Mate Hénin was on deck. He stood at the bulwark, and supported his rocking figure by holding a rope, and the scowl upon his face as he ran his gleaming eyes over the sea was as dark as the scowl upon the sky.
‘How is this weather to end?’ called Alphonse to him.
‘In wind,’ he answered.
‘Will it be a fair wind?’
‘The devil alone knows. But better a hurricane than this.’ He uttered a malediction. ‘Is it to be Toulon with us? Or is it to be six months of the Bay of Biscay? Are we to run short of water and provisions? I am no oyster, I. Give me a hurricane sooner than six months of the Bay of Biscay in this tumbling shell.’ He uttered another malediction, and scowled even yet more fiercely as he looked up at the sky and then around him.
Alphonse translated his speech with a smile. ‘Do not mind him,’ he exclaimed; ‘he has a tender heart and no man sheds tears more easily.’
It began to rain and I returned to the cabin. I removed the cloak, seated myself on a locker and gave myself up to thought. If I could not remember who I was, what was to become of me? When this brig arrived at Toulon whither should I proceed for shelter and protection? Captain Regnier had spoken of the British Consul; but I was a stranger to the British Consul. I had nothing whatever to communicate to him about my past, saving that I was found far out at sea in a little sailing-boat, and rescued by the people of the brig Notre Dame de Boulogne. Would he house me or elsewhere find shelter and food for me until he had discovered who I was? But how would he be able to discover who I was? And when he found that inquiry was futile would he go on sheltering and protecting me? My thoughts filled me with terror. I was ignorant of the duties of a Consul, and I could not understand that there might be anything to hope or to expect from him. Then, again, my memory being gone, I was as much at fault when I reasoned forwards as when I directed the eyes of my mind backwards. I could not conceive, for instance, that on my landing at Toulon, and representing my dreadful and helpless condition to the British Consul, he would take steps to send me home, because I had no imagination of home. I could not positively affirm that I was English; I was in the condition of a mute—nay, I was far worse off than a mute, because a mute has his memory, and can express what is in his mind by writing or by dumb show; whereas I had nothing to tell. I could speak, and the words I pronounced were English; but that was all. However my tale might run, it would be without meaning: and when I thought of myself as landing at Toulon, of arriving at a place where I had not a friend—though if there had been twenty friends there I should not have remembered them—when I thought of the few shillings my purse contained, that all the wearing apparel I possessed was upon me, that I should not be able to say who I was, where I came from, in what part of the world my home was situated—when I thought thus I trembled in every limb, my heart felt cold as stone, and I strove to ease the agony of my mind by weeping; but no tears flowed. I had wept so often of late throughout the days, and in the dark hours of the nights, that the source of my tears seemed to have been dried up.
The good-natured Alphonse, observing the dreadful and insupportable misery in my face and posture, thought to cheer me up; he sat beside me, entreated me not to fret, and spoke cheerfully of the future. But my inward anguish was too extreme to suffer me to listen to him, and after awhile he withdrew to his cabin and played somewhat stealthily upon his fiddle, thinking, perhaps, I could not hear him, yet wishing to divert himself.
Shortly before the cabin dinner hour, that is to say, a little before one o’clock, there was a sudden commotion on deck, a noise of ropes hastily flung down, the sounds of men running about, accompanied by Captain Regnier’s bull-like bawlings. In a few minutes I heard a strange hissing, and the vessel leaned over and continued to lean down until she had arrived at so sharp an angle that I was only saved from sliding off the locker by pressing at the whole length of my arms against the table. The shouts of the men on deck were confused and incessant. Every man seemed to be roaring out orders on his own account. There was likewise an alarming noise of canvas violently shaken. The vessel was plunging heavily, and every now and then she received a blow from a sea that thrilled through her as a house shakes when a loaded van is passing the door, and every blow was followed by a fierce noise of seething like the sound of water poured on fire.