Chapter X: The Darkest Hour

The memory of that awful time is soothed and assuaged to me by virtue of the strong soul who, under Providence, was given to us to command it. If destiny had used him its instrument to precipitate the tragedy, long, I am sure, hanging over our heads, it had done so consciously, by higher command, in order to neutralize the effects of its own inexorable decree. So thought Mr. Sant presently; and gratefully we acquiesced, giving thanks to Providence. Like children, we had played with fire, not realizing, nor, I think, deserving the consequences. All honour, then, after God, to His little self-possessed deputy, who of his confidence and resolution helped us to the nerve to escape them.

For a time Harry and I--I may surely admit it without shame--were beside ourselves. To be thus cast away and abandoned on a sandbank in mid-ocean--for to all appearances, and intents and purposes, our fate seemed nothing less--it was horrible beyond words. An hour--perhaps two hours--and a lingering death must overtake us. Already--we could see by the near lines of foam, could gather from the changed whisper of the tide--the seaward surges were freshening to their return. We hurried to and fro, wringing our hands, crying for impossible help, never once in our distraction holding escape as conceivable save by external agency. The bank on which we stood stretched north and south, a sleek, hateful mockery. It were useless to traverse it up and down; yet we went, as if to hurry this way and that over it were to summon of our agonized need a causeway to the unseen shore five miles distant; we went, until the terror of ranging adrift, beyond recovery, from our one hope of resource, already grown a desolate phantom behind us in the mist, sent us frantically back to the side of the motionless figure, which had not once stirred since we parted from it raving.

“Mr. Pilbrow!” I cried. “_What_ are we to do?”

“Ah!” he answered, sharp as an echo: “to command yourselves!”

It was like a tonic of steel served from a pistol.

“We will--we do,” said Harry, forcing down his terror in one great gulp. “Dick, don’t be a fool!”

Some shame, I think, stiffened me. The debility of despair conceded a hope to the mere prospect of discussion. What a courage was this to succumb without an effort; to have reason, and yield it to the shadow falling before the fact!

“All right,” I muttered. “I’m an ass. Only let him tell us what we’re to do. He brought this on us, you know.”

He showed no resentment of my bitterness.

“Yes,” he said, in a strong quiet voice. “I brought this on you, Richard; for you warned me and I overruled your warning, being sceptical without knowledge, which is the boast of fools. The man was mad, and I thought to control him with reason, having failed in that as in everything else. Now accursed shall I be in the eyes of my co-trustee, your dear uncle.”

His mention of Uncle Jenico quite upset me again.

“O!” I cried violently, “what do _you_ matter! If you drown, you’ve only yourself to thank. _He_ would have stopped my going, but I wouldn’t tell him anything about it, because I thought it was nonsense to be afraid. And now he’ll wait and wait, and we shall never come, and it will break his heart.”

He stood before me, dripping wet, a most wretched, pathetic expression on his face. It was due less, I knew, to despair than to sorrow over my revolt against him. At the vision of it I was moved even against my will to remorse.

“Well,” I said miserably, “I don’t want to put all the blame on you, though you might have given me credit for a reason. You don’t know what we know about the man, or his interest in shutting our mouths. I ought to have told you, perhaps; but the secret was saving for another who has more right to it. It doesn’t matter now. We only want to get out of this--Mr. Pilbrow, do you hear? O, please think of something! There must be a way! To stand here, and----”

“Richard!” he cried, in great emotion. He half advanced, holding out his hand, then suddenly commanded himself, let it fall, and became in a moment a figure of passionless resolution.

“You are right,” he said, dryly defining and articulating each word. “This is no time for recriminations. We must compose ourselves--must think. The way out of a trap is never the way in. That is where men waste themselves. Now, tell me: nobody knows of our coming here?”

“Nobody,” I said, “nor saw us take the boat. There isn’t a hope of our being rescued from the shore. We can’t see it, even; and if _we_ could be made out here, who’s abroad to mark us? Besides, even if any one did, there’s bare time, even now, to put off and cover the distance before----”

“H’mph!” he pondered, frowning and fondling his gritty chin. Then he turned to my friend.

“How long have we?” he asked.

Harry gave a desperate glance seawards.

“Say an hour here--perhaps two, if we climbed the wreck. But there’s deep water between. Ah! you didn’t know that, did you? but there is--and you----”

Joshua made a gesture of dissent.

“No,” he said, “I can’t swim. Leave me out of the question. But you two can, I know. Why shouldn’t _you_ reach the shore?”

Harry shook his head.

“The tide’s running in, it’s true; but five miles, and in December!”

He ended with a despairing shrug.

“Very well,” said Joshua, so prompt and decided that he made us jump. “Then the wreck’s our one asset; and we’ll just go and see the best use we can make of it.”

