Page:The Iron Pirate 1905.djvu/377

Rh whence you may look to the distant horizon in that search for other ships; which may be pastime, or may be, as in our case, a search on which your very life depends.

How often during that long afternoon, when my hair was matted with the salt of the spray, and my hands were burnt with a consuming fire, and my body was chill or hot with the fever of the long exposure, did I, from such a pinnacle, cast my eyes around the foam-decked waste, and finding it all barren, feel my heart sink as the dinghy swept again into the dark-green abyss, and all around me were the walls of water! How many prayers did not I send up in the silence of my heart: how many thoughts of Roderick and of Mary, how many farewells to them! And when I prayed for life, and no answer seemed to come, and I remembered the years that might have been before me—years now to be unknown in the silence of the grave—I had a great bitterness against all fate and all men, and I crouched in the boat with my suffering heavy upon me. But Black continued to drink, and when the sun fell low in the west, and the whole heavens were as mountains and peaks of the crimson fire, I knew by his mutterings that the frenzy of the old madness was upon him.

At one time he called upon his wife, I doubt not, and gave mad words of self-reproach and of regret. And then he would mutter of his son, as