Wild Adventures round the Pole Part 9

There is some strange mystery about the matter, which we would fain have solved. But stay--not here, and not yet. You must be very tired and weary; you must first have rest and refreshment, after which you can tell us your tale. Stevenson, see the little boat hauled up; and, doctor, I place this young lady under your care; to-night I hope to land her safely in Reikjavik; meanwhile my cabin is at her disposal."

"Come, la.s.sie," said the good surgeon, laconically, leading the way down the companion.

Merely dropping a queenly curtsey to McBain and our young heroes, she followed the doctor without a word.

Peter the steward placed before her the most tempting viands in the s.h.i.+p, yet she seemed to have but little appet.i.te.

"I am tired," she said at length, "I fain would rest. Long weary weeks of sorrow have been mine. But they are past and gone at last."

Then she retired, this strange ocean waif and stray, and so the day wore gradually to a close, and they saw no more of her until the sun, fierce, fiery, and red, began to disappear behind the distant snow-clad hills; then they found her once more in their midst.

She had gathered the folds of her plaid around her, her long yellow hair still floated over her shoulders, and her dreamy blue eyes were shyly raised to McBain's face as she began to speak.

"I owe you some explanation," she said. "My strange conduct must appear almost inexplicable to you. My appearance among you two nights ago was intended to save you from the destruction that awaited you--from the destruction that had been prepared for you by the Danish wreckers."

"Sir," she continued, after a pause, "I am myself a Dane. My father was parish minister in the little village of Elmdene. Alas! I fear he is now no more. Afflictions gathered and thickened around us in our once happy little home, and the only way we could see out of them was to leave our native land and cross the ocean. In America we have many friends who had kindly offered us an asylum, until happier days should come again. Our vessel was a brig, our crew all told only twenty hands, and we, my brother, father, and myself--for mother has long since gone up beyond--were the only pa.s.sengers.

"All went well until we were off the northern Shetlands, when at the dark, starry hour of midnight our s.h.i.+p was boarded and carried by pirates. Every one in the s.h.i.+p was put to the sword, saving my father and myself. My poor dear brave brother was slain before my eyes, but he died as the Danes die--with his face to the foe. My father was promised his life if he would perform the ceremony of marriage between myself and the pirate captain, who is a Russian, a daring, fearless fellow, but a strange compound of superst.i.tion and vice--a man who will go to prayers before scuttling a s.h.i.+p! The object of this pirate was to seize your vessel; he would have met and fought you at sea, but the easier plan for him was to try to wreck you. Fortune seemed to favour this bold design of his. The lights placed on sh.o.r.e, to represent a vessel of large size, were part and parcel of his vile scheme. But the darkness of the night enabled me to escape and come towards you. Then I feared to return; but, alas! alas! I now tremble lest my dear father has had to pay the penalty of my rashness with his life."

[The story of the pirate is founded on fact.]

"But the s.h.i.+p--this pirate?" said McBain. "We sailed around the island next day but saw no signs of him?"

"Then," said the girl, "he must have escaped in the darkness, immediately after discovering the entire failure of his scheme."

"And whither were you bound for when we overtook you, my poor girl?"

asked McBain.

"At Reikjavik," she replied, "I have an uncle, a minister. He it was who taught me all I know, while he was still at home in Elmdene--taught me among other things the beautiful language of your country, which I speak, but speak so indifferently."

"Can this be," said McBain, "the self-same pirate that attacked the _s...o...b..rd_?"

"The very same thought," answered Ralph, "was pa.s.sing through my own mind."

"And yet how strange that a pirate should, cruise in these far northern seas?"

"She has less chance of being caught, at all events," Allan said.

"Ha?" exclaimed McBain, with a kind of grim, exultant laugh, "if she comes across the _Arrandoon_, that chance will indeed be a small one.

She'll find us a different kind of a craft from the _s...o...b..rd_."