With the word, he was striding over the sand, and, sprung to some sudden thrill of hope at his confidence, we followed him, our hearts thumping.

When we came down to the little strait, we found it already and undoubtedly widened. The cream of incoming surf showed more boldly over the lip of the further bank where the wreck lay; and between that and ourselves there was a sense of busier movement, as it might be water yawning and stretching after sleep.

“Now,” said Joshua, sharp as a lash, “swim across to her.”

“Swim! At once?” I exclaimed. “And what about you?”

“I’ve told you to leave me out,” he said, dry and composed. “You must swim, as you can’t jump. I’ll wait you here. Maybe you’ll find the means to float back on boards or such.”

Then we saw what was in his mind. It was a chance against all odds, and so poor a one, that we had hardly considered it, I think, in our agitation. The storm, we felt, must have gutted the carcase as clean as a dressed ox’s. Nothing detachable, but must have been wrenched and flung away. From where we stood, indeed, only the framework of the poop, gaunt, and inflexible, and rigid in its suggestion of ribs and spars shattered but unyielding, appeared to have survived its furious sacking by the waves. Moreover, a certain suspicion had come to us that Rampick had not now made his first acquaintance with the wreck; that, even perhaps so early as the serving of the last ebb, when fresh from hearing of our plans, he had rowed over to examine his ground by lantern-light, and to make sure--as so cunning a madman would--that no contingency of crate or cask or loosened plank should be allowed to mar his wicked purpose.

Though we might or might not be right in this (in point of fact, I believe, we were right), our hope, looking upon that lean account of ruin, was a very little hope. Still, for what it was, it lost nothing in inspiration from the self-confidence of our companion. I turned a desperate inquiring glance on Harry.

“Come!” he said, in answer; and, without another word between us, we had slipped down and taken the water.

As for that, it was chill enough, but, to traverse the interval, child’s play for swimmers so young and hardy. In five minutes we had emerged, sleek and dripping, on the further side, and the wreck was close before us.

We shook ourselves like dogs, and ran up the sand. The shivered frame of the thing lay pitched on the sharp back of the drift, where the poor ship must have dumped herself to be broken like a stick across a housemaid’s knee. What remained was a melancholy witness to the impotence of man’s bravest efforts to command Nature in her passions. She must have been a fine craft, of many thousand tons burden, by evidence of this fragment. _Ex pede Herculem_. Now, the forlorn remnant of her was so shattered as to look, at these close quarters, more like the wreck of a blown-down hoarding than of a gallant vessel. Wryed, and gaping, and burst apart, her ribs had been stripped, inside and out, of everything that could be torn away and swallowed; so that what survived, survived by virtue of a tenacity, which, inasmuch as it had defied the wrench of the storm, was little likely to yield _us_ salvage.

And, indeed, we reached her only to find our apprehensions confirmed. Shorn through her waist, it appeared, close off by the poop, and her fore-part lifted, and rolled, and ravished God knew whither, she had disgorged her vitals into the gulf to the last bolt, so that not one loose board of her remained to reward us, unless buried beyond our recovery in the sand, into which the jagged wound of her emptied trunk was plugged.

We climbed, and pulled, and tested, running hither and thither. We fell upon our knees, and with our hands dug frantically, until they bled, into the wedged drift. It yielded nothing. From time to time we desisted, and gazed, in a panic of fear, at the water, where, but a few yards beyond and below her stern, it rustled and curvetted, advancing and retreating, and advancing yet another step to play cat-like with our anguish.

At last, and for the last time of many, we mounted the slope of stubborn planks, to struggle with some fractured balk of timber, some broken rib end, which might seem to promise yielding to our frenzied blows and kicks. It was all of no avail. Like lost souls we paused, looking down on a litter of splinters, our great need’s only recompense; and, “O, my God!” whispered Harry, and staggered back where he stood, and flung himself, quite ill and overcome, upon the bulwarks.

He was up by the broken stern-post, and, sick to note the rising of the tide, he looked down. On the instant he uttered a wild exclamation, jumped to his feet, went over the side, and vanished.

I was poising myself a little below on the slope of the deck. At his cry I dropped and slipped, landed at the bottom, recovered my feet, and raced round to meet him. Then I, too, uttered a yell; for here, unnoticed by us before, was at least a straw of hope to catch at.

It was a great spar, which lay down the slope of the sand, with some wreck of tackle yet tangled about it, and its butt wedged under the stern of the ship.

“Lord!” shrieked my friend. “Come and pull, Dicky! O, Lord! Come and pull!”

He was skipping and sobbing as if he were cracked. “Get a purchase!” he screeched. “We must have it out if we bust ourselves!”

