An Oldport Romance
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson >> An Oldport Romance
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The youth simpered and disclaimed.
"Jump in, then, Miss Maxwell. Never mind the expense. It's
only the family carriage;--surname and arms of Jones. Lucky
there are no parents to the fore. Put my shawl over you, so."
"O Blanche!" said Hope, "what injustice--"
"I've done myself?" said the volatile damsel. "Not a doubt of
it. That's my style, you know. But I have some sense; I know
who's who. Now, Jones, junior, make your man handle the
ribbons. I've always had a grudge against that ordinance about
fast driving, and now's our chance."
And the sacred "ordinance," with all other proprieties, was
left in ruins that day. They tore along the Avenue with
unexplained and most inexplicable speed, Hope being concealed
by riding backward, and by a large shawl, and Blanche and her
admirer receiving the full indignation of every chaste and
venerable eye. Those who had tolerated all this girl's previous
improprieties were obliged to admit that the line must be drawn
somewhere. She at once lost several good invitations and a
matrimonial offer, since Jones, junior, was swept away by his
parents to be wedded without delay to a consumptive heiress who
had long pined for his whiskers; and Count Posen, in his
Souvenirs, was severer on Blanche's one good deed than on the
worst of her follies.
A few years after, when Blanche, then the fearless wife of a
regular-army officer, was helping Hope in the hospitals at
Norfolk, she would stop to shout with delight over the
reminiscence of that stately Jones equipage in mad career, amid
the barking of dogs and the groaning of dowagers. "After all,
Hope," she would say, "the fastest thing I ever did was under
your orders."
XXI.
A STORM.
THE members of the household were all at the window about noon,
next day, watching the rise of a storm. A murky wing of cloud,
shaped like a hawk's, hung over the low western hills across
the bay. Then the hawk became an eagle, and the eagle a
gigantic phantom, that hovered over half the visible sky.
Beneath it, a little scud of vapor, moved by some cross-current
of air, raced rapidly against the wind, just above the horizon,
like smoke from a battle-field.
As the cloud ascended, the water grew rapidly blacker, and in
half an hour broke into jets of white foam, all over its
surface, with an angry look. Meantime a white film of fog
spread down the bay from the northward. The wind hauled from
southwest to northwest, so suddenly and strongly that all the
anchored boats seemed to have swung round instantaneously,
without visible process. The instant the wind shifted, the
rain broke forth, filling the air in a moment with its volume,
and cutting so sharply that it seemed like hail, though no
hailstones reached the ground. At the same time there rose upon
the water a dense white film, which seemed to grow together
from a hundred different directions, and was made partly of
rain, and partly of the blown edges of the spray. There was but
a glimpse of this; for in a few moments it was impossible to
see two rods; but when the first gust was over, the water
showed itself again, the jets of spray all beaten down, and
regular waves, of dull lead-color, breaking higher on the
shore. All the depth of blackness had left the sky, and there
remained only an obscure and ominous gray, through which the
lightning flashed white, not red. Boats came driving in from
the mouth of the bay with a rag of sail up; the men got them
moored with difficulty, and when they sculled ashore in the
skiffs, a dozen comrades stood ready to grasp and haul them in.
Others launched skiffs in sheltered places, and pulled out
bareheaded to bail out their fishing-boats and keep them from
swamping at their moorings.
The shore was thronged with men in oilskin clothes and by women
with shawls over their heads. Aunt Jane, who always felt
responsible for whatever went on in the elements, sat in-doors
with one lid closed, wincing at every flash, and watching the
universe with the air of a coachman guiding six wild horses.
Just after the storm had passed its height, two veritable wild
horses were reined up at the door, and Philip burst in, his
usual self-composure gone.
"Emilia is out sailing!" he exclaimed,--"alone with Lambert's
boatman, in this gale. They say she was bound for
Narragansett."
"Impossible!" cried Hope, turning pale. "I left her not three
hours ago." Then she remembered that Emilia had spoken of going
on board the yacht, to superintend some arrangements, but had
said no more about it, when she opposed it.
"Harry!" said Aunt Jane, quickly, from her chair by the window,
"see that fisherman. He has just come ashore and is telling
something. Ask him."
The fisherman had indeed seen Lambert's boat, which was well
known. Something seemed to be the matter with the sail, but
before the storm struck her, it had been hauled down. They
must have taken in water enough, as it was. He had himself
been obliged to bail out three times, running in from the reef.
