I woke from a deep sleep, and opened my eyes against the glare of the risen sun. Death must be like such sleep as that, thought I. I sat up and met Laura’s gaze fixed upon me. She was seated on a seaman’s chest lightly smoothing her hair, and the jewels on her fingers sparkled like dewdrops on the golden fall of her tresses. She looked the better for the night’s rest, her complexion fresher, her eyes freed of the delicate haziness that had yesterday somewhat dimmed their rich violet sparkles; the pale greenish shadow under them, too, was gone. A little past her stood Lady Monson, gazing seawards under the shelter of her hand. Her shape made a very noble figure of a woman against the blue brilliance of atmosphere betwixt the edge of the spread sail and the forecastle rail; the cap she wore I supposed she had found in her sister’s box. Her hair was extraordinarily thick and long and of a lustreless black, and looked a very thunder-cloud upon her back, as I have before said; it put a wild and almost savage spirit into her beauty, which this slender headgear of lace or whatnot somewhat qualified; in fact, she looked a civilised woman with that cap on, but her cheeks were so white as to be painful to see. The full life of her seemed to have entered her eyes; her breast rose and fell slowly, as if her heart beat with labour; yet, slow as every movement in her was, whether in the turn of her head, the droop of her arm, the lifting of her hand, it was in exquisite correspondence with the suggestion of cold dignity and haughty indifference you seemed to find in her form and carriage.
I had a short chat with Laura, and found she had rested well. The men were off the galleon.
‘They have gone to the wreck, I suppose,’ said I, scarce able to see that way, however, for the blinding dazzle of sunshine that made the leagues of eastern ocean as insupportable to the gaze as the luminary himself.
‘The poor man Johnson is dead!’ she exclaimed.
‘Ah! I feared it. I believed I could hear death in his voice when he spoke in his sleep last night.’
‘Cutbill and Head,’ she continued, for she was now well[322] acquainted with the names of the men, ‘have carried his body to bury in the sea past that slope there.’
I sat silent a little. I had all along secretly expected that the man would die, yet the news that he was dead strangely affected me. It might be because he had been amongst the saved, and it seemed hard and cruel that he should perish after having come off with his life out of a conflict that had destroyed robuster men. Then again there was the loneliness of his death, expiring, perhaps, after vainly struggling to make some whispered wants audible to our sleeping ears or to the nodding figure standing at a distance from him on the look-out.
I sent a look round the sea, compassing the blue line as fully as the blaze would permit. The calm was as dead as it had been throughout the night. In the west the heads of a few clouds of the burning hue of polished brass showed with a stare out of a dimness over the sea there. There was bitter loathing of all this deadness and tranquillity in me as I stepped to the side for a sight of Finn down on the beach. What phantom of chance was there for us unless a breeze blew? Dowling was at work below winding with his auger into the galleon’s side. He had made two further holes to starboard, and was now piercing a third.
‘There ain’t anything like the first weight of water in her now, sir,’ he sung out; ‘see how languid these here spurts are as compared to yesterday’s spouting.’
I overhauled the whip that was rove at the end of the derrick, secured the end, and went down hand over hand. My skin felt parched and feverish and thirsty for a dip. ‘I’m off for a plunge,’ I called to Laura, who came to the side to look at me as I slipped down. I found Finn exploring amongst the wreckage on the shore; Cutbill and Head were then coming round from the other side of the island, their heads hung and their feet taking the pumice rocks with funeral strides.
‘How are you, Finn?’ I called to him.
‘Thank God, I feel myself again. The pain in my side’s gone, and my breath comes easy. Poor Johnson’s dead.’
‘I know.’
‘Something whilst he was in the water struck agin his heart. But arter all, sir, what does it matter, since a man can die but once, where he takes his header from?’
‘We must suffer nothing to depress us, Finn. Good morning, Cutbill. How are you, Head? A sad job for sunrise to turn you to, men.’
‘Poor Sammy!’ exclaimed Cutbill in a deep sea growl full of emotion, and a slight lift of his face, smothered in whiskers, to the sky. ‘He’s been hailed for the last time. He’s gone where there’s no more tarning out.’
