My Danish Sweetheart,

A Novel Vol.1 (1 of 3)

William Clark Russell

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

CHAPTER I.

A SULLEN DAY.

On the morning of October 21, in a year that one need not count very far back to arrive at, I was awakened from a light sleep into which I had fallen after a somewhat restless night by a sound as of thunder some little distance off, and on going to my bedroom window to take a view of the weather I beheld so wild and forbidding a prospect of sea and sky that the like of it is not to be imagined.

The heavens were a dark, stooping, universal mass of vapour—swollen, moist, of a complexion rendered malignant beyond belief by a sort of greenish colour that lay upon the face of it. It was tufted here and there into the true aspect of the electric tempest; in other parts, it was of a sulky, foggy thickness; and as it went down to the sea-line it wore, in numerous places, a plentiful dark shading that caused the clouds upon which this darkness rested to look as though their heavy burthen of thunder was weighing their overcharged breasts down to the very sip of the salt.

A small swell was rolling in betwixt the two horns of cliff which framed the wide bight of bay that I was overlooking. The water was very dark and ugly with its reflection of the greenish, sallowish atmosphere that tinged its noiseless, sliding volumes. Yet spite of the shrouding shadow of storm all about, the horizon lay a clear line, spanning the yawn of ocean and heaven betwixt the foreland points.

There was nothing to be seen seaward; the bay, too, was empty. I stood for a little while watching the cloud of foam made by the swell where it struck upon the low, black ledge of what we call in those parts Deadlow Rock, and upon the westernmost of the two fangs of reef, some little distance away from the Rock, and named by the sailors hereabouts the Twins; I say I stood watching this small play of white water and hearkening for another rumble of thunder; but all remained hushed—not a breath of air—no glance of dumb lightning.

On my way to the parlour I looked in upon my mother, now an old lady, whose growing infirmities obliged her to keep her bed till the day was advanced. I kissed and greeted her.

'It seems a very dark melancholy morning, Hugh,' says she.

'Ay, indeed,' I answered. 'I never remember the like of such a sky as is hanging over the water. Did you hear the thunder just now, mother?'

She answered no, but then, to be sure, she was a little deaf.

'I hope, Hugh,' said she, with a shake of her head and smoothing her snow-white hair with a hand that slightly trembled, 'that it may not end in a lifeboat errand. I had a wretched dream last night. I saw you enter the boat and sail into the bay. The sun was high and all was bright and clear; but on a sudden the weather grew black—dark as it now is. The wind swept the water, which leaped high and boiled. You and the men strove hard to regain the land, and then gave up in despair, and you put right before the wind, and the boat sped like an arrow into the gloom and haze; and just before she vanished a figure rose by your side where you sat steering, and gazed at me thus'—she placed her forefinger upon her lip in the posture of one commanding silence. 'It was your father, Hugh: his face was full of entreaty and despair.' She sighed deeply. 'How clearly does one sometimes see in dreams!' she added. 'Never was your father's face in his dear life more distinct to my eyes than in this vision.'

'A Friday night's dream told on a Saturday!' said I, laughing; 'no chance of its coming true, though. No fear of the Janet'—for that was the name of our lifeboat—'blowing out to sea. Besides, the bay is empty. There can be no call. And supposing one should come and this weather should burst into a hurricane, I'd rather be afloat in the Janet than in the biggest ship out of London or Liverpool docks;' and so saying I left her, never giving her dream or her manner another thought.

After I had breakfasted I walked down to the esplanade to view the Janet as she lay snug in her house. I was her coxswain, and how it happened that I filled that post I will here explain.

My father, who had been a captain in the merchant service, had saved money, and invested his little fortune in a couple of ships, in one of which, fifteen years before the date of this story, he had embarked to take a run in her from the river Thames to Swansea, where she was to fill up with cargo for a South American port. She was a brand-new ship, and he wished to judge of her sea-going qualities. When she had rounded the North Foreland the weather thickened; it came on to blow a gale of wind; the vessel took the ground somewhere near the North Sand Head, and of twenty-three people aboard of her fifteen perished, my father being among those who were drowned.

