The Pilot and his Wife: Chapter 23

Chapter 23

Towards dinner-time Salv� and Nils Buvaagen were standing for a moment
together by the ship'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 shore 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 Salv� 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 bumps over the
banks, we shall manage somehow or other inside I expect."

"God grant it!" said Salv�, and turned away.

Nils remained standing where he was for a moment, and something like a
spasm passed 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.

Salv� seemed like one conscience-smitten. His face wore an expression of
strained uneasiness, and his look more and more, as the moments passed,
betokened the consciousness that a struggle for life was before them.
Through the glass 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, Salv�," 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 God's gracious help!" she answered; "remember that, Salv�."

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 shore 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
shore 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.

Salv� 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. Salv�
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 glass 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 Salv� 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 mass 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 crashing 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, Salv� 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 Salv�, through his hollowed hand; and he sprang over with
an axe to do it. Nils Buvaagen came to his assistance, 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, Salv� 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 bumps, over to the shoal
inside, where the bow-timbers were stove in--"the best thing that could
have happened to them," Salv� 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 shore;
but, to their despair, they saw them all at once disappear.

Salv�, 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 shore 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 passing.

As Salv� 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.

Salv� 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 passed to her from hand to
hand, and was safe in them again, and then she watched anxiously for
Salv� 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 ashore.

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

"It was resolutely done, Northman, to steer like that--only that you
did, you'd have passed 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
fishing 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. Salv� carried the child,
sheltering it from the pricking 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 Salv� 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 compassion that was better than any more formal
welcome, "The poor woman and her child have been cast ashore, 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 Salv�, 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," Salv� 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.

Turning to Salv� then she said a little curtly, "For the like of that we
take no payment," adding in a milder tone, "We have two sons ourselves
who ply to Norway--there's a bad coast there too."

Salv� was pale and worn out with over-exertion, and after taking a
mouthful of food he lay down to rest. But he could not sleep, and
towards morning he was lying awake listening to the dull booming of the
distant sea. Elizabeth was tossing about feverishly and talking in her
sleep. Her brain was evidently busy with the terrors of the previous
night, and from occasional words it seemed as if he had a share in her
thoughts. He lay and listened, though there was not much to be made out
of her disjointed utterances. She grew more restless, and began to talk
more excitedly--

"Never! never!" she said, vehemently; "he shall never hear a word about
the brig," and she went on then in a confidential whisper--

"Shall he, Gjert? He shall find us in our berth, or else he will think
we are afraid."

Salv� kissed her forehead tenderly, but with a sigh. There had been a
motive then, after all, at the bottom of that display of confidence
which had occasioned him such pangs of self-reproach.

A couple of hours after he was on the way down to the sea to look at the
brig. The general aspect of the world about him was in harmony with his
mood. The wind whistled over the dreary sand-hills, whirling the sand in
clouds in among the downs that stretched away like a storm-tossed sea
into the distance, in every variety of desolate and jagged outline. Upon
the melancholy shore a sea-gull or two were circling round some old
black stumps of wreck that protruded from the sand; while beyond lay the
dismal expanse of the western sea, without a sail upon its leaden waste
of waters, so shunned by all. Dreariness, wreck, and desolation were on
every side; and it seemed to Salv� that it was only a reflection of his
own life. He had got to be the owner of a brig, and there it lay, what
remained of it, buried in the sand. He had succeeded in making Elizabeth
his own, but had he thereby added anything to the happiness of his life?

He stood gazing at the remains of his brig, over which the yellow waves
were breaking, in a state of gloomy abstraction, from which he was only
aroused by the approach of Ib Mathisen and a party of his own crew, who
had followed him to the shore to see if possibly they might retrieve
some of their property. He joined them in the search, and with but small
result; three ship chests and the compass being all the reward of an
hour's labour among the timber-ends and bolts and pieces of rigging that
strewed the beach, or made ripples in the sand for a long distance in
either direction.

They remained that day in the fishing hamlet; and when Salv� had made
his declaration before the authorities, and had paid the crew what he
owed them with the greater part of the money he had saved, he and
Elizabeth took passage for Christiansand in a corn ship from Harboere.

He was very silent on the way, thinking about his future; and the
prospect was not a bright one: he knew that there prevailed but one
opinion among the crew about the loss of the brig, that he had his own
folly only to thank for it; and as this, of course, would get about, his
chance of being employed as a skipper by any shipowner would be very
small. Elizabeth's popularity in Tonsberg might probably be of service
to him, but he would sooner starve than help himself to a situation by
means of it; and in her present circumstances she should not even return
to Tonsberg.

One only course remained open to him if he was not to begin again from
the very beginning--he would become an uncertificated pilot for the
Arendal district. No one knew the coast there better than he did; he had
always had the idea in his mind, ever since the night when he brought
the Juno into Merd�; and out there, or in some other spot along the
coast, he reflected gloomily that he could have Elizabeth all to
himself.

When he announced his decision to Elizabeth, she entered with animation
into the project; and when he went on to add, that she would have to be
content now with being only a common man's wife, she replied,
intrepidly--

"If he is only called Salv� Kristiansen, I require nothing more."

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