Laura and her sister sat on one of the sailors’ chests that we had sent up; Johnson leaned on top of a flour or biscuit barrel that stood on end, with his eyes fixed up on the western sea. There was still a deal of bright curiosity in Laura’s face as her gaze ran over the deck, resting again and again with a sparkle in it upon some lovely fibrine form, some lily-like sea flower, some plant as of green marble; but Lady Monson’s countenance was listless and almost empty of expression. Any astonishment she might have felt was exhausted. I had scarce time after being swayed inboards to take even a swift view of this glittering miracle before she asked me in a voice cold and commanding, yet, I am bound to say, of beauty too—some of the notes soft almost as a flute’s—‘When will the men spread the sail as an awning, Mr. Morison? They should prepare for the night. Darkness speedily comes when the sun is gone, and we are without lights.’

[309]

‘The men have worked very well, Lady Monson,’ said I. ‘They will rig up a sail promptly for you, I am sure. I am not in command of them, as of course you know, but they have attended cheerfully to many of my suggestions. They were your husband’s servants, madam.’

‘And therefore mine, if you put it so,’ she answered with an angry flash of her eyes at me.

‘I have no doubt,’ said I, ‘that they will be willing to do any thing you may desire,’ and with that I stepped to the side to see what they were about, with so strong an aversion in me that I could only heartily hope it would never betray me into any more defined expression of it than mere manner might convey.

Laura came to my side as though to observe with me what the men were about, and whispered, ‘She is very trying, Mr. Monson, but bear with her. It will not need a long imprisonment of this kind to tame her.’

‘My dearest,’ said I, ‘I have not a word to say against her. My quarrel is with you.’ She stared at me. ‘I call you Laura! Again and again last night you let me tell you I loved you. By your own admission I am your sweetheart, and yet you call me Mr. Monson.’

‘Oh, I will call you Charles; I never thought of it!’ she exclaimed, blushing rosy. ‘What are the men doing?’ she exclaimed, peering as though engrossed by the movements of the seamen.

Cutbill was winding away at the shell-thickened side of the galleon with an auger; further aft stood Head similarly employed. On a line with my face as I looked down there was a finger-thick coil of water spouting out of the vessel’s side, smoking upon the rocks and streaming away in a rivulet into holes which it overflowed. I explained to Laura the fellows’ employment.

‘They have a notion,’ said I, ‘that there may be treasure contained in the hold of this old galleon, but before they can search they must empty her of the water she is full of. Below there!’ I called.

Finn looked up. ‘I see that you have bored through her,’ said I. ‘Is her side hard?’

‘As stone, sir,’ he answered. ‘The shells come away pretty easy, but her timber’s growed into regular iron.’

I asked him how many holes they were going to pierce. He answered three, that she might be draining handsomely through the night.

‘The sooner we can rig up a sail, Finn, to serve as a shelter, the better,’ I called down to him. ‘When the sun is gone there’ll be nothing to see by. The men will be wanting their supper too; then there’s that lump of a porpoise to be got out of the craft, for we don’t want to be poisoned as well as shipwrecked; and if daylight enough lives after all this,’ I continued, ‘we ought to beach high and dry as much as we can come at to-night that may be washing about out of the yacht down there, in case it should come[310] on to blow. There’s no moving on this island for the holes in it when the darkness falls.’

‘Ay, ay, sir, we’ll be with ye in a jiffy,’ he answered.

‘What think you of this marine show?’ I said to Laura.

‘It is too beautiful to believe real. The mermaids have made a garden of this ship. How lovingly, with what exquisite taste have they decorated these old decks!’

‘Happy for us,’ I exclaimed, ‘that the earthquake should have struck her fair, and brought her, beflowered and bejewelled as she is, to the surface. She is more than an asylum. She compels our attention and comes between us and our thoughts and fears.’

‘Would she float, do you think, if all the water were to be let out of her?’

