“Hush, hush, my son,” the old priest murmured.
But Jason did not hear him. “Now listen,” he cried, “and hear my vow.” And still he held the cold hand in his, and still the ashy face rested on them.
“I will hunt the world over until I find that man, and when I have found him I will slay him.”
“What are you saying?” cried the priest.
But Jason went on with an awful solemnity. “If he should die, and we should never meet, I will hunt the world over until I find his son, and when I have found him, I will kill him for his father’s sake.”
“Silence, silence,” cried the priest.
“So help me, God!” said Jason.
Stephen Orry, on leaving his wife, has left Iceland as seaman in an English ship, and deserted from it on touching the Isle of Man. There he finds a companion in “the slattern and drab of the island,” and though vaguely ashamed of her, marries her. Michael, “little Sunlocks,” is the offspring of this unhappy union, a union becoming more degrading and more horrible to Stephen with every year of the child’s life. The father’s tortured brain, after trying every other means within his knowledge, resolves to kill his son rather than leave him to grow up under the influence of such a mother, and with that purpose he takes the child out to sea in his little boat. This passage is one of most beautiful that Hall Caine has yet written.
Little Sunlocks had never been out in the boat before and everything was a wonder and delight to him.