 CHAPTER XXII A CHANGE COMES OVER THE FRENCHMAN Desard was dogged and scowling. Such was his temper that had Ibeen a small or weak man, or a person likely to prove submissive. He would have given a loose to his foul tongue, and maybe handled me very roughly. But my demeanor was cold and resolved, and not of a kind to improve his courage. I leveled a deliberate, semi-contemptuous gaze at his own fiery stare, and puzzled him too. I believe a good deal by my cool reserve. He muttered whilst we ate, drinking plentiful of wine, and garnishing his droughts with oaths and despair. And then, after falling silent, and remaining so for the space of twenty minutes, during which I lighted my pipe, and sat with my feet close to the furnace, listening with eager ears to the sound of the ice, and the dull crying of the wind, he exclaimed sulkily, Your scheme is a failure. The schooner is fixed. What's to be done now? I don't know that my scheme is a failure, said I. What did you suppose, that the blast would blow the ice with the schooner on it into the ocean clear of the island? If the ice is so shaken as to enable the swell to detach it, my scheme will have accomplished all I have proposed. If, he cried scornfully and passionately, If you would deliver us nor save the treasure, I tell you the schooner is fixed, as fixed as the damned in everlasting fire. Be it so, he cried, clenching his fist, but you must meddle no more. The bokeh del dragón is mine, mine, be a sea, now, now that they're all dead and gone but me, smitting his bosom. And if ever she is to float, let nature or the devil launch her, no more explosions with the risks your failure has made her and me run. His voice sank, he looked at me in silence, and then with a wild grin of anger he exclaimed, What made you awaken me? I was at peace, neither cold, hungry, nor hopeless. What demon forced you to bring me to this, to bring me back to this? Mr. Tassard, said I coldly, I don't ask your pardon for my experiment. I met well, and to my mind it is no failure yet. But for disturbing your repose I do sincerely beg your forgiveness and solemnly promise you, if you will return to the state in which I found you, that I will not repeat the offence. He eyed me from top to toe in silence, filled and lighted his hideous pipe, and smoked with his back turned upon me. Had there been another warm place in the schooner, I should have retired to it, and left this surly and scandalous savage to the enjoyment of his own company. His temper rendered me extremely uneasy. The arms room was full of weapons. He might draw a pistol upon me and shoot me dead before I should have time to clench my hand. Nor did I conceive him to have his right mind. His panic, terrors, and outbursts of rage were such extremes of behavior as suggested some sort of organic decay within. He had been, for eight and forty years, insensible, and all that time the current of life had been frozen in him, not dried up and extinguished. Therefore, taking his age to be fifty-five, when the frost seized him, he would now be one hundred and three years old, having subsisted into this great span of time in fact, though confronting me with the aspect of an elderly man merely. Death ends time, but this man never had been dead, or surely it would not have been in the power of brandy and chafing in fire to arouse him, and though all the process of nature had been checked at him for nearly half a century, yet he must have been throughout as much alive as a sleeping man, and consequently, when he awoke, he arose with the weight of a hundred and three years upon his brain, which may suffice to account for the pre-natural peculiarities of his character. After sitting along while, sullenly smoking in silence, he fetched his mattress and some covers, lay down upon it, and fell fast asleep. I admired and envied this display of confidence, and hardly wished myself as safe in his hands as he was in mine. The afternoon passed. I was on deck a half-dozen times, but never witnessed the least altercation in the ice. My spirit sank very low. There was bitter remorseless defiance in the white, fierce, rigid stare of the ice, and I could not but believe, with the Frenchman, that all our labor and expenditure of powder was in vain. There was no more noticeable weight in the wind, but the sea was beginning to beat with some strength upon the coast, and the schooner sometimes trembled to the vibrations of the blows. There was also a continuous crackling noise coming up out of the ice, and just as I came on deck on my third visit, a block of ice, weighing, I dare say, a couple of hundred tons, fell from the broken shoulder on the starboard quarter, and plunged with a roar like a thunder-clap into the chasm that had opened in the night. I sat before the furnace, extremely dejected, whilst the Frenchman snored on his mattress. I could no longer flatter myself that the explosions had made the impression I had expected on the ice, and my mind was utterly at a loss. How to deliver myself from this horrible situation I could not imagine. As to the treasure? Why, if the chests had been all filled with gold, they might have gone to the bottom there, and then for me. So utterly insignificant did their values seem as against the pricelessness of liberty and joy of deliverance. Had I been alone, I should have had a stouter heart, I dare say, for then I should have been able to do as I pleased. But now I was associated with a bloody-minded rogue whose soul was in the treasure, and who was certain to oppose any plan I might propose for the construction of a boat or raft out of the material that formed the schooner. The sole ray of hope that gleamed upon me broke out of the belief that this island was going north, and that when we had come to the height of the summer in these seas, the wasting of the coast or the dislocation of the northern mass would release us. Yet this was poor comfort, too. It threatened a terrible long spell of waiting, with perhaps disappointment in the end, and months of enforced association with a wretch with whom I should have to live in fear of my life. When I was getting separate to start awoke, quitted his mattress, and came to his bench. Has anything happened whilst I slept, said he? Nothing, I answered. The ice shows no signs of giving. I see none, said I. Well, cried he, with a sarcastic sneer. Have you any more fine schemes? Tis your turn now, I replied. Try your hand. If you fail, I promise you I shall not be disappointed. Let you English sailors, said he, wagging his head, and regarding me with great deal of wildness in his eye. Speak of yourselves as if the finest seamen in the world. Justify the maritime reputation of your nation by showing me how we are to escape with the schooner from the ice. Mr. Tissard, said I, approaching him, and looking him full in the face. I would advise you to sweeten your temper and change your tone. I have borne myself very moderately towards you, submitted to your insults with patience, and have done you some kindness. I am not afraid of you. On the contrary, I look upon you as a swaggering bully and a horny villain. Do you understand me? I am a desperate man in a desperate situation, but if I don't fear death, depend upon it, I don't fear you. And I take God to witness that if you do not use me with the civility I have a right to expect, I will kill you. My temper had given way. I meant every word I spoke, and my air and sincerity rendered my speech very formidable. I approached him by another stride. He started up, as I thought to seize me, but in reality to recoil, and this he did so effectually as to tumble over his bench, and down he fell, striking his bald head so hard that he lay for several minutes motionless. I stood over him till he chose to sit erect, which he presently did, rubbing his pole and looking at me with an air of mingled bewilderment and fear. This is a scurvy usage to give a shipmate into stress, said he. Odd's life, man! I had thought that there was some sense of humor in you. Your hand, Mr. Rodney. I feel dazed. I helped him to rise, and he then sat down in a somewhat rickety manner, rubbing his eyes. It might have been fancy. It might have been the illusion of the furnace light, combined with the venerable appearance his long hair and naked paint gave him, but me thought, in those few moments he had grown to look twenty years older. Never concern yourself about my humor, Mr. Tassard, said I, preserving my determined air and coming close to him again. How is it to stand between us? I leave the choice to you. If you will treat me civilly, you'll not find me wanting in every disposition to render our miserable state tolerable. But if you insult me, use me injurously, and act the pirate over me, who am I an honest man by God, Mr. Tassard, I will kill you? He stooped away from me, and raised his hand in a posture as if to fend me off, and cried in a whining manner. I lost my head. This gunpowder business hath been a hellish disappointment. Look you, Mr. Rodney, come. We will drink a can to our future amity. I answered coldly that I wanted no more wine, and bade him be aware of me that he had gone far enough that our hideous condition had filled my soul with desperation and misery, and that I would not have my life on this frozen schooner made more abominable than it was by his swagger, lies, and insults, and I added in a loud voice and in a menacing manner that death had no terrors for me, and that I would dispatch him with as little fear as I should meet my doom whatever shape it took. I marched on deck, not a little astounded by the cowardice of the old rascal, and very well pleased with the marked impression my bearing and language had produced on him. Now that I supposed for a moment that my bold comportment would save me from his knife or his pistol, when he should think proper to make away with me, no, all I reckoned upon was cowing him into a civiler posture of mind, and checking his aggression in insolence. As to his murdering me, I was very sure he would not attempt such an act whilst we remained imprisoned. Loneliness would have had more horrors for him than for me, and though my machinery of minds had apparently failed, he was shrewd enough, despite his rage of disappointment, to understand that more was to be done by two men than by one, and that between us something might be attempted which would be impractical by a single pair of hands, and particularly old hands such as his. I stayed but a minute or two on deck. Such was the cold that I do not know I had ever felt it more biting and bitter. The sound of foaming waters filled the air, and the wind itself was blowing fairly strong in gusts that screamed in the frozen rigging, or in blasts that it had the deep echo of the thunder claps of the splitting ice. The clouds were numerous and dark, and the shadow of the night, and the swiftness of their motion as they sailed up and out of the southwest quarter was illustrated by the leaping of the few bright stars from one dusky edge to another. I returned below and sat down. The