University of Virginia Library

71. CHAPTER LXXI.

— Lear.

At one o'clock at night, in the midst of the Atlantic, a
hundred leagues west of the Azores, the bark Swallow,
freighted with salt cod for the Levant, was scudding furiously,
under a close-reefed foresail, before a fierce gale. On board
were her captain, two mates, seven men, a black steward, a
cabin boy, and Mr. John White, a passenger.

The captain and his mates were all on deck. John White,
otherwise Horace Vinal, occupied a kind of store room, opening
out of the cabin. Here a temporary berth had been
nailed up for him, while on the opposite side were stowed a
trunk belonging to him, and three barrels of onions belonging
to the vessel's owners, all well lashed in their places.

The dead lights were in, but the seas, striking like mallets
against the stern, pierced in fine mist through invisible crevices,
bedrizzling every thing with salt dew. The lantern,

hanging from the cabin roof, swung angrily with the reckless
plungings of the vessel.

Vinal was a good sailor; that is to say, he was not very
liable to that ocean scourge, seasickness, and the few qualms
he had suffered were by this time effectually frightened out
of him. As darkness closed, he had lain down in his clothes;
and flung from side to side till his bones ached with the incessant
rolling of the bark, he listened sleeplessly to the hideous
booming of the storm. Suddenly there came a roar so
appalling, that he leaped out of his berth with terror. It
seemed to him as if a Niagara had broken above the vessel,
and was crushing her down to the nethermost abyss. The
rush of waters died away. Then came the bellow of the
speaking trumpet, the trampling of feet, the shouts of men,
the hoarse fluttering of canvas. In a few moments he felt
a change in the vessel's motion. She no longer rocked with
a constant reel from side to side, but seemed flung about at
random, hither and thither, at the mercy of the storm.

She had been, in fact, within a hair's breadth of foundering.
A huge wave, chasing on her wake, swelling huger and
huger, towering higher and higher, had curled, at last, its
black crest above her stern, and, breaking, fallen on her in a
deluge. The captain, a Barnstable man of the go-ahead
stamp, was brought at last to furl his foresail and lie to.

Vinal, restless with his fear, climbed the narrow stairway
which led up to the deck, and pushed open the door at the
top; but a blast of wind and salt spray clapped it in his face,
and would have knocked him to the foot of the steps, if he
had not clung to the handrail. He groped his way as he

could back to his berth. Here he lay for a quarter of an
hour, when the captain came down, enveloped in oilcloths,
and dripping like a Newfoundland dog just out of the water.
Vinal emerged from his den, and presenting himself with his
haggard face, and hair bristling in disorder, questioned the
bedrenched commander touching the state of things on deck.
But the latter was in a crusty and savage mood.

“Hey! what is it?” — surveying the apparition by the
light of the swinging lantern, — “well, you be a beauty, I'll
be damned if you ain't.”

“I did not ask you how I looked; I asked you about the
weather.”

“Well, it ain't the sweetest night I ever see; but I guess
you won't drown this time.”

“My friend,” said Vinal, “learn to mend your way of speaking,
and use a civil tongue.”

The captain stared at him, muttered an oath or two, and
then turned away.

Day broke, and Vinal went on deck. It was a wild dawning.
The storm was at its height. One rag of a topsail was
set to steady the vessel; all the rest was bare poles and black
dripping cordage, through which the gale yelled like a forest in
a tornado. The sky was dull gray; the ocean was dull gray.
There was no horizon. The vessel struggled among tossing
mountains, while tons of water washed her decks, and the
men, half drowned, clung to the rigging. Vast misshapen
ridges of water bore down from the windward, breaking into
foam along their crests, struck the vessel with a sullen shock,
burst over her bulwarks, deluged her from stem to stern,

heaved her aloft as they rolled on, and then left her to sink
again into the deep trough of the sea.

Vinal was in great fear; but nothing in his look betrayed
it. He soon went below to escape the drenching seas; but
towards noon, Hansen, the second mate, a good-natured old
sea dog, came down with the welcome news that the gale
had suddenly abated. Vinal went on deck again, and saw a
singular spectacle. The wind had strangely lulled; but the
waves were huge and furious as ever; and the bark rose
and pitched, and was flung to and fro with great violence, but
in a silence almost perfect. Water, in great quantities, still
washed the deck, but found ready escape through a large
port in the after part of the vessel, the lid of which, hanging
vertically, had been left unfastened.

The lull was of short space. A hoarse, low sound began
to growl in the distance like muffled thunder. It grew
louder, — nearer, — and the gale was on them again. This
time it blew from the north-west, and less fiercely than before.
The venturous captain made sail. The yards were braced
round; and leaning from the wind till her lee gunwale scooped
the water, the vessel plunged on her way like a racehorse.
The clouds were rent; blue sky appeared. Strong winds
tore them apart, and the sun blazed out over the watery convulsion,
changing its blackness to a rich blue, almost as dark,
where the whirling streaks of foam seemed like snow wreaths
on the mountains. Jets of foam, too, spouted from under
the vessel's bows, as she dashed them against the opposing
seas; and the prickling spray flew as high as the main top.

The ocean was like a viking in his robust carousals, — terror
and mirth, laughter and fierceness, all in one.