His brother—my uncle, George Tregarthen—was a well-to-do merchant in the City of London, and in memory of my father's death, which grieved him to the soul, and which, with the loss of the others, had come about through delay in sending help from the land—for they fired guns and burnt flares, and the adjacent light-ship signalled with rockets that a vessel was ashore; but all to no purpose, for when the rescue was attempted the ship was breaking up, and most of her people were corpses, as I have said—my uncle, by way of memorializing his brother's death, at his own cost presented the little town in which my father had lived with a lifeboat, which he called the Janet, after my mother. I was then too young to take a part in any services she rendered; but by the time I had reached the age of twenty I was as expert as the smartest boatman on our part of the coast, and as I claimed a sort of captaincy of the lifeboat by virtue of her as a family gift, I replaced the man who had been her coxswain, and for the last two years had taken her helm during the six times she had been called upon; and not a little proud was I to be able to boast that, under my charge, the Janet in those two years had rescued twenty-three men, five women, and two children from certain death.

No man could love his dog or his horse—indeed, I may say, no man could love his sweetheart—with more fondness than I loved my boat. She was a living thing, to my fancy, even when she was high and dry. She seemed to appeal to me out of a vitality that might well have passed for human, to judge of the moods it kindled in me. I would sit and view her, and think of her afloat, figure some dreadful scene of shipwreck, some furious surface of seething yeast, with a ship in the heart of it, coming and going amid storms of spray; and then I would picture the boat crushing the savage surge with her shoulder, as she stormed through the tremendous play of ocean on her way to the doomed craft whose shrouds were thick with men; until such emotions were raised in me that I have known myself almost unconsciously to make an eager step to the craft, and pat her side, and talk to her as though she were living and could understand my caress and whispers.

My mother was at first strongly opposed to my risking my life in the Janet. She said I was not a sailor, least of all was I of the kind who manned these boats, and for some time she would not hear of me going as coxswain in her, except in fine weather or when there was little risk. But when, as coxswain, I had brought home my first little load of precious human freight—five Spaniards, with the captain's wife and a little baby, wrapped in a shawl, against her heart—my mother's reluctance yielded to her pride and gratitude. She found something beautiful, noble, I had almost said divine, in this life-saving—in this plucking of poor human souls from the horrible jaws of Death—in the hope and joy, too, raised in the heart of the shipwrecked by the sight of the boat, or in the supporting animation which came from knowledge that the boat would arrive in time, and which enabled men to bear up, when, perhaps, had there been no promise of a boat coming to them, they must have drooped and surrendered their spirits to God.

Well, as I have said, I went down to the esplanade, where the boat-house was, to take a look at the boat, which was, indeed, my regular daily custom, one I could find plenty of leisure for, since I was without occupation, owing to a serious illness that had baulked my efforts six years before, and that had left me too old for another chance in the same way—and without will, either, for the matter of that; for my mother's income was abundant for us both, and, when it should please God to take her, what was hers would be mine, and there was more than enough for my plain wants.

Before entering the house I came to a stand to light a pipe and cast a look around. The air was so motionless that the flame of the match I struck burnt without a stir. I took notice of a slight increase in the weight of the swell which came brimming into the bay out of the wide, dark field of the Atlantic Ocean: for that was the sea our town faced, looking due west from out of the shadow of the Cornwall heights, at the base of which it stood—a small, solid heap of granite-coloured buildings dominated by the tall spire of the church of St. Saviour, the gilt cross atop of which gleamed this morning against the scowl of the sky as though the beam of the risen sun rested upon it.

The dark line of the broad esplanade went winding round with the trend of shore to the distance of about a mile. The dingy atmosphere gave it a colouring of chocolate, and the space of white sand which stretched to the wash of the water had the glance of ivory from the contrast. The surf was small, but now that I was near I could catch a note in the noise of it as it foamed in a cloudy line upon the sand, which made me think of the voice of a distant tempest, as though each running fold brought with it, from far past the sea-line, some ever-dying echo of the hurricane's rage there. But a man had need to live long at the seaside to catch these small accents of storm in the fall and pouring of the unvexed breaker.

