“She’s a splendid craft, gentlemen,” said the captain, when they had assembled for refreshment in the cabin, during one of the brief lulls of the furious blast; “but I’m afraid we should none of us have seen another day if we had been caught outside. A man feels very small at a time like this. The worst hurricane I was ever in. Didn’t think the wind could blow so fiercely, Mr Jack, eh?”
Jack shook his head.
“It feels,” he said slowly, “as if the world had broke away, and was rushing on through space faster and faster, and never to stop again.”
“Yes, sir,” said the captain quietly, as he gazed at the thoughtful lad. “You’re a scholar, and have read and studied these things. So have I, sir, but not from books, and it seems to me that these things work by their wonderful laws for reasons far beyond our little minds to grasp, and all are working for some great end.”
No one answered, and the wind began to increase in violence again, the noise almost stifling the captain’s next words:—
“But we have not broken away, sir, and the sun will rise to a minute in the morning, just as if this hurricane had not come, and please God everything around us will be calm; but be sure yonder you will hardly know the island, it will be such a wreck.”
The captain’s words were true enough as to the calm, for just before daylight the intense blackness which had covered the heavens passed away, leaving the stars glittering with a most wondrous brilliancy; there was a deep murmur dying away in the distance, and, utterly exhausted, Jack laid himself down on one of the cabin lounges, to drop off into the deep sleep of utter exhaustion, one from which he awoke to find the warm glow of evening shining in at the open window, and his father watching him with an anxious expression upon his face.
Captain Bradleigh was quite right. The hurricane had passed, and the aspect of the island from where Jack stood with his glass on deck, sweeping the mountain slopes, in places a terrible wreck. The hollows and deep ravines had naturally escaped, but the higher portions, even on that side, were swept bare, and every now and then the lad gazed through his binocular at piled-up masses of tangled bough and branch shattered and splintered as if they had been straws.
“Yes, my lad, it looks a terrible ruin here and there,” said the captain, as Jack handed him the glass to try; “but changes take place quickly out here, and the sun’s hard at work already repairing damages. Those heaps will soon rot away, and fresh growth cover the bare patches. It’s bad enough, but an eruption from the mountain there would have done more mischief than this.”
Over a late meal there was a discussion about their future proceedings, and the elders went into the pros and cons of their position.