"Was there any landing which they could reach?" Harry asked.
There was none,--but the light-ship lay right in their track,
and if they had good luck, they might get aboard of her.
"The boatman?" said Philip, anxiously,--"Mr. Lambert's boatman;
is he a good sailor?"
"Don't know," was the reply. "Stranger here. Dutchman,
Frenchman, Portegee, or some kind of a foreigner."
"Seems to understand himself in a boat," said another.
"Mr. Malbone knows him," said a third. "The same that dove
with the young woman under the steamboat paddles."
"Good grit," said the first.
"That's so," was the answer. "But grit don't teach a man the
channel."
All agreed to this axiom; but as there was so strong a
probability that the voyagers had reached the light-ship, there
seemed less cause for fear.
The next question was, whether it was possible to follow them.
All agreed that it would be foolish for any boat to attempt it,
till the wind had blown itself out, which might be within half
an hour. After that, some predicted a calm, some a fog, some a
renewal of the storm; there was the usual variety of opinions.
At any rate, there might perhaps be an interval during which
they could go out, if the gentlemen did not mind a wet jacket.
Within the half-hour came indeed an interval of calm, and a
light shone behind the clouds from the west. It faded soon
into a gray fog, with puffs of wind from the southwest again.
When the young men went out with the boatmen, the water had
grown more quiet, save where angry little gusts ruffled it. But
these gusts made it necessary to carry a double reef, and they
made but little progress against wind and tide.
A dark-gray fog, broken by frequent wind-flaws, makes the
ugliest of all days on the water. A still, pale fog is
soothing; it lulls nature to a kind of repose. But a windy fog
with occasional sunbeams and sudden films of metallic blue
breaking the leaden water,--this carries an impression of
something weird and treacherous in the universe, and suggests
caution.
As the boat floated on, every sight and sound appeared strange.
The music from the fort came sudden and startling through the
vaporous eddies. A tall white schooner rose instantaneously
near them, like a light-house. They could see the steam of the
factory floating low, seeking some outlet between cloud and
water. As they drifted past a wharf, the great black piles of
coal hung high and gloomy; then a stray sunbeam brought out
their peacock colors; then came the fog again, driving
hurriedly by, as if impatient to go somewhere and enraged at
the obstacle. It seemed to have a vast inorganic life of its
own, a volition and a whim. It drew itself across the horizon
like a curtain; then advanced in trampling armies up the bay;
then marched in masses northward; then suddenly grew thin, and
showed great spaces of sunlight; then drifted across the low
islands, like long tufts of wool; then rolled itself away
toward the horizon; then closed in again, pitiless and gray.
Suddenly something vast towered amid the mist above them. It
was the French war-ship returned to her anchorage once more,
and seeming in that dim atmosphere to be something spectral and
strange that had taken form out of the elements. The muzzles of
great guns rose tier above tier, along her side; great boats
hung one above another, on successive pairs of davits, at her
stern. So high was her hull, that the topmost boat and the
topmost gun appeared to be suspended in middle air; and yet
this was but the beginning of her altitude. Above these were
the heavy masts, seen dimly through the mist; between these
were spread eight dark lines of sailors' clothes, which, with
the massive yards above, looked like part of some ponderous
framework built to reach the sky. This prolongation of the
whole dark mass toward the heavens had a portentous look to
those who gazed from below; and when the denser fog sometimes
furled itself away from the topgallant masts, hitherto
invisible, and showed them rising loftier yet, and the tricolor
at the mizzen-mast-head looking down as if from the zenith,
then they all seemed to appertain to something of more than
human workmanship; a hundred wild tales of phantom vessels came
up to the imagination, and it was as if that one gigantic
structure were expanding to fill all space from sky to sea.
They were swept past it; the fog closed in; it was necessary to
land near the Fort, and proceed on foot. They walked across the
rough peninsula, while the mist began to disperse again, and
they were buoyant with expectation. As they toiled onward, the
fog suddenly met them at the turn of a lane where it had
awaited them, like an enemy. As they passed into those gray and
impalpable arms, the whole world changed again.