A number of white-breasted gulls, with black-edged wings, were flying close inshore this side the Deadlow Rock and Twins: their posture was in the main one of hovering and peering, and there was a sort of subdued expectancy rather than restlessness in their motions; but they frequently uttered sharp cries, and were certainly not afishing, for they never stooped. Within a stone's-throw of the lifeboat house was a coastguard's hut, a little place for keeping a look-out from, marked by a flag-post; and the preventiveman, with a telescope under his arm, stood in the doorway, talking to an aged boatman named Isaac Jordan. The land past that flagstaff went in a rise, and soared into a very noble height of dark cliff, the extremity of which we called Hurricane Point. It looked a precipitous, deadly, inhospitable terrace of rocks in the dismal light of that leaden morning. The foreland rose out of the bed of foam which was kept boiling at the iron base by the steadfast hurl of the Atlantic swell; yet Hurricane Point made a fine shelter of our bay when the wind came out from the north, and I have seen the sea there bursting and soaring into the air in volumes of steam, and the water a mile and a half out running wide and wild and white with the whipping of the gale, when, within, a wherry might have strained to her painter without shipping a cupful of water.

There was an old timber pier going into the sea from off a projection of land, upon the northernmost point of which the lifeboat house stood; this pier had a curl like the crook of a sailor's rheumatic forefinger; but it was not possible to find any sort of harbour in the rude, black, gleaming embrace of its pitched and weedy piles, save in smooth and quiet weather. It was an old pier, and had withstood the wash and shocks of fifty years of the Atlantic billow—enough to justify a man in staring at it, since ours was a wild and stormy seaboard, where everything had to be as strong as though we were at sea and had the mighty ocean itself to fight. At times a collier would come sailing round Bishopnose Point, a tall, reddish-hued bluff past Deadlow Rock, and slide within the curve of the pier, and discharge her freight. Here, too, in the seasons might be seen a cluster of fishing-boats, mainly the sharp-ended luggers of Penzance; but this morning, as I have already said, all was vacant from the horizon to the white sweep of sand—vacant and, in a manner, motionless too, with the quality of stagnation that came into the picture out of the sullen, breathless, gloom-laden atmosphere, nothing stirring, as it seemed, save the heave of the swell, and a few active figures of 'longshoremen down by the pier hauling up their boats high and dry upon the sand, with an eye to what was coming in the weather.

I entered the lifeboat house and killed ten minutes or so in surveying the fabric inside and out, and seeing that everything was in readiness should a call come. A ship's barometer—a good instrument—hung against the wall or bulkhead of the wooden edifice. The mercury was low, with a depression in the surface of the metal itself that was like emphasizing the drop.

Our manner of launching the Janet was by means of a strong timber slipway, that went in a pretty sharp declivity from the forefoot of the boat to some fathoms past low-water mark. There could be no better way of getting her water-borne. The sand was flat; there was little to be done with a heavy boat on such a platform, let us have laid what greased woods or rollers we chose under her keel. But from the elevation of her house she fled, when liberated, like a gull into the rage of the water, topping the tallest comber, and giving herself noble way in the teeth of the deadest of inshore hurricanes.

As I stood at the head of this slipway, looking along it to where it buried itself in the dark and sickly green of the flowing heave of the sea, old Isaac Jordan came slowly away from the coastguardsman and saluted me in a voice that trembled under the burthen of eighty-five years. Such another quaint old figure as this might have been hunted for in vain the whole coast round. His eyes, deep-seated in his head seemed to have been formed of agate, so stained and clouded were they by time, by weather, and, no doubt, by drink. His tall hat was bronzed with wear and exposure, the skin of his face lay like a cobweb upon his lineaments, and when he smiled, he exhibited a single tobacco-stained tooth, which made one think of Deadlow Rock. Isaac did not belong to these parts, yet he had lived in the place for above half a century, having been brought ashore from a wreck in which he had been found, the only occupant, lying senseless upon the deck. When he recovered he was without memory, and for five years could not have told his father's name nor the place he hailed from. When at last recollection returned to him, he was satisfied to remain in the corner of this kingdom on which the ocean, so to speak, had cast him, and for fifty years he had never gone half a mile distant from the town unless seaward, and then never beyond the bay, where he would fish for his own feeding, or ply as a carrier between the shore and such ships as brought up.

'Good-marning, Mr. Tregarthen,' said he in the accent of Whitstable, which was his native place; 'reckon there'll be some work afore ye if so be as this here muckiness ain't agoing to blow away;' and he turned up his marbled eyes to the sky in a sort of blind groping way.

