The motions of the ship were so violent that we found it hard to keep our seats.
The food was flung over the fiddles into our laps. Every recovery had the abruptness of the flight of a missile; the water roared about the cabin windows, and again and again as the hull sank or soared, the thunder of the sea swept through her as though she had split.
The companion hatch was opened, and Captain Burke descended. He was cased in oilskins, and one whole side of him was white with frozen snow. He came to the table and sat down.
'Now will you tell us what has happened, Edward?' exclaimed his wife, and she crooked her brows with a straining of her large short-sighted eyes, shining with fear, to catch the expression on his face as it showed and shifted in a sort of hysteric agility with the leap of the shadows under the lamp.
'All three masts are gone by the board.'
'What's to be done, then?'
'Eh? Done?' he cried, white in the face, his eyes keen and hot with irritability, pulling off his sou'-wester and striking it upon the table with a blow that dislodged a moulded helmet of snow hard as plaster, 'we want daylight first. You don't realise here what it's like on deck. It's a frightful night.' He checked himself with a look at me and added, 'But we'll have the old jade out of it though it should come to warping her with the Horn for a kedge. We'll put ye safe ashore, miss. By God, then, but Sir Mortimer shan't know you for plumpness and bloom!'
He forced a smile that had more the look of a snarl than a grin with the teeth he disclosed, his eyes taking no part in it. His wife caught a bottle from the swing-tray as it swept to her outstretched hand and mixed a tumbler of drink. He swallowed it, and then picked up a leg of fowl and a piece of white biscuit, and whilst he alternately bit from either hand he talked to his wife thus:
'The first outfly was a squall of hurricane force, and it pinned her right down in the trough. I thought she was gone. The men could only hold on. The boatswain at last managed to scramble forward, where he got hold of an axe. He brought it aft, and others taking heart on hearing him sing out, got into the main chains, and with hatchets and knives went to work at the lanyards. The mast went, and with it the other two. It was like the melting of a shadow aloft, with a crash along the starboard length of her that's made matchwood of the bulwarks, I allow, and in a minute spars and rigging were over the side.'
'Is the ship sound?'