There had been but little in the thunder of the storm, which still showed livid over the eastern horizon, that surpassed the wild and prodigious roaring of this first outfly of the hurricane. The ship continued to lie down to the fierce sweep of the wind at the angle she had reached to—it was as good or bad, indeed, as being on her beam ends—and Miss Temple and I were forced to keep our seats upon the hencoop, no more able to crawl up the deck to where the companion hatch was than had it been a slope of polished ice. This maybe was what she meant by ‘the ridiculousness of her position.’ The captain, standing to windward, was sending ominous looks at the band of the foretopsail and at the foretopmaststay-sail, the cloths of which continued miraculously to hold. There was too much wind for the sea to rise suddenly; indeed, the weight of the blast had smoothed down what remains of swell the rain and hail had left; the ocean was a level surface of foam, out of which the tempest of wind was tearing up whole snowstorms of flakes of spume, which flew over the ship in clouds that whitened out into a sort of dazzle, as though sun touched, as they flew in their throbbing masses athwart the leaden sky which poured across the sea over the ship’s bows in rags and trailing lengths and gyrating coils of sooty vapour.
‘Look!’ I shouted to Miss Temple, and pointed over our stern, where, out of the flying faintness and thickness of spray, the figure of the brig was at that instant forming itself.
I sprang upon the hencoop, the better to see, grasping the mizzen shrouds for support.
‘Shall I give you a hoist?’ I cried to the girl.
Her curiosity was too strong; the flying brig—a fleeting vision of the object which had filled us with alarm and suspense throughout the day, was a wonder to be witnessed at such a time as that at any cost. Her lips parted in the word yes to the howl of the gale, and in a moment I had her up alongside of me, my arm through hers, securely gripping and supporting her, and the pair of us gazing breathlessly at the sight astern.
With her single mast rising to the topmast cross-trees, the yards square, the remains of the trysail streaming like white hair from gaff and boltrope, the brig swept under our stern, shooting sheer athwart, seething smoothly as a sleigh over a level plain of snow, and rushing before the wind straight as the flight of an arrow. A coil of thick black smoke, whose base was reddened by sudden tongues of fire, blew over her bow, and coloured the atmosphere into which she rushed with a complexion of thunder. It seemed to rise from the fore-hatch, and it fled straight off the deck. I caught a sight of crowds of men forward and aft, with a couple of fellows leaping into the fore-rigging as the brig rushed by, to gesticulate to us. But the vision came and went in a few breaths like an object seen by lightning. So dense was the gale with spray, that there was scarcely a cable’s length of opening round about us. The brig showed and was gone! a phantasm, with the white waters pouring over her spritsail yard as she rushed through it, and no more of her was to be noted by the eye during the headlong swiftness of her plunge from one wall of spindrift into another, than the delicate lines of her rigging supporting the foremast, the bowsprit vanishing in a cloud of smoke, blowing ahead of her, a length of white deck, a flash of skylight glass, the glimmer, so to speak, of some score of faces turned our way.
‘She is on fire,’ I cried in Miss Temple’s ear: ‘she carries a doomed crew into that thickness!’
She moved, as if to resume her seat, and very carefully I got her on to the hencoop again.
But the first terrific spite of the gale was now gone, and the squab form of the Indiaman lifting a little out of the seething cauldron in which she lay with her main-deck rail flush with the yeasty surface, was beginning slowly to pay off. Her decks gradually grew level, and presently she was right before the wind, with the howl of it at her taffrail, and her huge bows heaping up the white sea till the leaps of the summits were at either cathead.
Mr. Colledge’s face showed in the companion-way.