“Ah!” she cried, “that Jean is a fool. And he, who pretends to have been a fisherman when he was young—to let us come to our deaths like this!”
She lifted her head, and ducked it again, as a sea jumped up under the bow and rattled into the boat.
“I see no ship,” she cried. “Let us go back, if we can. Name of God!—we shall be drowned! I see no ship, I tell you!”
“But I do,” answered Barebone, shaking the water from his face, for he had no hand to spare. “But I do, which is more important. And you are not even wet!”
And he laughed as he brought the boat up into the wind for a few seconds, to meet a wild gust. Juliette turned in surprise at the sound of his voice. In the safe and gentle seclusion of the convent-school no one had thought to teach her that death may be faced with equanimity by others than the ordained of the Church, and that in the storm and stress of life men laugh in strange places and at odd times.
Loo was only thinking of his boat and watching the sky for the last of the storm—that smack, as it were, in the face—with which the Atlantic ends those black squalls that she sends us, not without thunder and the curtailed lightning of northern seas. He was planning and shaping his course; for the watchers on board “The Last Hope” had already seen him, as he could ascertain by a second light, which suddenly appeared, swung low, casting a gleam across the surf-strewn water, to show him where the ladder hung overside.
“Tell Monsieur de Gemosac that I have Mademoiselle and her maid here in the boat,” Barebone called out to Captain Clubbe, whose large face loomed above the lantern he was holding overside, as he made fast the rope that had been thrown across his boat and lowered the dripping sail. The water was smooth enough under the lee of “The Last Hope,” which, being deeply laden, lay motionless at her anchor, with the stream rustling past her cables.
“Stand up, mademoiselle,” said Barebone, himself balanced on the after-thwart. “Hold on to me, thus, and when I let you go, let yourself go.”
There was no time to protest or to ask questions. And Juliette felt herself passed on from one pair of strong arms to another, until she was standing on the deck under the humming rigging, surrounded by men who seemed huge in their gleaming oil-skins.
“This way, mademoiselle,” said one, who was even larger than the others, in English, of which she understood enough to catch his meaning. “I will take you to your father. Show a light this way, one of you.”