"Twel' day, you see," she said; "perhaps you all right—perhaps"—and here she gave a faint but accurate limitation of the dreadful shudder which precedes the unspeakable agonies of tetanus.
"Nellie's right," said Hayston; "keep up your spirits, for you won't know till then whether you're to go to sleep in your hammock in blue water or not."
This was a cheerful prospect, but I had come through many perils, and missed the grim veteran by so many close shaves, that I had grown to be something of a fatalist like Hayston.
"Well! if I go under it won't be your fault, Nellie! So, Captain, remember I make over to her all the stuff in my trade chest. Send any letters and papers to the address you know in Sydney, and a bank draft for what you will find in the dollar bag. Nellie will have some good dresses anyhow."
"Dress be hanged!" quoth Nellie, who was emphatic in her language sometimes. "You go home to mother yet;" and she arose and left hurriedly. Poor Nellie!
In that day when we and others who have sinned, after fullest knowledge of good and evil "know the right and yet the wrong pursue," shall be arraigned for deeds done in the flesh, will the same doom be meted out to this frank, untaught child of Nature and her sisters? I trow not. I must say that for a day or two before the fated twelfth which Nellie so stoutly insisted upon, I felt slightly anxious. What an end to all one's hopes, longings, and glorious imaginings, to be racked with tortures indescribable before dying like a poisoned hound, all because of the instinctive, senseless act of a stupid savage!
To die young, too, with the world but opening before me! Life with its thousand possibilities just unrolled! One's friends, too,—the weeping mother and sisters, whose grief would never wholly abate this side of time; the old man's fixed expression of sorrow. These thoughts passed through my brain, with others arising from and mingled with them, as I left my hammock early on the twelfth day. I dressed quickly, and going on deck, that daily miracle occurred—"the glorious sun uprist."
The dawnlight now began to infuse the pearly rim, which, imperceptibly separating from the azure grey horizon, deepened as it touched the edge of the vast ocean plain. Faintly glimmering, how magically it transformed from a dim, neutral-tinted waste to an opaline clarity of hue—a fuller crimson. Then the wondrous golden globe heaved itself over the edge of our water-world all silently, and the day, the 19th of October, began its course.
Should I live to see its close?
How strange if all this time the subtle poison should have lurked in one's veins until the exact moment, when, like a modern engine of devilry—an infernal machine with a clock and apparatus—set to strike and detonate at a given and calculated hour, the death-stroke should sound!