“Well, gentlemen, I shall call the young lady, and you shall hear the marvellous tale from her own lips.”
Somewhat abashed at first to find herself in such august company, and in a room more beautiful than anything she could ever have dreamed about, Meta was soon reassured by the professor’s kindly voice. He sat beside her, and held one hand in his.
Then she told her story, as she had told it to Professor Hodson in his study. She hid nothing, kept nothing back, told all the truth, even about her love and betrothal to Claude, talking low but earnestly, as innocently as a child repeating its prayer by its mother’s knee.
There was no more eager listener than Captain Jahnsen, the sailor I have mentioned. As long as she spoke his eyes were riveted on her face, sometimes he even changed colour in his seeming excitement. When she had finished, he stood up.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I have been all my life a man of action, not of words; and now what I have to say must be said briefly indeed. For the last many years I have been a sailor and adventurer combined. I have dug gold, ploughed the sea, and searched for diamonds; not unsuccessfully, as you are all aware. For years and years previous to that I was a Greenland sailor, not hailing from any British port; not sailing in beautiful barques or full-rigged ships, but in an open boat from Lapland. What made me so? Fate. I once commanded as splendid a little craft as ever sailed the sea. I had on board my wife and my child-daughter. I was wrecked—a sailor’s luck, you say, but mine was a sadder one than falls to the lot of most sailors. My dear wife—ah! gentlemen, the memory of that terrible night almost unmans me even yet—was killed in my arms by a falling spar; my daughter was swept away. Two sailors and I alone were saved by a Lapland walrus boat. We lay-to for hours. No sign of life was visible; again I dropped insensible; I was ill, mad, raving for weeks. Yet calmness and peace came at last. But never more dared I go near that awful coast. To me the very memory of it and of that night has ever been like a nightmare.”
“Where were you wrecked?” asks Professor Hodson.
“On the Icelandic coast, north of Reykjavik.”
Meta has turned suddenly pale, and her eyes fill with tears.
She timidly advances. “Father,” she murmurs.
There is no wild excitement; no melodrama. Captain Jahnsen stoops and kisses his daughter’s brow.