The Tragedy of Ida Noble. William Clark Russell
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threw my oar inboards and sat down to collect my mind and think. My consternation, as I have said, was almost paralyzing. The suddenness of the desperate and dreadful situation in which I found myself benumbed my faculties for a while. I was without food; I was without drink; I was also without mast, sail, or compass, in a little open boat in the heart of a wide surface of sea, the night at hand—a night of storm, as I might fear when I cast my eyes up at the wet, near, scowling face of the sky and then looked round at the fast-darkening sea, narrowed to a small horizon by the gloomy walls of rain, in the western quarter of which the American had already vanished, while my own ship, as I stood straining my gaze at the pale blotch she made, slowly melted out like one's breath upon a looking-glass. Yet, heavy as my heart was with the horror of my position, I do not remember that I was then sensible of despair in any degree. When my wits in some measure returned, I thought to myself, rascal as the Yankee captain has proved himself, he surely will not be such a villain as to leave me to perish out here. He will know, by the Ocean Ranger pursuing him, that Captain Hoste has not seen my boat. Then he will shorten sail to enable the Ocean Ranger to approach, and hail Captain Hoste to tell him that I am adrift somewhere astern; so that at any hour I may expect to see the loom of my ship close at hand in search of me, within earshot, with a dozen pairs of eyes on the look-out and a dozen pairs of ears straining for my first cry.
That my drift might be as inconsiderable as possible, I lashed the two oars of the boat together, made them fast to the painter, threw them overboard and rode to them. But when this was done it was dark, I may say pitch dark; the rain fell heavily and continuously, and the wind sang through it in a sort of shrill wailing such as I had never before taken notice of in the wind at sea, and this noise put a new and distinct horror into my situation because of my loneliness. The froth of the streaming ripples broke bare and ghastly, and the run of the waters against the boat's sides filled the atmosphere with notes as of drowning sobbing. The cold of the night was made piercing by the wet of it and the quarter whence the wind blew. I was soaked to the skin, and sat hugging my shuddering body, forever staring around into the blind obscurity, and forever seeing nothing more than the mocking and fleeting flash of the near run of froth.
The breeze held steady, but something of weight came into the heave of the little ridges, and from time to time the chop of the boat's bows as she chucked into a hollow, meeting the next bit of a sea before she had time to fairly rise to it; from time to time, I say, some handfuls of spray would come slinging out of the darkness forward into my face, but nothing more than that happened during those hours of midnight gloom. Though never knowing what the next ten minutes might bring forth, I had made up my mind that I was to be drowned, or if not drowned then that I was doomed to some dreadful ending of insanity which should be brought about by hunger, by thirst, by that awful form of mental anguish which is called despair, and that if I were spared to see the sun rise I should never see him set again.
But the night passed—the night passed, and I remember thanking God that it was an August night, which signified, comparatively speaking, short hours of darkness. It passed, and the breaking dawn found me crouching and hugging myself as I had been crouching and hugging myself during the black time that was now ending, staring in my loneliness, and with a heart that felt broken, over the low gunwale of the boat at the rim of the sea which slowly stole out all round me in a line of ink against the ashen slant of the sky. It had ceased to rain, but the morning broke sullen and gloomy; the heavens of the complexion they had worn when the night had darkened upon them; the wind no stronger than before, yet singing past my ears with a harsh salt shrillness that had something squall-like in the keen-edged tone of it each time the head of a swell threw me up to the full sweep.
I stood up, weak and trembling, and searched the ocean, but there was nothing to be seen. Again and again I explored the horizon with eyes rendered dim by my long vigil and by the smarting of the salt which lay in a white crust about the eyelids and in the hollows, but there was nothing more to behold than the gray ocean, freckled with foam, throbbing desolately in the cold gray light to its confines narrowed by the low seat from which I gazed.
I had now no hope whatever of being searched for and picked up by my own ship. I did not doubt that she had pursued the Yankee, who had outsailed her and been lost sight of by her in the darkness, and that Captain Hoste, understanding the villainous trick that had been played upon him, but assuming that I, as well as the two men, had been detained by the American, had long ago shifted his course and proceeded on his voyage. I looked at my watch, but I had forgotten to wind it overnight, and it had stopped. By and by I reckoned the hour to be between eight and nine. There was no sun to tell the time by. Not until then was I sensible of hunger and thirst. Now on a sudden I felt the need of eating and drinking, and the mere circumstance of there being nothing to eat and drink—and more particularly to drink—fired my imagination, which at once converted thirst into a consuming pain, and I put my lips to my wet sleeve and sucked; but the moisture was bitter, bitter with salt, and I flung myself down into the bottom of the boat with a cry to God that, if I was to perish, my agony might come quickly and end quickly.
I believe I lay in a sort of stupor for some hour or more; then noticing a slight brightening in the heavens directly overhead, as though due to the thinning of the body of vapor just there, I staggered on to my feet, and no sooner was my head above the boat's gunwale than I spied a vessel steering directly for me, as I was immediately able to perceive. How far distant she was I could not have said, but my sailor's eye instantly witnessed the course she was pursuing by the aspect of her canvas, that was of a brilliant whiteness, so that at first I imagined her to be the American in search of me, until, after viewing her for some time steadfastly, I perceived that she was a large topsail schooner, apparently a yacht, heeling from the wind, and sliding nimbly through the water, as one might tell by the rapidity with which the whole fabric of her enlarged.
The sight gave me back all my strength. I sprang into the bows, dragged the oars inboard, and to one of them attached my coat, which I went to work to flourish, making the wet serge garment rattle like the fly of a flag as I swept it round and round high above my head. Within half an hour she was close to me, with her square canvas aback to deaden her way, the heads of a number of people dotting the line of her rail—a shapely and graceful vessel indeed, with a band of yellow metal along her waterline, dully glowing over the white edge of froth, as though some light of western sunshine slept upon her, her canvas gleaming like satin, a spark or two in her glossy length where her cabin port-holes were, and the brassy gleam of some gilt effigy under her bowsprit, from which curved to the masthead the lustrous pinions of her jibs and staysail.
A red-headed man wearing a cap with a naval peak stood abaft the main rigging in company with others, and as the beautiful little vessel came softly swaying and floating down over the heave of the swell to my boat, he cried out, "Can you catch hold of the end of a line?"
"Ay, ay," I answered, in a weak voice, lifting my hand.
"Then look out!" he bawled.
A seaman grasping a coil of rope sprang on top of the bulwarks and sent the fakes of the line spinning to me. I caught the end with a trembling grasp and took a turn round a thwart, but not till then could I have imagined how weak I was, for even as I held the rope my knees yielded and I sank into the bottom of the boat in a posture of supplication, half swooning. The next moment the little fabric had swung in alongside the schooner; I was grasped by some sailors and lifted on board.
"Let the boat go adrift, she's of no use to us," the red-headed man cried out.
Another standing near him exclaimed with a strong foreign accent, but in good English, "Stop! what name is written in her?"
Some one answered, "The Ocean Ranger, London."
"Let that be noted, and then let her go," said the voice with the foreign accent.
In this brief while I stood, scarcely seeing though I could hear, supported by the muscular grip of a couple of the seamen who had dragged me over the side.
"Bring a chair," exclaimed the red-headed man.
"No," cried the other with a foreign accent, "let him be taken into the cabin and fed. Do not you see that he perishes of hunger and of thirst and of cold?"
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