My Danish Sweetheart Volume III Part 5

'I am quite satisfied with my accommodation, thank you,' she answered, without looking up.

He youthfully wagged his head in reproach of what his manner seemed to consider no more than an enchanting girlish capriciousness, and adding, 'Well, I entreat you both to make yourselves thoroughly at home,' he disappeared.

Punmeamootty arrived. He entered soundlessly as a spirit, and with the gliding movements that one could imagine of a phantom. I said to Helga:

'Abraham's philosophy shall be mine. My temper shall not prevent me from using our friend's larder. You asked just now what will sicken him. Let us eat and drink him up! Punmeamootty, when is the gale going to burst?'

'It will not be long, sah,' he answered, showing his teeth.

'Put the best supper you can upon the table. Have you nothing better than rum to drink?'

'Dere is wine, sah.'

'Yes, and very poor wine too. Have you no brandy?'

'Yes, sah, de Capt'n hab some choice brandy for sickness.'

'Put a bottle of it on the table, Punmeamootty, and be quick, like a good fellow as you are, to serve the food before this sweet little s.h.i.+p begins to kick up her heels.'

He showed his teeth again, with a glance at the skylight, following it on with a short-lived look of deep interest at Helga, then slipped away.

With wonderful nimbleness he had spread the cloth and put ham, salt beef, biscuit, and such things upon the table.

'Now draw that cork!' said I.

The pop of it brought the whiskers to the open skylight as if by magic.

'Quite right, quite right!' exclaimed the Captain. 'I hope, Miss Helga, this repast is of _your_ ordering? What have you there, Punmeamootty?'

he suddenly cried with excitement. 'That is brandy, I believe?'

'I ordered it!' I called out in a sullen voice.

'You will handle it tenderly, if you please,' said he, with a trifle of asperity in his speech. 'It is a fine cordial brandy, and I have but three bottles of it.'

I returned no answer, and he vanished.

'Upon my word, I believe Abraham is right, after all!' said I, with a laugh. 'Now, Helga, to punish him, if the road to his sensibility lie through ham and beef!'

She feigned to eat merely to please me, as I could see. Though I was not very hungry, I made a great business of sharpening my knife, and fell to the beef and ham with every appearance of avidity, not doubting that we should be furtively surveyed from time to time by the Captain, who could peep at us unseen without trouble as he pa.s.sed the skylight, and who could very well overhear the clatter of dishes, the sharpening of my knife, and my calls to the steward, so silent did the night continue, as though there rested some great hush of expectancy upon the ocean.

I filled a b.u.mper of brandy-and-water, and exclaimed in a loud voice:

'Here's to our speedy release, Helga! But if that is not to happen, then here's to the safest and swiftest pa.s.sage this crazy old bucket is capable of making. And here's to proceedings hereafter to be taken!'

The coloured steward stood looking on with a grin of wonder.

'Capital brandy, this, Punmeamootty!' I sang out in accents that might have been heard upon the forecastle. 'Another drop, if you please! Thank you! I will help myself.'

A mere drop it was, for I had had enough; but I took care by my posture to persuade an eye surveying me from above that I was not sparing the bottle.

'You may clear away, Punmeamootty; and if you can find a cigar I shall feel obliged by your bringing it to me.'

'Well, and how are we getting on?' exclaimed the Captain, bending his head into the skylight.

'We have supped, thank you,' I answered haughtily and coldly.

'Punmeamootty, a cigar, if you please!'

The Captain's head vanished.

'Me no sabbee where the Capt'n him keep his cigar,' said Punmeamootty.

'Ransack his cabin!' said I loudly.

The fellow shook his head, but there was enjoyment in his grin, with an expression of elation in his eyes that borrowed a quality of fierceness from the singularly keen gleam which irradiated their dusky depths. I was about to speak, when Helga raised her hand.

'Hark!' she cried.

I bent my ear, and caught a sound resembling the low moan of surf heard at a distance.

'More than a capful of wind goes to the making of that noise,' said I.

A bright flash of lightning dazzled upon the skylight and eclipsed the cabin-lamp with its blinding bluish glare. A small shock of thunder followed. I heard the Captain cry out an order; the next minute the skylight was hastily closed and a tarpaulin thrown over it.

'Bring me my oilskins, Punmeamootty!' shouted the Captain down the companionway. The man ran on deck with the things.

'Can that be rain?' cried Helga.

Rain it was indeed! a very avalanche of wet, charged with immense hailstones. The roar of the smoking discharge upon the planks was absolutely deafening. It lasted about a couple of minutes, then ceased with startling suddenness, and you heard nothing but the surf-like moaning that had now gathered a deeper and a more thrilling note, mingled with the wild sobbing in the scuppers, and a melancholy hissing of wet as the water on the quarter-deck splashed from side to side to the light rolling of the barque. Yet fully another five minutes pa.s.sed in quiet, while the growling of the thunder of the still distant storm-swept sea waxed fiercer and fiercer. It was as though one stood at the mouth of a tunnel and listened to the growing rattling and rumbling of a long train of goods waggons approaching in tow of a panting locomotive.

Then in a breath the wind smote the barque, and down she leaned to it.

So amazingly violent was the angle, I do most truthfully believe that for the s.p.a.ce of some twenty or thirty seconds the barque lay completely on her beam ends, as much so as if she were bilged high and dry upon a shoal, and there was a dreadful noise of water pouring in upon her deck from over the submerged lee main-deck rail.

Helga was to windward, and the table supported her, but the chair upon which I was seated broke away with me, and I fell sprawling upon my back amid a whole raffle of the contents of the table, which Punmeamootty had not yet removed. The full mess of it came headlong about me with a mighty smash; the beef, the ham, the bottle of brandy, now s.h.i.+vered into a thousand pieces, the jam pots, the biscuits, the knives and forks--all these things I lay in the midst of, and such was the heel of the deck that I could not stir a limb. Helga shrieked.

I cried out:

'I am not hurt; I'll rise when I can.' Someone was hoa.r.s.ely bawling from the p.o.o.p; but whatever the meaning of the yell might have been, it was immediately followed by a loud report resembling the blast of a twenty-four-pounder gun. 'There goes a sail!' I shouted. The vessel found life on being relieved of the canvas, whatever it was; there was a gradual recovery of her hull, and presently she was on a level keel, driving smoothly as a sleigh over a level plain of snow, but with such an infernal bellowing and hooting and ear-piercing whistling of wind accompanying her that there is nothing I can imagine to liken it to.

I waited awhile, and then, bidding Helga stay where she was, went on to the quarter-deck; but all betwixt the rails was of a pitch darkness, with a sort of h.o.a.riness in the blackness on either hand outside, rising from the foam, of which the ocean was now one vast field. I mounted the p.o.o.p-ladder, but was blinded in a moment by the violence of the wind, that was full of wet, and was glad to regain the cabin; for I could be of no use, and there was no question to be asked nor answer to be caught at such a time.

CHAPTER III.

JOPPA IS IN EARNEST.

It was about half-past nine when this gale took us, but such was the force and weight of it, so flattening and shearing was its scythe-like horizontal sweep, that no sea worth speaking of had risen till ten o'clock, and then, indeed, it was beginning to run high. All this while there had been no sound of human voices, but at this hour a command was delivered above our heads, and going on to the quarter-deck, I dimly discerned the figures of men hauling upon the forebraces; but they pulled dumbly; no song broke from them; they were silent as though in terror. A little later on I knew by the motions of the barque that she had been brought to the wind and lay hove-to.