These, however, were only seaweed and foambells, or floating blubber, to which the water gave unusual size and phosphorescent light, while the sufferers' giddy brains and weakened eyesight lent them wild and fantastic forms.
Poor Tom Bartelot must have been quite deranged; for more than once Morley heard him singing what seemed to be a scrap of his old drinking song, and his voice sunk into a childish quaver at the couplet:
"Oh, deign, ye kind powers, with this wish to comply,
May I always be drinking yet always be dry."
Then he suddenly changed his note to a kind of hoarse wail, as he sang:
"King Death was a rare old fellow,
He sat where no sun could shine;
He lifted his hand so yellow,
And pledged us in coal-black wine."
He soon after became senseless, and hung, as if asleep, drooping, alas! it might be, dead, in the lashings that secured him to the taffrail.
Towards the morning of that terrible night, Morley felt life ebbing within him, and, as it ebbed, he had a last wild dream—wild, indeed; but too delicious to be true.
A long, long time seemed to elapse, but another day had dawned, and a ship—the false, cruel Prussian barque of yesterday—had returned in quest of them. She lay to, a boat came off, he heard the rattle of the fall tackles, and the splash of the water. They were, he thought, rescued; he felt the lashing that bound his swollen limbs cut by a seaman's jack-knife, and now kind faces and kind hands were around him, and gentle voices were murmuring in his ear.
Cool wine and grateful cordials seemed to be poured between his parched lips, and then to be suddenly withheld when he would have imbibed more.
Oh, the madness of this tantalising and most feverish dream, for Ethel Basset seemed to be there!