Page:The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.djvu/280

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prison, without delay. He received the communication with perfect calmness, and acquiesced in its propriety. Nearly all the inmates of the prison had assembled to witness its removal ; they fell back on either side when the widower appeared ; he walked hurriedly forward, and sta- tioned himself, alone, in a little railed area close to the lodge gate, from whence the crowd, with an instinctive feeling of delicacy, had retired. The rude coffin was borne slowly forward on men's shoulders. A dead silence pervaded the throng, broken only by the audible lament- ations of the women, and the shuffling steps of the bearers on the stone pavement. They reached the spot where the bereaved husband stood : and stopped. He laid his hand upon the coffin, and mechani- cally adjusting the pall with which it was covered, motioned them onwards. The turnkeys in the prison lobby took oif their hats as it passed through, and in another moment the heavy gate closed behind it. He looked vacantly upon the crowd, and fell heavily to the ground.

" Although for many weeks after this, he was watched night and day, in the wildest ravings of fever, neither the consciousness of his loss, nor the recollection of the vow he had made, ever left him for a moment. Scenes changed before his eyes, place succeeded place, and event followed event, in all the hurry of delirium ; but they were all connected in some way with the great object of his mind. He was sailing over a boundless expanse of sea, with a blood-red sky above, and the angry waters lashed into fury beneath, boiling and eddying up, on every side. There was another vessel before them, toiling and labouring in the howling storm ; her canvass fluttering in ribbons from the mast, and her deck thronged with figures who were lashed to the sides, over which huge waves every instant burst, sweeping away some devoted creatures into the foaming sea. Onward they bore, amidst the roaring mass of water, with a speed and force which nothing could resist ; and striking the stern of the foremost vessel, crushed her, beneath their keel. From the huge whirlpool which the sinking wreck occa- sioned, arose a, shriek so loud and shrill — the death-cry of a hundred drowning wretches, blended into one fierce yell — that it rung far above the war-cry of the elements, and echoed, and re-echoed till it seemed to pierce air, sky, and ocean. But what was that — that old grey-head that rose above the water's surface, and with looks of agony, and screams for aid, buffeted with the waves ! One look, and he had sprung from the vessel's side, and with vigorous strokes was swimming towards it. He reached it; he was close upon it. They were his features. The old man saw him coming, and vainly strove to elude his grasp. But he clasped him tight, and dragged him beneath the water. Down, down with him, fifty fathoms deep ; his struggles grew fainter and fainter, until they wholly ceased. He was dead ; he had killed him, and had kept his oath.

" He was traversing the scorching sands of a mighty desert, bare- footed and alone. The sand choked and blinded him ; its fine thin grains entered the very pores of his skin, and irritated him almost to madness. Gigantic masses of the same material, carried forward by the wind, and shone through, by the burning sun, stalked in the distance like