'He says,' replied the other phlegmatically, 'that she's a corp ahlready, and that it will only bring bad luck to the fishin' to take a dead body intil the boat.'
'But she's not dead,' cried Fairchild wildly, 'she was alive this minute on the rock. Make them lift her in.'
'Ye shud ha' brought the priest wid ye,' responded the giant with a neutral compassion; 'them wans is not to be druv by no man barrin' him, when they jine to take a conthrairy notion yon road.'
At this the echo of Seymour's last words returned clearly upon Fairchild's brain, and he cursed himself for his inattention. With it, too, there returned the remembrance of other words of Seymour's. He recognized that this was a crisis and braced himself to make a fight of it.
'Good God, men,' said he, 'you don't mean to say you will let a woman die before your eyes for a miserable superstition like that? Why, I can see her breathe; she's as much alive as any of us. See, she's opening her eyes. For God's sake lift her in,' he broke off, in frenzied tones. They turned indifferently away, and the hopelessness of pulling against the dead weight of their superstition settled down over his mind and enveloped it in black despair. But he continued desperately:
'If you take her in I'll give you money,—a hundred pounds a head,—five hundred pounds,—I'll give you all that I've got.' For a moment their attention was attracted and their cupidity aroused. But the sums he mentioned were so large that they defeated his own object. They conveyed no meaning to the narrow minds of the fishermen accustomed to think in pence. They sounded in their ears like promises of fairy gold. Had he offered them a new boat and nets they would have understood it and jumped at the offer. But he paid the penalty now of not knowing his ground. Once more they turned away.
Then something went snap in his temple, and he lost control over himself, and with that all chance of influencing them.
'You are not men,' he raved, the tears streaming from his eyes, 'but brutes. It is too cruel. You can't mean it. Will no one help me? I'll have you all hung for murdering her. Why haven't I got a pistol with me? and I'd shoot you all like dogs. You hounds, I'll strangle you now,' and he threw himself choked with sobs upon the stroke. But it was not more hopeless to cast his puny force against the dead wall of their superstition than against that iron chest. The giant took him in his arms like an infant, and replaced him gently upon his seat. The others laughed.
'Av the whelp doesn't quit bletherin', putt him in the wather along of his swateheart, Dan,' said one of them in an ugly tone.
The young man rose again from his seat, and tried to cast himself over the side, even though he couldn't swim, to be beside his beloved. But again he was caught and placed on the thwart, to which this time he was strapped down, so that mercifully he could not see over the gunwale of the boat.