My Danish Sweetheart: A Novel. Volume 1 of 3

by William Clark Russell

'What can be done?' cried I. 'We shall have to make some desperate thrust for life—contrive something out of the hencoop—spare booms—whatever is to be found.'

'What chance—what chance have we in such a sea as this?' she exclaimed, clasping her hands and looking up at me with eyes large with emotion, though I found nothing of fear in the shining of them or in the working of her pale face.

I had no answer to make. Indeed, it put a sort of feeling into the blood like madness itself even to talk of a raft, with the sound in our ears of the sea that was raging outside.

'And then there is my father,' she continued, 'helpless—unable to move—how is he to be rescued? I would lose my life to save his. But what is to be done if this gale continues?'

'His experience should be of use to us,' said I. 'Let us go and talk with him.'

She opened the door of the berth, halted, stared a minute, then turned to me with her forefinger upon her lip. I peered, and found the poor man fast asleep. I believed at first that he was dead, so still he lay, so easy was his countenance, so white too; but after watching a moment, I spied his breast rising and falling. Helga drew close and stood viewing him. A strange and moving sight was that swinging cot—the revelation of the deathlike head within, the swaying boyish figure of the daughter gazing with eyes of love, pity, distress at the sleeping, haggard face, as it came and went.

She sat down beside me. 'I shall lose him soon,' said she. 'But what is killing him? He was white and poorly yesterday; but not ill as he is now.'

It would have been idle to attempt any sort of encouragement. The truth was as plain to her as to me. I could find nothing better to say than that the gale might cease suddenly, that a large steam-frigate had passed us a little while before, that some vessel was sure to heave into sight when the weather moderated, and that meanwhile our efforts must be directed to keeping the vessel afloat. I could not again talk of the raft; it was enough to feel the sickening tossing of the ship under us to render the thought of that remedy for our state horrible and hopeless.

The time slowly passed. It was drawing on to one o'clock. I went on deck to examine the helm and to judge of the weather; then sounded the well, but found no material increase of water. The barque, however, was rolling so furiously that it was almost impossible to get a correct cast. Before re-entering the house, I sent a look round from the shelter of the weather-bulwark, to observe what materials were to be obtained for a raft should the weather suffer us to launch such a thing, and the barque founder spite of our toil. There was a number of spare booms securely lashed on top of the seamen's deck-house and galley, and these, with the hencoop and hatch-covers, and the little casks or scuttle-butts out of which the men drank would provide us with what we needed. But the contemplation of death itself was not so dreadful to me as the prospect which this fancy of a raft opened. I hung crouching under the lee of the tall bulwark, gnawing my lip as thought after thought arose in me, and digging my finger-nails into the palms of my hands. The suddenness of it all! The being this time yesterday safe ashore, without the dimmest imagination of what was to come—the anguish of my poor old mother—the perishing, as I did not doubt, of my brave comrades of the lifeboat—then, this vessel slowly taking in water, dying as it were by inches, and as doomed as though Hell's curse were upon her, unless the gale should cease and help come!

I could not bear it. I started to my feet with a sense of madness upon me, with a wild and dreadful desire in me to show mercy to myself by plunging and by silencing the delirious fancies of my brain in the wide sweep of seething waters that rushed from the very line of the rail of the barque as she leaned to her beam-ends in the thunderous trough of that instant. It was a sort of hysteria that did not last; yet might I have found temptation and time in the swift passage of it to have destroyed myself, but for God's hand upon me, as I choose to believe, and to be ever thankful for.