Frenchman asked me no questions. He had his can in the oven, and his death's head in his great hand, and puffed out clouds of smoke of the color of his beard, and indeed in the candle and firelight looked like a figure of old time with his long nose and bald head. I addressed one or two civil remarks to him, which he answered in a subdued manner, discovering no resentment whatever that I could trace in his eyes or the expression of his countenance, and being wishful to show that I bore no malice, I talked of pirates and their usages, and asked him if the Boca del Dragón fought under the red or black flag. Why, the black flag, certainly, said he, but if we met with resistance it was our custom to haul it down and hoist the red flag to let our opponents know we should give no quarter. Where is your flag-locker, said I? In my berth he answered. I should like to see the black flag, I exclaimed, to the one piece of bunting I believe I have never viewed. I'll fetch it, said he, and taking the lamp-horn went aft very quickly. But with the certain stagger in his walk, which I should have put down to the wine if it was not that his behavior was free from all symptoms of ebriation, the change in him surprised me, but not so greatly as you might suppose. Indeed, it excited my suspicions rather than my wonder. Fear worked in him unquestionably, but what I seemed to see best was some malign design which he hoped to conceal by an air of consolation and a quality of respectful bonimy. He came back with the flag in his hand, and we spread it between us. It was black, with the yellow skull grinning in the middle, over this an hourglass, and beneath the crossbones. What consternation has this signal caused, and does still cause, said I, surveying it, whilst a hundred fancies of the barbarous scenes it had flown over, the miserable cries from mercy that had swept up past it to the ear of God crowded into my mind? I think, Mr. Tassard, said I, that our first step, should we ever find ourselves afloat in this ship, must be to commit this and all other flags of the like kind on board to the deep. There is evidence in this piece of drapery to hang an angel. He let fall his ends of the flag and sat down suddenly. Yes, he answered, sending a curious rolling glance around the cook room, and at the same time bringing his hands to the back of his head. This is evidence to dangle even an honester man than you, sir. All flags but the end sign we shall resolve to sail under must go. All flags, and all of the wearing apparel. And, and, but, here he muttered a curse. We are fixed. There is to be no sailing. He shook his head and covered his eyes. His manner was strange, and a stranger for his quietude. I said to him, Are you ill? He looked up sharply and cried vehemently, No, no. Then he stretched his lips in a very ghastly grin, and turned it to take the can from the oven. But his hand missed it. And he appeared to grope as if he were blind, though he looked at the can all the time. Then he catched it and brought it to his mouth, but trembled so much that he spilt as much as he drank. And after putting the can back, set shaking his beard and stroking the wet off it, me thought, in a very mechanical, lunatic way. I thought to myself, Is this behavior some stratagem of his? What device can such a bearing hide? If he is acting, he places part well. I rolled the black flag into a bundle and flung it into a corner, and, resuming my seat and my pipe, continued more for civility's sake than because of any particular interest I took in the subject, to ask him questions about the customs and habits of pirates. I believe, said I, the buccaneers are so resolute in having clear ships that they have neither beds nor seats on board. The English he answered, speaking slowly, and letting his pipe droop whilst he spoke with his eyes fixed on deck, not the Spanish, to the custom of most English pirates to eat and sleep upon the deck, for the sake of a clear ship, as you say. The Spaniards love comfort. You may observe his fancy in this ship. How was the plunder partitioned, I asked. Everything is put into the common chest, as we call it, and brought to the mast and sold by auction. Strange, he cried, breaking off and putting his hand to his brow. I find my speech difficult. Do you notice I halt and utter thickly? I replied no. His voice seemed to be the same as hitherto. Yet I feel ill. Holy Mother of God, what is this feeling coming upon me? Oh, Jesus, how faint and dark! He half rose from his bench, but sat again, trembling as if the palsy had seized him. And I noticed his head dotted with beads of sweat. He had drunk so much wine and spirits throughout the day that a dram would have been of no use to him. I said, I expect it will be the blow on the back of your head, when you fell just now, that has produced this feeling of giddiness. Let me help you to lie down, for his mattress was on deck. The sensation will pass, I don't doubt. If he heard he did not heed me, but fell a muttering and crying to himself. And now I did certainly remark equality in his voice that was new to my ear. It was not, as he had said, a labor or thickness of utterance, but a dryness and parchedness of old age, with many breaks from highs to low notes, and a lean noise of dribbling threading every word. He sweated and talked and muttered. But this was from sheer terror. He did not swoon, but sat with a stoop, often pressing his brows and gazing about him like one whose senses are all abroad. Gracious mother of all angels, he exclaimed, crossing himself several times, but with the feeble most agitated hand, and speaking in French and English, and sometimes interjecting in invocation in Italian or Spanish, though I give you what he said in my own tongue. Surely I am dying. O Lord, how frightful to die. O holy virgin, be merciful to me. I shall go to hell. O Jesuit, I am past forgiveness. For the love of heaven, Mr. Rodney, some brandy. O that some saint would interpose for me. Quite a few years longer. Grant me a few years longer. I beseech for time that I may repent. And he extended one quivering hand for the brandy, of which a draught stood melted in the oven, and made the sign of the cross upon his breast with the other. Whilst he continued to whine out in his cracked pipes the wildest appeals for mercy, saying a vast deal that I durst not venture to set down. So plentiful and awful were his clamors, for time that he might repeat, though he never lapsed into blasphemy, but on the contrary discovered an agony of religious horror. I was much astonished and puzzled by this illness that had come upon him. For, though he talked of darkness and faintness and of dying, he continued to sit up on his bench, and to take pulls at the can of brandy I had handed him. It might be, indeed, that a sudden faintness had terrified him nearly out of his senses with a prospect of approaching death. But that would not account for the peculiar note and appearance of age that had entered his figure, face, and voice. Then an extraordinary fancy occurred to me. Had the whole weight of the unhappy rich's years suddenly descended upon him? Or, if not wholly arrived, might not these indications in him mark the first stages of a gradually increasing pressure? The heat, the vivacity, the fierceness, spirits, and temper of the life I had been instrumental in restoring to him probably illustrated his character as it was eighty and forty years since. That had flourished artificially from the moment of him awakening down to the present hour. But now the hand of time was upon this man, whose age was above a hundred. He might be decaying and wasting, even as he sat there, into such an intellectual condition and physical aspect as he would possess, and submit that he had come without a break into his present age. I was fascinated by the mystery of his vitality and breathlessly watched him, as if I expected to witness some harlequin change in the face and mark the transformation of his polished brow into the lean austerity of wrinkles. His voice sank into a mere whisper at last, and then, ceasing to speak altogether, he dropped his chin onto his bosom and began to sway from side to side, catching himself from falling with several paralytic starts, but without lifting his head or opening his eyes that I could see, and manifesting every symptom of extreme drowsiness. I got up and laid my hand on his shoulder, on which he turned his face and viewed me with one eye closed, and the other scarce open. How are you feeling now? said I. Sleepy. Very sleepy, he answered. I'll put your mattress into your hammock, said I, and the best thing you can do is go and turn in properly and get a long night's rest, and tomorrow morning you'll feel yourself as hardy as ever. He mumbled some answer which I interpreted to signify very well, so I shouldered his mattress and slung a lantern in his cabin, and then returned to help him to bed. He sat reeling on the bench, his chin on his breast, catching himself up as before with little, sharp, terrified recoveries, and I was forced to put my hand on him again to make him understand I had come back. He then made as if to rise, but trembled so violently that he sank down again with the groan, and I was obliged to put my whole strength to the lifting of him to get him on to his legs. He leaned heavily upon me, breathing hard, stooping very much and trembling. When we got to his cabin, I perceived that he would never be able to climb into his hammock, nor had I the power to hoist a man of his bulk so high. To end the perplexity, I cut the hammock down and laid it on the deck, and covering him with the heap of clothes, unslunged the lantern, wished him good night, closed the door, and returned to the furnace. The ice breaks away. It was not yet eight o'clock. I was restless in my mind, under a great surprise, and was not sleepy. I filled a pipe, made me a little panicin' of punch, and sat down before the fire to think. If ever I had suspected the accuracy of my conjecture, that the Frenchman's sudden astonishing indisposition was the effect of his extreme age coming upon him, and breaking down the artificial vitality with which he had bristled into life under my hands, I must have found fifty signs to set my misgivings at rest in his drowsiness, nodding, bowed form, weakness, his tottering and trembling, and other features of his latest behavior. If I was right, then I had reason to be thankful to Almighty God for this unparalleled and most happy dispensation. For now I should have nothing to fear from the old rogue's vindictiveness and horrid greed. Supposing him to be no more than a hundred, the infirmities of five school years would stand between him and me, and protect me as effectually as his death. I had nothing to dread from a man who could scarce stand, whose pulsed hand could scarce clasp a knife, whose evil tongue could scarce articulate the terrors of his soul or the horrors of his recollection. The wonder of it all was so great it filled me with admiration and astonishment. Had he been dead and come to life again as Lazarus, or one of those bodies which arose during the time our Lord hung upon the cross, then, questionless, he must have picked up the chain of his life at the link which death had broken, and continued his natural walk into age and decay, though interrupted by a thousand years of the sepulcher, as if his life had been without this black hiatus, and he was proceeding steadily and humanly from the cradle. But collecting that the vital spark could never have been extinguished in him, I understood that time, which has absolute control over life, still knew him as its prey during all those forty-eight years in which he had lain frozen, that it had seized him now and suddenly and pinned upon his back the full burden of his lustres. This I say I believed, but the morrow, of course, would give me further proof. Well, it was a happy and gracious deliverance for me. He could do me no hurt. The scythe had sheared his talons, and all without occasioning my conscience the least uneasiness whatever. Whereas, but for this interposition, I did truly and solemnly believe that it must have come to my having had to slay him, that I might preserve my own life. Thus I sat for an hour smoking and wetting my lips with the punch, whilst the fire burned low, so exulting in the thought of my escape from the treacherous villain I had recovered from the grave, and in the feeling that I might now be able to go to rest, to move here and there, to act as I pleased, without being haunted and terrified by the shadow of his foul intent, that I hardly gave my mind for a moment to the situation of the schooner, nor to the barren consequences of my fine scheme of minds. The wind blew strong. I could hear the humming of it in every fiber of the vessel. The bed on which she rested trembled to the blows of the seas upon the rocks. From time to time, in the midst of my musing, I started to the sharp claps of parted ice. Still feeling sleepless, I threw a few coals on the fire, and catching sight of the pirate flag opened it on the deck as wide as the space would permit, and sat down to contemplate the hideous insignia embroidered on it. My mind filled with a hundred fancies, as my gaze went from the skull on the black field to the death's head pipe that had fallen from the grasp of Tassard and lay on the deck, and I was sitting lost in a deep, dreamlike contemplation, when I was startled and shocked into instantaneous activity by a blast of noise louder than any thunderclap that ever I heard, ringing and booming through the schooner. This was followed by a second, and then a third, at intervals during which you might have counted ten, and I became sensible of a strange sickening motion which lasted about twenty or thirty moments, such as might be experienced by one swiftly descending in a balloon or in falling from a height whilst pent up in a coach. For a little while the schooner healed over so violently that the benches and all things movable in the cookroom slidered as far as they could go, and I heard a great clatter and commotion among the freight in the hold. She then came upright again, and simultaneously with this, a vast mass of water tumbled onto the deck and washed over my head, and then fell another, and then another. All in such a way as to make me know that the ice had broken and slipped the schooner close to the ocean, where she lay exposed to its surges, but not free of the ice, for she did not toss or roll. I seized the lantern and sprang to the cabin where I hung it up and mounted the companion steps. But as I put my hand to the door to thrust it open, a sea broke over the side and filled the decks, bubbling and thundering past the companion hatch in such a way as to advise me that I need but open the door to drown the cabin. I waited, my heart beating very hard, mad to see what had happened, but not daring to trust myself on deck, lest I should be immediately swept into the sea. T'was the most terrible time I had yet lived through in this experience. To every blow of the billows the schooner trembled fearfully. The crackling noises of the ice was as though I was in the thick of a heavy action. The full weight of the wind seemed to be upon the ship, and the screeching of it in the iron-like shrouds pierced to my ear through the hissing and tearing sounds of the water washing along the decks, and the volcanic notes of the surges breaking over the vessel. I say to hear all this and not to be able to see, to be ignorant of the situation of the schooner, not to know from one second to another whether she would not be crushed up and crumbled into staves, or be hurled off her bed and be pounded to fragments upon the ice rocks by the seas, or be dashed up by the cannonading of the surge into the water and turned bottom up, made this time out and away more terrible than the collision between the laughing Mary and the iceberg. I drew my breath with difficulty, and stood upon the companion ladder harkening with straining ears my hand upon the door. I was now sensible of a long-drawn, stately, solemn kind of heaving motion in the schooner, which I put down to the rolling of the ice on which she rested, and this convinced me that the mass in whose hollow she had been fixed had broken away and was afloat, and riding upon the swell that underran the billows. But I was far too much alarmed to feel any of those transports in which I must have indulged, had this issue, to my scheme, happened in daylight and in smooth water. I was terrified by the apprehensions which had occurred to me even whilst I was at work on the mines. I mean that if the bed broke away the schooner would make it top heavy and that it would capsize, and thus I stood in a very agony of expectancy, caged like a rat and as helpless as the dead. Half an hour must have passed, during which time the decks were incessantly swept by the seas, in so much that I never once durst opened the door even to look out. But nothing having happened to increase my consternation in this half hour, though the movement in the schooner was that of a very ponderous and majestical rolling and heaving, showing her bed to be afloat. I began to find my spirits and to listen and wait with some buddings of hope and confidence. At the expiration of this time the seas began to fall less heavily and regularly onto the deck, and presently I could only hear them breaking forward, but without a quarter their former weight, and nothing worse came aft than large brisk shards of spray. I armed myself with additional clothing for the encounter of the wet, cold and wind, and then pushed open the door and stepped forth. The sky was dark with rolling clouds, but the ice put its own light into the air, and I could see as plain as if the first of the dawn had broken. It was, as I had supposed, the mass of the valley in which the schooner had been sepulchred for eight and forty years had come away from the main and lay floating within a cable's length of the coast. A stranger, wonderful a picture, human eye never beheld. The island's shore ran a rampart of faintness along the darkness to where it died out in liquid dusk to right and left. The schooner sat upon a bed of ice that showed a surface of about half an acre. Her stern was close to the sea, and about six feet above it. On her laboured quarter the slope or shoulder of the eclivity had been broken by the rupture, and you looked over the side into the clear sea, beyond the limits of the ice there, but a breast of the four shrouds, the ice rose in a kind of wall. A great splinter, it looked of what was before a small broad-browed hill, and the wind, or the sea, having caused the body on which the schooner lay to there. This wall stood as a shield betwixt the vessel and the sergers, and was now receiving those blows, which had, here to four, struck her starboard side amid ships and filled her decks. Oh, for a wizard's incorn, that I might make you see the picture as I view it now, even with the eye of memory. The posture of the little burg pointed the schooner's head seawards, about west. The ice terraces of the island lay with the wild strange gleam of their own snow radiance upon them, upon the laboured quarter. Around the schooner was the whiteness of her frozen seat, and her outline was an inky, exquisitely defined configuration upon it. Above the crystal wall on the laboured bow rose the spume of the breaking surge in pallid bodies, glancing for an instant, and sometimes shaking a thunder into the ship, when a portion of the seething water was flung by the wind upon the folksal deck. At moments a larger sea than usual overran the ice on the laboured beam and quarter, and boiled up round about the buttocks of the schooner. To leeward the smooth backs of the billows rolled away in jet, but the fitful throbbing and feeble flashings of froth, commingled with the dim shine of the ice, were overall, tincturing the darkness with a spectral sheen, giving to everything a quality of unearthliness that was sharpened yet by the sounds of the wind in the gloom on high, and the hissing and foaming of waters sending their league's distant voices to the air upon the wings of the icy blast. The wind, as I have said, blew from the southwest, but the trend of the island coast was northeast, and as the mass of ice I was upon, imparting from the main, had floated to a cable's length from the cliffs, there was not much danger whilst the wind and sea held of the burg, if I may so term it, being thrown upon the island. That the ice under the schooner was moving, and if so, at what rate it was too dark to enable me to know by observing the marks on the coast. There was to be no sleep for me that night, and knowing this I stepped below and built up a good fire, and then went with the land horn to see how Tassard did, and to give him the news. But he was in so deep a sleep, that after pulling him a little without awakening him, I let him lie, nothing but the sound of his breathing, persuading me that he had not lapsed into his old frozen state again. Of all long nights, this was the longest I ever passed through. I did truly believe that the day was never to break again over the ocean. I must have gone from the fire to the deck thirty or forty times. The schooner continued upright. I had no fear of her over-setting. She sat very low, and the ice also showed but a small head above the water, and as the body of it lay pretty flat, then, even supposing its submerged bulk was small, there was little chance of its capsizing. I also noticed that we were setting seawards, that is to say, to the westward, by a noticeable shrinking of the pallet coast. But I never could stay long enough above to observe with any kind of narrowness, the wind being full of the wet that was flown over the ice wall, and the cold unendurable. All night I kept the fire going, and on several occasions visited the Frenchman, but found him motionless in sleep. I kept too good a lookout to apprehend any sudden calamity short of capsizal, which I no longer feared, and during the watchers of that long night I dreamt a hundred waking