‘I would not stake a kiss from you, Laura, on it, but unless she is full of petrified cargo and ocean deposit, stones, shells, and so on, I don’t see why she shouldn’t swim, though she might float deep.’

‘Imagine if we could launch her and save our lives by her!’ cried Laura, clasping her hands; then changing her voice and casting down her eyes she added: ‘I must go to Henrietta. She watches me intently. She wonders that I can smile, I dare say; and I wonder too when I think for an instant. Poor Wilfrid! poor Wilfrid! and my maid too, and the others who are lying dead in that calm sea.’

She moved away slowly towards her sister.

I looked about me for a forecastle or maindeck hatch or any signs of an entrance into the silent interior under foot, but the crust of shells and the grass and plants and vegetation concealed everything. Both the front of the poop and that of the short raised quarter-deck seemed inlaid with shells like a grotto. There was doubtless a cabin under the poop, with probably a door off the quarter-deck, and windows in the cabin front to be come at by beating and scraping. It might furnish us with a shelter, but how would it show? What apparel had the sea clothed it with? An emotion of deep awe filled and subdued me when I looked at this ship. I was sufficiently well acquainted with old types of craft to guess the century to which this vessel had belonged, and even supposing her to have been one of the very last of the ships of her particular build and shape, yet even then I might make sure that she could not be of a less age than a hundred and twenty or thirty years, so that I might safely assume that she had been resting in the motionless dark-green depths of this ocean for above a hundred years. She had been a three-masted vessel, but all traces of her mizen-mast had vanished. Her figure made one think of a tub, the sides slightly pressed in. All about her bows was so thickly encrusted with shells that it was impossible to guess the character of the structure there. I traced the outline of a beak or projection at the stem head with a hollow betwixt it and the fore part of the forecastle deck. Little more was to be gathered, for all curves and[311] outlines here were thickened into grotesque bigness of round and surface out of their original proportions and shape by deposits of shells. Indeed, the well in the head was choked with marine vegetation. It was like a square of tropic soil loaded with the eager growths of a fat and irresistible vitality, appearances as of guinea grass, wondrous imitations of tufts of rushes, beds of pink and feathering mosses, star blossoms, thickets of delicate filaments, gorgeous heads in velvet, snake-like trailings, sea-roses, dark satin masses of plants of a crimson colour, and a hundred other such things, with a subsoil of shells, whose dyes glanced through the growth in gleams of purple and orange and pearl and apple-green, in shapes of mitres, harps, volutes, and so forth.

The men now arrived on board; three holes had been pierced in the galleon’s side, and the water hissed with a refreshing sound on to the rocks, intermingled with the faint lipping of the brine that was slowly filtering down the sides from the main-deck. Finn’s first directions were to make an awning of the stay-foresail. The canvas had long ago dried out into its original whiteness, so fiery had been the heat of the sun, and so ardent the temperature of this porous island. The sail was easily spread. The stump of the foremast, as I have before said, was close into the head; the sparkling shaft served as an upright for the head of the sail to be seized to, and the wide foot of it, shelving like the roof of a house, was secured to the bows. For that night, at all events, we chose the forecastle to rest on, partly because we happened to be on it and our provisions were stocked there, and next because the main-deck was still almost awash; and then, again, there was the great porpoise to get rid of, and, in truth, until one could force an entrance into the craft it mattered little at which end of her one lay.

The sun still floated about half an hour above the sea. I had again and again looked yearningly around the firm, light-blue ocean line, but the azure circle ran flawless to either hand the wedge of dark-red gold that floated without a tremble in the dazzle of it under the sun.

‘Nothing can show in this here calm, sir,’ said Finn, as I brought my eyes away from the sea. ‘No use expecting of steam; and, what’s moved by wind ain’t going to hurry itself this weather, sir.’

‘Let’s get supper,’ said I. ‘There should be starlight enough anon, I think, Finn, to enable us to fill a couple of the empty casks with the sweetest of the water that we can find in those holes.