I had sprung and seized on it even as he spoke. To lift it was far beyond our strength; but straining and hauling our mightiest, we found we could shift it a little, right and left, like a colossal dead tooth in its socket.

“O, if we only had Uncle Jenico’s wrench!” I panted, as we paused a moment in exhaustion. We were quite breathless and white. The sweat, for all the weather, was running down our faces.

“Harry!” I groaned piteously, “if we can’t get it out now, after all this--this----”

The look in his eyes stopped me. The despair was quite gone from them, and the old breezy fearlessness returned.

“But we’re going to get it out,” he cried, “and without Uncle Jenico’s wrench, too.”

His gay new confidence was revivifying, amazing. My heart, for all its terror, was beginning to expand in the radiance of it.

“How?” I gasped. “Don’t keep me waiting, you--you old beast!”

“I’ll show you,” he said; and with the word was down among the tackle, unknotting and pulling.

I watched him breathless--helped him where I could. Between us, in a few minutes, we had disentangled many fathoms of unbroken rope, and still there was more to come. We wrought hurriedly, feverishly, with one eye always on the rising water.

“Let it only wait,” said Harry through his teeth, “till we’ve got this clear, and then it may come as fast as it likes.”

I worked on hard, not asking him why. Perhaps I had a lingering horror that his answer would disillusion me, show this shadow of hope a heart-breaking chimera. And still stealthily the tide crept up, and still we had not done.

But at length the last kink was unravelled, and we rose with a shout. One end of the rope was still fastened tight to a ring-bolt in the spar at its seaward end. The other Harry shouldered, and with it turned to run up the bank.

“Do you understand yet, gaby?” he demanded, grinning triumphant.

“You are going to get a haul on the thing, to one side and further up?”

“Yes, I am.”

My spirits sank a little.

“We shan’t be able to move it that way any more than we did before--anyhow, not to pull it out of its hold.”

“Shan’t we? Wait and see.”

“O, Harry! Don’t be such a fiend.”

“Why, Dicky, you stoopid, look here. I examined the thing, which you didn’t, no more than Rampick himself, if it’s true he’s been here already. He thought it wedged tight, maybe, and safe from us. Well, I tell you it’s only caught by the tip of its nose--far enough in to baffle us lying as it does, _but easy enough to pull out floating_.”

I stared at him a moment; then gave a wild hoot, and began to dance about as he had done before, and threw up my cap, and ended by hugging him.

“You beauty, you beauty! You dear old positive genius and darling! We shall get away, after all, with nothing but a ducking. And Uncle Jenico----”

A sudden choke stopped me. I turned away so that my friend shouldn’t see my shame.

“Dick, old man,” he said, soberly. “You mustn’t be too wild even now. It’s all right, I hope; only--well, it’s cold, and three of us to drift five miles on a spar----”

But I wouldn’t heed a word of his admonition. The recoil from despair had sent my wits toppling clean head over heels. If nothing but a bowl had offered, I should have been as joyous as a wise man of Gotham to commit our destinies to it. To have some means, any, to escape this hideous nightmare of enchainment to a living death!

“Hi! Gee-whoa! Get on!” I cried, chuckling hysteric, and drove Harry, holding the rope-end, up the sand before me. It paid out behind, and did not pull taut till we were well on the slope. Then, for the first time, we thought of Joshua, and turned to look for him.

He was standing, with some suggestion of agitation, on the edge of the further drift. The water had crept up since we left him, widening ominously the channel between. We waved our hands to him, and he responded.

“Look here,” said Harry. “He mustn’t be left in his ignorance; it’s torture. Besides---- Hold on, Dicky, while I go to him.”

“Why don’t you bawl across?”

“He’d never gather. We must have him ready, and I can’t explain here. Don’t drop the rope for a moment while I’m gone.”

“All right. But why not have a pull first, to see if it’ll come free without?”

“Mighty! Not for the world! It’s been rotting in the water: supposing it snapped? There’ll hardly be a strain when the tide lifts the thing, and gets under the seat of the old girl--you believe me. Did you see her name?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s _The Good Hope_. Hurrah!”--and he scuttled from me, and the next moment was squattering through the water of the little strait. I watched his chestnut ball of a head lovingly as it drew a line across the channel; and I danced with excitement again to see his streaming shoulders emerge presently, and Joshua, as near wrought-up as I, run out knee-deep to help him ashore, and support him--as if he needed support--and kneel to wring out his clothes, while the faint gabble of their voices came to me. And then I turned to look seawards once more, and, behold! the comb of a little wave struck the spar-end, and seethed up and over it, and the sight made my heart flutter.

