University of Virginia Library

21. XXI.
A STORM.

THE members of the household were all
at the window about noon, next day,
watching the rise of a storm. A murky wing
of cloud, shaped like a hawk's, hung over the
low western hills across the bay. Then the
hawk became an eagle, and the eagle a gigantic
phantom, that hovered over half the visible
sky. Beneath it, a little scud of vapor, moved
by some cross-current of air, raced rapidly
against the wind, just above the horizon, like
smoke from a battle-field.

As the cloud ascended, the water grew rapidly
blacker, and in half an hour broke into
jets of white foam, all over its surface, with
an angry look. Meantime a white film of fog
spread down the bay from the northward.
The wind hauled from southwest to northwest,
so suddenly and strongly that all the anchored
boats seemed to have swung round instantaneously,
without visible process. The instant the
wind shifted, the rain broke forth, filling the

air in a moment with its volume, and cutting
so sharply that it seemed like hail, though no
hailstones reached the ground. At the same
time there rose upon the water a dense white
film, which seemed to grow together from a
hundred different directions, and was made
partly of rain, and partly of the blown edges
of the spray. There was but a glimpse of
this; for in a few moments it was impossible
to see two rods; but when the first gust was
over, the water showed itself again, the jets of
spray all beaten down, and regular waves, of
dull lead-color, breaking higher on the shore.
All the depth of blackness had left the sky,
and there remained only an obscure and
ominous gray, through which the lightning
flashed white, not red. Boats came driving
in from the mouth of the bay with a rag of
sail up; the men got them moored with difficulty,
and when they sculled ashore in the
skiffs, a dozen comrades stood ready to grasp
and haul them in. Others launched skiffs in
sheltered places, and pulled out bareheaded to
bail out their fishing-boats and keep them
from swamping at their moorings.

The shore was thronged with men in oilskin
clothes and by women with shawls over their

heads. Aunt Jane, who always felt responsible
for whatever went on in the elements, sat
in-doors with one lid closed, wincing at every
flash, and watching the universe with the air
of a coachman guiding six wild horses.

Just after the storm had passed its height,
two veritable wild horses were reined up at
the door, and Philip burst in, his usual self-composure
gone.

“Emilia is out sailing!” he exclaimed,
— “alone with Lambert's boatman, in this
gale. They say she was bound for Narragansett.”

“Impossible!” cried Hope, turning pale.
“I left her not three hours ago.” Then she
remembered that Emilia had spoken of going
on board the yacht, to superintend some arrangements,
but had said no more about it,
when she opposed it.

“Harry!” said Aunt Jane, quickly, from
her chair by the window, “see that fisherman.
He has just come ashore and is telling something.
Ask him.”

The fisherman had indeed seen Lambert's
boat, which was well known. Something
seemed to be the matter with the sail, but before
the storm struck her, it had been hauled

down. They must have taken in water enough,
as it was. He had himself been obliged to
bail out three times, running in from the reef.

“Was there any landing which they could
reach?” Harry asked.

There was none, — but the light-ship lay
right in their track, and if they had good luck,
they might get aboard of her.

“The boatman?” said Philip, anxiously, —
“Mr. Lambert's boatman; is he a good sailor?”

“Don't know,” was the reply. “Stranger
here. Dutchman, Frenchman, Portegee, or
some kind of a foreigner.”

“Seems to understand himself in a boat,”
said another.

“Mr. Malbone knows him,” said a third.
“The same that dove with the young woman
under the steamboat paddles.”

“Good grit,” said the first.

“That's so,” was the answer. “But grit
don't teach a man the channel.”

All agreed to this axiom; but as there was
so strong a probability that the voyagers had
reached the light-ship, there seemed less cause
for fear.

The next question was, whether it was possible

to follow them. All agreed that it would
be foolish for any boat to attempt it, till the
wind had blown itself out, which might be
within half an hour. After that, some predicted
a calm, some a fog, some a renewal of
the storm; there was the usual variety of
opinions. At any rate, there might perhaps
be an interval during which they could go out,
if the gentlemen did not mind a wet jacket.

Within the half-hour came indeed an interval
of calm, and a light shone behind the
clouds from the west. It faded soon into a
gray fog, with puffs of wind from the southwest
again. When the young men went out
with the boatmen, the water had grown more
quiet, save where angry little gusts ruffled it.
But these gusts made it necessary to carry a
double reef, and they made but little progress
against wind and tide.

A dark-gray fog, broken by frequent windflaws,
makes the ugliest of all days on the
water. A still, pale fog is soothing; it lulls
nature to a kind of repose. But a windy fog
with occasional sunbeams and sudden films of
metallic blue breaking the leaden water, —
this carries an impression of something weird
and treacherous in the universe, and suggests
caution.

