“Into the dinghy with you,” he cried, “and row these children and the passenger out a mile from the ship—two miles—three miles—make an offing.”
“Sure, Captain dear, I’ve left me fiddle in the—”
Le Farge dropped the bundle of things he was holding under his left arm, seized the old sailor and rushed him against the bulwarks, as if he meant to fling him into the sea through the bulwarks.
Next moment Mr. Button was in the boat. Emmeline was handed to him, pale of face and wide-eyed, and clasping something wrapped in a little shawl; then Dick, and then Mr. Lestrange was helped over.
“No room for more!” cried Le Farge. “Your place will be in the longboat, Mrs. Stannard, if we have to leave the ship. Lower away, lower away!”
The boat sank towards the smooth blue sea, kissed it and was afloat.
Now Mr. Button, before joining the ship at Boston, had spent a good while lingering by the quay, having no money wherewith to enjoy himself in a tavern. He had seen something of the lading of the Northumberland, and heard more from a stevedore. No sooner had he cast off the falls and seized the oars, than his knowledge awoke in his mind, living and lurid. He gave a whoop that brought the two sailors leaning over the side.
“Bullies!”
“Ay, ay!”
“Run for your lives—I’ve just rimimbered—there’s two bar’ls of blastin’ powther in the hould!”
Then he bent to his oars, as no man ever bent before.
Lestrange, sitting in the stern-sheets clasping Emmeline and Dick, saw nothing for a moment after hearing these words. The children, who knew nothing of blasting powder or its effects, though half frightened by all the bustle and excitement, were still amused and pleased at finding themselves in the little boat so close to the blue pretty sea.
Dick put his finger over the side, so that it made a ripple in the water (the most delightful experience of childhood). Emmeline, with one hand clasped in her uncle’s, watched Mr. Button with a grave sort of half pleasure.
He certainly was a sight worth watching. His soul was filled with tragedy and terror. His Celtic imagination heard the ship blowing up, saw himself and the little dinghy blown to pieces—nay, saw himself in hell, being toasted by “divils.”
But tragedy and terror could find no room for expression on his fortunate or unfortunate face. He puffed and he blew, bulging his cheeks out at the sky as he tugged at the oars, making a hundred and one grimaces—all the outcome of agony of mind, but none expressing it. Behind lay the ship, a picture not without its lighter side. The longboat and the quarter-boat, lowered with a rush and seaborne by the mercy of Providence, were floating by the side of the Northumberland.
From the ship men were casting themselves overboard like water-rats, swimming in the water like ducks, scrambling on board the boats anyhow.
From the half-opened main-hatch the black smoke, mixed now with sparks, rose steadily and swiftly and spitefully, as if driven through the half-closed teeth of a dragon.
A mile away beyond the Northumberland stood the fog bank. It looked solid, like a vast country that had suddenly and strangely built itself on the sea—a country where no birds sang and no trees grew. A country with white, precipitous cliffs, solid to look at as the cliffs of Dover.
“I’m spint!” suddenly gasped the oarsman, resting the oar handles under the crook of his knees, and bending down as if he was preparing to butt at the passengers in the stern-sheets. “Blow up or blow down, I’m spint—don’t ax me, I’m spint!”
Mr. Lestrange, white as a ghost, but recovered somewhat from his first horror, gave the Spent One time to recover himself and turned to look at the ship. She seemed a great distance off, and the boats, well away from her, were making at a furious pace towards the dinghy. Dick was still playing with the water, but Emmeline’s eyes were entirely occupied with Paddy Button. New things were always of vast interest to her contemplative mind, and these evolutions of her old friend were eminently new.
She had seen him swilling the decks, she had seen him dancing a jig, she had seen him going round the main deck on all fours with Dick on his back, but she had never seen him going on like this before.
She perceived now that he was exhausted, and in trouble about something, and, putting her hand in the pocket of her dress, she searched for something that she knew was there. She produced a Tangerine orange, and leaning forward she touched the Spent One’s head with it.
Mr. Button raised his head, stared vacantly for a second, saw the proffered orange, and at the sight of it the thought of “the childer” and their innocence, himself and the blasting powder, cleared his dazzled wits, and he took to the sculls again.
“Daddy,” said Dick, who had been looking astern, “there’s clouds near the ship.”
In an incredibly short space of time the solid cliffs of fog had broken. The faint wind that had banked it had pierced it, and was now making pictures and devices of it, most wonderful and weird to see. Horsemen of the mist rode on the water, and were dissolved; billows rolled on the sea, yet were not of the sea; blankets and spirals of vapour ascended to high heaven. And all with a terrible languor of movement. Vast and lazy and sinister, yet steadfast of purpose as Fate or Death, the fog advanced, taking the world for its own.
Against this grey and indescribably sombre background stood the smouldering ship with the breeze already shivering in her sails, and the smoke from
