute like one on the roof of a house. Such was the slant of the deck I could no more have crawled up it to where Mrs. Burke hung by a stanchion than up a wall. This awful sensation of the ship being upset was dreadfully increased and made a sickness of for the very soul itself to faint under, by her motions in the vast hollow swell which the hurricane was tearing into shreds. Whenever a pause of the beating sea left a weather cabin window weeping, yet clear to that extent, I could judge it was about black as midnight outside. The globe of the lamp had swung hard against the deck, and rarely came from it even with a windward roll. All in a moment the ship lurched over yet, till you would have thought she was turning keel up, and this motion was accompanied by such a thump of the sea, such a shattering inleaping of tons of water, it was as though a huge gun or a whole broadside of pieces had been fired on board of us.
And again through the roaring blow of water I caught the muffled noise of the rending of wood. I shrieked out in that moment of agonising suspense, 'We are sinking!' and indeed so blinding was the eclipse of the window glass that I did truly believe we were going down and were even then below the surface.
Mrs. Burke was unable to make any reply. She was almost black in the face with the anguish of supporting her weight and with horror and fear. In a few moments the strength of her arms gave out; but by relaxing her grip she doubtless saved her neck; her grasp loosened and she slided her embrace down the stanchion to the deck, and then let go and swept silent and helpless as a length of timber down to close beside me; her feet struck the cabin wall hard, and she lay a minute without motion as though the breath had been shocked out of her. She then grasped my hand and cried out: