CHAPTER XXIII.
THE ICE BREAKS AWAY.
It was not yet eight o'clock. I was restless in my mind, under a greatsurprise, and was not sleepy. I filled a pipe, made me a little pannikinof punch, and sat down before the fire to think. If ever I had suspectedthe accuracy of my conjecture that the Frenchman's sudden astonishingindisposition was the effect of his extreme age coming upon him andbreaking down the artificial vitality with which he had bristled intolife under my hands, I must have found fifty signs to set my misgivingsat rest in his drowsiness, nodding, bowed form, weakness, his totteringand trembling, and other features of his latest behaviour. If I wasright, then I had reason to be thankful to Almighty God for thisunparalleled and most happy dispensation, for now I should have nothingto fear from the old rogue's vindictiveness and horrid greed. Supposinghim to be no more than a hundred, the infirmities of five score yearswould stand between him and me, and protect me as effectually as hisdeath. I had nothing to dread from a man who could scarce stand, whosepalsied hand could scarce clasp a knife, whose evil tongue could scarcearticulate the terrors of his soul or the horrors of his recollection.
The wonder of it all was so great it filled me with admiration andastonishment. Had he been dead and come to life again, as Lazarus, orone of those bodies which arose during the time our Lord hung upon thecross, then, questionless, he must have picked up the chain of his lifeat the link which death had broken, and continued his natural walk intoage and decay (though interrupted by a thousand years of the sepulchre)as if his life had been without this black hiatus, and he was proceedingsteadily and humanly from the cradle. But collecting that the vitalspark could never have been extinguished in him, I understood that time,which has absolute control over life, still knew him as its prey duringall those forty-eight years in which he had lain frozen; that it hadseized him now and suddenly, and pinned upon his back the full burden ofhis lustres. This I say, I believed; but the morrow, of course, wouldgive me further proof.
Well, 'twas a happy and gracious deliverance for me. He could do me nohurt; the scythe had sheared his talons, and all without occasioning myconscience the least uneasiness whatever: whereas, but for thisinterposition, I did truly and solemnly believe that it must have cometo 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 fromthe treacherous villain I had recovered from the grave, and in thefeeling 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 ofhis foul intent, that I hardly gave my mind for a moment to thesituation of the schooner nor to the barren consequences of my finescheme of mines.
The wind blew strong. I could hear the humming of it in every fibre ofthe vessel. The bed on which she rested trembled to the blows of theseas upon the rocks. From time to time, in the midst of my musing, Istarted to the sharp claps of parted ice. Still feeling sleepless, Ithrew a few coals on the fire, and catching sight of the pirate flagopened it on the deck as wide as the space would permit, and sat down tocontemplate the hideous insignia embroidered on it. My mind filled witha hundred fancies as my gaze went from the skull on the black field tothe death's-head pipe that had fallen from the grasp of Tassard and layon the deck, and I was sitting lost in a deep dreamlike contemplation,when I was startled and shocked into instantaneous activity by a blastof noise, louder than any thunder-clap that ever I heard, ringing andbooming through the schooner. This was followed by a second and then athird, at intervals during which you might have counted ten, and Ibecame sensible of a strange sickening motion, which lasted about twentyor thirty moments, such as might be experienced by one swiftlydescending in a balloon, or in falling from a height whilst pent up in acoach.
For a little while the schooner heeled over so violently that thebenches and all things movable in the cook-room slided as far as theycould go, and I heard a great clatter and commotion among the freight inthe hold. She then came upright again, and simultaneously with this avast mass of water tumbled on to the deck and washed over my head, andthen fell another and then another, all in such a way as to make me knowthat 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 shedid not toss or roll.
I seized the lanthorn and sprang to the cabin, where I hung it up, andmounted the companion-steps. But as I put my hand to the door to thrustit open a sea broke over the side and filled the decks, bubbling andthundering past the companion-hatch in such a way as to advise me that Ineed but open the door to drown the cabin. I waited, my heart beatingvery hard, mad to see what had happened, but not daring to trust myselfon deck lest I should be immediately swept into the sea. 'Twas the mostterrible time I had yet lived through in this experience. To every blowof the billows the schooner trembled fearfully; the crackling noises ofthe ice was as though I was in the thick of a heavy action. The fullweight of the wind seemed to be upon the ship, and the screeching of itin the iron-like shrouds pierced to my ear through the hissing andtearing sounds of the water washing along the decks, and the volcanicnotes of the surges breaking over the vessel. I say, to hear all thisand not to be able to see, to be ignorant of the situation of theschooner, not to know from one second to another whether she would notbe crushed up and crumbled into staves, or be hurled off her bed and bepounded to fragments upon the ice-rocks by the seas, or be dashed by thecannonading of the surge into the water and turned bottom up, made thistime out and away more terrible than the collision between the _LaughingMary_ and the iceberg.
I drew my breath with difficulty, and stood upon the companion-ladderhearkening with straining ears, my hand upon the door. I was nowsensible of a long-drawn, stately, solemn kind of heaving motion in theschooner, which I put down to the rolling of the ice on which sherested; and this convinced me that the mass in whose hollow she had beenfixed had broken away and was afloat and riding upon the swell thatunder-ran the billows. But I was far too much alarmed to feel any ofthose transports in which I must have indulged had this issue to myscheme happened in daylight and in smooth water. I was terrified by theapprehensions which had occurred to me even whilst I was at work on themines; I mean, that if the bed broke away the schooner would make ittop-heavy and that it would capsize; and thus I stood in a very agony ofexpectancy, caged like a rat, and as helpless as the dead.
Half an hour must have passed, during which time the decks wereincessantly swept by the seas, insomuch that I never once durst open thedoor even to look out. But nothing having happened to increase myconsternation in this half-hour, though the movement in the schooner wasthat of a very ponderous and majestical rolling and heaving, showing herbed to be afloat, I began to find my spirits and to listen and wait withsome buddings of hope and confidence. At the expiration of this time theseas began to fall less heavily and regularly on to the deck, andpresently I could only hear them breaking forward, but without a quartertheir former weight, and nothing worse came aft than large brisk showersof 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 skywas dark with rolling clouds, but the ice put its own light into theair, and I could see as plain as if the first of the dawn had broken. Itwas as I had supposed: the mass of the valley in which the schooner hadbeen 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,wonderfuller picture human eye never beheld. The island shore ran arampart of faintness along the darkness to where it died out in liquiddusk to right and left. The schooner sat upon a bed of ice that showed asurface of about half an acre; her stern was close to the sea, and aboutsix feet above it. On her larboard quarter the slope or shoulder of theacclivity had been broken by the rupture, and you looked over the sideinto the clear sea beyond the limit of the ice there; but abreast of theforeshrouds the ice rose in a kind
of wall, a great splinter it lookedof what was before a small broad-browed hill, and the wind or the seahaving caused the body on which the schooner lay to veer, this wallstood as a shield betwixt the vessel and the surges, and was nowreceiving those blows which had heretofore struck her starboard sideamidships and filled her decks.
Oh for a wizard's inkhorn, that I might make you see the picture as Iview it now, even with the eye of memory! The posture of the little bergpointed the schooner's head seawards, about west; the ice-terraces ofthe island lay with the wild strange gleam of their own snow radianceupon them upon the larboard quarter; around the schooner was thewhiteness of her frozen seat, and her outline was an inky, exquisitelydefined configuration upon it; above the crystal wall on the larboardbow rose the spume of the breaking surge in pallid bodies, glancing foran instant, and sometimes shaking a thunder into the ship when a portionof the seething water was flung by the wind upon the forecastle deck; atmoments a larger sea than usual overran the ice on the larboard beam andquarter, and boiled up round about the buttocks of the schooner. Toleeward the smooth backs of the billows rolled away in jet, but thefitful throbbings and feeble flashings of froth commingled with the dimshine of the ice were over all, tincturing the darkness with a spectralsheen, giving to everything a quality of unearthliness that wassharpened yet by the sounds of the wind in the gloom on high and thehissing and foaming of waters sending their leagues-distant voices tothe ear upon the wings of the icy blast.
The wind, as I have said, blew from the south-west, but the trend of theisland-coast was north-east and as the mass of ice I was upon in partingfrom the main had floated to a cable's length from the cliffs, there wasnot much danger, whilst the wind and sea held, of the berg (if I may soterm it) being thrown upon the island. That the ice under the schoonerwas moving, and if so, at what rate, it was too dark to enable me toknow by observing the marks on the coast. There was to be no sleep forme that night, and knowing this, I stepped below and built up a goodfire, and then went with the lanthorn to see how Tassard did and to givehim the news; but he was in so deep a sleep, that after pulling him alittle without awakening him I let him lie, nothing but the sound of hisbreathing persuading me that he had not lapsed into his old frozen stateagain.
Of all long nights this was the longest I ever passed through. I didtruly believe that the day was never to break again over the ocean. Imust have gone from the fire to the deck thirty or forty times. Theschooner continued upright. I had no fear of her oversetting; she satvery low, and the ice also showed but a small head above the water, andas the body of it lay pretty flat, then, even supposing its submergedbulk was small, there was little chance of its capsizing. I also noticedthat we were setting seawards--that is to say, to the westward--by anoticeable shrinking of the pallid coast. But I never could stay longenough above to observe with any kind of narrowness, the wind being fullof the wet that was flung over the ice-wall and the cold unendurable.
All night I kept the fire going, and on several occasions visited theFrenchman, but found him motionless in sleep. I kept too good a look-outto apprehend any sudden calamity short of capsizal, which I no longerfeared, and during the watches of that long night I dreamt a hundredwaking dreams of my deliverance, of my share of the treasure, of myarriving in England, quitting the sea for ever, and setting up as agreat squire, marrying a nobleman's daughter, driving in a fine coach,and ending with a seat in Parliament and a stout well-sounding handle tomy name.
At last the day broke; I went on deck and found the dawn brighteninginto morning. The wind had fallen and with it the sea; but there stillran a middling strong surge, and the breeze was such as, in sailors'language, you would have shown your top-gallant sails to. I could nowtake measure of our situation, and was not a little astonished anddelighted 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 hadbeen set away from the main by some current was very certain. There wasa westerly tendency in all the bergs which broke from the island, thesmall ones moving more quickly than the large, for the sea in the northand west was dotted with at least fifty of these white masses, great andlittle. On the other hand, the wind and seas were answerable for theprogress we had made to the north.
The wall of ice (as I call it) that had stood over against the larboardbow was gone, and the seas tumbled with some heaviness of froth and muchnoise over the ice, past the bows, and washed past the bends on eitherside in froth rising as high as the channels. I noticed a great quantityof broken ice sinking and rising in the dark green curls of the billows,and big blocks would be hurled on to the schooner's bed and then beswept off, sometimes fetching the bilge such a thump as seemed to swinga bellow through her frame. It was only at intervals, however, thatwater fell upon the decks, for the ice broke the beat of the moderatingsurge and forced it to expend its weight in spume, which there was notstrength of wind enough to raise and heave. Since the vessel continuedto lie head to sea, my passionate hope was that these repeated washingsof the waves would in time loosen the ice about her keel, in which caseit would not need much of a billow, smiting her full bows fair, to slideher clean down and off her bed and so launch her. There were manyclouds in the heavens, but the blue was very pure between. The morningbrightening with the rising of the sun, I directed an earnest gaze alongthe horizon, but there was nothing to see but ice. Some of the bergs,however, and more particularly the distant ones, stole out of the blueatmosphere to the sunshine with so complete a resemblance to the liftingcanvas of ships that I would catch myself staring fixedly, my heartbeating fast. But there was no dejection in these disappointments; theecstasy that filled me on beholding the terrible island, the hideousfrozen prison whose crystal bars I had again and again believed werenever to be broken, now lying at a distance with its northern capeimperceptibly opening to our subtle movement, was so violent that Icould not have found my voice for the tears in my heart.
This, then, was the result of my scheme; it was no failure, as Tassardhad 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 feelan instant's anxiety touching the condition of the schooner--I meanwhether she would leak or prove sound when she floated--and how we twomen were to manage to navigate so large a craft, that was still as muchspellbound aloft in her frozen canvas and tackle as ever she had been inthe sepulchre in which I discovered her.
I went below, and put the provisions we needed for breakfast into theoven, and entered Tassard's cabin. On bringing the lanthorn to his faceas he lay under half a score of coats upon the deck, I perceived thathe was awake, and, my heart being full, I cried out cheerily, "Goodnews! good news! the gunpowder did its work! The ice is ruptured and weare afloat, Mr. Tassard, afloat--and progressing north!"
He looked at me vacantly, and giving his head a shake exclaimed, "Howcan I crawl from this mound? My strength is gone."
If I was amazed that the joyful intelligence I had delivered produced noother response than this querulous inquiry, I was far more astonished bythe sound of his voice. It was the most cracked and venerable pipe thatever tickled the throat of old age, a mingling of wailing falsettos andof hollow gasping growls, the whole very weak. I threw the clothes offhim, and said, "Do you wish to rise? I will bring your breakfast here ifyou wish."
He looked at me, but made no answer. I bawled again, and observed (bythe dim lanthorn light) that he watched my lips with an air ofattention; and whilst I waited for his reply he said, "I don't hearyou."
Anxious to ascertain to what extent his hearing was impaired, I kneeledon the deck, and putting my lips to his ear said, not very loud, "Willyou 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. Ibelieved him stone-deaf till, on roaring with all the power of my lungs,he answered "Yes."
I took him by the hands and hauled him gently on to his feet, and hadto contin
ue holding him or he must have fallen. Time was beginning withhim when he had gone to bed, and the remorseless old soldier hadcompletely finished his work whilst his victim slept. I viewed theFrenchman whilst I grasped his hands, and there stood before me ashrunk, tottering, deaf, bowed, feeble old man. What was yesterday apolished head was now a shrivelled pate, as though the very skull hadshrunk and left the skin to ripple into wrinkles and sit loose andpuckered. His hands trembled excessively. But his lower jaw was held inits place by his teeth, and this perpetuated in the aged dwindledcountenance something of the likeness of the fierce and sinister visagethat had confronted me yesterday. I was thunder-struck by thealteration, and stood overwhelmed with awe, confusion, and alarm. Then,re-collecting my spirits, I supported the miserable relic to the fire,putting his bench to the dresser that he might have a back to leanagainst.
He could scarce feed himself--indeed, he could hardly hold his chin offhis 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 hesat, _a hundred and three years of age_!
He looked it. Ha, thought I, I was dreading your treachery yesterday;there is nothing more to fear. Besides that he was nearly stone deaf, hecould 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 roarout to him that we were adrift, but he looked so imbecile that Ithought, to what purpose? If there be aught of memory in him, let himsit and chew the cud thereof. He cannot last long; the cold must soonstop 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 atransformation I am sure had never before encountered mortal eyes, andit was terrifying to be alone with it.