‘He’s lived hard, worked hard, and died hard,’ said Head, bringing his eyes in a squint to my face, ‘and it would be hard if he’s gone to hell arter all.’
[323]
‘Stow all sarmons,’ cried Finn; ‘let’s see now if there’s anything come ashore worth having.’
I left them wading and searching, and trudging to the other side of the island, stripped, and advanced into the water to the height of my hips, not daring to venture further for fear of sharks. The plunge made a new man of me, and when I returned it was with a good appetite and a hearty disposition to help in any sort of work that might advantage us. The men met with a barrel of pork and another case of potted meats. The water was as pure and bright as glass over the shelving beach, and what lay near to on the fluctuating sulphur-coloured bottom was as plain as though viewed through air. We were thus enabled to rescue much of what in thick water we should never have seen; amongst other matters, three cases of champagne, a case of bottled beer, a small cask of brandy, and one or two other articles which had formed a portion of the forecastle stores, not to mention many armsful of stuff for making flares with, should a vessel show in the night. Of the cabin provisions we recovered but little, owing to their having been stowed aft for the most part, where the yacht had been literally torn to pieces. The bows of the vessel stood gaunt and bare in the light-blue water. I saw poor Finn gazing at the remains until his eyes moistened, and he broke away with a deep sigh and a dreary look at me. I never could have imagined that anything inanimate could have appealed so humanly as that mutilated fragment of a fabric that but a little while before shone as sweet and stately a figure upon the sea as any structure of her size that ever lifted a snow-white spire to the sky.
It was after ten o’clock, as was to be guessed by the sun’s height, when we started to break into the interior of the galleon. We had worked hard since sunrise; filled another brace of empty casks, which we had found on the beach, with water out of the holes in the rocks; hoisted these casks aboard along with the other provisions and spirits we had fallen in with; got our breakfast; then with prodigious labour and difficulty had turned the great dead porpoise out of the ship by clapping tackles to it and prizing it up with a small studding-sail boom that served as a handspike. The main-deck was now as dry as the poop or forecastle. Lady Monson remained seated under the awning. Laura, on the other hand, with a handkerchief tied over her head, reckless of her complexion, wandered like a child about the decks, examining the many gorgeous sea-plants, bending her fair face to an iridescent cluster of shells, gazing with rounded eyes and an expression of charming wonder at some flat, flint-coloured, snake-like creeper as if she believed it lived. The wondrous marine parterre seemed the richer for the presence and movements of the lustrous-haired girl, as a rose appears to glow into darker and finer beauty when lifted to some lovely face.
We resolved to attack the cabin entrance first, but it was hard to tell where the door lay, whether in the front of the poop or of[324] the quarter-deck. There were steps leading from one deck to the other on either hand close against the bulwarks, as you easily guessed by the incline and appearance of the thick moulding of shells upon them. Cutbill was for attacking the quarter-deck front, but Finn agreed with me that the state cabin would lie under the poop, and that the door to it, therefore, would be somewhere in the front of that deck. To this part, then, we carried the tool-chest. There were five of us; every man seized an implement and to it we fell, scraping, hammering, chipping, prizing. Dowling and Head worked as though they had already caught sight of the glitter of precious metal within. Some of the shelly adhesions were hard as rock, some broke away easily in lumps, like bricks from a house that is being demolished; but the thickness was staggering, it was a growth of layer upon layer, and every man had a great mound of splintered or concreted shells at his feet when the front at which we worked was still heavily coated. There seemed a sort of sacrilege in the destruction of so much beauty. Again and again I would pause to admire a shape of exquisite grace, a form of glorious hue, before striking; and then it seemed to me as I toiled, many fancies crowding into my head now that I looked close into this glorious incrustation, that it was impossible this galleon could have been sunk to the depth I had first imagined. Surely no such rainbow-like life as I now witnessed existed in the black and tideless depths, countless fathoms out of reach of the longest and fiercest lance of light the sun could dart. No, she had probably settled down on some hilltop within measurable distance of the surface, on some submarine volcanic eminence where the vitality of the deep was all about her.
