Dan Merrithew Part 23

Before another hour had pa.s.sed, clouds began to rise from out the sea.

There came a fitful breeze, with a little hum to it. To the southeast-ward the horizon a.s.sumed a grayish-white tinge.

Dan watched it anxiously, and the girl followed his gaze and then glanced at him inquiringly.

"It's going to cloud over," he said. "There may be some deviltry before we make sh.o.r.e."

He moistened his fingers, moving them to and fro in the air.

"It isn't a storm," he said; "it is fog."

"Fog!" The girl was trembling. "What does that mean?"

"It means that for a while old ocean is going to destroy all our pretty scenery, and that it is going to be cold and nasty and disagreeable."

Already, in fact, the ocean had lost its color. Heavy blue-white clouds with shredded, filmy foundations, which seemed almost to sweep the waters, moved swiftly to the westward, while in the background the wall of mist advanced silently to encompa.s.s them. They could feel its breath, heavy, clammy, chilling.

Presently a ma.s.s of vapor, like a detached squadron of cavalry, swept about the derelict and then moved on, leaving little shredded patches hanging about the foremast.

Quite unknown to the girl, Dan, the preceding day, had constructed a raft, which he regarded as being quite as safe for ocean travelling, if not quite so comfortable, as the derelict. He had lashed supplies, a small cask of water, and the like thereon, and now, with the fog-pall gathering about, he went amids.h.i.+ps, examined it carefully, and made sure that nothing would prevent a hasty launching in event of disaster.

When he returned the murk had closed in thickly. It was as though the vessel were immured from the world. Virginia was standing at the wheel, and with the pall throwing the derelict into more sombre relief, Dan caught more strongly than ever the utter contrast which her presence brought to this abandoned hulk. Whenever she had walked along the deck it had seemed a profanation to him that the uneven planking should know her tread; that she should be on the derelict at all was, he felt, a working of Fate against everything that was beautiful and graceful.

Now, as she stood there in the pallid gloom, she suggested some tall, beautiful genius, presiding over the wrack of elemental things, facing a more glorious future.

"How shut in everything seems!" she said, as Dan took the wheel from her hands. He had a long fog-horn which he blew at intervals.

"We haven't seen a speck of a s.h.i.+p," he explained, "but now the fog is about us there's liable to be a fleet of them in our vicinity at any time. At least that has been my experience with fogs. It would not be much fun to be rammed, although in our present condition I fancy it would hurt the other vessel more than it would this."

Hour after hour they went on blindly, silently, save at such times as Dan's raucous horn blasts went tearing through the fog. The wind had died away. Sometimes the forward part of the vessel was hidden from their view. Frequently it seemed distorted; strange phantom shapes filled the deck, and the soughing of the yielding hull brought strange, uncanny sounds to their ears.

Dan was seated on the deck, his eyes peering about on all sides, trying to pierce the veil, every nerve taut, every sense alert. The girl crept close beside him, so that she touched him, and there she remained, while all the terrors of the ghostly s.h.i.+p arose to confront her. The weed-hung, slimy rails and wave-bitten deck stretched away in ever-fading perspective to the foremast where everything ended in an amorphous blur.

There came a time when the two felt almost a part of the deep--two mortals admitted into all the hidden evils that lurk thereon. Their lot to witness the inception of mighty tempests; to hear great gray waves boast of the harm they had done and the winds to plan their rending deeds. Perhaps they themselves would be called to the work, to deal to some proud vessel the death blow as so many derelicts have done.

Once far off there sounded a series of whistle blasts, hoa.r.s.e, tremulous notes of warning and inquiry. But as the two listened with straining ears the sounds became more dim. Finally they ceased altogether.

The girl eventually lost all sense of acute feeling. She sat dumb, her undeviating eyes fastened upon Dan's face, as though in him she found all that was tangible or normal or real. Her hand was resting on his shoulder now, clutching it tight; but if he knew it was there, he made no sign.

At length, toward evening, as though in a dream, Dan's voice bore upon her ears. For a moment she gazed at him dully, and then she comprehended his words.

"It is beginning to rain, Virginia. The fog will go away now."

"Oh, good!" she exclaimed.

"The wind is freshening, too," he added, "and it doesn't feel very good. I think we're going to have a blow for a change."

It seemed so. Already the mists were beginning to scuttle away before the increasing wind-rush which moaned with evil breath.

"Will you hold the wheel for a moment, please," said Dan.

As she placed her hands on the spokes he went forward and lowered the sail. There were two lines of reef points in the section of canvas and Dan took in both. When he hoisted it again there was just a patch of three-cornered sail.

Within half an hour it was raining hard. The wind was increasing slowly but surely, and the sea was rising. Dan asked the girl to go into the cabin and to remain there either until the storm was over, or he summoned her. She obeyed him partially. She went into the cabin, but returned quickly with two slickers.

"Do you suppose," she cried, "I am going to let you be alone now? I am going to help you, and, if it must be, to die with you. I am not a bit afraid any more."

Dan placed his hand on her arm.

