I should have in agined myself too anxious--nay, to put it plainly, too alarmed to sleep, and it seemed that I went up many times to take a look around; and still I must have slept, for I started from my chair in a sudden terror of dream or noise, and with a lurch of the hull fell upon my knees, but was up instantly.
The motion of the craft had changed; the moment I had my wits I felt that the sea was pyramidal, which told me there had been a quite recent shift of wind. I cannot imagine anything more dislocating, more unnerving, more brain sickening, than the leaps and rolls of the hull upon the sea that, by the movement, I knew was darting in almost perpendicular thrusts, spear shaped billows lifting in ebon darts and daggers, and putting a frightful wildness into the flings of the fabric.
Miss Otway lay with her eyes shut, and seemed asleep; a small fire glowed in the stove, and the lighted lantern swung in the centre of the cabin as though some invisible hand grasped it, seeking to jerk it off its hook. I took the bull's-eye and went on deck, and found the wind a dry gale, but observed a thickness as of fog in it, but it was too dark to make sure. I staggered to the binnacle and saw the wind was blowing out of north again: a cruel shift! I stared and smelt for ice, but saw no loom, and tasted no more than the freezing coldness of the blast.
What was the hour? I went below and found it half-past eight o'clock. Oh! what an interminable darkness was that! Where was the ice? It could not be far off. What and whither was our drift? I felt like a madman then.
Miss Otway slept on. I believe it might have been an hour and a half after I had awakened that, not knowing but that the poor young heart in her had been stopped by terror, or the delicate blood in her frozen, I stooped to view her face, the lamp burning dimly; she showed like a piece of exquisitely chiselled marble: I can't tell why, but her whiteness seemed to my mood to exactly fit the bitterness of this time, the frost, the snow, the ice, the wild gale and foaming waters; was I as mad then as I had felt some time before, to bend over her and get a fancy of her into my head as a spirit of these wild and desolate parts? Put yourself in my place and you'll not wonder to find your brow hot with fancies more desperately and tragically strange than such a crazy notion as this.