Part 6 (2/2)
The winds veered into the southwest, and, reinforced, were controlled by a violent hurricane that had rushed up the Atlantic coast from the West Indies. The novice aboard was elated, for he thought that the fiercer the wind blew behind the vessel, the faster the steamer would be driven forward. How little some of us really know! The cyclone at sea is a rotary storm, or hurricane, of extended circuit. Black clouds drive down upon the sea and s.h.i.+p with a tiger's fierceness as if to crush all life in their pathway.
Officers and crew, in waterproof garments, become as restless as bunched cattle in a prairie blizzard. All eyes now roam from prow to stern, from deck to top mast. The lightning's blue flame plays with the steel masts, and overhead thunders drown the noise of engines and propellers. Thick black smoke and red-hot cinders shoot forth from the three black-throated smoke-stacks.
The huge steamer, no longer moving with the ease of the leviathan, seems a tiny craft and almost helpless in the chopped seas that give to the s.h.i.+p a complex motion so difficult, even for old sailors, to antic.i.p.ate.
Tidal wave follows tidal wave in rapid succession. Both trough and crest are whipped into whitecaps like tents afield, till sea and storm seem leagued to deluge the world again.
Captain Morgan, lashed to the bridge, has full confidence in himself, his doubled watch ahead, his compa.s.ses, and the throbbing engines below.
Dangers have now aroused the man and his courage grows apace. Moments supreme come to every captain at sea, the same as to captains who wage wars on the land.
The decks are drenched, great waves pound the forward deck and life-boats are broken from their moorings. Battened hatches imprison below a regiment of souls, some suffering the torments of stomachs in open rebellion, others of heads swollen, while others lose entire control of an army of nerves that center near and drive mad the brain.
To the uninitiated, words are powerless to reveal the torments of the imprisoned in a modern steel inquisition, rocking and pitching at the mercy of mighty torrents in a mid-ocean cyclone. Mephistopheles, seeking severest punishment for the d.a.m.ned, displayed tenderness in not adopting the super-heated and sooted pits where stokers in storms at sea are forced to labor and suffer.
All that terrible second day and night at sea, the Harrises and others tossed back and forth in their unstable berths, some suffering with chills and others with burning heat. Some, Mrs. Harris and daughter among them, lay for hours more dead than alive, their wills and muscles utterly powerless to reach needed and much coveted blankets.
The dining saloon was deserted except by a few old sea-travelers. Before dinner, Leo ventured above and for a moment put his head outside. The gale blowing a hundred miles an hour hit him with the force of a club.
When he went below to see Alfonso, his face was pale, and his voice trembled as he said, ”Harris, before morning we shall all sink to the bottom of the Atlantic with the 'Majestic' for our tomb.” Half undressed, Leo dropped again into his berth where he spent a miserable night.
CHAPTER VI
HALF-AWAKE, HALF-ASLEEP
Few persons find life enjoyable in a great storm at sea, for the discomfitures of mind and body are many. The s.h.i.+p's officers and crew are always concerned about the welfare of the pa.s.sengers and the safety of steamer and cargo.
True, Leo, with the instincts of an artist, had stood for hours on the deck, partially sheltered by a smoke-stack, to study wave motions and the ever-changing effects of the ocean. Never before had he known its sublimity. When the sea was wildest and the deck was wave-swept, he in his safe retreat made sketches of waves and their combinations which he hoped sometime to reproduce on canvas. At other times, conscious of storm dangers in mid-ocean, Leo's conscience troubled him. For a year he had been much in love with a pretty Italian girl, daughter of an official, long in the service of the Italian government at the port of New York.
Rosie Ricci was fifteen years old when she first met Leo. Dressed in white, she entered an exhibition of water colors on W. 10th street with her mother one May morning, as Leo had finished hanging a delicate marine view sketched down the Narrows.
Glances only between Leo and Rosie were exchanged, but each formed the resolution sometime, if possible, to know the other. Rosie's father had died when she was only fourteen years old, and existence for Mrs. Ricci and her little family had been a struggle. For the last year, a happy change had come in their condition. A letter had been received from a rich senator by Mrs. Ricci, which was couched in the tenderest language.
The senator explained in his letter that at a musicale, given on Fifth Avenue, he had heard a Rosie Ricci sing a simple song that revived memories of an early day. This fact, coupled with Rosie's charming simplicity and vivacity of manner, fixed her name in his mind; later he was reading the _New York Tribune_, and the name Ricci arrested his attention.
The item mentioned the death of Raphael Ricci, ex-consul, and the senator's object in writing was to inquire further as to the facts. Did he leave a competency? If not, would the family receive such a.s.sistance as would enable the daughter, if Rosie Ricci was her daughter, to obtain a further musical education?
The senator's letter dropped from the mother's hands; she was overcome with the good news. Rosie picked it up saying, ”Mother dear, what is the matter? What terrible news does it contain?”
”Not bad news, child! possibly good news; a letter from a stranger who offers aid in our distress, a letter from one holding a high position.
I wonder what it all means? Has the senator been prompted by the spirit of your anxious father, or is there evil in the communication?”
”Tell me, mother, tell me all about it!” But before the mother could speak, Rosie was reading the letter aloud. She threw up her hands in delight and flew into her mother's arms. ”How good the Lord is to us!”
Rosie exclaimed. She had been eager for a musical education and to win fame on the stage.
In June, by appointment, Mrs. Ricci and daughter met the Senator at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. It was arranged that Rosie should have the best musical education obtainable in Boston, and further that the senator should pay her expenses in Boston and New York, and that the mother's rent should be included in his liberality. At times, the mother questioned the senator's motives, but he always seemed so kind and fatherly that she spurned the thought as coming from the Evil One.
The senator as he left, put several bills in Mrs. Ricci's hand, saying, ”You and Rosie will find need of them for clothes for the daughter and for other expenses.”
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