My Danish Sweetheart Volume I Part 3

'We!' said he significantly, looking from me to my mother. 'You'll not venture to-night, I hope, Tregarthen.'

'If the call comes, most certainly I shall,' said I, flus.h.i.+ng up, but without venturing to send a glance at my mother. 'I have appointed myself captain of my men, and is it for _me_, of all my boat's crew, to s.h.i.+rk my duty in an hour of extremity? Let such a thing happen, and I vow to Heaven I could not show my face in Tintrenale again.'

Mr. Trembath seemed a little abashed.

'I respect and admire your theory of dutifulness,' said he; 'but you are not an old hand--you are no seasoned boatman in the sense I have in my mind when I think of others of your crew. Listen to this wind! It blows a hurricane, Hugh,' he exclaimed gently; 'you may have the heart of a lion, but have you the skill--the experience----' He halted, looking at my mother.

'If the call comes I will go,' said I, feeling that he reasoned only for my mother's sake, and that in secret his sympathies were with me.

'If the call comes, Hugh must go,' said my mother. 'G.o.d will s.h.i.+eld him.

He looks down upon no n.o.bler work done in this world, none that can better merit His blessing and His countenance.'

Mr. Trembath bowed his head in a heartfelt gesture.

'Yet I hope no call will be made,' she went on. 'I am a mother----' her voice faltered, but she rallied, and said with courage and strength and dignity: 'Yes, I am Hugh's mother. I know what to expect from him, and that whatever his duty may be, he will do it.' Yet in saying this she pressed both her hands to her heart, as though the mere utterance of the words came near to breaking it.

I stepped to her side and kissed her. 'But the call has not yet come, mother,' said I. 'The vessel's anchors may hold bravely, and then, again, the long dark warning of the day will have kept the coast clear of s.h.i.+ps.'

To this she made no reply, and I resumed my seat, gladdened to the very heart by her willingness that I should go if a summons came, albeit extorted from her love by perception of my duty; for had she been reluctant, had she refused her consent indeed, it must have been all the same. I should go whether or not, but in that case with a heavy heart, with a feeling of rebellion against her wishes that would have taken a deal of spirit out of me, and mingled a sense of disobedience with what I knew to be my duty and good in the sight of G.o.d and man.

I saw that it comforted my mother to have Mr. Trembath with her, and when he offered to go I begged him to stop and sup with us, and he consented. It was not a time when conversation would flow very easily.

The noise of the gale alone was subduing enough, and to this was to be added the restlessness of expectation, the conviction in my own heart that sooner or later the call must come; and every moment that I talked--putting on as cheerful a face as I could a.s.sume--I was waiting for it. I constantly went to the window to look out, guessing that if they burnt a flare aboard the barque the torch-like flame of it would show through the weeping gla.s.s; and shortly before supper was served--that is to say, within a few minutes of nine o'clock--I left the parlour, and going to a room at the extremity of the pa.s.sage, where I kept my sea-going clothes, I pulled on a pair of stout fisherman's stockings, and over them the sea-boots I always wore when I went in the lifeboat. I then brought away my monkey-jacket and oilskins and sou'-wester, and hung them in the pa.s.sage ready to s.n.a.t.c.h at; for a summons to man the boat always meant hurry--there was no time for hunting; indeed, if the call found the men in bed, their custom was to dress as they ran.

Thus prepared, I returned to the parlour. Mr. Trembath ran his eye over me, but my mother apparently took no notice. A cheerful fire blazed in the grate. The table was hospitable with damask and crystal; the play of the flames set the shadows dancing upon the ceiling that lay in the gloom of the shade over the lamp. There was something in the figure of my old mother, with her white hair and black silk gown and antique gold chain about her neck, that wonderfully fitted that homely interior, warm with the hues of the coal-fire, and cheerful with pictures and with several curiosities of s.h.i.+eld and spear, of stuffed bird and Chinese ivory ornament, gathered together by my father in the course of many voyages.

Mr. Trembath looked a plump and rosy and comfortable man as he took his seat at the table, yet there was an expression of sympathetic anxiety upon his face, and frequently I would catch him quietly hearkening, and then he would turn involuntarily to the curtained window, so that it was easy to see in what direction his thoughts went.

'One had need to build strongly in this part of the country,' said he, as we exchanged glances at the sound of a sudden driving roar of wind--a squall of wet of almost hurricane power--to which the immensely strong fabric of our house trembled as though a heavy battery of cannon were being dragged along the open road opposite, 'for, upon my word, Hugh,'

said he--we were old friends, and he would as often as not give me my Christian name--'if the Dane hasn't begun to drag as yet, there should be good hope of her holding on throughout what may still be coming.

Surely, for two hours now past her ground-tackle must have been very heavily tested.'

'My prayer is,' said I, 'that the wind may chop round and blow off sh.o.r.e. They'll have the sense to slip then, I hope, and make for the safety of wide waters, with an amids.h.i.+p helm.'