'I never remember the like of such a morning as this, Isaac,' said I, going down to him that I might not oblige him to strain his poor old trembling voice.

'Lard love ye!' he exclaimed; 'scores and scores, Mr. Tregarthen. I recollect of just such another marning as this in forty-four; ay, an' an uglier marning yet in thirty-three. That were the day when the Kingfisher went down and drownded all hands saving the dawg.'

'What's going to happen, d'ye think, Isaac?'

'A gale o' wind, master, but not yet. He's a bracing of himself up, and it'll be all day, I allow, afore he's ready;' and once again he cast up his agate-like eyes to the sky. 'What's the day o' the month, sir?' he added with a little briskening up.

'October the 21st, isn't it?'

'Why, Gor bless me! yes, an' so it be!' he exclaimed, with a face whose expression was rendered spasmodic by an assumption of joyful thought. 'The hanniversary of Trafalgar, as sure as my name's Isaac! On this day Lord Nelson was killed. Gor bless me! to think of it! I see him now,' he continued, turning his eyes blindly upon my face. 'There's nothen I forget about him. There's his sleeve lying beautifully pinned agin his breast, and the fin of his decapitated harm a-working full of excitement within; there's his cocked-hat drawed down ower the green shade as lies like a poor man's plaister upon his forehead; there's his one eye a-looking through and through a man as though it were a bradawl, and t'other eye, said to be sightless, a-imitating of the seeing one till ye couldn't ha' told which was which for health. There was spunk in the werry wounds of that gent. He carried his losses as if they was gains. What a man! There ain't public-houses enough in this country, to drink to the memory of such a gentleman's health in. There ain't. That's my complaint, master. Not public-houses enough, I says, seeing what he did for this here Britain.'

Though nobody in Tintrenale (as I choose to call the town) in the least degree believed that old Isaac ever saw Lord Nelson, despite his swearing that he was five years old at the time, and that he could recollect his mother hoisting him up in her arms above the heads of the crowd to view the great Admiral—I say, though no man believed this old fellow, yet we all listened to his assurances as though very willing to credit what he said. In truth, it pleased us to believe that there was a man in our little community who with his own eyes had beheld the famous Sailor, and we let the thing rest upon our minds as a sort of honourable tradition, which we would not very willingly have disturbed. However, more went to this talk of Nelson in old Isaac than met the ear; it was indeed, his way of asking for a drink, and, as he had little or nothing to live upon save what he could collect out of charity, I slipped a couple of shillings into his hand, for which he continued to God-bless me till his voice failed him.

I held my gaze fixed upon the sky for some time, to gather, if possible, the direction in which the great swollen canopy of cloud was moving, that I might know from what quarter to expect the wind when it should arise; but the sullen greenish heaps of shadow hung over the land and sea as motionless as they were dumb. Not the least loose wing of scud was there to be seen moving. It was a wonderfully breathless heaven of tempestuous gloom, with the sea at its confines betwixt the two points of land looking to lift to it in its central part as though swelled, owing to the illusion of the line of livid shade there, and to a depression on either side, caused by a smoky commingling of the atmosphere with the spaces of water.

While I stood surveying the murky scene, that was gradually growing more dim with an insensible thickening of the air, several drops of rain fell, each as large as a half-crown.

'Stand by now for a flash o' lightning,' old Isaac cried in his trembling voice; 'wance them clouds is ripped up, all the water they hold 'll tumble down and make room for the wind!'

But there was no lightning. The rain ceased. The stillness seemed to deepen to my hearing, with a fancy to my consciousness of a closer drawing together of the shadows overhead.

''Tain't so wery warm, neither,' said old Isaac; 'and yet here be as true a tropic show as old Jamaikey herself could prowide.'

Every sound was startlingly distinct—the calls and cries of the fellows near the pier, as they ran their boats up; the grit of the keels on the hard sand, like the noise of skates travelling on ice; the low organlike hum of the larger surf beating upon the coast past Bishopnose Point; the rattle of vehicles in the stony streets behind me; the striking of a church bell—the hoarse bawling of a hawker crying fish: it was like the hush one reads of as happening before an earthquake, and I own to an emotion of awe, and even of alarm, as I stood listening and looking.

