Claude himself went personally to the men. He assured them that every nugget of gold they found would be their own; that they were now shipwrecked mariners; that they were to some extent, therefore, free agents, and could, if they chose, throw over allegiance to him, their former captain.
“No, sir,” the men cried, “we will never do that. We have lived together happily and cheerily enough, let us die together.”
“Who talks of dying?” cried Paddy O’Connell. “Sure we’ll never die at all, at all. Is it because the winter is with us, and darkness all around us, that we’d go and cry like a choild that has been sent to bed widout a light? Troth, men, it’s meself that’s ashamed av ye entoirely. Won’t the sun come back and shine down on us wid de blessing o’ Heaven in a few or three months? Then won’t we take our guns under our arms and go marching thro’ the country as bould as Inniskilling Dragoons? And won’t there be such sport and such fun all the way south, as you never had the loikes of before? And sure, won’t we reach the say at last, and go off in some ship or another to England and Oirland? And och! won’t our wives and sweethearts, if we’ve got any, be glad to see us just—the darlints that they thought they’d never see in loife again, because the big whales av Greenland had eaten them up? And sure, won’t me own dear mother, and Biddy my sister, and the pig, the crayture, go wild wid the joy that’ll be on to them when they see their Patrick march in at the door again! Hooch! hurrah! it’s myself that’s as happy as a king wid the thoughts av it all.”
Paddy’s speech had even greater effect in keeping up the men’s spirits than had Claude’s. They resumed their work more cheerfully, and Paddy constantly led them with song or with joke.
Lectures and concerts were resumed in the wooden tent, now their sole abode. But the singing lacked spirit, and the dancing was nil.
They say that sorrows seldom come singly. It appeared even now, in December, that the proverb would hold good in the case of those forlorn mariners. For the winter turned out to be one of awful gloom and darkness.
The aurora, that shone with such radiance the winter before, now showed only occasionally, and that only as a faint white glimmer among the clouds. No moon or stars were ever seen.
Sometimes, for a week at a time, the snow fell and the wind raged with such fearful and bitter force as to preclude the possibility of any one ever putting his head beyond the threshold of the door on pain of instant suffocation.
At such times it taxed all the energies of Claude and the doctor, and even of Paddy himself, to keep the men from sinking into utter despondency.
Even Fingal, and Alba the snow-bird, seemed to partake of a portion of the general gloom. Fingal lying quietly in his corner, dreaming, perhaps, of the bonnie heather hills of Scotland; and Alba, with drooping wings—her head under one—perched over Claude’s couch.