We were apparelled for the deck, and finding the captain gone, we followed, and though scarcely five minutes had elapsed since the boatswain bawled, already the long-boat was some ship's lengths distant, bowed almost to the line of her lee rail by a great square of white canvas, shaded here and there where the moisture had not dried out of it. She looked full of people as she rose to the head of the folds, ripping through it with the icy breeze fresh off her bow, till the lift of the foam sparkled in a fountain-like arch right athwart her forward, and her speed raised two humps of froth on either quarter, and shot a long milk-white glance of wake, bright as a meteor's line of light, far astern of her, lifting and falling on the swell, and defined to its extremity even amidst the smoke and snap of the running seas.
Captain Burke with one hand grasping the edge of the companion stood watching her. When we came up his first words were, after a brief pause:
'They'll overhaul the ship if they can only get a sight of her. Look how she sails, and how finely she is handled.'
'She may be the means of saving us,' cried Mrs. Burke. 'What use were they on board of us? But they're useful there. They'll be sighted and rescued, and we shall be hunted after.'
But I did not want her nor her husband after I had watched the boat a little to tell me that, unless they quickly encountered succour, their situation, crowded together in a small exposed space, would be terrible. Also, since Mrs. Burke would not have left her husband, I should have been the only woman in her. I cannot say how the mere sight of her as she swept onwards, dwindling as you gazed into a mere toy, regularly sinking out of sight till nothing showed but a gleaming curve of her topmast cloths, wan and slender as a distant sea-fowl's pinion, then taking the slope till she leaned, poised and foaming for a breathless instant, upon the flying summit: I cannot tell you, I say, how solemnly and awfully that mere toy, full of human beings, emphasised to my perception the vastness and the loneliness of this cold, green, heaving breast of ocean.
Captain Burke took the telescope out of the companion and swept the sea for some little distance on either hand the boat's bows, pausing on the lee side of the fabric where, my sight being good, I spied a point like a light tipping the sea-line against some dark clouds there whenever the hull soared.
'That's the ship,' said he, pointing. 'They may catch her! Why, had I thought of it—but who's going to make proposals to mutineers?—the scoundrels have stolen my only boat. How do they know in leaving us what's to become of us without a boat?'
'Had you thought of what?' said his wife.
'I'd have given them a handful of rockets.'
We stood watching the boat till the white spot she became was one with the breaking seas. The hull looked indescribably forlorn. The sense of all life, saving us three, having gone out of her, brought a deeper spirit of desolation into her labouring shape. Oh, the heart-sickness that came into you out of her dismal regular rolling in the trough! The swell lifted her, the seas burst upon her weather side as against a rock, broke into smoke, and smote the hollow they sprang from with the loud hissing of a hail squall. There was a constant dreary gleam of ice as the fabric swayed, pallid glares along her side, blue glancings from the long barbs at the catheads; the frozen snow the whole length of the deck had a shrewd keen sparkle. In places along the working line of the sea hung motionless the faint marble of bergs; but long before the boat was lost to view the feather-tip of sail she was pursuing had vanished.