We came to woodwork at last, or what had been wood. It was fossilised timber, and the blows of a hammer rang upon it as though an anvil was struck.
‘Here’s where the door is,’ roared Cutbill.
We saw the line of what was manifestly a doorway showing in a space clear of shells, and in a moment we all fell upon it and presently laid it bare—a little door about five feet high close against the starboard heap of shells which buried the poop ladder there.
‘Don’t smash it if ’ee can help it,’ called out Finn.
But it would not yield to any sort of coaxing short of Cutbill’s thunderous hammer, which he swung with such Herculean muscle, that after half a dozen blows the door went to pieces and tumbled down with a clatter as of the fragments of iron. It was pitch dark inside, of course, but for that we were prepared. Dowling and Head were for thrusting in at once.
‘Back!’ bawled Finn. ‘What sort of air for breathing d’ye think this is after being bottled up afore your great-grandmothers was born.’
Yet for my part, though I stood close, I tasted nothing foul. The first breath of the black atmosphere came out with a wintry[325] edge of ice, and the chill of it went sifting into the sultry daylight of the open air till I saw Laura, who stood some little distance away watching us, recoil from the contact of it.
‘There’s nothing to be done in there without a light of some kind,’ said I. ‘How was this cabin illuminated? From the deck, I presume, as well as by portholes.’
‘Let me go and see, sir,’ said Finn.
The gang of us armed with tools crawled up the line of shells against the door and gained the poop-deck. There was a coffin-shaped heap of glittering incrustation close to where the mizzen-mast had probably stood; the form of it indicated a buried skylight. We fell upon it, and after we had chipped and hammered for some quarter of an hour, the mass of it broke away, and went thundering into the cabin below. The sweep of cold air that rose drove us back.
‘Casements of this skylight were blown out, I reckon, when she settled,’ said Finn; ‘’stonishing how them shells should have filled up the cavity without anything to settle on.’
‘Weeds and plants stretched themselves across, maybe,’ said I, ‘and made a platform for them.’
We returned to the quarter-deck but waited awhile before entering the cabin, that the atmosphere might have time to sweeten. Thickly as the upper works of the vessel were coated I suspected that they would be sieve-like in some places from the circumstance of our finding no water in the cabin. I put my head into the door, fetched a breath, and finding nothing noxious in the atmosphere, exclaimed, ‘We may enter now with safety, I believe.’ The interior lay very clearly revealed. A sunbeam shone through the deck aperture, and the cold, drowned, amazing interior lay bathed in a delicate silver haze of the morning light. I felt a deeper awe as I stood looking about me than any vault in which the dead had been lying for centuries could have inspired. The hue of the walls was that of ashes. It was the ancient living-room of the ship and went the whole width of her, and in length ran from the front of the deck through which we had broken our way to the moulding of the castle-like pink-shaped stern, the planks sloping with a considerable spring or rise. It had been a spacious sea-chamber in its day. There were here and there incrustations in patches of limpet-like shells upon the sides and upper deck; under foot was a deal of sand with dead weeds, no hint of the vegetation that showed without. There were fragments of wreckage here and there which I took to be the remains of the furniture of the place; it had mostly washed aft, as though the vessel had settled by the stern.
Up in a corner on the port side that lay somewhat darksome, on a line with the door, were a couple of skeletons with their arms round each other’s neck. They seemed to stand erect, but in fact they rested with a slight inclination against the scantling of the cabin front. Some slender remains of apparel clung to the ribs and shoulder-bones, and a small scattering of like fragments[326] lay at their feet, as though shaken to the deck with the jarring of the fabric by the volcanic stroke that had uphove her.
‘Hearts my life,’ murmured Finn. ‘What a hobject to come across! Why, they’ve been men!’
‘A man and a woman more like,’ said Cutbill, ‘a-taking a last farewell as the ship goes down.’
‘May I come in, Charles?’ exclaimed Laura, putting her head into the door.
She advanced as she spoke, but her eye instantly caught the embracing skeletons. She stopped dead and recoiled, and stood staring as if fascinated.
