My Danish Sweetheart: A Novel. Volume 2 of 3

by William Clark Russell

'Nothing,' I answered, dismounting from the thwart.

'Well, there's all day before ye,' paid Jacob, who had taken the helm.

Now that daylight was come, my first look was at Helga, to see how she had borne the bitter time that was passed. Her eyelids were heavy, her cheeks of a deathlike whiteness, her lips pale, and in the tender hollow under each eye lay a greenish hue, resembling the shadow a spring leaf might fling. It was clear that she had been secretly weeping from time to time during the dark hours. She smiled when our eyes met, and her face was instantly sweetened by the expression into the gentle prettiness I had first found in her.

I next took a survey of my new companions. The man styled Abraham was a sailorly-looking fellow, corresponding but indifferently with one's imagination of the conventional 'longshoreman. He had sharp features, a keen, iron-gray, seawardly eye, and a bunch of reddish beard stood forth from his chin. He was dressed in pilot-cloth, wore earrings, and his head was encased in a sugar-loafed felt hat, built after the fashion of a theatrical bandit's.

Jacob, on the other hand, was the most faithful copy of a Deal boatman that could have been met afloat. His face was flat and broad, with a skin stained in places of a brick-red. He had little, merry, but rather dim blue eyes, and suggested a man who would be able, without great effort of memory, to tell you how many public-houses there were in Deal, taking them all round. He had the whitest teeth I had ever seen in a sailor, and the glance of them through his lips seemed to fix an air of smiling upon his face. His attire consisted of a fur-cap, forced so low down upon the head that it obliged his ears to stand out; a yellow oilskin jumper and a pair of stout fearnaught trousers, the ends of which were packed into half-wellington boots.

The third man, named Thomas or Tommy, still continued out of sight, in the forepeak. One will often see at a glance as much as might occupy some pages to even briefly describe. In a few turns of the eye I had taken in these two men and their little ship. The boat seemed to me a very fine specimen of the Deal lugger. Her forepeak consisted of a forecastle, the deck of which was carried in the shape of a platform several feet abaft the bulkhead, which limited the sleeping compartment, and under this pent-house or break were stored the anchors, cables, and other gear belonging to the little vessel. In the middle of the boat, made fast by chains, was a stove, with a box under the 'raft,' as the forecastle-deck is called, in which were kept the cooking utensils. I noticed fresh water casks stowed in the boat's bilge, and a harness-cask for the meat near the forepeak. Right amidships lay a little fat punt, measuring about fourteen feet long, and along the sides of the thwarts were three sweeps or long oars, the foremast that had been 'sprung,' and a spare bowsprit. This equipment I took in with the swift eye of a man who was at heart a boatman.

A noble boat, indeed, for Channel cruising, for the short ragged seas of our narrow waters. But for the voyage to Australia! I could only stare and wonder.

The big lugsail was doing its work handsomely; the breeze was out on the starboard quarter—a pleasant wind, but with a hardness in the face of the sky to windward, a rigidity of small compacted, high-hanging cloud with breaks of blue between, showing of a wintry keenness when the sun soared, that promised a freshening of the wind before noon. Under the steadfast drag of her lug, the light, bright-sided boat was buzzing through it merrily, with a spitting of foam off either bow, and a streak on either side of wool-white water creaming into her wake, that streamed, rising and falling, far astern.

Had her head been pointing the other way, with a promise of the dusky gray of the Cornish coast to loom presently upon the sea-line, I should have found something delightful in the free, floating, airy motion of the lugger sweeping over the quiet hills of swell, her weather-side caressed by the heads of the little seas crisply running along with her in a sportive, racing way. But the desolation of the ocean lay as an oppression upon my spirits. I counted upon the daybreak revealing several sail, and here and there the blue streak of a steamer's smoke; but there was nothing of the sort to be seen, while every hour of such nimble progress as the lugger was now making must to a degree diminish our chances of falling in with homeward-bound craft; that is to say, we were sure, sooner or later, to meet with a ship going to England; but the farther south we went the longer would be the intervals between the showing of ships by reason of the navigation scattering as it opened out into the North Atlantic; and so, though I never doubted that we should be taken off the lugger and carried home, yet as I looked around this vacant sea I was depressed by the fear that some time might pass before this would happen, and my thoughts went to my mother—how she might be supposing me dead and mourning over me as lost to her for ever, and how, if I could quickly return to her, I should be able to end her heartache and perhaps preserve her life; for I was her only child, and that she would fret over me even to the breaking of her heart, I feared, despite her having sanctioned my going out to save life.

Yet, when I looked at Helga, and reflected upon what her sufferings had been and what her loss was, and noted the spirit that still shone nobly in her steadfast gaze, and was expressed in the lines of her lips, I felt that I was acting my part as a man but poorly, in suffering my spirits to droop. This time yesterday we were upon a raft, from which the first rise of sea must have swept us. It was the hard stare of the north-westerly sky that caused me to think of this time yesterday; and with something of a shiver and a long deep breath of gratitude for the safety that had come to us with this little fabric buoyant under our feet, I broke away from my mood of dulness with a half-smile at the two homely boatmen, who sat staring at Helga and at me.