The Pilot and his Wife Part 19

"If he cannot trust us, we two must teach him--mustn't we, Gjert?"

CHAPTER XXIII.

Towards dinner-time Salve and Nils Buvaagen were standing for a moment together by the s.h.i.+p's side.

The storm had perceptibly lulled, but the weather was still dull and hazy, and the sea high. Two or three sea-gulls were circling drearily between them and the coast, where they could now see a long line of yellow foaming breakers like a huge wall, rising and falling on the sandbanks, with here and there a mast-high jet of spray from some reef outside. Although the wind was on sh.o.r.e they could hear the dull thunder of the breakers there, and a kind of dim rumbling in the air. The next three or four hours would obviously decide their fate.

Neither spoke; each was occupied with his own reflections. Nils was thinking of his wife and children at home, and Salve of his future. It was hard to lose the brig; he had worked hard for the money she represented, and he would have now to begin again on the lowest step of the ladder--if he escaped with his life, that was to say.

Less selfish thoughts succeeded then, and he turned to Nils.

"What I feel most in this business, Nils," he said, earnestly, "is the thought that you or any of the others may perhaps pay the penalty for my mad sailing last night, with your lives. The brig is my own affair."

"Oh, it will be all right, captain, you'll see," replied Nils, cheeringly. "If we can hang on to the old craft while she b.u.mps over the banks, we shall manage somehow or other inside I expect."

"G.o.d grant it!" said Salve, and turned away.

Nils remained standing where he was for a moment, and something like a spasm pa.s.sed across his heavy features. He believed their situation to be desperate, and the vision of his home again rose before him, and almost choked him.

"Relieve the pumps!" was heard. It was his turn again, and he gave himself unweariedly to the work.

Salve seemed like one conscience-smitten. His face wore an expression of strained uneasiness, and his look more and more, as the moments pa.s.sed, betokened the consciousness that a struggle for life was before them.

Through the gla.s.s a knot of people could be seen gathering on the downs which ran along the coast, with their jagged formations showing out in tones of dim violet and blue.

He stood now in the companion with his wife and his child, and sighed heavily as he looked at them.

"I would gladly give the brig, and be reduced to my own two hands once more, to have last night over again, Elizabeth!" he said.

She pressed his hand with an expression of sympathy, which answered him better than words; and the next moment he was again the practical man, showing her how she might tie the child to her breast with a handkerchief.

"I can't stay with you any longer now," he said. "I am responsible for the lives of all on board, and must do my duty by them."

"Do your duty, Salve," she said.

"And so," he concluded, as, trying to conceal his emotion, he stroked her forehead and then the child's, "you must keep a good heart. When the pinch comes I shall be at your side, and we shall win through it, you'll see."

"With G.o.d's gracious help!" she answered; "remember that, Salve."

He strode away then down the deck and called the crew aft to take counsel with him on the situation. The vessel was rapidly becoming water-logged.

"Listen, my lads!" he said; "this is a serious business, as you can all very clearly see. But if we only have stout hearts we may get out of it yet, at all events with our lives. We have about three hours still before we run upon the sandbanks; but by that time it will have begun to get dark, and it may be difficult for the people on sh.o.r.e to come to our rescue. We must steer straight in and choose the likeliest place ourselves; and if you are of the same way of thinking we'll head for the sh.o.r.e now at once, rather than wait to have the old craft flung over the banks in the dark like a dead fish."

The crew were silent, and looked anxiously over towards the land. But when Nils Buvaagen declared himself a supporter of the captain's plan by crossing over the deck to him, all the others followed.

Salve went himself to the wheel, and gave the order to "Ease off the sheet."

"Ease it is," was the answer; and that was the last order ever given on board the Apollo.

Running now before the wind, they rapidly approached the land. Salve stood at the wheel, resting his knee from time to time on one of the spokes, with a concentrated look on his dark keen face, and his eye searching like a kite's along the coast for the place they were to make for. A couple of times he took up the gla.s.s and directed it towards the downs, where a group of people were moving about.

The chalk-white wall of water, rising and falling, grew higher and higher as they approached it; the noise and the dull roar of the breakers became more and more deafening, and a feeling of faintness crept over Elizabeth as she looked towards the land, and began to realise their danger.

The suspense was so painfully prolonged, a mist was coming before her eyes, so that she could scarcely see Salve over at the wheel; and she tried, in her terror, to keep them fixed upon the child in her arms. The seething, hissing sound in the air around her kept increasing, and made her giddy; a confusion of wild sounds, that grew louder and ever louder, seemed to fill her brain; and before her eyes there was nothing but a whirl of scudding flakes of white. A ma.s.s of sand-laden foaming water appeared then suddenly to rise before her with a towering crest; she heard one loud cry of terror from different voices; the brig seemed lifted high in the air; the mainmast tottered; and a suffocating deluge of water came cras.h.i.+ng down upon her, nearly carrying her with it down the cabin stairs, where she was clinging. Again and again it came, and her one thought now was to hold fast.

When she returned to consciousness again, Salve was by her side. They were fastened to the same rope, and all the crew had come aft, and lashed themselves there. The brig lay over on her side upon the inner bank, with her stern up, and with the mainmast lying over the side. She kept lifting and striking heavily against the bottom, while heavy seas, one after another, swept her forward.