As the boat floated on, every sight and
sound appeared strange. The music from the
fort came sudden and startling through the
vaporous eddies. A tall white schooner rose
instantaneously near them, like a light-house.
They could see the steam of the factory floating
low, seeking some outlet between cloud
and water. As they drifted past a wharf, the
great black piles of coal hung high and
gloomy; then a stray sunbeam brought out
their peacock colors; then came the fog again,
driving hurriedly by, as if impatient to go
somewhere and enraged at the obstacle. It
seemed to have a vast inorganic life of its
own, a volition and a whim. It drew itself
across the horizon like a curtain; then advanced
in trampling armies up the bay; then
marched in masses northward; then suddenly
grew thin, and showed great spaces of sunlight;
then drifted across the low islands, like
long tufts of wool; then rolled itself away
toward the horizon; then closed in again,
pitiless and gray.

Suddenly something vast towered amid the
mist above them. It was the French war-ship
returned to her anchorage once more, and
seeming in that dim atmosphere to be something

spectral and strange that had taken
form out of the elements. The muzzles of
great guns rose tier above tier, along her side;
great boats hung one above another, on
successive pairs of davits, at her stern. So
high was her hull, that the topmost boat and
the topmost gun appeared to be suspended in
middle air; and yet this was but the beginning
of her altitude. Above these were the
heavy masts, seen dimly through the mist;
between these were spread eight dark lines of
sailors' clothes, which, with the massive yards
above, looked like part of some ponderous
framework built to reach the sky. This prolongation
of the whole dark mass toward the
heavens had a portentous look to those who
gazed from below; and when the denser fog
sometimes furled itself away from the topgallant
masts, hitherto invisible, and showed
them rising loftier yet, and the tricolor at the
mizzen-mast-head looking down as if from the
zenith, then they all seemed to appertain to
something of more than human workmanship;
a hundred wild tales of phantom vessels came
up to the imagination, and it was as if that
one gigantic structure were expanding to fill
all space from sky to sea.

They were swept past it; the fog closed
in; it was necessary to land near the Fort,
and proceed on foot. They walked across
the rough peninsula, while the mist began to
disperse again, and they were buoyant with
expectation. As they toiled onward, the fog
suddenly met them at the turn of a lane
where it had awaited them, like an enemy.
As they passed into those gray and impalpable
arms, the whole world changed again.

They walked toward the sound of the sea.
As they approached it, the dull hue that lay
upon it resembled that of the leaden sky.
The two elements could hardly be distinguished
except as the white outlines of the
successive breakers were lifted through the
fog. The lines of surf appeared constantly to
multiply upon the beach, and yet, on counting
them, there were never any more. Sometimes,
in the distance, masses of foam rose up like a
wall where the horizon ought to be; and, as
the coming waves took form out of the unseen,
it seemed as if no phantom were too vast or
shapeless to come rolling in upon their dusky
shoulders.

Presently a frail gleam of something like
the ghost of dead sunshine made them look

toward the west. Above the dim roofs of
Castle Hill mansion-house, the sinking sun
showed luridly through two rifts of cloud, and
then the swift motion of the nearer vapor
veiled both sun and cloud, and banished
them into almost equal remoteness.

Leaving the beach on their right, and passing
the high rocks of the Pirate's Cave, they
presently descended to the water's edge once
more. The cliffs rose to a distorted height in
the dimness; sprays of withered grass nodded
along the edge, like Ossian's spectres. Light
seemed to be vanishing from the universe,
leaving them alone with the sea. And when
a solitary loon uttered his wild cry, and rising,
sped away into the distance, it was as if life
were following light into an equal annihilation.
That sense of vague terror, with which the
ocean sometimes controls the fancy, began to
lay its grasp on them. They remembered that
Emilia, in speaking once of her intense shrinking
from death, had said that the sea was the
only thing from which she would not fear to
meet it.

Fog exaggerates both for eye and ear; it is
always a sounding-board for the billows; and
in this case, as often happens, the roar did not

appear to proceed from the waves themselves,
but from some source in the unseen horizon,
as if the spectators were shut within a beleaguered
fortress, and this thundering noise
came from an impetuous enemy outside. Ever
and anon there was a distinct crash of heavier
sound, as if some special barricade had at
length been beaten in, and the garrison must
look to their inner defences.

The tide was unusually high, and scarcely
receded with the ebb, though the surf increased;
the waves came in with constant
rush and wail, and with an ominous rattle of
pebbles on the little beaches, beneath the
powerful suction of the undertow; and there
were more and more of those muffled throbs
along the shore which tell of coming danger
as plainly as minute-guns. With these came
mingled that yet more inexplicable humming
which one hears at intervals in such times,
like strains of music caught and tangled in
the currents of stormy air, — strains which
were perhaps the filmy thread on which tales
of sirens and mermaids were first strung, and
in which, at this time, they would fain recognize
the voice of Emilia.