dreams of my deliverance, of my share of the treasure, of my arriving in England, quitting the sea for ever, and setting up as a great squire, marrying a nobleman's daughter, driving in a fine coach, and ending with a seat in parliament, and a stout, well-sounding handle to my name. At last the day broke. I went on deck, and found the dawn brightening into morning. The wind had fallen, and with it the sea, but there still ran a middling strong surge, and the breeze was such as, in sailor's language, you would have shown your top gallant sails to. I could now take measure of our situation, and was not a little astonished and delighted to observe the island to be at least a mile distant from us, and the north-east end lying very plain, the ocean showing beyond it, though in the south-west the ice died out upon the sea-line. That we had been set away from the main by some current was very certain. There was a westerly tendency in all the bergs which broke from the island, the small ones moving more quickly than the large, for the sea in the north and west was dotted with at least fifty of these white masses, great and little. On the other hand the wind and seas were answerable for the progress we had made to the north. The wall of ice, as I call it, that had stood over against the laboured bow was gone, and the seas tumbled with some heaviness of froth and much noise over the ice, past the bells and wash past the bends on either side in froth rising as high as the channels. I noticed a great quantity of broken ice sinking and rising in the dark green curls of the billows, and big blocks would be hurled onto the schooner's bed and then be swept off, sometimes fetching the bilge with such a thump as seemed to swing a bellow through her frame. It was only at intervals, however, that water fell upon the decks, for the ice broke the beat of the moderating surge and forced it to expend its weight in spume, which there was not strength of wind enough to raise and heave. Since the vessel continued to lie head to sea, my passionate hope was that these repeated washings of the waves would in time loosen the ice about her keel, in which case it would not need much of a bellow smiting her full bow's fair to slide her clean down and off her bed, and so launch her. There were many clouds in the heavens, but the blue was very pure between. The morning brightening with the rising of the sun, I directed an earnest gaze along the horizon, but there was nothing to see but ice. Some of the bergs, however, are more particularly the distant ones, stole out of the blue atmosphere to the sunshine, with so complete a resemblance to the lifting canvas of ships that I would catch myself staring fixedly, my heart beating fast. But there was no dejection in these disappointments. The ecstasy that filled me on beholding the terrible island, the hideous frozen prison whose crystal bars I had again and again believed were never to be broken, now lying at a distance with its northern cape, imperceptibly opening to our subtle movement, was so violent that I could not have found my voice for the tears in my heart. This, then, was the result of my scheme. It was no failure, as Tassard had said, as he owed his life to me, so now did he owe me his liberty. Nay, my transports were so great that I would not suffer myself to feel an instant's anxiety touching the condition of the schooner. I mean whether she would leak or prove sound when she floated, and how we two men were to manage to navigate so large a craft that was still as much spellbound a loft in her frozen canvas and tackle as ever she had been in the sepulchre in which I discovered her. I went below and put the provisions we needed for breakfast into the oven, and entered Tassard's cabin. On bringing the land-horn to his face as he lay under half a score of coats upon the deck, I perceived that he was awake, and, my heart being full, I cried out cheerily, Good news, good news! The gunpowder did its work, the ice is ruptured, and we are afloat, Mr. Tassard, afloat, and progressing north. He looked at me vacantly, and, giving his head a shake, exclaimed, How can I crawl from this mound? My strength is gone. If I was amazed that the joyful intelligence I had delivered produced no other response than this quarrelous inquiry, I was far more astonished by the sound of his voice. It was the most cracked and venerable pipe that ever tickled the throat of old age, a mingling of wailing falsettos and of hollow, gasping growls, the whole very weak. I threw the clothes off him, and said, Do you wish to rise? I will bring your breakfast here, if you wish. He looked at me, but made no answer. I bawled again, and observed, by the dim lamp-horn light, that he watched my lips with an air of attention, and whilst I waited for his reply, he said, I don't hear you. Anxious to ascertain to what extent his hearing was impaired, I kneeled on the deck, and putting my lips to his ear, said, Not very loud. Will you come to the cook-house? Which he did not hear, and then louder. Will you come to the cook-house? Which he did not hear, either. I believed him stoned death, till, on roaring with all the power of my lungs, he answered, Yes. I took him by the hands, and hauled him gently onto his feet, and had to continue holding him, or he must have fallen. Time was beginning with him when he had gone to bed, and the remorseless old soldier had completely finished his work, whilst his victim slept. I viewed the Frenchman whilst I grasped his hands, and there stood before me a shrunk, tottering, deaf, bowed, feeble old man. What was yesterday a polished head, was now a shriveled paint, as though the very skull had shrunk, and left the skin to ripple into wrinkles, and sit loose and puckered. His hands trembled excessively, but his lower jaw was held in its place by his teeth, and this perpetuated in the aged dwindled countenance something of the likeness of the fierce and sinister visage that had confronted me yesterday. I was thunderstruck by the alteration, and stood overwhelmed with awe, confusion, and alarm. Then, recollecting my spirits, I supported the miserable relic to the fire, putting his bench to the dresser that he might have abacked to lean against. He could scarce feed himself, indeed he could hardly hold his chin off his breast. He had gone to bed a man, as I might take it, of fifty-six, and during the night the angel of time had visited him, and there he sat, a hundred and three years of age. He looked at, ha! I thought, I was dreading your treachery yesterday. There is nothing more to fear. Besides that, he was nearly stone deaf. He could hardly see, and I was sure if he should be able to move at all, he could not stir a leg without the help of sticks. I was going to roar out to him that we were adrift, but he looked so imbecile that I thought, to what purpose? If there be ought of memory in him, let him sit and chew the curd thereof. He cannot last long. The cold must soon stop his heart, and with that I went on eating my breakfast in silence, but greatly affected by this astonishing mark of the hand of Providence, and under a very heavy and constant sense of awe, for the like of such a transformation I am sure had never before encountered mortal eyes, and it was terrifying to be alone with it. End of The Ice Breaks Away Chapter 24 Of The Frozen Pirate This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Angela Jeffries. The Frozen Pirate by William Clark Russell Chapter 24 The Frenchman Dies However, if I expected my Frenchman to sit very long silent, he soon un-deceived me by beginning to complain in his tremulous aged voice of his weakness in aching limbs. Tis the terrible cold that has affected me, said he, whilst his head knotted nervously. I feel the rheumatism in every bone. There is no weakness like the rheumatic I have heard, and tis true, tis true. It may lay me along, yes, by the virgin, tis rheumatism, what else. Here he was interrupted by a long fit of coughing, and when it was ended he turned to address me again, but looked at the bulkhead on my right, as if his vision could not fix me. But my capers are not over, he cried, setting up his rickety shrill throat. No, no, vive la amour, vive la foi. The sun is coming. The sun is the fountain of life. I, mon brave, there are some shakes in these stout legs yet. He shook his head with the fine air of cunning and knowingness, grinning very oddly, and then, falling grave with the startling suddenness, he began to dribble out a peretical love story. He had once before favoured me with, describing the charms of the woman with a horrid lear, his head nodding with the nervous affection of age all the time, whilst he looked blindly in my direction, a hideous and yet pitiful object. I could not say that his mind was gone, but he talked with many breaks for breath, and not very coherently, as though the office of his tongue was performed by habit rather than memory, so that he often went far astray and babbled into sentences that had no reference to what had gone before, though on the whole I managed to collect what he meant. I was sure he had not power enough of vision to observe me in the dim reddish light of the cook room, and this being so, he could not know I was present, more particularly as he could not hear me, yet he persisted in his poor babble, which was a behavior in him that, more than ever, the manner of his speech persuaded me of his imbecility. He made no reference to our situation, and in solemn truth I believed his memory retained no more than a few odds and ends of the evil story of his life, like bits of tarnished lace and a rusty button or two lying in the bottom of a dark chest that has long been emptied of the clothes it once held. But my condition made such heavy demands upon my thoughts that I had very much less attention to give to this surprising phenomena of senility than its uncommon merits deserved. It had puzzled every member of the faculty that I have mentioned it to, the supposition being that, given the case of suspended animation, there is no waste, and the person would quit his stupor with the same power and aspects as he possessed when he entered it, though it lasted a thousand years. But granting, there is no waste. Time is always present, waiting to settle accounts when the sleeper lifts his head. There may be an artificial interval during which the victim might show as my pirate did, but the poised load of years is severed on a sudden by the scythe and becomes super incumbent, and with the weight comes the transformation and this theory. As the only eyewitness of the marvelous thing, I will hold and maintain Walt's die of breath in my body to support it. I left him gabbing to himself, sometimes grinning as if greatly diverted, sometimes lifting a trembling hand to help his ghostly recital by an equally ghostly dumb show, and went on deck, satisfied that he was too weak to get to the fire and meddle with it, but sufficiently invigorated by his long night's rest to sit up without tumbling off the bench. This time I carried with me an