They walked toward the sound of the sea. As they approached
it, the dull hue that lay upon it resembled that of the leaden
sky. The two elements could hardly be distinguished except as
the white outlines of the successive breakers were lifted
through the fog. The lines of surf appeared constantly to
multiply upon the beach, and yet, on counting them, there were
never any more. Sometimes, in the distance, masses of foam rose
up like a wall where the horizon ought to be; and, as the
coming waves took form out of the unseen, it seemed as if no
phantom were too vast or shapeless to come rolling in upon
their dusky shoulders.
Presently a frail gleam of something like the ghost of dead
sunshine made them look toward the west. Above the dim roofs
of Castle Hill mansion-house, the sinking sun showed luridly
through two rifts of cloud, and then the swift motion of the
nearer vapor veiled both sun and cloud, and banished them into
almost equal remoteness.
Leaving the beach on their right, and passing the high rocks of
the Pirate's Cave, they presently descended to the water's edge
once more. The cliffs rose to a distorted height in the
dimness; sprays of withered grass nodded along the edge, like
Ossian's spectres. Light seemed to be vanishing from the
universe, leaving them alone with the sea. And when a solitary
loon uttered his wild cry, and rising, sped away into the
distance, it was as if life were following light into an equal
annihilation. That sense of vague terror, with which the ocean
sometimes controls the fancy, began to lay its grasp on them.
They remembered that Emilia, in speaking once of her intense
shrinking from death, had said that the sea was the only thing
from which she would not fear to meet it.
Fog exaggerates both for eye and ear; it is always a
sounding-board for the billows; and in this case, as often
happens, the roar did not appear to proceed from the waves
themselves, but from some source in the unseen horizon, as if
the spectators were shut within a beleaguered fortress, and
this thundering noise came from an impetuous enemy outside.
Ever and anon there was a distinct crash of heavier sound, as
if some special barricade had at length been beaten in, and the
garrison must look to their inner defences.
The tide was unusually high, and scarcely receded with the ebb,
though the surf increased; the waves came in with constant rush
and wail, and with an ominous rattle of pebbles on the little
beaches, beneath the powerful suction of the undertow; and
there were more and more of those muffled throbs along the
shore which tell of coming danger as plainly as minute-guns.
With these came mingled that yet more inexplicable humming
which one hears at intervals in such times, like strains of
music caught and tangled in the currents of stormy
air,--strains which were perhaps the filmy thread on which
tales of sirens and mermaids were first strung, and in which,
at this time, they would fain recognize the voice of Emilia.
XXII.
OUT OF THE DEPTHS.
AS the night closed in, the wind rose steadily, still blowing
from the southwest. In Brenton's kitchen they found a group
round a great fire of driftwood; some of these were fishermen
who had with difficulty made a landing on the beach, and who
confirmed the accounts already given. The boat had been seen
sailing for the Narragansett shore, and when the squall came,
the boatman had lowered and reefed the sail, and stood for the
light-ship. They must be on board of her, if anywhere.
"There are safe there?" asked Philip, eagerly.
"Only place where they would be safe, then," said the
spokesman.
"Unless the light-ship parts," said an old fellow.
"Parts!" said the other. "Sixty fathom of two-inch chain, and
old Joe talks about parting."
"Foolish, of course," said Philip; "but it's a dangerous
shore."
"That's so," was the answer. "Never saw so many lines of reef
show outside, neither."
"There's an old saying on this shore," said Joe:--
"When Price's Neck goes to Brenton's Reef,
Body and soul will come to grief.
But when Brenton's Reef comes to Price's Neck,
Soul and body are both a wreck."
"What does it mean?" asked Harry.
"It only means," said somebody, "that when you see it white all
the way out from the Neck to the Reef, you can't take the
inside passage."
"But what does the last half mean?" persisted Harry.
"Don't know as I know," said the veteran, and relapsed into
silence, in which all joined him, while the wind howled and
whistled outside, and the barred windows shook.
Weary and restless with vain waiting, they looked from the
doorway at the weather. The door went back with a slam, and
the gust swooped down on them with that special blast that
always seems to linger just outside on such nights, ready for
the first head that shows itself. They closed the door upon
the flickering fire and the uncouth shadows within, and went
forth into the night. At first the solid blackness seemed to
lay a weight on their foreheads. There was absolutely nothing
to be seen but the two lights of the light-ship, glaring from
the dark sea like a wolf's eyes from a cavern. They looked
nearer and brighter than in ordinary nights, and appeared to
the excited senses of the young men to dance strangely on the
waves, and to be always opposite to them, as they moved along
the shore with the wind almost at their backs.
