She was still crying when Frederick reached deck. His attempts at consolation did not touch her. He had never before seen her cry, and the state she was in, so like the one from which he himself had scarcely emerged, aroused his pity and sympathy, which, however, were rather of a paternal sort, untinged by his former passion.
"I am not to blame," she suddenly said, "that my father lost his life. I am not even responsible for Mr. Achleitner. I did my best to dissuade him from making the trip."
Frederick stroked Ingigerd's hand.
"All due respect to Achleitner, but if I mourn single victims of that fearful night, I first think of the heroes of the Roland, Captain von Kessel, his mate, Von Halm, and all those picked braves who really died like great men fulfilling their duty. They are a loss to the world. At the first sight of them, I, in my innocence, actually believed the Lord would never permit their destruction."
LIX
The Hamburt had left behind the vast solitude of the ocean, broken only at long intervals by single far-off ships, and was already making its way through waters lively with a large number of steamers and sailing craft, leaving, and making for, the port. Now the lighthouse at Sandy Hook was visible.
Though Ingigerd as well as Frederick could not still the fluttering of their shaken souls, they were fascinated by the changing pictures of the entrance to the harbour. It was an amazing spectacle. Surprise followed surprise. Each second brought a new sensation.
A gigantic White Star liner came gliding toward them slowly, to the accompaniment of its brass band. It was starting out on the passage that the Hamburt was just concluding. Passengers swarmed like ants on the majestic vessel's decks, giving an impression of gaiety and festivity. What knew they of the thing awaiting them, perhaps, out there on the ocean? When they looked down upon the little Hamburt, with its few passengers on deck, they had not the least inkling of the greatness, the fearfulness of the event of which those few puny persons were the sole surviving witnesses.
The emotion that filled the Roland's passengers with restlessness and excited them as with fire and tears when the Hamburt entered New York Harbour and steamed up through the Lower Bay toward the Narrows, was both a farewell to home and to the dangers of the sea and a greeting to solid land, to a stable human civilisation. This was the known, the usual, the mother's lap from which they had sprung and in which they had grown until the time came for them to start out upon their spiritual life's journey. It was also that without which the individual even to-day is helpless against the powers of nature.