"Yare!" added Ormiston, whose tall figure loomed in the labouring shallop like that of an armed giant; "cheerily, ho! for if it is our fate to be hanged we will never be drowned."
"Hold!" exclaimed the Earl, as they pulled under the lee of the lofty poop, "yonder is one whom I would rather die than leave behind to perish, for then I would forfeit mine honour."
"Cock and pie! Lord Earl, art thou mad?" cried Ormiston, in great wrath; "is this a time to have thy qualms about honour, when ten minutes more may see us all in the pit of hell?"
"Peace, peace; shame on thee, laird of Ormiston!" cried David Wood. "Mother of God, watch over us!"
"Hob, peace with thy blasphemy!" said the Earl, "or I will have thee cast into the sea. Is this a time for such dreadful thoughts as thine? By the bones of my father, I shall save him. Ho, there! Konrad of Saltzberg, I pledged my word to land thee on thy native shore, and even in this moment of dread I will redeem it, or perish with thee. Leap with a bold heart, and a ready will, and gain our boat if thou canst, albeit that it is laden so heavily."
Aware that the chance was a last one, Konrad, who could swim like a duck, sprang at once into the waters of his native fiord, and, rising a short distance from the boat, was pulled in by the athletic Ormiston. Then the oars were dipped in the frothy water, and, urged by wind and tide, the laden boat shot away from the desolate wreck.
At that moment a wild shriek—the last despairing cry of the strong and the brave, who had never flinched when the arrow flew and the culverin boomed around them—ascended from the seething ocean to the sky; the wreck parted into a thousand fragments, that covered the face of the water; and these, with the poor fellows who clung to them with the blind tenacity of despair and death, were again and again, at the sport of the waves, dashed against the ridgy summits, that were one moment visible in terrible array in the moonlight, and the next were hidden, as a mountain of foam swept over them, hurrying into the deep vortex of the whirlpool the last fragments and the corpses of the Fleur-de-Lys.
CHAPTER XX.
CHRISTIAN ALBORG.
Where the wave is tinged with red,
And the russet sea-leaves grow;
Mariners, with prudent dread,
Shun the whelming reefs below.
Thus, all to soothe the chieftain's woe,
Far from the maid he loved so dear,
The song arose so soft and slow,
He seem'd her parting sigh to hear.
Leyden's Mermaid.