Mrs. Beresford sank down, and prayed, holding Vespasian by the knee.
Fortunately, as in that vessel wrecked long syne on Melita, “the hind part of the ship stuck fast and remained immovable.”
But for how long?
Each wave now struck the ship's weather quarter with a sound like a cannon fired in a church, and sent the water clear into the mizen-top. It hit them like strokes of a whip. They were drenched to the skin, chilled to the bone, and frozen to the heart with fear. They made acquaintance that hour with Death. Ay, Death itself has no bitterness that forlorn cluster did not feel: only the insensibility that ends that bitterness was wanting.
Now the sea, you must know, was literally strewed with things out of the Agra; masts, rigging, furniture, tea-chests, bundles of canes, chairs, tables; but of all this jetsam, Dodd's eye had been for some little time fixed on one object: a live sailor drifting ashore on a great wooden case. It struck him after a while that the man made very little way, and at last seemed to go up and down in one place. By-and-bye he saw him nearer and nearer, and recognised him. It was one of the three washed off the bowsprit.
He cried joyfully, “The tide has turned! here's Thompson coming out to sea.”
Then there ensued a dialogue, incredible to landsmen, between these two sailors, the captain of the ship and the captain of the foretop, one perched on a stationary fragment of that vessel, the other drifting on a pianoforte, and both bawling at one another across the jaws of death.
“Thompson ahoy!”
“Hal-lo!”
“Whither bound?”