Meanwhile the doctor had tried her under sail, and satisfied himself that every thing worked well, and that she was in proper trim. Then he moored her within a fathom from the shore, and waited for a moon to light him on his voyage. Whither?
Carefully, too––like one who had passed a lifetime on the ocean, from the China Seas to the broad Atlantic, under the suns of the tropics as well as in the dim gloom of high latitudes––the doctor studied the clouds and watched their course, noting the flight of the birds in the air and the track of fish in the sea. At last the trade breezes began to blow regularly and steadily; the land winds, too, in the gray of the morning, fluttered timidly away out to sea, and the round pearly moon shone bright and mellow over rock and water.
“To-morrow, my brave boy, we shall sail away from the island. Ah! you clap your hands, eh? Yes, we shall go to find mamma!” This was said as man and child stood for the last time on the lofty crag, while the former ranged his dark eyes scrutinizingly around the horizon. Nothing in sight!
Once more to their chapel of refuge, where, for the first time in all their association, putting the child to sleep by himself, the doctor sat down on the trestle by the entrance, and, lighted by the brilliant moon, he caught up the tangled mazes of the hide net which had bound him, and sedulously applied himself to a task before him.
Any one who has seen the effect produced by a violent gale upon the tattered shreds of a shivered main-top-sail, bound up into the most tortuous knots that it is possible to conceive of, and so hard and solid that you might saw the canvas balls in slices like boards, may form some idea of the task the doctor had imposed upon himself to loosen the hide strands tied together by the furious fingers of the hurricane. Patiently and quietly, with no sign of temper, he applied himself to the work, and with nothing but a sharp-pointed spike to aid his hands, he began to unravel, bit by bit, the laced knots and bunches of raw-hide, without ever cutting a strand, until, as the moon sank glimmering down, the tangled mass lay in clear coils beside him––though in several pieces, where it had been severed by the teeth of that little mouse purring behind the altar––and the task was done. Then raising the trestle, he bore it within the altar, and with the now unraveled coil of hide, and the softer silk rope for a pillow, he again stretched himself upon what once had been his bed of torture.
For what possible object all this labor had been undertaken, or for what future purpose––vague they must have been––no one but the persevering man who did it can tell; and there he lay, no sound coming from his compressed lips till the day dawned. Then he arose, and, kneeling over the sleeping child, he again solemnly repeated the oath he had before taken in his hut––
“Sleeping or waking, on land or sea, I devote the remainder of my wretched life to returning this lost child to his mother. So help me God!”
The little boy stirred, as if the angels and the sweet Virgin were whispering their protecting power over him, and, with a smile dawning upon his rosy, dimpled cheeks, he raised the lids from his bright hazel eyes, and put his fat round arms around the doctor’s neck. If two great drops fell upon that upturned innocent little face from the dark full eyes bending over him, they were not tears of sorrow! Oh, no! It was the dew of hope and trustfulness falling from the soul of a repentant sinner relying upon an all-wise Providence.
“Come, my Henri, say your little prayer of the morning, and we will go.” The man had taught the child that little prayer which he himself had learned at his mother’s knee.