‘Not the fittest sight in the world for you, Laura,’ said I, taking her hand to lead her forth.
‘They were living beings once, Charles!’ she exclaimed, drawing a deep breath, and slightly resisting my gentle drawing of her to the door.
‘Ay, red hearts beat in them, passions thrilled through them, and love would still seem with them. What were they? Husband and wife—father and daughter—or sweethearts going to their grave in an embrace?’
She shuddered and continued to gaze. Ah, my God! the irony of those skeletons’ posture,—the grin of each skull as though in mirthless derision of the endearing, caressing grasp of the long and stirless arms!
‘Oh, Charles!’ exclaimed Laura in a whisper of awe and grief, ‘is love no more than that?’
‘Yes, love is more than that,’ I answered softly, conducting her, now no longer reluctant, to the door; ‘there is a noble saying, Where we are death is not; where death is we are not. Death is yonder and so love is not. But that love lives, horrible as the symbol of it is—it lives, let us believe! and where it is death is not. Would Lady Monson like to view this sight?’
‘It is a moral to break her heart,’ she answered; ‘she would not come.’
She went towards her sister thoughtfully.
‘There’s nothing here, men,’ said I, returning.
‘Them poor covies’ll frighten the ladies,’ said Dowling, eyeing the skeletons with his head on one side; ‘better turn ’em out of this.’
‘Let them rest,’ said I. ‘The ladies will not choose this cabin now to lie in.’
‘If them bones which are a-hugging one another so fondly to-day could talk,’ said Cutbill, ‘what a yarn they’d spin!’
‘Pooh,’ said I, ‘I’ve had enough of this cabin,’ and with that I walked right out.
The men followed. It was broiling hot, the sea a vast white gleam tremorlessly circling the island and steeping like quicksilver into the leagues of faint sky; the bronzed brows of the clouds in the west still burned, looming bigger. I prayed heaven there might be[327] wind there. Laura had told her sister of our discovery in the cabin, and when, whilst we sat making a bit of a midday meal, my sweet girl, in a musing, tender way, talked of this shipwreck of a century and a half old as though she would presently speak of that cabin memorial of it so ghastly and yet so touching, Lady Monson imperiously silenced her.
‘Our position is one of horror!’ she exclaimed; ‘do not aggravate it.’
The men, defying the heat, went to work when they had done eating, to search for the main hatch that they might explore the hold. I observed that Finn laboured with vigour. In short the four of them had convinced themselves that there was grand purchase to come at inside this ancient galleon, and they thirsted for a view of the contents of her. I was without their power of sustained labour, was enfeebled by the tingling and roasting of the atmosphere; my sight was pained, too, by the fierce glare on the unsheltered decks; so I plainly told them that I could help them no more for the present, and with that threw myself down on the sail beside the chest on which Laura was seated, and talked with her and sometimes with Lady Monson, though the latter’s manner continued as uninviting as can well be imagined.
However, some hope was excited in me by the spectacle of the slowly growing brass-bright brows of cloud in the west. There was a look of thunder in the rounds of their massive folds, and in any case they promised some sort of change of weather, whilst they soothed the eye by the break they made in the dizzy, winding horizon, and the bald and dazzling stare of the wide heavens brimming with light, which seemed rather to rise from the white metallic mirror of the breathless sea than to gush from the sun that hung almost directly over our heads.
It took the men three hours to find and clear the hatch, and then uproot it. The square of it then lay dark in the deck, and Laura and I went to peer down into it along with the others who leant over it with pale or purple faces. The daylight shone full down and disclosed what at the first glance seemed no more to me than masses of rugged, capriciously heaped piles of shells, with the black gleam of water between, and much delicate festooning of seaweed drooping from the upper deck and from the side, suggesting a sort of gorgeous arras with the intermingling of red and green and grey. One could not see far fore or aft owing to the intervention of the edges of the hatch, but what little of the interior was visible discovered a vegetable growth as astonishing as that which glorified the decks; huge fans, plants exactly resembling the human hand, as though some Titan had fallen prone with............