The vessel was now heading directly for the south-east coast of Iceland.

Somewhere in there, though at present hidden by points of land and rocky islets, lay the capital of Iceland, which they hoped to reach ere midnight.

A more lovely land and seascape than that which was now stretched out before them, it would indeed be difficult to conceive. The sun had gone down behind the western end of a long line of snow-clad mountains, serrated, jagged, and peaked, but their tops were all rose-tipped with his parting beams. Above them the sky was clear, with just one speck of crimson cloud; the lower land between was bathed in a purple mist, through which the ice-bound rocks could dimly be discerned, while the mantle of night had already been spread over the ocean.

It was "nightfall on the sea."

CHAPTER EIGHT.

A GALE FROM THE MOUNTAINS--DAYBREAK IN ICELAND--THE GREAT BALLOON ASCENT--RORY'S YARN--THE SNOW-CLOUD--THE PIRATE IS SEEN.

A whole week has elapsed since the events transpired which I have related in last chapter,--a week most interestingly if not always quite pleasantly spent. The _Arrandoon_ is lying before the quaint, fantastical old town of Reikjavik, surrounded almost in every direction by mountains bold and wild, the peaked summits and even the sides of which are now covered with ice and snow. For spring has not yet arrived to unrivet stern winter's chains, to swell the rivers into roaring torrents, and finally to carpet the earth with beauty. The streams are still frozen, the bay in which the good s.h.i.+p lies at her anchors twain, is filled with broken pancake-ice, which makes communication with the sh.o.r.e by means of boat a matter of no little difficulty, for oars have to be had inboard or used as pressing poles, and boat-hooks are in constant requisition.

Winter it is, and the country all around might be called dreary, were it not for the ever-varying shades of colour that, as the sun s.h.i.+nes out, or anon hides his head behind a cloud, spread themselves over hill and dale and rugged glen. Oh! the splendour of those sunrises and sunsets, the rose tints, the purples, the emerald greens and cool greys, that blaze and blend, grow faint and fade as they chase each other among mountains and ravines! What a poor morsel of steel my pen feels as I attempt to describe them! Yet have they a beauty peculiarly their own,--a beauty which never can be forgotten by those whose eyes have once rested thereon.

The fair-haired Danish girl has been landed, and for a time has found shelter and peace in the humble home of her uncle the clergyman. Our heroes have been on sh.o.r.e studying the manners and customs of the primitive but hospitable people they find themselves among.

Several city worthies have been off to see the s.h.i.+p and to dine. But to-night our heroes are all by themselves in the saloon. Dinner is finished, nuts and fruit and fragrant coffee are on the table, at the head of which sits the captain, on his right the doctor and Ralph, on his left Allan and Rory. Freezing Powders, neatly dressed, is hovering near, and Peter, the steward, is not far off, while the c.o.c.katoo is busy as usual, helping himself to tremendous billfuls of hemp-seed, but nevertheless putting in his oar every minute, with a "Well, duckie?" or a long-drawn "Dea-ah me!"

I cannot say that all is peace, though, beyond the wooden walls of the _Arrandoon_, for a storm is raging with almost hurricane violence, sweeping down from the hills with ever-varying force, and threatening to tear the vessel from her anchorage. Steam is up, the screw revolves, and it taxes all the engineer's skill to keep up to the anchors so as to avert the strain from them.

But our boys are used to danger by this time, and there is hardly a moment's lull in the conversation. Even Sandie McFlail, M.D. o'

Aberdeen, has already forgotten all the horrors of _mal-de-mer_; he even believes he has found his sea-legs, and feels all over as good a sailor as anybody.

"Reikjavik?" says Ralph; "isn't it a queer break-jaw kind of a name. It puts one in mind of a mouthful of exceedingly tough beefsteak."

"A gastronomic simile," says Rory; "though maybe neither poetical nor elegant, sure, but truly Saxon."

