It appeared that the skipper of the vessel, with seven of the crew, had been landed by a British cargo steamer at Hobart Town, Tasmania. The Westward Ho! had picked them up in a small boat about seven days out from Capetown.
According to the story of the Seagull's skipper—Captain Wilkinson—she had experienced extremely bad weather for some days, and, becoming almost unmanageable, had been run down by a large liner in the middle of a dark night at the height of the gale.
Whether the liner was British or foreign, Captain Wilkinson could not state; but, in any case, she had continued on her way without attempting to stand by to save life. The Seagull foundered in less than ten minutes, Captain Knowlton persisting in his refusal to leave in the first, and—as Captain Wilkinson declared—the only, boat which got away. He had done his utmost to stand by, in spite of the fury of the gale; but when day broke, and the storm to some degree abated, there was no sign of either Captain Knowlton or the Seagull. That she had foundered with the remainder of the crew and her owner the skipper had not the slightest doubt, although he went as far as to admit, to the newspaper reporter, the possibility that the small boat in which he had escaped might have drifted some distance from the scene of the wreck in the darkness.
My only gleam of hope was due to Mr. Bosanquet, although I felt inclined to discount this, because he was given to look at the brightest side of things, and often predicted fine weather just before a storm.
'Still,' he urged, 'you do not know for certain that Captain Knowlton was drowned. I admit there is a great probability that you will never see him again, but, after all, it is quite within the bounds of possibility that the skipper's boat drifted away, and that the owner and the rest of the crew managed to leave the Seagull. Of course,' he added, 'if I am right, you are pretty certain to hear something farther in a week or two.'
Accordingly I lived in the most acute suspense during the next few days; but the time passed without news of Captain Knowlton, and such faint hope as I had cherished faded entirely away. In the meantime it seemed evident that Mr. and Mrs. Turton had not shared it. I learned from Augustus that his father had written to Mr. Windlesham, asking that I might be removed from Ascot House as a bad bargain.
Moreover, I began to observe a kind of resentfulness in Mr. Turton's demeanour, and especially in his wife's. It was rumoured in the school that they were 'hard up,' and hence the shorter supplies of meat and butter. But it was Augustus who first made me realise my new situation.
'I say, Everard,' he said, when we were alone one day, 'I should not care to stand in your shoes. Now Captain Knowlton is dead you cannot stay here, you know.'
'Well,' I answered, 'who wants to stay? I am going to Sandhurst soon.'
'I guess you are not, though!' he exclaimed. 'There is no one to pay for you, and Windlesham is mean enough to say he won't take you off our hands.'