"He is dreaming of the old Aurora, of fifty guns," said Morrison, in a weak voice, quite unlike his own. "Hollo, Noah, old fellow; you've not unroved your life-lines yet, eh?"
"No, mate, thank Heaven," he replied, in something of the same childish treble; "nor you. And you shall see the Black Dog of Belhelvie yet, as I hopes one of these blessed days to see Dungeonness Light and the buoy at the Nore."
"Here, shipmate, drink this, and talk after," said Joe, the steward, as he held another cup of warm tea (in which a whipped egg was substituted for milk) to the lips of Noah, who drained it at a draught, and then looked less wild and more awake.
"Go ahead, old boy," said Joe, a curly-headed, good-humoured-looking English lad, as he tucked the blanket about Noah's shoulders; "it is tea for dunnage, and soft biscuits for ballast just now. By-and-by, it will be grog and old horse for cargo, eh?"
"It's the 'tween decks that did it," muttered Noah. "I thought I was aboard the old Haurora in the Black Sea, with the boatswain ahead in the dingy, seeing all the yards squared by the lifts and braces."
Bartelot sank into slumber again, but Morley began to be more lively and awake, and proceeded to compare with Morrison the notes and incidents of yesterday, and how they came to be rescued. Their voices sounded strangely to themselves and to each other, as at times they sank into husky whispers.
Morrison had seen much of the world. In the words of his countryman, a poor sailor too (Falconer, the doomed author of the "Shipwreck"), he had been in every climate under the sun.
"Where polar skies congeal the eternal snow,
Or equinoctial suns for ever glow.
Smote by the freezing or the scorching blast,
'A ship-boy on the high and giddy mast,'
From, regions where Peruvian billows roar
To the bleak coasts of savage Labrador.
From where Damascus, pride of Asian plains,
Stoops her proud neck beneath tyrannic chains,
To where the Isthmus, laved by adverse tides,
Atlantic and Pacific seas divides.
But while he measured o'er the painful race,
In fortune's wild, illimitable chase,
Adversity, companion of his way,
Still o'er the victim hung with iron sway."
Morrison was deeply thankful to Providence for his rescue; and on the first night of their being saved, Morley could remember, through his dreams, hearing the poor fellow praying very devoutly in his hammock, and in his own national dialect, which grew all the broader and more Doric as he communed with God and himself.
On the afternoon of the day, so pregnant with events of importance to him personally, Cramply Hawkshaw felt himself impelled, on various pretences, to keep aloof from those who shared the cabin with him; for he was in momentary dread that Dr. Heriot, to whom the name of Morley Ashton had been rendered quite familiar by the confidences of Rose Basset, would enter, and startle all by announcing who was one of the four men rescued from the wreck.