Adventures in Many Lands

by Various

To my surprise it was coiled up inside the bows. Puzzling over this, I made the end fast to a cleat on the yacht, then took the lamp and turned the light over the side, so that it shone fairly into the boat.

Then, for the second time that night, my pulses beat fast, and my scalp tingled with something approaching fear, and I wished I had a friend on board with me.

It seemed as if my foolish idea of a dead body asking for compassion was coming true. For there was a huddled-up form lying on the bottom of the boat, its head inclined half on and half off the stern thwart, its whole attitude suggestive of the helplessness of death.

I stood as if paralysed for a few seconds, filled with a craven longing to get back to the cosy cabin, shut the hatch, and wait till daylight before approaching any nearer that still form, dreading what horrors an examination might reveal. But more humane and reasonable thoughts soon came; perhaps this poor drifting bit of humanity was not dead, but had been sent my way in the dead of night to revive and shelter.

Feeling that I must act at once, or I might not act at all—or at least till daybreak—I put a great restraint upon my feelings of repugnance, caught up the lamp, stepped into the boat, and raised the drooping head on to my arm.

As I did so, the hood-like covering which had concealed the face fell back, and in a moment all my shrinking and horror vanished once for all—swallowed up in pity, compassion, and amazement—for on my arm rested the sweet face of a young and very pretty girl, marred only by its pallor and a bad bruise on the right temple.

Even in the lamplight I could see she was a lady born and bred; her face alone told me that, and the rich material of fur-lined cloak and hood merely confirmed it.

Here was no horrible midnight visitor, then; but certainly what seemed to me a great mystery—far more so than the dead body of labourer or wherry-man floating down with the tide would have furnished.

A lady, insensible apparently from a blow on the forehead, floating alone in an open boat at midnight, on a lonely tidal water, far from any resort of the class to which she seemed to belong, and saved from long hours of exposure—perhaps death—by the marvellous chance (if it could be called so) of colliding with my yacht on the way to the open sea.

It was too great a puzzle to attempt to solve on the spur of the moment, and I had first to apply myself to the evident duty of getting my fair and mysterious visitor into my cabin, there to try to undo the effects of whatever untoward accidents had befallen her.