So Ethel, Rose, and the old nurse, to the intense mortification of the latter, left the deck, and retired to the cabin to wait the event.
The truth was that the worthy young doctor had found the four sufferers on the wreck, though not dead, as he fully ascertained on feeling their pulses, in such a frightful state of prostration and delirium, that he deemed it better Ethel and Rose should be spared the shock of their first appearance, and should not witness the conveyance of them up the ship's side.
"They are all in the boat now, and now she is shoved off. Give way, my boys—give way!" shouted the captain, whose kind, ruddy English face flushed with eagerness. "Lay out on your oars and pull with a will, for a glass of grog awaits you all."
To do them justice, the men in the boat needed no incentive; to the whole length of their arms they bent to their oars, and the boat came sheering alongside in a twinkling.
"In larboard oars, out fenders," said Mr. Foster, as he relinquished the tiller.
"Into the main-chains there, some of you, and bear a hand to get the poor fellows on board," said Captain Phillips, jumping down the short ladder at the break of the quarter-deck, just as four thin and wasted figures—their tattered clothes sodden and saturated by salt water, their matted hair encrusted with salt—were handed like children up the side, passed over the bulwark, and laid on the deck near the long-boat.
"Poor fellows, poor fellows! God help them," said Phillips, commiseratingly, as they seemed quite insensible. Their teeth were clenched, but their lips were far apart, cracked, parched, and, in some instances, bleeding. They breathed irregularly, and twitched their fingers convulsively.
"They must be your peculiar care for a time, doctor," said Mr. Basset, as Heriot flung his coat on the deck, and while rolling up his shirt-sleeves, rushed below to his medicine-chest.
"Boy, Joe—steward, bring wine and brandy here! Carpenter, get four comfortable hammocks slung in the 'tween decks; and you, Quaco, my darkey, get us plenty of hot water from the galley," cried Phillips.
"Yaas, sar," replied the sable Virginian, as he hastened forward with a bucket.