“Harry!” I screeched; and gripped the rope as if I feared some unnamable wickedness were seeking to snatch it out of my hands. I did not dare to turn again; but watched the hurrying tide fascinated; and, almost before I knew it, Harry was at my side.

“Lord, Dicky!” he whispered, his eyes glistening; “it comes, don’t it! Don’t let go! We mustn’t give it a chance.”

If it had only answered to our thoughts! How slow it crawled, without haste or flurry, sometimes seeming to drop dormant as if to take us off our guard. Presently, what with the strain and our shivering, we were fain to squat gingerly upon the sand, and grip, and watch, setting our chattering teeth. What if our expectations were to be cruelly baffled after all! What if the spar were anchored by some unexpected unseen grapnel to the bank! I turned sick at the thought. The water by now lipped along it, covering some three feet of its end. And still, to any gentle test of pulling it responded nothing.

Suddenly, eccentric as always in its motions, the tide bowled a succession of heavier wavelets shorewards. The first found us sitting, the rope taut between us and the spar, and left us sprawling backwards in a puddle of water. I thought the mere wash of it had upset us, till, in the midst of my spluttering and clutching to recover purchase, I heard my friend sing out--

“Get up! Hold on! Dick! O, come, come!”

Then, scrambling, gasping, to my feet, I saw what had happened. The spar, answering to our strain in the bobble of water, had swung towards us, the rope had slackened, and over we had tumbled. Chattering with excitement, we got hold once more, and pulled.

Still it did not come free, nor for long minutes yet. We tugged and hauled what we dared, and ceased, and tugged again. Not--to cut short that tale of agony and suspense--until we were ankle deep in water; not until the rush of little incoming waves foamed high on the stern of _The Good Hope_, kicking her up, and loosening her nip on that grim-held relic of her own; not until the sands were whelmed near and far, so that we seemed to sprout, three fantastic trunks of humanity, from the surface of the ocean itself, did a great surge and vortex, answering to our last despairing wrench, show us that we had been successful.

And even then some dreadful moments passed--moments of terror lest the rope had given--before the mass, rolling sluggishly to the surface, revealed itself.

We were panting and sobbing as we hauled it in. But Harry kept his wits through all.

“Get astride, Dick,” he said, “and help me to fasten this home.”

“This” was the running gear, which he wanted to dispose about the spar in such way as to give us all some hold to cling by. We wrought quick and hard, and in a little had it looped to our satisfaction. The wreckage consisted of a huge segment of a main lower and top-mast, with the step, pretty complete, and the whole of the over-lapping part bolted snug, on either side of which the great sticks had snapped. It was in all some twenty feet long, perhaps, with rings and shroud fastenings and cut ends of rigging yet attached; and it floated massive, on an even keel, so to speak, so that in places we could even walk on it without fear of upsetting in that tranquil sea.

“Now,” said Harry at last, “to get to Mr. Pilbrow!”

I swear till that moment we had realized no difficulty; and then, with the word, we were staring aghast at one another. The spar sat too deep to move; not till the tide had risen another two feet at least would she ride over the bank; we knew no way round. Could he plant himself firm in that hurrying sway of water until we reached him?

We stood up and waved and shouted: “We’re coming in a little! Hold on till we come!” I don’t know if he heard us. He stood there plunged to the knees--the oddest, most tragic sight. He waved back and screeched something--what, we could not understand. Every few minutes we dropped overboard, and heaved our utmost at the great hulk, only to have her ride a few feet and ground again. But at last, when the water was up to his shoulders, she gave a little dip and curtsey, and the following wave washed her on. We yelled, then, and slipped into the water for the last time, and, finding no bottom, kicked out frantic, holding each to a loop of the rope, and propelled her slowly before us, The tide took her now, and do what we would, we could not coax her in a direct course for our friend. We saw we should miss him by a full fathom; he was staggering, desperate to keep his foothold; we drove near.

“Fling yourself forward!” shrieked Harry. “It’s your only chance!” And with the word scrambled on to the spar again. I was on Joshua’s side; and I dwelt in an agony, holding on to the rope with one hand, while I strained to draw her closer.

It was no use, and seeing we must float past, I echoed Harry’s scream. Joshua sprang out and forward on the instant, and, with a mighty flounder of water, disappeared. But the impetus of his leap carried him towards me, and suddenly, like a crooked bough borne on a flood, an arm of him was stuck out within a yard of my reach. I let go my hold to dash and clutch it, and as I swerved, Harry, snapping down, caught at one of my kicking ankles and held on. My head went under; but I had the wrist like a vice; and in another minute I and my quarry were drawn to the spar side, and our noddles, gobbling and clucking and purple with suffocation, helped right way up.

We were saved! So far we had won free. _Vogue la galère_!