By and by there were but two left of all that suffering crew—the captain and the boy—and these two clung together like ghosts, defying mortality. They strove to be patient and hopeful: if they could not eat, they could drink, for the nights were dewy, and sometimes a mist covered them—a mist so dense it seemed almost to drip from the rags that poorly sheltered them. A cord was attached to the shrouds, the end of it carefully laid in the mouth of a bottle slung in the rigging. Down the thin cord slid occasional drops: one by one they stole into the bottle, and by morning there was a spoonful of water to moisten those parched lips—sweet, crystal drops, more blessed than tears, for they are salt—more precious than pearls. A thousand prayers of gratitude seemed hardly to quiet the souls of the lingering ones for that great charity of Heaven.
There came a day when the hearts of God's angels must have bled for the suffering ones. The breeze was fresh and fair; the sea tossed gayly its foam-crested waves; sea-birds soared in wider circles, and the clouds shook out their fleecy folds, through which the sunlight streamed in grateful warmth: the two ghosts were talking, as ever, of home, of earth, of land. Land—land anywhere, so that it were solid and broad. Oh, to pace again a whole league without turning! Oh, to pause in the shadow of some living tree!—to drink of some stream whose waters flowed continually—flowed, though you drank of them with the awful thirst of one who has been denied water for weeks, and weeks, and weeks!—for three whole months—an eternity, as it seemed to them!
Then they pictured life as it might be if God permitted them to return to earth once more. They would pace K——street at noon, and revisit that capital restaurant where many a time they had feasted, though in those days they were unknown to one another; they would call for coffee, and this dish and that dish, and a whole bill of fare, the thought of which made their feverish palates grow moist again. They would meet friends whom they had never loved as they now loved them; they would reconcile old feuds and forgive everybody everything; they held imaginary conversations, and found life very beautiful and greatly to be desired; and somehow they would get back to the little café and there begin eating again, and with a relish that brought the savory tastes and smells vividly before them, and their lips would move and the impalpable morsels roll sweetly over their tongues.
It had become a second nature to scour the horizon with jealous eyes: never for a moment during their long martyrdom had their covetous sight fixed upon a stationary object. But it came at last. Out of a cloud a sail burst like a flickering flame. What an age it was a-coming! how it budded and blossomed like a glorious white flower, that was transformed suddenly into a barque bearing down upon them! Almost within hail it stayed its course, the canvas fluttered in the wind; the dark hull slowly rose and fell upon the water; figures moved to and fro—men, living and breathing men! Then the ghosts staggered to their feet and cried to God for mercy. Then they waved their arms, and beat their breasts, and lifted up their imploring voices, beseeching deliverance out of that horrible bondage. Tears coursed down their hollow cheeks, their limbs quaked, their breath failed them: they sank back in despair, speechless and forsaken.
Why did they faint in the hour of deliverance when that narrow chasm was all that separated them from renewed life? Because the barque spread out her great white wings and soared away, hearing not the faint voices, seeing not the thin shadows that haunted that drifting wreck. The forsaken ones looked out from their eyrie, and watched the lessening sail until sight failed them, and then the lad with one wild cry leaped toward the speeding barque, and was swallowed up in the sea.
Alone in a wilderness of waters! Alone, without compass or rudder, borne on by relentless winds into the lonesome, dreary, shoreless ocean of despair, within whose blank and forbidding sphere no voyager ventures; across whose desolate waste dawn sends no signal and night brings no reprieve; but whose sun is cold, and whose moon is clouded, and whose stars withdraw into space, and where the insufferable silence of vacancy shall not be broken for all time.
O pitiless Nature! thy irrevocable laws argue rare sacrifice in the waste places of God's universe!...
The Petrel gave a tremendous lurch, that sent two or three of us into the lee corners of the cabin; a sea broke over us, bursting in the companion-hatch, and half filling our small and insecure retreat; the swinging lamp was thrown from its socket and extinguished; we were enveloped in pitch-darkness, up to our knees in salt water. There was a moment of awful silence: we could not tell whether the light of day would ever visit us again; we thought perhaps it wouldn't. But the Petrel rose once more upon the watery hilltops and shook herself free of the cumbersome deluge; and at that point, when she seemed to be riding more easily than usual, some one broke the silence: "Well, did the captain of the Perle live to tell the tale?"
Yes, he did. God sent a messenger into the lonesome deep, where the miserable man was found insensible, with eyes wide open against the sunlight, and lips shrunken apart—a hideous breathing corpse. When he was lifted in the arms of the brave fellows who had gone to his rescue, he cried "Great God! am I saved?" as though he couldn't believe it when it was true: then he fainted, and was nursed through a long delirium, and was at last restored to health and home and happiness.