"What did that old fellow mean?" said Malbone in Harry's ear,
as they came to a protected place and could hear each other,
"by talking of Brenton's Reef coming to Price's Neck."
"Some sailor's doggerel," said Harry, indifferently. "Here is
Price's Neck before us, and yonder is Brenton's Reef."
"Where?" said Philip, looking round bewildered.
The lights had gone, as if the wolf, weary of watching, had
suddenly closed his eyes, and slumbered in his cave.
Harry trembled and shivered. In Heaven's name, what could this
disappearance mean?
Suddenly a sheet of lightning came, so white and intense, it
sent its light all the way out to the horizon and exhibited
far-off vessels, that reeled and tossed and looked as if
wandering without a guide. But this was not so startling as
what it showed in the foreground.
There drifted heavily upon the waves, within full view from the
shore, moving parallel to it, yet gradually approaching, an
uncouth shape that seemed a vessel and yet not a vessel; two
stunted masts projected above, and below there could be read,
in dark letters that apparently swayed and trembled in the wan
lightning, as the thing moved on,
BRENTON'S REEF.
Philip, leaning against a rock, gazed into the darkness where
the apparition had been; even Harry felt a thrill of
half-superstitious wonder, and listened half mechanically to a
rough sailor's voice at his ear:--
"God! old Joe was right. There's one wreck that is bound to
make many. The light-ship has parted."
"Drifting ashore," said Harry, his accustomed clearness of head
coming back at a flash. "Where will she strike?"
"Price's Neck," said the sailor.
Harry turned to Philip and spoke to him, shouting in his ear
the explanation. Malbone's lips moved mechanically, but he said
nothing. Passively, he let Harry take him by the arm, and lead
him on.
Following the sailor, they rounded a projecting point, and
found themselves a little sheltered from the wind. Not knowing
the region, they stumbled about among the rocks, and scarcely
knew when they neared the surf, except when a wave came
swashing round their very feet. Pausing at the end of a cove,
they stood beside their conductor, and their eyes, now grown
accustomed, could make out vaguely the outlines of the waves.
The throat of the cove was so shoal and narrow, and the mass of
the waves so great, that they reared their heads enormously,
just outside, and spending their strength there, left a lower
level within the cove. Yet sometimes a series of great billows
would come straight on, heading directly for the entrance, and
then the surface of the water within was seen to swell suddenly
upward as if by a terrible inward magic of its own; it rose and
rose, as if it would ingulf everything; then as rapidly sank,
and again presented a mere quiet vestibule before the excluded
waves.
They saw in glimpses, as the lightning flashed, the shingly
beach, covered with a mass of creamy foam, all tremulous and
fluctuating in the wind; and this foam was constantly torn away
by the gale in great shreds, that whirled by them as if the
very fragments of the ocean were fleeing from it in terror, to
take refuge in the less frightful element of air.
Still the wild waves reared their heads, like savage, crested
animals, now white, now black, looking in from the entrance of
the cove. And now there silently drifted upon them something
higher, vaster, darker than themselves,--the doomed vessel. It
was strange how slowly and steadily she swept in,--for her
broken chain-cable dragged, as it afterwards proved, and kept
her stern-on to the shore,--and they could sometimes hear amid
the tumult a groan that seemed to come from the very heart of
the earth, as she painfully drew her keel over hidden reefs.
Over five of these (as was afterwards found) she had already
drifted, and she rose and fell more than once on the high waves
at the very mouth of the cove, like a wild bird hovering ere it
pounces.
Then there came one of those great confluences of waves
described already, which, lifting her bodily upward, higher and
higher and higher, suddenly rushed with her into the basin,
filling it like an opened dry-dock, crashing and roaring round
the vessel and upon the rocks, then sweeping out again and
leaving her lodged, still stately and steady, at the centre of
the cove.
They could hear from the crew a mingled sound, that came as a
shout of excitement from some and a shriek of despair from
others. The vivid lightning revealed for a moment those on
shipboard to those on shore; and blinding as it was, it lasted
long enough to show figures gesticulating and pointing. The old
sailor, Mitchell, tried to build a fire among the rocks nearest
the vessel, but it was impossible, because of the wind. This
was a disappointment, for the light would have taken away half
the danger, and more than half the terror. Though the cove was
more quiet than the ocean, yet it was fearful enough, even
there. The vessel might hold together till morning, but who
could tell? It was almost certain that those on board would try
to land, and there was nothing to do but to await the effort.
