There was nothing to do but to wait. Some little trifle of property I had below in the cabin, but nothing that I cared to burthen myself with at such a time. All the money I had brought with me, bank-notes and some gold, was in the pocket-book I carried. As for my sweetheart's wardrobe, what she had with her, as you know, she wore, so that she would be leaving nothing behind her. But never can I forget the expression of her face, and the exclamations of horror and astonishment which escaped her lips, when, on my seating her under the bulwark, she sent a look at the yacht. The soaked, stained, mutilated appearance of the little craft persuaded her she was sinking even as we sat together gazing. At every plunge of the bows she would tremulously suck in her breath and bite upon her under-lip with nervous twitchings of her fingers, and a recoil of her whole figure against me.
"Oh, Herbert," she cried, "when shall we leave? We shall be drowned."
I answered her that there was no fear of that. "Though," said I, "but for that ship heaving into sight and standing by us, our fate might have been sealed before the close of the day."
"But how are we to get into the ship?" she cried, straining her eyes, brilliant with emotion, at the vessel that hung, rolling stately, so close by that I could distinguish the features of the crowds of people who lined the rails staring at us.
I explained that the gale was slackening, that fair weather was at hand, as one might tell by the gradual opening of the horizon, and the clarification of the stuff that had been hanging in soot for hours and hours low down over our splintered, withered-looking mast-head, and that, in a short time, the sea would be sufficiently quiet to enable the ship to lower one of the large white quarter-boats which were hanging by davits inboards over the poop.
"The sea runs too high yet," said I, "not for a boat to live in, but to take us off. She might be swamped, stove, sunk alongside of us; and there is time, plenty of time, my darling. Whilst that ship keeps us in view we are safe."
But though there might have been plenty of time, as I told her, the passage of it was of a heart-subduing slowness. It was some half-hour or so after our coming on deck, that Caudel, quitting the pump at which he had been taking a spell, approached me and said:
"You'll onderstand, of course, Mr. Barclay, that I, as master of this yacht, sticks to her?"
"What!" cried I, "to be drowned?"
"I sticks to her, sir," he repeated, with the emphasis of irritability in his manner that was not at all wanting in respect either. "I dorn't mean to say if it should come on to blow another gale afore that there craft," indicating the ship, "receives ye, that I wouldn't go too. But the weather's amoderating; it'll be tarning fine afore long, and I'm agoing to sail the Spitfire home."