Next moment she was in her mother’s arms, who was soothing her, and laughingly trying to banish her fears.
We leave them there and follow the gale.
It had gone careering on, over mountain, moorland, and lake, seeming to gather force as it went. It must have been at its height when it swept over the bleak, bare islands of Shetland, and made madly off for the Norwegian coast. Old, old, white-haired men, who had lived their lives in this ultima Thule, never remembered a fiercer storm. On one of the most barren and bleakest islands, next morning, the beach was found bestrewn with wreckage from some gallant ship, and the merciless waves had thrown up more than one dead body, and there they lay as if asleep, with dishevelled hair, in which were sand and weeds, hands half clenched, as if, in the agony of death, they had tried to grasp at something, and cold, hard, wet faces upturned to the morning sun.
The Fairy Queen was trying to round a rocky cape when the white horses of that gale of wind first appeared on the horizon, heading straight for them. Once round the point they would be comparatively safe.
“Look!” cried Leonard to Douglas, whose watch it was. The sun was going down behind the western waves. Wild and red he looked, and shorn of his beams, and tinging all the water ’twixt the barque and the horizon a bright blood-red.
On came the white horses. It was a race between the barque and the gale of wind. Before her loomed the rocky promontory. The cliffs rose straight up out of the sea, and their heads were buried in haze. Close to the wind sailed the barque, as close as ever could be.
On and on she speeds, but the white horses are almost close aboard of her.
“Hands, shorten sail!”
The wind is on her. To shorten sail now were madness. The wind is on her, the brave ship leans over to it, till the water rushes in through the lee scuppers.