"Ah! weel," the doctor says, in his quiet, thoughtful, canny way, "I dinna know now. Some o' the vera best poetry of all ages bears reference to the pleesures o' the table. Witness Horace's Odes, for instance."

"Hear! hear!" from Allan; and "Horace was a brick!" from honest English Ralph; but Rory murmurs "Moore?"

"But," continues the doctor, "to my ear there is nothing vera harsh in the language that these islanders speak. They p.r.o.nounce the 'ch' hard, like the Scotch; their 'j's' soft, like the Spanish; and turn their 'w's' into 'v's.' They p.r.o.nounce church--kurk; and the 'j' is a 'y,' or next thing to it. 'Reik' or 'reyk' means smoke, you know, as it is in Scotch 'reek;' and 'wik,' or 'wich,' or 'vik' means a bay, as in the English 'Woolwich,' 'Sandwich,' etc, so that Reikjavik is simply 'the bay of smoke,' or 'the smoking bay;' but whether with reference to the smoke that hangs over the town, or the spray that rises mistlike from the seething billows when the wind blows, I cannot say--probably the former; and it is worthy of note, gentlemen, that some savage races far, far away from here--the aborigines of Australia, for example--designate towns by the term 'the big smoke.'"

"How profoundly erudite you are, doctor!" says Rory. "Now, wouldn't it have been much better for your heirs and a.s.signs and the world at large, if you had accepted a Professors.h.i.+p of Antiquity in the University of Aberdeen, instead of coming away with us, to cool the toes of you at the North Pole, and maybe leave your bones to bleach beneath the Aurora Borealis, eh?"

"Ha! there I have you," cries Sandie, smiling good-humouredly, for by this time he was quite used to Rory's bantering ways,--"there I have you, boy Rory; and it is with the profoundest awe and respect for everything sacred, that I remind you that the Aurora Borealis never bleached any bones; and those poor unfortunates who, in their devotion for science, have wandered towards the mystery land around the Pole, and there laid down their lives, will never, never moulder into dust, but, entombed in the green, salt ice, with the virgin snow as their winding-sheet, their bodies will rest in peace, and rest intact until the trumpet sounds."

There was a lull in the conversation at this point, but no lull in the storm; the waves dashed wildly over the s.h.i.+p, the wind roared through the rigging, the brave vessel quivered from stem to stern, as if in constant fear she might be hurled from the protection afforded by anchor and cable, and cast helpless upon the rock-bound sh.o.r.e.

A lull, broken presently by a deep sigh from Freezing Powders.

"Well, duckie?" said Polly, in sympathising tones.

"Well, Freezing Powders," said McBain, "and pray what are you sighing about?"

"What for I sigh?" repeated Freezing Powders. "Am you not afraid you'se'f, sah! You not hear de wild winds roar, and de wave make too much bobbery? 'Tis a'most enuff, sah, to make a gem'lam turn pale, sah!"

"Ha! ha?" laughed Rory; "really, it'll take a mighty big storm, Freezing Powders, to make you turn pale. But, doctor," he continued, "what say you to some music?"

"If you'll play," said the surgeon, "I'll toot."

And so the concert was begun; and the shriek of the storm spirit was drowned in mirth and melody, or, as the doctor, quoting Burns, expressed it,--

"The storm without might roar and rustle, They didna mind the storm a whustle."

But after this night of storm and tempest, what a wonderful morning it was! The sun shot up amidst the encrimsoned mountain peaks, and shone brightly down from a sky of cloudless blue. The snow was everywhere dazzling in its whiteness, and there was not a sigh of wind to raise so much as a ripple on the waters of the bay, from which every bit of ice had been blown far to sea. Wild birds screamed with joy as they wheeled in hundreds around the s.h.i.+p, while out in the bay a shoal of porpoises were disporting themselves, leaping high in air from out of the sparkling waters, and shrieking--or, as the doctor called it, "whustling"--for very joy.