I hung about the boat-house for hard upon two hours, expecting every minute to see the white line of the wind sweeping across the sea into the bay; for by this time I had persuaded myself that what motion there was above was out of the westward; but in all that time the glass-smooth dark-green surface of the swell was never once tarnished by the smallest breathing of air. Only one thing that was absent before I now took notice of: I mean a strange, faint, salt smell, as of seaweed in corruption, a somewhat sickly odour of ooze. I had never tasted the like of it upon the atmosphere here; what it signified I could not imagine. One of my boat's crew, who had paused to exchange a few words with me about the weather, called it the smell of the storm, and said that it arose from a distant disturbance working through the sea through leagues and leagues, as the dews of the body are discharged through the pores of the skin.

This same man had walked up to the heights near to Hurricane Point to take a view of the ocean, and now told me there was nothing in sight, save just a gleam of sail away down in the north-west, almost swallowed up in the gloom. He was without a glass, and could tell me no more than that it was the canvas of a ship.

'Well,' said I, 'nothing, if it be not steam, is going to show itself in this amazing calm.' And, saying this, I turned about and walked leisurely home.

We dined at one o'clock. We were but two, mother and son; and the little picture of that parlour arises before me as I write, bringing moisture to my eyes as I recall the dear, good, tender heart never more to be beheld by me in this world—as I see the white hair, the kindly aged face, the wistful looks fastened upon me, and hear the little sighs that would softly break from her when she turned her head to send a glance through the window at the dark malignant junction of sea and sky ruling the open between the points and at the frequent flashing of the foam on those evil rocks grinning upon the heaving waters, away down to the southward. I could perceive that the memory of her dream lay upon her in a sort of shadow. Several times she directed her eyes from my face to the portrait of my father upon the wall opposite her. Yet she did not again refer to the dream. She talked of the ugly appearance of the sky, and asked what the men down about the pier thought of it.

'They are agreed that it is going to end in a gale of wind,' I answered.

'There is no ship in the bay,' said she, raising a pair of gold-rimmed glasses to her eyes and peering through the window.

'No,' said I; 'and the sea is bare, saving a single sail somewhere down in the north-west.'

She smiled, as though at a piece of good news. There could be no summons for the lifeboat, she knew, if the bay and the ocean beyond remained empty.

After dinner, while I sat smoking my pipe close against the fire—for the leaden colour in the air somehow made the atmosphere feel cold, though we were too far west for any touch of autumnal rawness just yet—and while my mother sat opposite me, poring through her glasses upon a local sheet that told the news of the district for the week past—the Rector of Tintrenale, the Rev. John Trembath, happening to pass our window, which was low-seated, looked in, and, spying the outline of my figure against the fire, tapped upon the glass, and I called to him to enter.

'Well, Mr. Coxswain,' says he, 'how is this weather going to end, pray? I hear there's a ship making for this bay.'

'I hope not,' says my mother quietly.

'How far distant is she?' said I.

'Why,' he answered, 'I met old Roscorla just now. He was fresh from Bishopnose way, and told me that there was a square-rigged vessel coming along before a light air of wind out of the west, and apparently heading straight for this bight.'

'She may shift her helm,' said I, who, though no sailor, had yet some acquaintance with the terms of the sea; 'there'll be no shelter for her here if it comes on to blow from the west.'

'And that's where it is coming from,' said Mr. Trembath.

'Oh for a little break of the sky—for one brief gleam of sunshine!' cried my mother suddenly, half starting from her chair as if to go to the window. 'There's something in a day of this kind that depresses my heart as though sorrow were coming. Do you believe in dreams, Mr. Trembath?' And now I saw she was going to talk of her dream.

'No,' said he bluntly; 'it is enough to believe in what is proper for our spiritual health. A dream never yet saved a soul.'

'Do you think so?' said I. 'Yet a man might get a hint in a vision, and in that way be preserved from doing a wrong.'

'What was your dream?' said Mr. Trembath, rounding upon my mother; 'for a dream you have had, and I see the recollection of it working in your face as you look at me.'

She repeated her dream to him.

'Tut! tut!' cried he; 'a little attack of indigestion. A small glass of your excellent cherry brandy would have corrected all these crudities of your slumbering imagination.'