old perspective glass I had noticed in the chest in my cabin, the chest in which were the nautical instruments, charts, and papers, and leveled it along the coast of the island, but it was a poor glass, and I found I could manage nearly as well with the naked eye. There is no change of any kind, only that there was a sensible diminution in the blowing of the wind and a corresponding decrease in the height of the seas. The ice stretched in a considerable bed on either hand to the ship and ahead of her. The water frothed freely over it, and there was a great jangling and flashing of broken pieces, but the hull was no longer heavily hit by them. I got into the main chains to view the body of the vessel, and noticed with satisfaction that the constant pouring of the sea had thinned down the frozen snow to the depth of at least a foot. This encouraged me to hope that the restless tides would sap to her keel at least, and put her into a posture to be easily launched by the blow of the surge upon her bows. That is, if fortune continued to keep her head on. But by this time, my transports having moderated, I was grown fully sensible of the extreme peril of our position. Should the sea rise and the ice bring her broadside to it, it was inevitable, it seemed to me, that she must go to pieces. Or if the ice on which she floated, fouled some other berg, it might cost us all our spars. Then again occurred the dismal question. Should she launch herself, would she float? For eighty and four years she had been high and dry. Never a cocker's hammer had rung upon her in all that time. Tassard had spoken of her as a stout ship, and so she was. I did not doubt. But the old rogue talked as if she had been stranded six months only. I had no other hope that the intense cold had treated her timbers as it had treated the bodies of her people. An expectation not unreasonable when I considered the state of her stores and the manifest substantiality of her inward fabric. I regained the deck and stepped over to the pumps. There were two of them, but built up in snow. My business was to save my life if I could, and the schooner too, for the sake of the great treasure in her. Nothing must disconcern me, I said to myself. I must spare no labor, but act a hearty sailor's part and ask for God's continence. So I trotted below, and selected some weapons from the arms room, such as a tomahawk, a spade-headed spear, a pike and a chopper. I returned to the pumps and fell upon them with a will. The ice flew about me, but I continued to smite, the exercise making me hot and renewing my spirits, and in an hour. But it took me an hour. I had chopped, hacked, and beaten one of the pumps, pretty clear of its thick crystal coat. They were what is called brake pumps. That is to say, pumps which are working by handles. The ice, of course, held them immovable, but they looked to be perfectly sound and good working order, though there would be neither chance nor need to test them until the schooner went afloat. I cleared the other one, and was well satisfied with my morning's work, but I did bitterly lament the lack of a little crew. Even the Frenchman, as he was yesterday, would have served my turn. For between us we might have made shift to clamor aloft, and with the hatchets break the sails free of their ice-bonds, and so expose canvas enough to hold the wind, which could not have failed to impart a swifter motion to the burg. But with my single pair of hands I could only look up idly at the yards in gaffes standing hard as granite. Still, even such surface as the spars and riggings offered to the breeze helped our progress. We were but a very little burg, nay, not a burg, but rather a sheet of ice lying indifferently flat upon the sea, and, as I believe, without much depth. Our spars and gear were as if the ice itself were rigged as a ship, and then there was the height of the hole besides to offer to the breeze a tolerable resistance for its offices of propulsion. In this way I explain our progress, but whatever the cause, certain it was that our bed of ice was fairly underweight, and at noon the island of ice bore at least half a league distance from us, and we had opened the sea broadly past its northern cape. I have often diverted myself with wondering what sort of impression the posture of our schooner would have made on the minds of sailors siding us from their deck. We looked to be floating out of water, and mariners who regard the devil as a conjurer must have accepted us as one of his pet inventions. The many icebergs which encumbered the sea filled me with anxiety. We were traveling faster than they, and it seemed impossible that we could miss striking one or another of them. Yet, perilous as they were, I could not but admire their beautiful appearance as they floated upon the dark blue of the running waters, flashing out very gloriously to the sun with a sparkling of tints upon their whiteness as if fires of twenty different colors had been kindled upon their craggy steeps, and then fading into a sulky watchet to the dull violet shadowing of the passing clouds. I particularly marked a very brilliant scene on the opening of five or six of them to the sunshine. They lay in such wise that the shadow of the cloud covered them all as with the veil, the skirts of which, trailing, left them to leap one after the other into the noontide dazzle, and as each one shot from the shadow the flash was like a volcanic spouting of white flame enriched with the prismatic dyes of emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and gems of lovely hue. To determine the hour and our position, I fetched a quadrant from my cabin, and was happily just in time to catch the sun crossing the meridian. My watch was half an hour fast, so I had been out of my reckoning to the extent of thirty minutes ever since I had been cast away. I made our latitude to be sixty-four degrees, twenty-eight minutes south, and the computation was perhaps near enough. This business ended. I went to the cookhouse to prepare dinner, and the first object I saw was to sard flat upon his face near the door that opened into the cabin. He groaned when I picked him up, which I managed without much exertion of strength, for so much had he shrunk that I dare say more than half his weight lay in his clothes, and set up upon his bench with his back to the dresser. I put my mouth to his ear and roared, Are you hurt? His head nodded as if he understood me, but I questioned if he did. He was the completest picture of old age that you could imagine. I fetched a couple of spears from the arm's room, and, cutting them to his height, put one in each hand that he might keep himself propped, and whilst my own dinner was boiling, I made him a mess of broth, with which I fed him. For now that he had the sticks, he would not let go of them. But in any case, I doubt if his trembling hand could have lifted the spoon to his lips without capsizing the contents down his beard. With some small idea of rallying the old villain, I mixed him a very stiff bumper of brandy, which he sucked down out of my hand with the utmost avidity. The draught soon worked in him, and he began to move his head about, seeking me in his blind way, and then cried in his broken notes. I have lost the use of my legs and cannot walk. Mother of God, what shall I do? Oh, holy Saint Antonio, what is to become of me? I guessed from this that, impelled by the habit or some small spur of reason, he had risen to go on deck and fallen. He went on vaporizing pitifully, gazed with sufficient steadfastness to let me understand that his vision received something of my outline, though he would fix his eyes either to the left or right of me, as though he was not able to see if he looked straight. And this and his mournful cackle and his nodding head, bowed form, propped hands, and diminished face made him look as distrustful and melancholy a picture of time as ever mortal man viewed. He broke off in his rambling to ask for more brandy, taking it for granted that I was still in the cook room, for I never spoke, and I filled a can for him as before held it to his mouth, which he opened wide, a piece of behavior which went to show that some of his wits still hung loose upon him. This was a strong dose, and cooperating with the other, soon seized hold on his head, and presently he began to laugh to himself and talk, and even broke into a stave or two, some French song which he delivered in a voice like the squeaking of a rat, alternating with the growling of a terrier. I guess his stumbling upon this old French catch, which I took it to be from seeing him feebly flourish one of his sticks as if inviting a chorus, put him upon speaking his own tongue altogether. For though he continued to chatter with all the volubility his breath would permit during the whole time I sat eating, not one word of English did he speak, and not one word therefore did I understand. Seeing how it must be with him presently, I brought him his mattress and rugs from his cabin, and had scarce lay them down when he let fall one of the sticks and drooped over. I grasped him, and partly lifting, partly hauling, got him on his back, and covered him up. In a few minutes he was asleep. I trust I shall not be deemed inhumane if I confess that I heartily wished his end would come. If he went on living he promised to be an intolerable burden to me, being quite helpless. Besides, he was much too old for this world, in which a man who reaches the age of ninety is pointed to as sort of a wonder. As there was nothing to be done on deck, I filled my pipe and made myself comfortable before the furnace, and was speedily sunk in meditation. I reviewed all the circumstances of my case, and considered my chances, and the nimble heels of imagination carried me home with this schooner. I asked myself, suppose I should have the good fortune to convey the treasure in safety to England, how was I to secure it? Let me imagine myself arrived in the Thames, the whole world stares at the strange antique craft sailing up the river. She would be boarded and rummaged by the customs people, who of course would light upon the treasure, what then? I knew nothing of the law, but I reckoned, since I should have to tell the truth, that the money or an jewelry would be claimed as stolen property, and I dismissed with a small reward for bringing it home. There was folly and such contemplation at such a time, when perhaps at this hour tomorrow, the chests might be at the bottom of the sea, and myself a drowned sailor floating three hundred fathoms deep. But man is a froward child, who builds mansions out of dreams, and jockied by hope, sets out at a gallop along the visionary road to his desires, and my mind was so taken up with considering how I should manage, when I brought the treasure home, that I spent a couple of hours in a conflict of schemes, during which time it never once occurred to me to reflect that I was a good way from home still, and that much must happen before I give myself the least concern as to the securing of the