Brave Gideon North! There was little time then to feel his loss; but it was to grow upon us more and more and more in the weeks and months to come. Stout-hearted, downright, thoughtful, kind—it is very seldom that one gets or loses such a friend.
The spar rolled and turned as it swept toward the shore. Now we were pounded and battered and almost drowned by the breakers; now we got a chance to breathe and regain our strength as we came into deeper, quieter water; now we were swept again through breakers that tossed us, half drowned, into surging shallows. And so, holding fast to one another, we were cast up on the shore in the darkness, where we crawled away from the long waves that licked over the wet sand, and sat down and watched and waited and watched.
Twice we heard someone calling aloud, and once I was sure that I saw someone struggling toward us out of the surge. But though we staggered down to the sea and shouted time and again, we got no answer. Slowly the conviction forced itself upon us that we five and some half a dozen sailors who had reached land before us were all who were left alive of the passengers and crew of the brig Adventure; that after all there was no hope whatever for Gideon North, that bravest of master mariners.
To such an end had come Cornelius Gleazen's golden dreams! Through suffering and disaster, they had led him to the ultimate wreck of every hope; his own catastrophe had shattered the future of more than one innocent man, and had caused directly the death of many innocent men.
It was a wild dawn that broke upon us on that foreign shore. The wind raged and the sea thundered, and black, low clouds raced over our heads. To watch by daylight the terrible cauldron through which we had come by dark was in itself a fearful thing; and beyond it, barely visible through the surf, lay the broken hull of the Adventure. So far as we could discover, there was no living creature in all that waste of waters.
My dream of being a prosperous ship-owner lay wrecked beside the shattered timbers of the Adventure; and knowing that, after all my youthful dreams of affluence, I now was a poor man with my way in the world to make, I felt that still another dream, a dearer, more ambitious dream, likewise was shattered.
If when I owned the brig and had good prospects Faith Parmenter had withdrawn behind a wall of reserve, if there had been someone else whom she held in greater favor,—of whom she thought more often,—what hope that I could win her now? Starting to walk away from the others, I saw that she was ahead of me, staring with dark, tearless eyes at the stormy sea. I stopped beside her.
"I suppose the time of our parting is near at hand," I began. "If I can in any way be of service to you—"
"You are going to leave me now? Here?"