"Get down here, then, under the lee of this cabin. We are not going to die. At least not yet a while."

So the storm came. With his patch of sail Dan had headed the craft up into the wind; and thus, with the boat already beginning to rise and fall, with the broad bow groaning, and oozing ends of planking, and dirty water, and the deck, contracting and expanding like the belly of a stricken whale, he settled down to the long fight.

The fog had all departed now. North, east, south, and west, nothing but the gray of onrus.h.i.+ng waves and a shrouded sky as implacable as the morning of doom. Darkness was falling swiftly. Soon the terrible night began.

Not that it was the worst storm in which Dan had ever been, but certainly he had never faced North Atlantic tumult under such a disadvantage, under conditions so desperately precarious. The bow rose but heavily to the seas, and never topped them. The water rus.h.i.+ng over, poured down the deck in mill-races, filling it to the rails, occasionally springing up over the p.o.o.p and the top of the after cabin, las.h.i.+ng the faces of the two crouching at the wheel behind it.

"It's a sou'easter, I'm almost certain," roared Dan in the girl's ear.

"It will work up to a climax gradually, and then gradually go down, at this season of the year. Don't be afraid of the water. We can't sink, I believe; the only danger is that we might break up--and we won't do that."

But despite the optimism of his words, Dan was not altogether certain that the wallowing wreck would hold together. There was nothing to do but wait and see. The situation he grasped in all its grievous details. He had never been so happy, so utterly at peace as aboard this derelict. No gilded barge of antiquity had ever been so glorious, so golden as this mangled wraith of the seas in the sunlit hours of the immediate past. Her voice, her laughter, had filled them with music, her presence with all the poetry and romance of the world, and the light in her eyes s.h.i.+ning for him alone had filled him with a great tenderness.

Now, the night, the storm, danger--death, perhaps. He shut his jaws and drove the flooding thoughts from his mind. Anger,--the anger of bereavement,--filled him, and he glared into the tempest and twisted the wheel as though combating a sentient adversary.

An hour pa.s.sed, Cimmerian blackness had fallen. The waves came savagely, ill-defined ma.s.ses let loose from a viewless limbo to work their harm. Sometimes they caught the dull gray flash of breaking waters, but more often everything was hidden. The roar of the wind and wave was incessant.

Dan's efforts to keep the derelict's head to the seas had failed. The hulk had slued around and was driving before the tempest, whither he did not know. Groaning, cras.h.i.+ng, crackling, the hulk lumbered on.

Once a wave leaped over the stern, stunning them with its thunderous impact, dragging at them powerfully, as though to draw them back into the sea whence it came.

Plunging thus, helpless, unseeing, they seemed to be flying as swiftly as the wind. A wild ride--to where? Were they driving out into the lonely heart of the deep, there to perish in a last long dive? Or was it sh.o.r.eward, with oblivion coming in the dreadful grinding and cras.h.i.+ng and shattering of timbers?

Neither had the heart for even a faint hope for safety; and yet Dan, with his hands stiffened on the wheel spokes, fought on. The girl, with her head bowed, sat still, her hands clinging to his shoulders.

They did not speak. Twice Dan had attempted to utter a cheering word, but the wind had swept the sounds from his lips.

Both knew that at any moment the derelict might succ.u.mb to the forces striving to destroy her. And, as they sat waiting, the realization came to both what a small part of the incidents of this heaving night the dismemberment of their was.h.i.+ng vessel would be. In the vortex of the riot, when the heavens and the ocean seemed united in the creation of chaos, they sensed the littleness of their own lives and the vanity of their affairs.

As a thunderous roar of wind smote the vessel Dan felt the pressure of Virginia's hand on his shoulder suddenly tighten. He turned to her, and through the darkness caught the vague outlines of her face, which was fixed on the faint blur which marked the forward part of the hulk.

His eyes followed just as her fingers loosened their grasp. He saw nothing save the dull flash of swirling waters and the amorphous blotch of hull. Slowly her hand tightened again; and then, as he looked he caught above the deck an impression of something moving. It seemed to be something that was revealing itself to the instinct rather than to their visual senses.

As the wind pa.s.sed on, leaving that confused murmur, broken only by the dogged rush of waters, Virginia spoke to Dan with trembling voice.

"What is it?"

Dan's eyes were still staring forward. He spoke through his clenched teeth.

"Wait a moment." More accustomed to the gloom ahead he was able to determine that the sail had torn from the boom and was waving out from the shattered mast-top like a flag. The mast itself seemed to be reeling. Was the hull opening and disintegrating?

Almost without volition he half arose to his feet. The girl followed his action, still clinging to his shoulder. Dan inclined his head to speak to her, when with a shriek the wind came again. There was a dull crash forward, a splintering and rearing of wood, a quivering of the entire hull; and then, as though hurled by a giant hand, a huge section of wood, whether a part of cargo or hull Dan could not tell, shot out of the night, cras.h.i.+ng a hole in the roof of the cabin behind which they were crouching, and then bounded over their heads into the sea.