treasure. Nothing worth recording happened that day. The winds slackened, and the ice traveled so slow that at sundown I could not discover that we had made more than a quarter of a mile of progress to the north since noon, though he had settled by half as much again that distance westwards. Whilst I was below, I could hear the ice crackling pretty briskly round about the ship, which gave me some comfort, but I could never see any change of consequence when I looked over the side or boughs. Only that at about four o'clock whilst I was taking a view from the forecastle, a large block broke away from beyond the starboard bough with the report of a swivel gun. I had not closed my eyes on the previous night, and was tired out when the evening arrived, and, as no good could come of my keeping a watch, for the simple reason that it was not in my power to avert anything that might happen, I tumbled some further covering over the Frenchman, who had lain on the deck all afternoon, sometimes dozing, sometimes waking and talking to himself, and appearing on the hull very easy and comfortable, and went to my cabin. I slept sound the whole night through, and on waking went on deck before going to the cookhouse and lighting the furnace, as was my custom. So impatient was I to observe our state and to hear such news as the ocean had for me, it was a very curious day, somewhat darksome, and a dead calm, and a large long swell out of the southeast. The sky was full of clouds, with the stooping appearance in the hang of them that reminded you of the belly of a hammock. They were of a sallow brown, very uncommon. Some of them round about sipped the sea-line, and their shadows, obliterating those parts of the sincture which they overhung, broke the continuity of their horizons as though they were valleys in the ocean there. A good part of our bed of ice was gone, at least a fourth of it, but the schooners still lay as strongly fixed as before. I had come to the deck, half expecting to find her afloat from the regular manner of her heaving, and I was bitterly disappointed to discover her route as strongly as ever in the ice, though the irritation softened when I noticed how the bed had diminished. The mass with the ship upon it rose and sank with the sluggish, squatting motion of a waterlogged vessel. It was an odd sensation to my legs after their long rest from such exercise. The heaving satisfied me that the base of the bed did not go deep, but at the same time it was all too solid for me. I could not doubt. For had the sheet been as thin as I had hoped, it must have given under the weight of the schooner and released her. The island lay a league distant on the larboard beam, and looked a wondrous, vast field of ice going into the south, and it stared very ghastly upon the dark green sea out of the clouds whose gloom sank behind it. I could not observe that we had drifted anything to the north, whilst our set to the westwards had been steady though snail-like. The sea in the north and northwest swarmed with bergs like great snow drops on the green undulating fields of the deep. Now and again the swell, in which fragments of ice floated with the gleam of crystal and liquid glass, would be too quick for our dull rise and overflow the bed, brimming to the channels with much noise of foam and pouring waters. But the interposition of the ice took half its weight out of it, and it never did more than send a tremble through the vessel. What to make of the weather I knew not? Certainly, of all the caprices of this huge cold sea, its calms are the shortest lived, but this knowledge helped me to know other. The clouds did not stir. In the northeast, a beam of sunshine stood like a golden waterspout, its foot in a little flood of glory. It stayed all the while whilst I was on deck, showing that the clouds had scarce any motion, and made the picture of the sea that way beyond nature to my sight, by the contrast of the defined shaft of gold, burning purely with the dusk of the clouds all about, and of the pool of dazzle at its foot, with the ugly green of the water that melted into it. I went below and got about lighting the fire. The Frenchman lay very quiet, under as many clothes as would fill a half-dozen of sacks. It was bitterly cold, sharper in the cookhouse than I had ever remembered it, and I could not conceive why this should be, until I recollected that I had forgotten to close the companion hatch before going to bed. I prepared some broth for my companion, and dressed some ham for myself and ate my breakfast, supposing he would meanwhile awake. But after sitting some time and observing that he did not stir, a suspicion flashed into my mind. I kneeled down and, clearing his face, listened. He did not breathe. I brought the lantern to him, but his countenance had been so changed by his unparalleled emergence from a state of middle life into extreme old age. He was so puckered, hollowed, gaunt, his features so distorted by the great weight of his ears that I was not to know him dead by merely viewing him. I threw the clothes off him, listened at his mouth breathlessly, felt his hands, which were ice-cold. Dead indeed, thought I, great father, tis thy will. And I rose very slowly, and stood surveying the silent figure with an emotion that owed its inspiration, partly to the several miracles of vitality I had beheld in him during our association, into a bitter feeling of loneliness that swelled up in me. Yes, I had feared and detested this man, but his quick transformation and silent dark exit affected me, and I looked down upon him sadly. Yet, to be perfectly candid with you, I recollect that, though it occurred to me to test if life was out of him by bringing him close to the fire and chafing him and giving him brandy, I would not stir. No, I would not have moved a finger to recover him, even though I should have been able to do so by merely putting him to the furnace. He was dead. And there was an end. And without further ado, I carried him into the forecastle, and threw a hammock over him, and left him to lie there till there should come clear water to the ship to serve him for a grave. End of Chapter 24. Recording by Angela Jeffries, Shelbyville, Illinois. Chapter 25 of The Frozen Pirate. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Frozen Pirate by William Clark Russell. The schooner frees herself. All day long the weather remained sullen and still, and the swell powerful. I was on deck at noon, looking at an iceberg half a league distant when it overset. It was a small berg, though large compared with most of the others. Yet such a mighty volume of foam boiled up has gave me a startling idea of the prodigious weight of the mass. The sight made me very anxious about my own state, and to satisfy my mind, I got upon the ice and walked round the vessel, and to get a true view of her posture went to the extreme end of the rocks beyond her bowels, and finally came to the conclusion that, supposing the ice should crumble away from her sides so as to cause the weight of the schooner to render it top-heavy, her buoyancy on touching the water would certainly tear her keel out of its frosty setting and leave her floating. Indeed, so sure was I of this that I saw, next to the ice splitting and freeing her in that way, the best thing that could happen would be its capsizal. I regained the ship and had paused an instant to look over the side, when I perceived the very block of ice on which I had come to a halt, break from the bed with a smart clap of noise, and completely roll over. Only a minute before had I been standing on it, and thus had sixty seconds stood between me and death, for most certainly must I have been drowned or killed by being beaten against the ice by the swell. I fell upon my knees and lifted up my hands in gratitude to God, feeling extra-ordinarily comforted by this further mark of His care of me, and very strongly persuaded that He designed I should come off with my life after all, since His providence would not work so many miracles for my preservation if I was to perish by this adventure. These thoughts did more for my spirits than I can well express, and the intolerable sense of loneliness was mitigated by the knowledge that I was watched, and therefore not alone. The day passed I know not how, the shadow as of tempest hung in the air, but never a cat's paw did I see to blur the rolling mirror of the ocean. The hidden sun sank out of the breathless sky, tinging the atmosphere with a faint hectic, which quickly yielded to the deepest shade of blackness. The mysterious desperate silence, however, that on deck weighed oppressively on every sense, as something false, menacing and malignant in the seas, was qualified below by the peculiar straining noises in the schooner's hold, caused by the swinging of the ice upon the swell. I was very uneasy. I dreaded a guile. It was impossible, but that the vessel must quickly go to pieces in a heavy sea upon the ice, if she did not liberate herself. But though this excited a depression melancholy enough, nothing else that I can recollect contributed to it. When I reviewed the apprehension the Frenchman had raised, and reflected how unsupportable a burden he must have become, I was very well satisfied to be alone. Time had fortified me. I had passed through experiences so surprising, encountered wonders so preternatural, that superstition lay asleep in my soul, and I found nothing to occasion in me the least uneasiness in thinking of the lifeless, shriveled figure of what was just now a fierce, cowardly, untamed villain lying in the folk's hall. I made a good supper, built up a large fire, and mixed myself a hearty bowl of punch. Not with the view of drowning my anxieties, God forbid. I was too grateful for the past to expectant of the future to be capable of so brutish a folly, but that I might keep myself in a cheerful posture of mind, and being sick of my own company, took the lantern to the cabin, lately used by the Frenchman, and found in a chest there, among sundry articles of attire, a little parcel of books, some in Dutch and Portuguese, and one in English. It was a little old volume, the author's name not given, and proved to be a relation of the writers being taken by pirates, and the many dangers he underwent. There was nothing in it, to be sure, that answered to my own case, yet it interested me mightily as an honest, unvarnished narrative of sea perils, and I see myself now in fancy reading it, the lantern hanging by a lanyard close beside my head, the book in one hand, my pipe in the other, the furnace roaring pleasantly, my feet close to it, and the atmosphere of the oven fragrant with the punch that I put there to prevent it from freezing. I had come to a certain page, and was reading this passage. Soon after we were on board, we all went into the great cabin, where we found nothing but destruction. Two screwtours I had there were broken to pieces, and all the fine goods and necessaries in them were all gone. Moreover, two large chests that had books in them were empty, and I was afterwards