A Dream of the North Sea | Page 5

not?"

"Yes; but the end is far off. We were so late--so late in beginning, and I
must pass away, and my place will know me no more; and many and
many another will pass away. Oh, yes! we shall travel from gulf to gulf;
but I think, sometimes, that my soul will be here on the wild nights. I
must be near my men--my poor men!--and I'll meet them when their
voyage is over."
The enthusiast spoke solemnly, and his queer diction somehow was not
unbecoming or grotesque. I suppose George Fox and Savonarola did
not use quite the ordinary language of their day and generation.
The doctor listened with a kind look on his strong face, and when the
dark young girl quietly whispered "Amen!" our professor quite simply
repeated the word.
Tom Lennard had been going through a most complicated series of
acrobatic movements, and he now broke in--
"Ah! Harry Fullerton, if you're not an angel, you're pretty near one. Ah!
that eloquence is of the most--the most--a kind of--ah!
fahscinating--oh-h-h! fahscinating! But I believe this vessel has a
personal spite against me, or else the sea's rising."
"It is, indeed," said Mr. Blair, who had peeped out from the companion.
"We're actually running up to the fleet, and the rocket has gone up for
them to haul trawls. It looks very bad, very bad. You're not frightened,
Mrs. Walton, I hope?"
The reserved, silent lady said--
"Oh, no! Marion and I seem to take kindly to bad weather. I believe if
she could wear a sou'-wester she would hang on to the rigging. It's her
combative instinct. But I do hope there is no danger for the poor
fishermen?"
Mr. Blair very quietly said--
"If their vessels were like ours there would be no fear. We haven't an

unsound rope or block, but many of the smacks are shockingly
ill-found, and one rope or spar may cost a crew their lives if it's faulty.
The glass has gone down badly, and we are in for a gale, and a heavy
one. But my ship would be quite comfortable in the Bay of Biscay."
A trampling on deck sounded. "See if the ladies can look from the
companion," said Tom Lennard. "The sight should be splendid. You
and I must shove on oilskins, Blair and see if we can keep our legs."
This was almost the end of the night's conversation. Those good
mission-folks, as has been seen, contrived to get on without saying
either clever things or bitter things, and persons who possess the higher
intellect may fancy that this was a sign of a poor spirit. Perhaps; and
yet I have read somewhere that the poor in spirit may not fare so very
badly in the long run.

CHAPTER II.
THE BREEZE.
The spectacle on deck was appalling, and the sounds were appalling
also. The blast rushed by with a deep ground note which rose in pitch
to a yell as the gust hurled itself through the cordage; each sea that
came down seemed likely to be the last, but the sturdy yacht--no
floating chisel was she--ran up the steep with a long, slow glide, and
smashed into the black hollow with a sharp explosive sound. Marion
Dearsley might have been pardoned had she shown tremors as the
flying mountains towered over the vessel. Once a great black wall
heaved up and doubled the intensity of the murky midnight by a sinister
shade; there came a horrible silence, and then, with a loud bellow, the
wall burst into ruin and crashed down on the ship in a torrent which
seemed made up of a thousand conflicting streams. The skipper silently
dashed aft, flung his arms round Tom Lennard, and pinned him to the
mast; Mr. Blair hung on, though he was drifted aft with his feet off the
deck until he hung like a totally new description of flying signal; the
ladies were drenched by the deluge which rushed down below, and the

steward, when he saw the water swashing about over his cabin floor,
exclaimed with discreet bitterness on the folly of inviting ladies to
witness such a spectacle as a North Sea gale.
Tom observed: "The grandeur is--ah! fahscinating, but it's rather damp
grandeur. It's only grandeur fit for heroes. Give me all my grandeur dry,
if you please."
"Yes, sir," said the streaming skipper, "that was a near thing for you
and me when she shipped it. If I hadn't been on the right side of the
mast, both on us must have gone." Dawn rose slowly; the sky became
blotched with snaky tints of dull yellow and livid grey; the gale kept on,
and the schooner was hove-to to meet a sea of terrifying speed and
height. Two of the ladies were