‘Ay, but food apart, since we must needs remain here through the night, I must endeavour to find something soft for you to lie upon. You cannot rest upon that hard locker.’
‘Oh, I do not want to rest,’ she exclaimed. ‘Do you think I could sleep? I shall sit as I am, and pray for the light to come and for a sight of the ships.’
I made no answer, though it was on the tip of my tongue to say I was sorry for her sake that it was I, and not Colledge, whom she was adrift with. It was an impulse coming through some sudden hot recollection of her treatment of me on board the Countess Ida; but I bit my lip, and was grateful for my silence a moment after, when I saw her fine eyes swimming with tears.
‘Pray have hope,’ I exclaimed. ‘I am sure after a bit you will find plenty of courage in your heart to confront this little passage, hard as it is. I will do what I can. I would you had a better sailor than I by your side; but what can be done by me shall be done, and the worst is a long way off yet, I am certain.’
She put her hands upon the table and hid her face in them. I lifted the lid of the locker I was using as a seat, to stow away the bottles in a safe place; for, talk as I might, it was only God could know whether it might not end in a single drop of the liquor becoming more precious to us than twenty times the value of the cargo of the Indiaman. There were some wearing apparel, a few small coils of ratline-stuff, and other odds and ends in the locker, but nothing noticeable. I then clawed my way to the deck-house door to take a look round. It was black as fog and darkness could make it. Close alongside, the foam glanced dimly, with now and again a flash of phosphoric light in some dark coil down whose slope the hull was sliding; but there was nothing else to see. The wind still blew fresh, but there was no recognisable increase in it since the hour of its first coming down upon the wreck. It made a most dismal and melancholy noise of howling in the sky, as it swept through the dark obscurity, splitting upon the foremast and the shrouds which supported the spar, in a low-toned long-drawn shriek, which had something of the sound of a human note as it pierced through the hissing and seething round about, and through the strange, low, dull thunder made by the shouldering of liquid folds coming together as they ran, and by the hurl of the surge as it rounded and dissolved into foam.
There could be very little doubt that the drift of a light empty shell of a wreck with a yard and mast and shrouds forward for the wind to catch hold of would be considerable in such weather as this. Helped by the beat of the seas, she might easily blow dead to leeward, in the trough as she was, at the rate of some three to four miles in the hour, so that daybreak would find her forty or fifty miles distant from the spot where we had boarded her. However, I comforted myself with the reflection that the commanders of the two ships would have a clear perception of such a drift as I calculated, and allow for it in the search they would surely make for the hull. I had but one fear: that the cutter had been seen leaving the wreck, for there was an interval at least of a minute or two between her dropping astern and manœuvring with her three oars and her envelopment by the fog. If, then, she had been sighted, the inference would inevitably be that Miss Temple, Colledge, and myself were in her; and so the hunt would be for the cutter, without reference to the hull, with every prospect of the search carrying the ships miles below the verge of our horizon.
Meanwhile, as I stood in that doorway looking into the blackness over the sides, I bent my ear anxiously forward; but though there were constant shocks of the sea smiting the bow, I never caught the noise of water falling in weight enough upon the deck to alarm me. The leap of the surge seemed to be always forward of the fore-shrouds, and the ducking and tossing of the fabric was so nimble, and the pouring of the blast so steadfast, that nearly all the water that sprang to the blow of the bow was carried overboard by the wind. This was about as comforting an assurance as could come to me; for I tell you it was enough to turn one’s heart into lead to look into that starless wall of blackness close against the ship, to see nothing but the pallid glimmer of froth, to hearken to the noises in the air, to feel the sickening and dizzy heavings of the sea, and then realise that this hull had been struck by lightning, that the forepart of her was burnt into a thin case of charred timbers, and that all three hatches in her, together with the skylight, lay open and yawning like the mouths of wells to the first rush of sea that should tumble over the side.
I will not feign to remember how that night passed. The tall wax candle burnt bravely and lasted long; but the guttering of it to the circlings of the air in the extremity of the cabin obliged me to light another before the night was spent. It a little encouraged Miss Temple to be able to see. God knows how it might have been with her had we been obliged to sit in that blackness. Once the candle was blown out, and when I had succeeded in lighting it afresh, after a few minutes of groping and hunting and manœuvring with my tinder-box, I looked at the girl, and knew by the horror that shone in her eyes, and the marble hardness in the aspect of her parted lips, as though her mouth were some carved expression of fear, how heart-subduing had that short spell of blackness proved. From time to time she would ask for a little wine, which she sipped as though thirsty, but she swallowed a few drops only, as if she feared that the wine, by heating her, would increase her thirst; yet when I spoke of going below to seek for some fresh water, she begged me not to leave her.
‘It is the memory of the body that sat at this table which makes loneliness insupportable to me, Mr. Dugdale,’ she exclaimed. ‘I seemed to see the dreadful object when the candle went out. I thought I had more spirit. I am but a very weak woman, after all.’
‘I do not think so,’ said I; ‘you are bearing this frightful trial very nobly. How would it be with some girls I know? They would be swooning away; they would be exhausting themselves in cries; they would be tearing themselves to pieces in hysterics. And how is it with me? Sometimes I am frightened to death, but not with fears of darkness or of the dead. I am certain we shall be rescued; this hull is making excellent weather of it; there is food and drink below, yet I am filled with consternation and grief. Why should it be otherwise? We are creatures of nerves, and this is an experience to test the courage of a saint.’