The men from the farmhouse had meanwhile come down with ropes.
It was simply impossible to judge with any accuracy of the
distance of the ship. One of these new-comers, who declared
that she was lodged very near, went to a point of rocks, and
shouted to those on board to heave him a rope. The tempest
suppressed his voice, as it had put out the fire. But perhaps
the lightning had showed him to the dark figures on the stern;
for when the next flash came, they saw a rope flung, which fell
short. The real distance was more than a hundred yards.
Then there was a long interval of darkness. The moment the
next flash came they saw a figure let down by a rope from the
stern of the vessel, while the hungry waves reared like wolves
to seize it. Everybody crowded down to the nearest rocks,
looking this way and that for a head to appear. They pressed
eagerly in every direction where a bit of plank or a
barrel-head floated; they fancied faint cries here and there,
and went aimlessly to and fro. A new effort, after half a dozen
failures, sent a blaze mounting up fitfully among the rocks,
startling all with the sudden change its blessed splendor made.
Then a shrill shout from one of the watchers summoned all to a
cleft in the cove, half shaded from the firelight, where there
came rolling in amidst the surf, more dead than alive, the body
of a man. He was the young foreigner, John Lambert's boatman.
He bore still around him the rope that was to save the rest.
How pale and eager their faces looked as they bent above him!
But the eagerness was all gone from his, and only the pallor
left. While the fishermen got the tackle rigged, such as it
was, to complete the communication with the vessel, the young
men worked upon the boatman, and soon had him restored to
consciousness. He was able to explain that the ship had been
severely strained, and that all on board believed she would go
to pieces before morning. No one would risk being the first to
take the water, and he had at last volunteered, as being the
best swimmer, on condition that Emilia should be next sent,
when the communication was established.
Two ropes were then hauled on board the vessel, a larger and a
smaller. By the flickering firelight and the rarer flashes of
lightning (the rain now falling in torrents) they saw a hammock
slung to the larger rope; a woman's form was swathed in it; and
the smaller rope being made fast to this, they found by pulling
that she could be drawn towards the shore. Those on board
steadied the hammock as it was lowered from the ship, but the
waves seemed maddened by this effort to escape their might, and
they leaped up at her again and again. The rope dropped beneath
her weight, and all that could be done from shore was to haul
her in as fast as possible, to abbreviate the period of
buffeting and suffocation. As she neared the rocks she could be
kept more safe from the water; faster and faster she was drawn
in; sometimes there came some hitch and stoppage, but by steady
patience it was overcome.
She was so near the rocks that hands were already stretched to
grasp her, when there came one of the great surging waves that
sometimes filled the basin. It gave a terrible lurch to the
stranded vessel hitherto so erect; the larger rope snapped
instantly; the guiding rope was twitched from the hands that
held it; and the canvas that held Emilia was caught and swept
away like a shred of foam, and lost amid the whiteness of the
seething froth below. Fifteen minutes after, the hammock came
ashore empty, the lashings having parted.
The cold daybreak was just opening, though the wind still blew
keenly, when they found the body of Emilia. It was swathed in
a roll of sea-weed, lying in the edge of the surf, on a broad,
flat rock near where the young boatman had come ashore. The
face was not disfigured; the clothing was only torn a little,
and tangled closely round her; but the life was gone.
It was Philip who first saw her; and he stood beside her for a
moment motionless, stunned into an aspect of tranquility.
This, then, was the end. All his ready sympathy, his wooing
tenderness, his winning compliances, his self-indulgent
softness, his perilous amiability, his reluctance to give pain
or to see sorrow,--all had ended in this. For once, he must
force even his accommodating and evasive nature to meet the
plain, blank truth. Now all his characteristics appeared
changed by the encounter; it was Harry who was ready,
thoughtful, attentive,--while Philip, who usually had all these
traits, was paralyzed among his dreams. Could he have fancied
such a scene beforehand, he would have vowed that no hand but
his should touch the breathless form of Emilia. As it was, he
instinctively made way for the quick gathering of the others,
as if almost any one else had a better right to be there.
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