‘It can be managed, I dorn’t doubt,’ said he.

‘These here chests, capt’n,’ exclaimed Cutbill, indicating the three sailors’ boxes that we had hoisted aboard, ‘belonged to O’Connor, Blake, and Tom Wilkinson. How do we stand as consarns our meddling with ’em?’

‘How d’ye suppose, William?’ answered Finn. ‘Use ’em, man, use ’em.’

[312]

‘Hain’t the dead got no rights?’ inquired Dowling.

‘Ay, where there’s law, mate,’ responded Finn, with a half-grin at me; ‘but there’s no law on the top crust of an airthquake, and I allow that whatever may come to us in such a place is ourn to do what we like with.’

‘Oh, certainly,’ I cried; ‘who the deuce wants to discuss the subject of law and dead men’s rights here? Overhaul those chests, Dowling, and use whatever you want that you may find in them.’

But one saw the mariner’s prejudices in the way in which the sailors opened and inspected the contents of the boxes. Had they had the handling of a portmanteau of mine or a trunk belonging to Wilfrid they might not have shown themselves so sensitive; but these were the chests of dead shipmates and messmates, of men they had gone aloft with, eaten and drank with, skylarked and enjoyed sailors’ pleasure with, and I saw they felt that they were doing a sort of violence to forecastle traditions by handling the vanished Jacks’ little property without the sort of right to do so which on board ship they would have obtained by a sale of articles at the mast. However, they found tobacco and pipes, which went far towards reconciling them towards Finn’s theory of appropriation. They also met with shoes, which were an unspeakable comfort to Dowling and Head, who were barefooted, and in torture with every step they took from the sharp edges and points of shells. There were rude articles of clothing too, which, when dried, would give the men a shift.

Well, we got supper, and when the meal was ended, there being yet a little space of daylight in the west, Cutbill, Dowling, and Head went to the beach to roll empty water-casks near to the galleon for filling with such water as we could find that was least brackish, and to drag clear of the wash of the sea any further casks and cases of provisions, wine, and the like, which they might chance to come across. Johnson continued too feeble to be of use. We had three mattresses already as dry as if they had never touched salt water, and one of them I unrolled and made the poor creature lie upon it. Then Finn and I went about to prepare for the night whilst we could still see. We stretched the gaff foresail over the plants and shrubs, placed the other two mattresses on one side of it, covering them with a portion of the sail-cloth that the ladies might have clean couches, and made a roll of the sail at the head of these mattresses to serve as a bolster. Tough as the growth of plants on the deck was, stiff as steel as I had thought at first, they proved brittle for the most part to rough usage, and were speedily broken by our tramping and stamping so as to form a sort of mattress under the sail, and we were grateful enough when by-and-by we came to lie down for the intervention of these petals and leaves and bulbs between our bones and the flint-like surface of the shells, as barbed and jagged as though formed of scissors and thumbscrews.

The sun sank and the darkness of the evening swept over the[313] sea as swiftly as the shadow of a storm, but it proved a glorious dusk, fine, clear, glittering though dark, the sky like cloth of silver, flashful in places with a view of the cross of the southern hemisphere low down to make one contrast this heat and stillness and placid grandeur of constellations with the roaring of Cape Horn and the rush of the mountain-high surge, down upon which that divinely planted symbol was gazing with trembling eyes. Nothing sounded save the plashing of the fountains of water spouting from the sides of the galleon, and the soft, cat-like breathing of the black line of sea sliding up and down the beach.

The men had made short work of filling the casks; and leaving them where they stood for the night, had clambered afresh to the forecastle. It was now too dark to deal with the porpoise; so we agreed to let the great thing rest till the morning. I and one or two of the others had tinder-boxes, and the means therefore of procuring a light, but we were without candles or lantern. This was a hardship in the absence of the moon that rose so late as to be worthless to us and that would be a new moon presently without light; though if I thought of that it was only to hope in God’s name that the rise of the silver paring would find us safe on board some ship homeward bound.

