For a moment the cottage shook. It was even reported that the shellbacks heard muffled screams. Indeed they had prepared to rush up the slopes to see if old Lydia was being murdered. But they did not go, nor was their presence needed, for it was only the cries of Lydia in hysterics at the sight of the Britisher’s anguish-stricken face.
Then the reaction came. The white man sat down in his arm-chair by his old grandfather clock and cried like a child.
While Lydia told me those things, that old grandfather clock still ticked on like doom. As we sat there in the silence, and the woman wept and wailed out all her sorrow to my sympathetic ears, the “tick! tick! tick!” seemed to chant out in a terribly relentless monotone:
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
“What happened then?” I said, as the woman still wept on and I pressed her hand. I hardly knew how to tell her all that I could tell: how Waylao had stowed away on my ship, and then of her last disappearance from the kind Matafas in Samoa. When at length I told her all that I knew, she stared at me like a bronze statue; her nose looked brittle, her eyes quite glassy. I cannot describe how affected I was by that South Sea mother’s grief over her lost child, and how I raised her hopes, swearing that I thought that Waylao was safe and sound, and would soon return, while my heart, alas! belied all that my voice uttered.
She was a brown-skinned woman, born and reared up in a savage land, yet I could see no difference between her grief and that of any other mother of the civilised world.
When the distraught woman had at length somewhat recovered, she continued to tell me about Benbow.