last feeble exertion on our parts could lead
to any result. I only proposed it because I
was driven to the end of my resources to keep
up the faintest flicker of spirit among the
men. They received my proposal with more
warmth and readiness than I had ventured
in their hopeless state, to expect from them.
Up to the turn of midnight they resolutely
raised their voices with me, at intervals
of from five to ten minutes, whenever the
boat was tossed highest on the waves. The
wind seemed to whirl our weak cries savagely
out of our mouths almost before we could
utter them. I, sitting astern in the boat,
only heard them, as it seemed, for something
like an instant of time. But even that was
enough to make me creep all over—the
cry was so forlorn and fearful. Of all
the dreadful sounds I had heard since
the first striking of the ship, that shrill
wail of despair—rising on the wave-tops, one
moment; whirled away, the next, into the black
night—was the most frightful that entered
my ears. There are times, even now, when it
seems to be ringing in them still.

Whether our first gleam of moonshine fell
upon old Mr. Rarx, while he was sleeping,
and helped to upset his weak brains
altogether, is more than I can say. But, for
some reason or other, before the clouds
parted and let the light down on us for the
second time, and while we were driving along
awfully through the blackest of the night, he
stirred in his place, and began rambling
and raving again more vehemently than ever.
To hear him now—that is to say, as well as I
could hear him for the wind—he was still
down in his gold-mine; but was laden so
heavy with his precious metal that he could
not get out, and was in mortal peril of being
drowned by the water rising in the bottom of
the shaft. So far, his maundering attracted
my attention disagreeably, and did no more.
But when he began—if I may say so—to
take the name of the dear little dead child in
vain, and to mix her up with himself and
his miserly greed of gain, I got angry, and
called to the men forward to give him a
shake and make him hold his tongue.
Whether any of them obeyed or not, I don’t
know—Mr. Rarx went on raving louder than
ever. The shrill wind was now hardly more
shrill than he. He swore he saw the white
frock of our poor little lost pet fluttering in
the daylight, at the top of the mine, and
he screamed out to her in a great fright
that the gold was heavy, and the water
rising fast, and that she must come down
quick as lightning if she meant to be in time
to help him. I called again angrily to the
men to silence him; and just as I did so, the
clouds began to part for the second time, and
the white tip of the moon grew visible.

“There she is!” screeches Mr. Rarx; and
I saw him by the faint light, scramble on his
knees in the bottom of the boat, and wave a
ragged old handkerchief up at the moon.

“Pull him down!” I called out. “Down
with him; and tie his arms and legs!”

Of the men who could still move about,
not one paid any attention to me. They were
all upon their knees again, looking out in the
strengthening moonlight for a sight of the ship.

“Quick, Golden Lucy!” screams Mr. Rarx,
and creeps under the thwarts right forward
into the bows of the boat. “Quick! my
darling, my beauty, quick! The gold is
heavy, and the water rises fast! Come down
and save me, Golden Lucy! Let all the rest
of the world drown, and save me! Me! me!
me! me!”

He shouted these last words out at the
top of his cracked, croaking voice, and
got on his feet, as I conjectured (for the
coat we had spread for a sail now hid
him from me) in the bows of the boat. Not
one of the crew so much as looked round
at him, so eagerly were their eyes seeking
for the ship. The man sitting by me
was sunk in a deep sleep. If I had left
the helm for a moment in that wind and
sea, it would have been the death of
every soul of us. I shouted desperately to
the raving wretch to sit down. A screech
that seemed to cut the very wind in two
answered me. A huge wave tossed the boat’s
head up wildly at the same moment. I
looked aside to leeward as the wash of the
great roller swept by us, gleaming of a lurid,
bluish white in the moonbeams; I looked
and saw, in one second of time, the face of
Mr. Rarx rush past on the wave, with the
foam seething in his hair and the moon
shining in his eyes. Before I could draw my
breath he was a hundred yards astern of us,
and the night and the sea had swallowed him
up and had hid his secret, which he had kept
all the voyage, from our mortal curiosity, for
ever.

“He’s gone! he’s drowned!” I shouted to
the men forward.

None of them took any notice; none of
them left off looking out over the ocean for
a sight of the ship. Nothing that I could
say on the subject of our situation at that
fearful time can, in my opinion, give such an
idea of the extremity and the frightfulness of
it, as the relation of this one fact. I leave it
to speak by itself the sad and shocking truth,
and pass on gladly to the telling of what
happened next, at a later hour of the night.

After the clouds had shut out the moon
again, the wind dropped a little and shifted
a point or two, so as to shape our course
nearer to the eastward. How the hours
passed after that, till the dawn came, is more
than I can tell. The nearer the time of
daylight approached the more completely
everything seemed to drop out of my mind, except
the one thought of where the ship we had
seen in the evening might be, when we looked
for her with the morning light.

It came at last—that grey, quiet light
which was to end all our uncertainty; which