What would the last scene of that tragedy be?
"Hallo, foretop there!" cried Bill Badger, the tall, lantern-jawed, and odious Yankee. "Well, capting, I guess you're chawed up rayther. Thunder and lightning! come, ship with us in the little game we've got in hand. Jine us; you carn't do better now; and who knows but you may get your gal with the black shiners, after all?"
"El cuchillo primero! (My knife first)" said Zuares Barradas, touching the haft of his Albacete knife with ferocious significance.
Honest Noah opened his eyes very wide at these singular remarks, which were followed by another roar of brutal laughter. On this, Hawkshaw, to get, if possible, beyond the reach of their conversation, trembling in every limb with rage, and with a strange blindness coming over his sight, as the old clamorous ferocity gathered in his soul, while feeling that the mocking words had not been uttered in vain—as they suggested certain ideas of probable vengeance on his exposers—proceeded to climb farther up the rigging, until he perched himself on the fore-crosstrees, his past experience having made him seaman enough to achieve this.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE MEETING.
How shall I describe the almost mute meeting between Ethel Basset and Morley Ashton? or shall I omit it altogether?
Instinctively, and with proper good taste, all in the cabin left them to themselves for a time; and even Rose—the saucy and impulsive Rose—who looked just as Morley had last seen her when playing at croquet in Acton Chase, with her pretty straw hat, her green zouave jacket, and tiny bronzed Balmoral boots, after rushing back to give him one kiss more, tripped upstairs on deck to join the doctor.
Mr. Basset had managed to break the matter—the vast secret—to Ethel skilfully and gently, by saying that the wrecked men could afford some information concerning Morley Ashton; that they knew where he was, that one had seen him lately, that he was alive and well, and so forth. Thus there was no scene, no screaming, no fainting for joy, and certainly no dying of that pleasant emotion. Such a climax as the latter would have put the narrator of these events very much about indeed, for, our story being a true one, this little romantic portion of it dovetails with the rest—rather flatly, perhaps, because it is true.
For a time neither could exactly "realise" (to use a good Americanism) that they were reunited—Ethel, that Morley lived; Morley, that he should so suddenly find himself by the side of her whom he had been pursuing through the deep, reunited, and on board the Hermione, of London.