'Oh, father!' There was a glad cry. 'God is good indeed! He has heard our prayers.'
It was Theo—or was it Theo's ghost?—who sat by the open window drinking in the sea breezes she was still too weak to go out of doors and meet. Yes, Theo was, day by day, coming back to her old sweet self, after a long spell of illness. There was only weakness left to fight—weakness and anxiety about Alick. As long as possible the fact of Alick having run away from home was kept from the prostrate girl. But in the end it abruptly leaked out, and nearly pushed her back through the gates of death.
Every means that the captain knew of had been set in motion to find the pair of runaways. But the searchers were checkmated at the outset by failing to find the boys at the Docks. The police in the end convinced themselves and the captain that the pair had stolen on board some foreign vessel on the eve of its departure, and, as stowaways, were already far off on the deep.
But which of the many hundreds of ships that had set sail since might the boys possibly be aboard? Again and again had the half-distracted father asked himself the maddening question as he paced the busy Docks. He would return then to Northbourne, where his other beloved child lay in jeopardy of her young life. Through the anxious night-watches by her bed, the old sailor pictured his boy on board some barque ploughing the seas, the stormy winds roaring through the rigging, the decks wet and slippery, the rough sailors cuffing and jostling the unwelcome intruders who had stolen their passages.
None knew better than the captain what the boys who had hidden themselves in some dark corner of an outward-bound vessel would be called upon to endure, when discovered; none knew better than he the hourly dangers to which they would be exposed in the perils of the deep—the risks of foundering, of collision, of tempests.
As the days wore on, and no word came of the runaways, the old sailor's heart sank to the lowest depths.
'Father, we must trust him to God; it's all we can do,' a low, weak voice whispered; and the old man took heart again. He would trust his boy to that—
'Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave.'
Perhaps of all mankind a sailor has experienced most signal proofs of the omnipotence of God. Throughout the daily dangers they are exposed to is the underlying, as well as the overruling, sense of the Almighty Power that holds the heavens in the hollow of His hand.
The captain knew that his girl was right. What he and she had to do was simply trust Alick to his Father in heaven.