"Have any letters come for me? Have people from New York arranged yet to take me away?" asked Flora, suddenly forgetting about the skipper and remembering her own career so terribly interrupted and so strangely retarded. "I shall be able to travel in a few days, I think. What have the newspapers said about my misfortunes?"
The pink faded a little from Mary's cheeks and her gray eyes seemed to dim.
"Saints love ye!" she said. "There bes no letters for ye, my dear—an' how would there be? Up-along they'll be still waitin' for the ship—or maybe they have give up waitin' by this time. How would they know she was wracked on this coast?"
The beautiful singer gazed at her in consternation and amazement. Her wonderful sea-eyes flashed to their clear sea-depths where the cross-lights lay.
"But—but has no word been sent to New York?—to anywhere?" she cried. "Surely you cannot mean that people do not know of the wreck, and that I am here? What of the owners of the ship? Oh, God, what a place!"
Mary was startled for a moment, then thoughtful. She had never before wondered what the great world of "Up-along"—which is everywhere south and east and west of Newfoundland, London, New York, Pernambuco, Halifax, Montreal, Africa, China and the lands and seas around and between—must think of the ships that sail away and never return. Wrecks had always seemed to her as natural as tides and storms. When the tide comes in who thinks of reporting it to the great world? Spars and shattered timbers come in on the tides; and sometimes hulls more or less unbroken; and sometimes living humans. Mary had seen something of these things herself and had heard much. She had never known of the spars or hulls being claimed by any person but the folk who found them and fought with the sea for them. She had seen shipwrecked sailors tarry awhile, take their food thankfully, and presently set out for St. John's and the world beyond, by way of Witless Bay. None of them had ever come back to Chance Along.
"I bes sorry for ye wid my whole heart," she said. "Yer folks will be mournin' for ye, I fear—for how would they know ye was safe in Chance Along? But the saints have presarved your life, dear, an' when spring-time comes then ye can sail 'round to St. John's an' away to New York. But sure, we might have writ a letter about ye an' carried it out to Witless Bay. The skipper can write."
"I have been buried alive!" cried Flora, covering her face with her hands and weeping unrestrainedly.
Mary tried to comfort her, then left the room to find Mother Nolan. The old woman was in the kitchen, and Dennis was with her.
"She bes desperate wrought-up because—because her folks up-along will think she bes dead," explained Mary. "She says she bes buried alive in Chance Along. Skipper, ye had best write a letter about herself an' the wrack, an' send it out. She bes a great person up-along."