'He is his father's son,' said Mr. Trembath, smiling at my mother. 'An amids.h.i.+p helm! It is as a sailor would put it. You should have been a sailor, Tregarthen.'

My mother gently shook her head, and then for some while we ate in silence, the three of us feigning to look as though we thought of anything else rather than of the storm that was raging without, and of the barque labouring to her cables in the black heart of it.

On a sudden Mr. Trembath let fall his knife and fork.

'Hist!' he cried, half rising from his chair.

'The lifeboat bell!' I shouted, catching a note or two of the summons that came swinging along with the wind.

'Oh, Hugh!' shrieked my mother, clasping her hands.

'G.o.d keep your dear heart up!' I cried.

I sprang to her side and kissed her, wrung the outstretched hand of Mr.

Trembath, and in a minute was plunging into my peacoat and oilskins. The instant I was out of the house I could hear the fast--I may say the furious--tolling of the lifeboat bell, and sending one glance at the bay, though I seemed almost blinded, and in a manner dazed by the sudden rage of the gale and its burthen of spray and rain against my face, I could distinguish the wavering, flickering yellow light of a flare-up down away in that part of the waters where the Twins and the Deadlow Rock would be terribly close at hand. But I allowed myself no time to look, beyond this hasty glance. Mr. Trembath helped me, by thrusting, to pull the house-door after me, for of my own strength I never could have done it; and then I took to my heels and drove as best I might headlong through the living wall of wind, scarcely able to fetch a breath, reeling to the terrific outflies, yet staggering on.

The gas-flames in the few lamps along the seafront were wildly dancing, their glazed frames rattled furiously, and I remember noticing, even in that moment of excitement, that one of the lamp-posts which stood a few yards away from our house had been arched by the wind as though it were a curve of leaden pipe. The two or three shops which faced the sea had their shutters up to save the windows, and the blackness of the night seemed to be rather heightened than diminished by the dim and leaping glares of the street lights. But as I neared the lifeboat house my vision was somewhat a.s.sisted by the whiteness of the foam boiling in thunder a long s.p.a.ce out. It flung a dim, elusive, ghostly illumination of its own up on the air. I could see the outline of the boat-house against it, the shapes of men writhing, as it seemed, upon the slipway; the figure of the boat herself, which had already been eased by her own length out of the house; and I could even discern, by the aid of that wonderful light of froth, that most of or all her crew were already in her, and that they were stepping her mast, which the roof of the house would not suffer her to keep aloft when she was under shelter.

'Here's the c.o.x'n!' shouted a voice.

'All right, men!' I roared, and with that I rushed through the door of the house, and in a bound or two gained the interior of the boat and my station on the after-grating.

CHAPTER III.

IN THE LIFEBOAT.

Now had come the moment when I should need the utmost exertion of nerve and coolness my nature was equal to. There was a large globular lamp alight in the little building--its l.u.s.tre vaguely touched the boat, and helped me to see what was going on and who were present. Nevertheless I shouted:

'Are all hands aboard?'

'All hands!' came a hurricane response.

'All got your belts on?' I next cried.

'All!' was the answer--that is to say, all excepting myself, who, having worn a cork-jacket once, vowed never again to embark thus enc.u.mbered.

'Are your sails hooked on ready for hoisting?' I shouted.

'All ready, sir!'

'And your haul-off rope?'

'All ready, sir!'

'Now then, my lads--look out, all hands!'

There was a moment's pause:

'Let her go!' I roared.

A man stood close under the stern, ready to pa.s.s his knife through the las.h.i.+ng which held the chain to the boat.

'Stand by!' he shouted. 'All gone!'

I heard the clank of the chain as it fell, an instant after the boat was in motion--slowly at first, but in a few breaths she had gathered the full way that her own weight and the incline gave her, and rushed down the slipway, but almost noiselessly, so thickly greased was the timber structure, with some hands hoisting the foresail as she sped, and others grimly and motionless facing seawards, ready to grasp and drag upon the haul-off rope the moment the craft should be water-borne amid the smothering surf.

The thunderous slatting of the sail as the yard mounted, flinging a noise of rending upon the ear as though the cloths were whipping the hurricane in rags, the furious roaring and seething and crackling and hissing of the mountainous breakers toward which the boat was darting--the indescribable yelling of the gale sweeping past our ears as the fabric fled down the ways--the instant sight of the torn and mangled skies, which seemed dimly revealed somehow by the snowstorms of froth coursing along the bay--all this combined into an impression which, though it could not have taken longer than a second or two to produce it, dwells upon my mind with so much sharpness that the whole experience of my life might well have gone to the manufacture of it.

We touched the wash of the sea, and burst through a cloud of foam; in the beat of a heart the boat was up to our knees in water; in another she was freeing herself and leaping to the height of the next boiling acclivity, with my eight men, rigid as iron statues in their manner of hauling and in their confrontment of the sea, dragging the craft through the surf and into deep water by the haul-off rope attached to an anchor some considerable distance ahead of the end of the slipway.