There was no sing-songing among them now, and what speaking I overheard was generally about the great dinners they had eaten, or about their dreams, which were usually of green fields and flower-beds and primroses and daisies—daisies, by heaven, in a world that was like a waste!
As for me I did my best to play the game of never giving up. It was a middling hard game, God knows, and after weeks of waiting a sense of helplessness settled down on me such as I had never known before.
I am not what is called a religious man, but when I thought of my darling's danger (for such I was sure it was) and how I was cut off from her by thousands of miles of impassable sea, there came an overwhelming longing to go with my troubles to somebody stronger than myself.
I found it hard to do that at first, for a feeling of shame came over me, and I thought:
"You coward, you forgot all about God when things were going well with you, but now that they are tumbling down, and death seems certain, you whine and want to go where you never dreamt of going in your days of ease and strength."
I got over that, though—there's nothing except death a man doesn't get over down there—and a dark night came when (the ice breaking from the cliffs of the Cape with a sound that made me think of my last evening at Castle Raa) I found myself folding my hands and praying to the God of my childhood, not for myself but for my dear one, that He before whom the strongest of humanity were nothing at all, would take her into His Fatherly keeping.
"Help her! Help her! I can do no more."
It was just when I was down to that extremity that it pleased Providence to come to my relief. The very next morning I was awakened out of my broken sleep by the sound of a gun, followed by such a yell from Treacle as was enough to make you think the sea-serpent had got hold of his old buttocks.
"The ship! The ship! Commander! Commander! The ship! The ship!"
And, looking out of my little window I saw him, with six or seven other members of our company, half naked, just as they had leapt out of their bunks, running like savages to the edge of the sea, where the "Scotia," with all flags flying (God bless and preserve her!), was steaming slowly up through a grinding pack of broken ice.