"The rigging to leeward must be cleared away, and we shall get off, lads!" shouted Salve, through his hollowed hand; and he sprang over with an axe to do it. Nils Buvaagen came to his a.s.sistance, and Elizabeth, in intense anxiety, watched the two men while they cut away rope after rope, holding on by the rigging all the time, the sea breaking over them, so that sometimes they were hardly visible through the drench of water. After one last stroke, which freed them from the mast, Salve was by her side again.

The next moment they were carried over the bank by the yellow churning surge, and with a succession of jerks and b.u.mps, over to the shoal inside, where the bow-timbers were stove in--"the best thing that could have happened to them," Salve said, coolly, "as it would relieve the vessel of the weight of water in the hold, and they might now be washed up nearer to the beach."

At length, after a couple of long and terrible hours, as twilight was coming on, and the face of the downs was becoming darker in the gloomy atmosphere, it seemed as if the vessel had finally settled. The waves now broke less frequently over her, but left a heavy deposit of sand upon the deck when they did break. It seemed likely that she would go to pieces, plank by plank, if they remained as they were through the night, or else perhaps they would be buried in sand.

On one side of the shoal--on the side where they saw people upon the beach--ran a channel with a strong current; and they, perceived that they had been fortunate to some extent in not having been washed right over into it, as in that case the brig must inevitably have sunk: on the other side there was navigable water, though with breakers here and there. Their signals, they knew, had been seen by the people on sh.o.r.e; but, to their despair, they saw them all at once disappear.

Salve, upon that, set to work to lash some planks together for a raft; and the crew followed his example with whatever they could lay their hands upon that would float. His idea was, to try and get Elizabeth and the child to land by tying them securely to the raft, and trust to his own swimming powers and address to reach the sh.o.r.e with the line he was attaching to it; and the only question then would be, whether he would be able to haul it to land against the strong back-suck of the receding waves, that left every time a long stretch of dry sand behind them.

Elizabeth was sitting meanwhile on the cabin-stairs, scarcely in a condition to comprehend what was pa.s.sing.

As Salve was occupied with this work, he suddenly heard a shout of joy round him. From behind a projection in the downs a group of men had appeared, carrying a large boat. They stopped at a corner of the beach.

A number of them took their seats in the boat; and as a wave was curling over to break, the others ran her down, and the back flow carried her out to sea, the men setting to work at once with all their might at the oars.

The plucky fellows evidently knew the water thereabouts; for they steered in a wide circle up behind a line of shoals, that acted like a mole in breaking the force of the waves, and bore down then obliquely upon the wreck, to leeward of which the water was comparatively smooth.

"Now then, look alive, my hearties!" they shouted, as they hooked on; and the admonition was scarcely needed.

Salve carried his almost unconscious wife down to the side, where they took her and laid her aft in the bottom of the boat; but she sat up with outstretched arms until her child had been pa.s.sed to her from hand to hand, and was safe in them again, and then she watched anxiously for Salve to come too. He sprang down into the boat the last, and then she fainted.

They put off, and stood in now on the crests of the waves straight for the beach, where a score of men in sea-boots and woollen jackets made a chain down into the water by holding each other's hands, and drew the boat ash.o.r.e.

They heard congratulations all round; and the man who had held the tiller exclaimed, as Salve silently grasped his hand--

"It was resolutely done, Northman, to steer like that--only that you did, you'd have pa.s.sed the night upon the bank."

The invitation of their rescuers to partake of such hospitality as they could offer was gladly accepted by the famished party from the wreck; and they followed the steersman, Ib Mathisen, and his comrades in among the downs, where the wind was no longer felt. It was some miles to the fis.h.i.+ng village; and they trudged on after it grew dark in silence, being too exhausted, and too dejected, to talk, their guides only keeping up a low conversation among themselves. Salve carried the child, sheltering it from the p.r.i.c.king sand that blew in their faces when they came out upon the flat downs farther on, and supporting Elizabeth at the same time.

At last they saw the lights of a group of cottages. The largest of these belonged to Ib Mathisen; and into this Salve and his wife were conducted, while the crew were distributed among the others.

Ib's wife, a robust-looking woman of fifty or thereabouts, with a bold, straightforward expression in her tanned countenance, was standing over by the fire with her sleeves tucked up baking, when they came in. She examined the incomers steadily for a moment without raising herself from her stooping position; but at the sight of Elizabeth and the child she exclaimed in a tone of compa.s.sion that was better than any more formal welcome, "The poor woman and her child have been cast ash.o.r.e, Ib?" and set about caring for their wants at once, her grown-up daughter helping her to draw a bench to the fire for them, and putting a kettle on to make something warm for them to drink. This was evidently not her first experience of the kind; and before long they had all put on dry clothes, and Elizabeth and the child were in a warm bed. As she went about she put questions in a low voice to her husband; and Salve, who was sitting with his cheek in his hand staring into the fire, heard her say--

"Perhaps he was the owner of the vessel himself?"

"Yes, she was all the property we possessed," Salve answered, quietly.

"But we are none the less grateful to your husband for rescuing us, and we have unfortunately very little to thank him with for venturing his life out on the banks in such weather."

"So you've been at that game again, Ib," said the wife, turning to her husband reproachfully, but not seeming altogether sincere in her reproach.