"I accept."
"The captain has your word of honour as between gentlemen?"
"As between—well, if you like it so—as between gentlemen."
The satire of the last word was too much for him, for he was one of the pleasantest fellows in his saner moments that I have ever met. We both laughed heartily, and then he said—
"But I'm forgetting, you've got no trunk, and I must lend you one. You're rather short of duds, I know, but we can rig you out until we get to Paris, and there the skipper will see to it—any way, so long as you've a coat thick enough, we won't criticise you in these parts; and I don't suppose you're thinking of garden parties."
"Anything but," I answered, as pleased as he was at the prospect of it all, and especially at the thought of quitting the ice-prison, if only for the winter; "I have neither clothes nor cash."
"Well, I don't see what you're going to do with the latter, just yet; but, man, you can just help yourself from the first Cunarder we stop—pshaw! don't look like that; wait until you feel the excitement of it all. Why, what is but one ship against the world, big men on their knees to you, money enough to wade in, and a fig for all the navies and all the fleets that ever left a port? I defy 'em to put a hand on the ship if they spend a million in the process. Come with us and see it all, and you'll say it's the most daring, the grandest, the most stupendous enterprise that man ever conceived."
It was no good to lift up one's voice against enthusiasm of this sort, so I let him lead me to his room, and took from him a trunk with some linen. As he said, it was more convenient to have my own things, and we were much of a build, so that his clothes were no ill-fit; and he was ridiculously generous, pressing all that he had upon me, and lending me a great gold watch and gold studs that were illicitly gotten, I felt sure.
In the end I had quite a store of clothing; and I waited while he finished his own work that we might go down together to the launch awaiting us. There we found Black, watching men who were putting large bales of goods into the screw steamer, and everywhere there was sign of the break-up of the settlement. The captain merely nodded when I gave him a word, and I thought that he was sore depressed, with scarce energy enough to be irritable. He seemed to doubt the wisdom of the departure even then; and he often hesitated in his walk, looking up to the windows of his home behind him. At the last, when the negro servants had come down the iron stairway, he locked the great door after them; and then he stood and cast his gaze over to the hills and the desolate land, which I believed he had a great kindness for. When he did join us, he gave the word, "Let her go!" with a dogged sort of indifference; and at his command the launch ploughed ahead, and passed through the cañon to the outer basin.
The sun was almost in the horizon then, and the northern lights were playing in the heavens, so that all the water was then alight with the glory of a hundred colours. Now orange, or a lighter golden, or blue as the Corsican Sea, or flaming scarlet, or emerald green, or all shades of yellow, with the pink and pearl and fainter green as of a colossal opal, the light fell and spread from bight to bight, and crag to crag; and above there were sheets of eruptive flame and great rumblings, and mighty arcs of fire spanning the whole heavens, and gripping them as with the glittering jewelled hand of some monstrous keeper of the skies whose mutterings came to us below. Or the scene changed again, and it was as though elves of the zenith had brought their golden caskets above the firmament, and there had burst them open, so that all the jewels of the light rained upon sea and land, and burnt each other with their own beauty as they fell; and the earth answered them back with her shining face. One of the supreme moments of life, truly, to bathe in this shower of multi-coloured splendour, to follow it in its golden path, where rocks took shape, and snow-forms lived, and the seas danced to its accompanying music, and one stood nearer to the great mysteries while yet farther from the homes of man.