informed they had been all thrown overboard, for one of the pirates on opening them swore there was jaw-work enough, as he called it, to serve a nation, and propose that they might be cast into the sea, for he feared there might be some books amongst them that might breed mischief enough, and prevent some of their comrades from going on in their voyage to Hell, whither they were all bound. I say I was reading this passage, not a little affected by the impiety of the rascal, for whose portrait my dead Frenchman might very well have sat, when I was terrified by an extraordinary loud explosion that burst so near and rang with such a prodigious clear note of thunder through the schooner that I veiled to God I believe the gunpowder below had blown up. And in this suspicion I honestly supposed myself right for a moment, for on running into the cabin I was dazzled by a crimson flame that clothed the whole interior with a wondrous gush of fire. But this, being instantly followed by such another clap as the former, I understood a thunderstorm had broken over the schooner. It was exactly overhead, and that accounted for the violence of the crashers, which were indeed so extreme that they sounded rather like the splitting of enormous bodies of ice close to, than the flight of electric bolts. The hatch lay open. I ran on deck, but scarce had passed my head through the companion, when down came a storm of hail, every stone as big as a pigeon's egg, and in all my time I never heard a more hellish clamour. There was not a breath of air. The hail fell in straight lines, which the fierce near lightning flashed up into the appearance of giant harp-strings, on which the black hand of the night was playing those heavy notes of thunder. I sat in the shelter of the companion, very anxious and alarmed, for there was powder enough in the hold to blow the ship into atoms, and the lightning played so continuously and piercingly that it was like a hundred darts of fire, violet, crimson, and sun-coloured in the grasp of spirits who thrust at the sea all over its face, with swift movement of the arms as though searching for the schooner to spear her. The hail storm ceased as suddenly as it had burst. I stepped onto the deck, and was like treading on shingle. There was not the least motion in the air, and the stagnation gave an almost supernatural character to the thunder and lightning. The ocean was lighted up to its furthest visible confines by the flames in the sky, and the repeated explosions of thunder exceeded the roaring of the ordinance of a dozen squadrons in hot fight. The ice-coast in the east, and the two score-burgs in the north and west, leapt out of one hue into another, and were my days in this world to exceed those of old Abraham. I should, to my last breath, remember the solemn and terrible magnificence of that picture of lightning-coloured ice, the sulfur-tinctured shapes of the swollen bodies of clouds, bringing their dark electric minds together in a huddle, the answering flash of the face of the deep to the lancing of each spiral dazzling bolt, with the air as still as the atmosphere of a cathedral for the thunder to roll its echoes through. There was a second furious shower of hail, and when that was over I looked forth, and observed that the storm was settling into the northeast, whence I concluded that what draught there might be up there sat in the southwest. Nor was I mistaken, for half an hour after the first of the outburst, by which time the lightning played weak, and at long intervals low down, and the thunder had ceased. I felt a crawling of air coming out of the southwest, which presently briskened into a small steady blowing. But not for long. It freshened yet and yet. The wrinkles crisped into whiteness on the black heavings. They grew into small surges with sharp, cubish snarlings, preludious of the lion's voice. And by ten o'clock it was blowing in strong squalls, the seas rising, and the clouds sailing swiftly in smoke-coloured rags under the stars. The posture of the ice inclined the schooner's starboard bow to the billows, and in a very short time she was trembling in every bone to the blows of the surges, which rolled boiling over the ice there, and struck her, flinging dim clouds of spoom in the air, which soon set the scuppers gushing. My case was that of a stranded ship, with this difference only, that a vessel ashore lies solid to the beating of the waves, whereas the ice was buoyant. It rose and fell, sluggishly it is true, and so somewhat mitigated the severity of the shocks of water. But, spite of this, I was perfectly sure that unless the bed broke under her, or she slipped off it, she would be in pieces before the morning. It was not in any hull put together by human hands to resist the pounding of those seas. The weight of the mighty ocean, along whose breast they raced, was in them, and though the wind was no more than a brisk guile, each billow by its stature showed itself the child of a giantess. The ice bed was like a whirlpool with the leap and flash and play of the froth upon it. The black air of the night was whitened by the storms of foam flakes which flew over the vessel. The roaring of the broken waters increased the horrors of the scene. I firmly believed my time was come. God had been merciful, but I was to die now. As to making any shift to keep myself alive after the ship should be broken up, the thought never entered my head. What could I do? There was no boat. I might have contrived some arrangement of booms and casks to serve as a raft, but to what purpose? How long would it take the wind and sea to freeze me? I crouched in the companion way, harkening to the uproar around, feeling the convulsions of the schooner fully prepared for death, dogged, and hopeless. No, I was not afraid. Suffering and expectation had brought me to that pass that I did not care. It is such an end as hundreds and thousands of sailors have met, I remember thinking. It is the fittest exit for a mariner. I have sinned in my time, but the almighty God knows my heart. To this tune ran my thoughts. I held my arms tightly folded upon my breast, and with set lips waited for the first of those crashing and rending sounds which would be token the ruin and destruction of the schooner. So passed half an hour. Then, being half-perished with the cold, I went to the furnace. For when the vessel went to pieces, it would matter little in what part of her I was, and took a dram as a felon swallows a draught on his way to the scaffold. Where I to attempt to describe the character of the thunderous noises in the ship, I should not be believed. The seas raised the most deafening roaring as they boiled over the ice and rolled their volumes against the vessel sides. Every curl swung a load of broken frozen pieces against the bells and bends, and the shocks resounded through her like blows from cyclopean hammers. It was as if I had been seated in the central stagnant heart of a small revolving hurricane, feeling no fainter sigh of air upon my cheek, whilst close around whirled the hellish tormenting conflict of white waters and yelling glass. On a sudden, in a breath, I felt the vessel rise. She was swung up with the giddy velocity of a hunter clearing a tall gate. She sank again, and there was a mighty concussion forward, then a pause of steadiness, whilst you might have countered five. Then a wild upward heave, a sort of sharp floating fall, a harsh grating along her keel and sides as though she was being smartly warped over rocks, followed by an unmistakable free pitching and rolling motion. I had sprung to my feet and stood waiting, but the instant I gathered by the movements of her that she was released, I sprang like a madman up the companion steps. The sea, breaking on her bow, flew in heavy showers along the deck, and half blinded me. But I was semi-delirious, and having sat so long, with death's hand in mine, was in a passionately defiant mood, with a perfect rage of scorn of peril in me, and I walked right on to the folksal, giving the flying sheets of water there no heed. In a minute a block of sea tumbled upon me and left me breathless. The iciness of it cooled my mind's heat, but not my resolution. I was determined to judge as best I could by the light of the foam of what had happened and holding on tenaciously to whatever came to my hand and progressing step by step, I got to the folksal and looked ahead. Where the ice was the water tumbled in milk, towards four or five ships' lengths distant, and I could distinguish no more than that. I peered over the lee bow, but could see no ice. The vessel had gone clear. How? I knew not, and can never know, but my own fancy is that she split the bed with her own weight when the sea rose and threw the ice up, for she had floated on a sudden, and the noises which attended her release indicated that she had been forced through a channel. I returned aft, barely escaping a second deluge, and looked over the quarter. No ice was there visible to me. The vessel rolled horribly, and I perceived that she had a decided list to starboard. The result of the shifting of what was in her when the ice came away from the main with her, and it was this heel that brought the sea washing over the bow. I took hold of the tiller to try it, but either the helm was frozen immovable, or the rudder was jammed in its gundjuns or in some other fashion fixed. Had she been damaged below? Was she taking water? I knew her to be so thickly sheathed with ice, that, unless it had been scaled off in places by the breaking of her bed, I had little fear, until this covering melted, or dropped off by the working of the frame, of the hull not proving tight. I should have been coated with ice myself had I stayed but a little longer in my wet clothes in that piercing wind, so I ran below, and bringing an armful of clothes from my cabin to the cookroom was very soon in dry attire, and making an extraordinary figure, I don't question, in the buttons, lace, and fripperies of the old-fashioned garments. The incident of the schooner's release from the ice had come upon me so suddenly, and at a time too, when my mind was terribly disordered, that I scarce realised the full meaning of it, until I had shifted myself, and fortified my heart with a dram, and got warm in the glow of the furnace. By this time she had fallen into the trough, and was labouring like a cask. That she would prove a heavy roller in a sea-way, a single glance at her fat buttocks and swelling bilge might have persuaded me, but I never could have dreamt she would wallow so monstrously. The oscillation was rendered more formidable by her list, and there were moments when I could not keep my feet. She was shipping water very freely over her starboard rail, but this did not much concern me, for the break of the poop-deck kept the after-part of the vessel indifferently dry, and the folksal and main hatchers were well secured. But there was one great peril I knew not how to provide against. I mean the flotilla of icebergs in the north and west. They lay in a long