It was like a funeral procession.
The thoughts of all were too deep for words.
Even the children were awed into silence by the seriousness of their elders;—a seriousness that was as much owing to the uncertainty of their own fate as to their regret at parting the last link that bound them to their English home and civilisation, from which they seemed to have been cut adrift for ever in casting off from the poor, old, ill-fated Nancy Bell!
Chapter Twenty Two.
Desolation Island.
Kate Meldrum was the first to break the melancholy silence that reigned as they rowed away from the old ship, all looking back sadly at her battered hull, whose crippled condition could now be better seen—the bows all rent and torn by the violence of the waves, the gaping sides, the gutted hold washed out by the water, and the sea around covered with pieces of shattered planking from the ’tween-decks, besides the curved knees and other larger parts of the timber work, that had been wrenched off during the vessel’s battle with the elements, and numbers of packing-cases and empty casks and barrels that were floating about, the flotsam and jetsam of the cargo.
“Papa,” said she, speaking low in order that none of the others could hear her, “did you see anything of the long-boat, or of the men who went away in her, when you were looking round the coast this morning—I forgot to ask you before.”
“No, my dear,” he answered. “There was not a trace of them, as far as I could see with the glass; either along the shore in the direction in which we are going now, or down to the southwards off there to the right!”