So up he arose upon his stretched sails,
Fearless expecting his approaching death;
So up he arose, that the air starts and fails,
And overpressed sinks his load beneath;
So up he arose, as doth a thunder cloud
Which all the earth with shadows black doth shroud;
So up he arose.
Phineas Fletcher.
"The Lord deliver me! once more, say I," ejaculated Robin Hays, "and the Lord deliver Dalton! He would sooner submit to have his limbs hewed one by one from his body, than permit a single plank of his good ship to be touched: he loves it far more than his own life. I will not speak with him about it. There is no possibility of a hundred of our men, if we could summon them from the different stations, encountering the well-disciplined soldiers now upon the island. Nothing legal or illegal can withstand the power or turn aside the will of that most wonderful man. It is useless to commune more with Dalton; but I will save him, though I perish in the attempt!"
It may be almost said that he flew to the Gull's Nest. When there, he turned with a stealthy step towards the chamber which his mother occupied. There was no living being in the room save one, and she was busied in composing the limbs and features of his dead parent, chanting, in a low monotonous tone, fragments of old songs and snatches of ballads appropriate to the gloomy task.
Robin clung to the door-post. However little he might have respected his mother, he knew she had loved him; and it is sad, in a world where so few affectionate ties are formed, to see the nearest and the dearest severed. He stood for a little watching the slow movements of the old crone, who was so withered and woe-looking that, with but slight effort of imagination, he might have believed the grave had given up one dead to prepare another for the sepulchre. The small lamp sent forth but little light, and the features of his mother, not yet decently arranged, had a scared and frightened look, as if terror, at the oncoming of death, had left her a powerless though unwilling captive.
"Has the spirit long passed!" at length inquired Robin, in a voice so low that the aged woman started, as if the whisper sounded from below the earth.
"Anan, Master Robin, is it you? Ah! I little thought you'd ha' been away; not that I fancy she missed ye much, for she didn't make much struggle—that is, not to say much at the very last—
'And at the last your bed shall be,
Ay, near the broad and briny sea!'"
She gave out the rhyme while smoothing back the hair from the haggard features of the corpse; and her trembling treble voice, so weak, so shrill, added a most miserable and desolating effect to the awful scene.
"Do it decently, good dame, decently and gently too, and you shall be rewarded," said Robin, deeply affected,—aware how impossible it was for him to remain and see that every thing was well ordered.