chain upon the sea, and though, to be sure, there was no doubt a wide channel between each, through which it might have been easy to carry a ship under control. Yet there was every probability of a vessel in the defenceless condition of the schooner, without a stitch of sail on her, and under no government of helm than a fixed rudder, being swept against one of those frozen floating hills, when indeed it would be good night to her, and to me too, for after such a catastrophe the sun would never rise for me or her again. Meanwhile I was crazy to ascertain if the schooner was taking in water. If there was a sanding-rod in the ship I did not know where to lay my hands upon it, but he is a poor sailor who is slow at substitutes. There were several spears in the arms-room, piratical plunder no doubt, with mere spikes for heads, like those weapons used by the Cafres and other tribes in that country. They were formed of a hard heavy wood. I took a length of rat-line-line and secured it to one of these spears, and carried it on deck with the pelder-room Bullseye lamp. But when I probed the sounding-pipe I found it full of ice, and as it was impossible to draw the pumps I flung my ingenious sounding-rod down in a passion of grief and mortification. Yet was I not to be beaten. Such was my temper had the devil himself confronted me, I should have defied him to do his worst, for I had made up my mind to weather him out. I entered the folksal, land-horn in hand, prized open the hatch, and dropped into the hold. It needed an experienced ear to detect the sobbing of internal waters amid the yearning gushes, the long gurgling washings, the thunderous blows, and shrewd, rain-like hissings of the seas outside. I listened with strained hearing for some minutes, but distinguished no sounds to alarm me with assurance of water in the hold. I could not mistake. I hearkened with all my might, but the noise was outside. I thanked God very heartily, and got out of the hold, and put the hatch on. There was no need to go aft and listen. The schooner was by the head, and there could be no water in the run that would not be forward too. Being reassured in respect of the staunchness of the hull, I returned to the fire, and proceeded to equip myself for a prolonged watch on deck. Whilst I was drawing on a great pair of boots, I heard a knocking in the after part of the vessel. I suppose she had drifted into a little field of broken ice, and that she would go clear presently, and I finished arming myself for the weather. But the knocking continuing, I went into the cabin where I heard it very plain, and walked as far as the lazarette hatch, where I stood listening. The noises were a kind of irregular thumping, accompanied by a peculiar grinding sound. In a moment, I guessed the truth, rushed on deck, and by the dim light in the air, saw the long tiller mowing to and fro. The beat of the beam seas had unlocked the frozen bonds of the rudder, and there swung the tiller, as though, like a dog, the ship was wagging her tail for joy. The vessel lay along, rolling so as to bring her starboard rail to a level with the sea. Her main deck was full of water, and the froth of it, combined with the ice that glazed her, made her look like a fabric of marble, as she swung on the black fold, air it broke into snow about her. I seized the tiller, and ran it over harder starboard, and I had not held it in that posture half a minute, when to my inexpressible delight, I observed that she was paying off. Her head fell slowly from the sea. She lurched drunkenly, and some tonnes of black water rolled over the bulwarks. She reeled consumedly to Labard, and rose squarely and ponderously to the height of the surge that was now above the beam. In a few moments she was dead before it, the helm amid ships, the wind blowing sheer over the stern, with half its weight seemingly gone through the vessel running, the tall seas chasing her high stern, and floating it upwards, till looking forward was like gazing down the slope of a hill. My heart was never fuller than then. I was half-crazy with the passion of joy that possessed me. Consider the alternations of hope and bitter despair which had been crowded into that night. We may wonder in times of security that life should be sweet, and admit the justice of the arguments which several sorts of writers, and the poets even more than the Parsons, use in defence of death. But when it comes to the pinch, human nature breaks through. When the old man in Esop calls upon death to relieve him, and the skeleton suddenly rises, the old man changes his mind, and thinks he will go on trying for himself a little longer. I liked to live, and had no mind for a wet shroud, and this getting the schooner before the wind, along with the old familiar feeling of the decks, reeling and soaring, and sinking under my feet, was so cordial and assurance of life that, I tell you, my heart was full too breaking with transport. However, I was still in a situation that made prodigious demands upon my coolness and wits. The wind was south-west, the schooner was running northeast, the bulk of the icebergs lay on the laboured bow, but there were others right ahead, and to starboard were also lay the extremity of the island, though I did not fear that if I could escape the rest. It was a dark night, me thinks there should have been a young moon curled somewhere among the stars, but she was not to be seen. The clouds flew dark and hurriedly, and the frosty orbs between were too few to throw a light. The ocean ahead and around was the duskier for the spectral illumination of the near foam and the glimmer of the ice-coated ship. I tested the vessel with the tiller, and found she responded but dully. She would be nimble under canvas, no doubt, but it was enough that she should answer her helm at all. Oh, I say, I was mighty thankful, most humbly grateful. My heart was never more honest to its maker than then. She crushed along, pitching pitifully, the dark seas on either hand, foaming to her quarters, and her rigging quarrelous with the wind. Had the Frenchman been alive to steer the ship, I might have found strength enough for my hands in the vigour of my spirit to get the spritzel yard square and chop its canvas loose. No, I might have achieved more than that even, but I could not quit the tiller now. I reckoned our speed at about four miles an hour, as fast as a hearty man could walk. The high stern, narrow as it was, helped us. It was like a mizzen in its way, and all aloft being stout to start with, and greatly thickened yet by ice, the surface up there gave plenty for the guile to catch hold on, and so we drove along. I could just make out the dim pallid loom of the coast upon the starboard beam, and a blob or two of faintness, most elusive and not to be fixed by the ice staring straight at them on the laboured bow. But it was not long before these blobs, as I termed them, grew planar, and half a score swam into the dusk over the bell spritend, and resembled dull small visionary openings in the dark sky there, or like stars magnified and dimmed into the mirror spectral light by mist. I passed the first at a distance of a quarter of a mile. It slidered by fantasmally, and another stole out right ahead. This I could have gone widely clear of by a little shift of the helm. But whilst I was in the act of starboarding, three or four bergs suddenly showed on the laboured bow, and I saw that unless I had a mind to bring the ship into the trough again, I must keep straight on. So I stared to bring the berg that was right ahead a little on the bow, with a prayer in my soul that there might be no low-lying block in the road for the schooner to split upon. It went by within a pistol shot. I was very much accustomed to the sight of ice by this time, yet I found myself glancing at this mass with pretty near as much wonder and awe as if I had never seen such a thing before. It was not above 30 feet high, but its shape was exactly that of a horse's head, the lips sipping the sea, the ears cocked, the neck arching to the water. You would have said it was some vast coarser rising out of the deep. The peculiar radiance of ice trembled off it like a luminous mist into the dusk. The water boiled about its nose and suggested a frothing caused by the monster-steeds expelled breath. Let a fire have been kindled to glow red where you looked for the eye, and the illusion would have been frightfully grand. The poet speaks of the spirits of the vasty deep. If you want to know what exquisite artists they are, enter the frozen silences of the south. Thus, threading my way, I drove before the seas and wind, striking a piece of ice but once only, and that a small lump which hit the vessel on the bow and went scraping past, doing the fabric no hurt, but often forced to slide perilously close by the bergs. I needed twenty instead of one pair of eyes. With ice already on either bow, on a sudden it would glimmer out right ahead, and I had to form my resolution on the instant. If ever you have been amid a pack of icebergs on a dark night in a high sea, you will understand my case. If not, the pen of a fielding or a defoe could not put it before you. For what magic has inked to express the roaring of swollen waters bursting into tall pile clouds against the motionless crystal heights, the mystery of the configuration of the faintness under the swarming shadows of the flying night, the sudden glares of breaking liquid peaks, the palpitating darkness beyond, the plunging and rolling of the ship, making her rigging ring upon the air with the reeling of her mass, the gradual absorption of the solid mass of dim luster by the gloomestern, the swift spectral dawn of such another light over the bowels, with many phantasmal outlines slipping by on either hand, like a procession of giant ocean spectres travelling white and secretly towards the silent dominions of the pole. Half this ice came from the island, the rest of it was formed of birds too tall to have ever belonged to the north end of that great stretch. It took three hours to pass clear of them, and then I had to go on clinging to the tiller and steering in a most melancholy, famished condition for another long half hour before I could satisfy myself that the sea was free. But now I was nearly dead with the cold. I had stood for five hours at the helm during all which time my mind had been wound up to the fiercest tension of anxiety, and my eyes felt as if they were strained out of their sockets by the searching of the gloom ahead, and nature having done her best gave out suddenly, and not to have saved my life could I have stood at the tiller for another ten minutes. The gear along the rail was so iron-hard that I could not secure the helm with it, so I softened some lashings by holding them before the fire, and finding the schooner on my return to be coming round to starboard, I helped her by putting the tiller harder port and securing it. I then went below, built up the fire, lighted my pipe, and sat down for warmth and rest. End of The Schooner Freeze Herself