We were unable to distinguish more of one another than the vague outlines of our figures, and this only against the stars over the crested height of bulwark, for the sail we had spread as an awning deepened the gloom; the growths on the galleon’s decks were black, and the shadows lay very thick to the height of the rail where the spangled atmosphere glistened to the edge of the stretched sail overhead. The faces of Laura and her sister showed in a dream-like glimmer. Finn and I had made a little barricade of casks, cases, and the like betwixt the mattresses on which the ladies were to lie and the other part of the forecastle, that they might enjoy the trifling privacy such an arrangement as this could furnish them with. The men formed into a group round about the mattress where Johnson lay, and lighted the pipes which they had been fortunate enough to meet with in the seamen’s chests. As they sucked hard at the bowls the glowing tobacco would cast a faint coming and going light upon their faces. They subdued their voices out of respect to us, and their tones ran along in a half-smothered growl. Much of their talk was about the yacht, her loss, their drowned mates, and the like. I sat beside Laura, with Lady Monson seated at a little distance from her sister, and we often hushed our own whispers to listen to the men. Their superstitions were stirred by their situation. This galleon lay under the stars, a huge looming mystery, vomited but a little while since from the vast depths of yonder black ocean; and now that the night had come her presence, her aspect, the stillness in her of the hushed, unconjecturable, fathomless liquid solitude out of which she had been hurled, stirred them to their souls. I could tell that by the superstitious character of their talk. They told stories of[314] their drowned shipmates’ behaviour on the preceding day—repeated remarks to which nothing but death could give the slightest significance. Johnson in a feeble voice from his mattress said that O’Connor half an hour before the yacht struck told him that he felt very uneasy, and that he’d give all he owned if there were a Roman Catholic priest on board that he might confess to him. He had led a sinful life, and he had made up his mind to give up the sea and to find work if he could in a religious house. ‘I thought it queer,’ added Johnson in accents so weak that they were painful to listen to, ‘that a chap like that there O’Connor, who was always a-bragging and a-grinning and joking, should grow troubled with his conscience all on a sudden. Never knew he was a Papish till he got lamenting that there warn’t a priest aboard to confess to.’

‘Mates,’ said Finn, whose voice sounded hollow in the darkness, ‘when death’s a-coming for a man he’ll often hail him, sometimes a good bit afore he arrives. The sperrit has ears, and it’s them that hears him, men. O’Connor had heard that hail, but only the secret parts in him onderstood it, and they set him a commiserating of himself for having lived sinfully, and started him on craving for some chap as he at all events could reckon holy, t’whom he could tell how bad he’d been. Though what good the spinning of a long yarn about his hevil ways into an old chap’s ear was going to do him, I’m not here to explain.’

Then Cutbill had something to tell of poor old Jacob Crimp, and Head of a shipmate whose name I forget. But they rumbled away presently from depressing topics into the more cheerful consideration of the contents of the galleon’s hold. I sat hand in hand with Laura listening.

‘This time yesterday,’ said I, ‘the cabin of the “Bride” was a blaze of light. I see the dinner table sparkling with glass and silver, the rich carpet, the elegant hangings, the lustrous glance of mirrors. What is there that makes life so dreamlike and unreal as the ocean? The reality of one moment is in a breath made a vision, a memory of in the next. The noble fabric of a ship melts like a snowflake, and her people vanish as utterly as though they had been transformed into spirits.’

‘Fire will destroy more completely than the ocean!’ exclaimed Lady Monson.

‘I think not,’ said I; ‘fire leaves ashes, the sea nothing.’

‘To the eye,’ said Lady Monson.

‘This time to-morrow we may be sailing home, Charles,’ said Laura.

‘Heaven grant it! Give me once more, Laura, the pavements of Piccadilly under my feet, and I believe there is no man in all England eloquent enough to persuade me that what we have undergone from the hour of our departure in the “Bride” to the hour of our return in the whatever her name may prove actually happened.’