But the mind of Vinal was blackness and unmixed gall.
His game was played and lost. The worst that he feared had
befallen him. Suspense was over, and he was freed from the
incubus that had ridden him so long. A something like
relief mixed itself with his bitter and vindictive musings.
He had not fled empty handed. He and Morton's friend
Sharpe had been joint trustees of a large estate, a part
of which, in a form that made it readily available, happened
to be in Vinal's hands at the time of his crisis. Dread
of his quick-sighted and vigilant colleague had hitherto
prevented him from applying it to his own uses. But this
fear had now lost its force. He took it with him on his
flight, and converted it into money in New York, where he
had embarked.

At night the descent of Hansen to supper was a welcome
diversion to his lonely thoughts. The old sailor seated himself
at the table: —

“I've lost all my appetite, and got a horse's. Here, steward,
you nigger, where be yer? Fetch along that beefsteak.
What do you call this here? Well, never mind what you
call it, here goes into it, any how.”

A silent and destructive onslaught upon the dish before him
followed. Then, laying down his knife and fork for a moment,
—

“I've knowed the time when I could have ate up the doctor
there,” — pointing to the steward, — “bones and all, and
couldn't get a mouthful, no way you could fix it.” Then,

resuming his labors, “Tell you what, squire, this here
agrees with me. Come out of that berth now, and sit down
here alongside o' me. Just walk into that beefsteak, like I
do. That 'ere beats physicking all holler.”

Thus discoursing, partly to himself and partly to Vinal,
and, by turns, berating the grinning steward in a jocular
strain, Mr. Hansen continued his repast. When, at last,
he left the cabin, Vinal found the solitude too dreary for
endurance; and, to break its monotony, he also went on
deck.

The vessel still scoured wildly along; and as she plunged
through the angry seas, so the moon was sailing among
stormy clouds, now eclipsed and lost, now shining brightly
out, silvering the seething foam, and casting the shadows of
spars and rigging on the glistening deck. Vinal bent over
the bulwark and looked down on the bubbles, as they fled
past, flashing in the moon.

His thoughts flew backward with them, and dwelt on the
hated home from which he was escaping.

“What an outcry! what gapes of wonder, and eyes turned
up to heaven! Gulled, befooled, hoodwinked! and now, at
last, you have found it out, and make earth and heaven ring
with your virtuous spite. I knew you all, and played you as
I would play the pieces on a chess board. The game was a
good one in the main, but with some blunders, and for those
I pay the price. If I had had that villain's brute strength,
and the brute nerve that goes with it, there would have been
a different story to tell. Before this, I would have found a way
to grind him to the earth, and set my foot on his neck.

They think him virtuous. He thinks himself so. The shallow-witted
idiots! Their eyes can only see skin-deep. They
love to be cheated. They swallow fallacies as a child swallows
sweetmeats. The tinsel dazzles them, and they take it
for gold. Virtue! a delusion of self-interest — self-interest,
the spring, lever, and fulcrum of the world. It is for my
interest, for every body's interest, that his neighbors should
be honest, candid, open, forgiving, charitable, continent, sober,
and what not. Therefore, by the general consent of mankind,
— the inevitable instinct of self-interest, — such qualities
are exalted into sanctity; christened with the name of
virtues; draped in white, and crowned with halos; rewarded
with praises here and paradise hereafter. Drape the skeleton
as you will, the bare skeleton is still there. Paint as thick
as you will, the bare skull grins under it, — to all who have
the eyes to see, and the hardihood to use them. How many
among mankind have courage to face the naked truth? Not
one in a thousand. Cannot the fools draw reason out of the
analogy of things? Can they not see that, as their bodies
will be melted and merged into the bodily substance of the
world, so their minds will be merged in the great universal
mind, — the animus mundi,—out of which they sprang, like
bubbles on the water, and into which they will sink again, like
bubbles when they burst? Immortality! They may please
themselves with the name; but of what worth is an immortality
where individuality is lost, and each conscious atom
drowned in the vast immensity? What a howling and
screeching the wind makes in the rigging! If I were given
to superstition, I could fancy that a legion from the nether
world were bestriding the ropes, yelping in grand jubilation
at the sight of —”

Here his thoughts were abruptly cut short. A combing
wave struck the vessel. She lurched with violence, and a
shower of foam flew over her side. Vinal lost his balance.
His feet slipped from under him. He fell, and slid quickly
across the wet and tossing deck. Instinctively he braced
his feet to stop himself against the bulwark on the lee side.
But at the point where they touched it was the large port
before mentioned. Though closed to all appearance, the bolt
was still unfastened. It flew open at his touch. Vinal
clutched to save himself. His fingers slipped on the wet
timbers, and with a cry of horror, he was shot into the bubbling
surges. There was a blinding in his eyes, a ringing in
his ears; then, for an instant, he saw the light, and the black
hulk of the vessel fled past like a shadow. Then a wave
swept over him: all was darkness and convulsion, and a
maddened sense of being flung high aloft, as the wave rolled
him towards its crest like a drift sea weed. Here again light
broke upon him; and flying above the merciless chaos, he
saw something like the white wing of a huge bird. It was
the reefed main-topsail of the receding vessel. He shrieked
wildly. A torrent of brine dashed back the cry, and foaming
over his head, plunged him down into darkness again.
Again he rose, gasping and half senseless; and again the
ravenous breakers beat him down. A moment of struggle
and of agony; then a long nightmare of dreamy horror,
while, slowly settling downward, he sank below the turmoil
of the storm; slowly and more slowly still, till the denser

water sustained his weight. Then with limbs outstretched,
he hovered in mid ocean, lonely, void, and vast, like a
hawk poised in mid-air, while his felon spirit, bubbling
to the surface, winged its dreary flight through the whistling
storm.