What struck most home to me was that my passionate dream to save Mary Robertson might be defeated. The miseries which had been accumulated on her wrung my heart to think of. First her shipwreck, and then the peril of the mutiny, and then the dreadful storm that had held us face to face with death throughout the fearful day, and then the death of her father, and now this new horror of the ship whereon we stood filling with water beneath our feet.
Yet hope—and God be praised for this mercy to all men—springs eternal, and after a few minutes my despair was mastered by reflection. If the ship made no more water than eight inches in three-quarters of an hour, it would be possible to keep her afloat for some days by regular spells at the pump, and there were four hands to work them if Miss Robertson steered whilst we pumped. In that time it would be a thousand to one if our signal of distress was not seen and answered.
Presently I heard the men pumping on the main-deck, and the boatswain's voice singing to encourage the others. What courage that man had! I, who tell this story, am ashamed to think of the prominence I give to my own small actions when all the heroism belongs to him. I know not what great writer it was who, visiting the field of the battle of Waterloo, asked how it was that the officers who fell in that fight had graves and monuments erected to them, when the soldiers—the privates by whom all the hard work was done, who showed all the courage and won the battle—lay nameless in hidden pits? And so when we send ships to discover the North Pole we have little to say about poor Jack, who loses his life by scurvy, or his toes and nose by frost-bites, who labours manfully, and who makes all the success of the expedition so far as it goes. Our shouts are for Jack's officer; we title him, we lionize him—his was all the work, all the suffering, all the anxiety, we think. I, who have been to sea, say that Jack deserves as much praise as his skipper, and perhaps a little more; and if honour is to be bestowed, let Jack have his share; and if a monument is to be raised, let poor Jack's name be written on the stone as well as the other's; for be sure that Jack could have done without the other, but also be sure that the other couldn't have done without Jack.
Chained to my post, which I dared not vacate for a moment, for the ship pitched heavily, and required close watching as she came to and fell off upon the swinging seas, I grew miserably anxious to learn how the pumping progressed, and felt that, after the boatswain, my own hands would do four times the work of the other two.
It was our peculiar misfortune that of the four men on board the ship three only should be capable; and that as one of the three men was constantly required at the wheel, there were but two available men to do the work. Had the steward been a sailor our difficulties would have been considerably diminished, and I bitterly deplored my want of judgment in allowing Fish and the Dutchman to be destroyed; for though I would not have trusted Johnson and Stevens, yet the other two might have been brought over to work for us, and I had no doubt that the spectacle of the perishing wretches in the long-boat, as she was whirled past us, would have produced as salutary an effect upon them as it had upon Cornish; and with two extra hands of this kind we could not only have kept the pumps going, but have made shift to sail the ship at the same time.
The hollow thrashing sounds of the pump either found Miss Robertson awake or aroused her, for soon after the pumping had commenced she came on deck, swathed in the big warm overcoat and fur cap.
Such a costume for a girl must make you laugh in the description; and yet, believe me, she lost in nothing by it. The coat dwarfed her figure somewhat, but the fur cap looked luxurious against her fair hair, and nothing could detract from the exquisite femininity of her face, manner, and carriage. I speak of the impression she had made on me in the daytime; the starlight only revealed her white face now to me.
"Is the water still coming into the ship?" she asked.
"The bo'sun has reported to me that eight inches deep have come into her since half-past nine."
"Is that much?"