‘I do not know how to thank you,’ I said in a broken voice.
‘Not a word of thanks, if you please,’ he answered. ‘You have suffered sadly, and for no inconsiderable part of your suffering is this ship responsible. We must make you all the amends possible.’
He motioned to the stewardess who opened the door.
‘I’ll not worry you now with looking at your head and dressing it,’ said Mr. McEwan; ‘take some rest first. I’ll call in upon you by-and-by.’
We passed into the brilliant saloon. The sun was now high, and his beams glittered gloriously upon the skylights, and were multiplied in a hundred sparkling prisms in the mirrors, lamps, and globes of fish. Through the windows of the skylight some of the sails of the ship were visible, and they rose swelling and towering and of a surf-like whiteness to the windy sky that lay in a hazy marble over the mastheads. The stewards were stripping the tables of the breakfast things, and at the forward end of the saloon stood a group of ladies conversing, and looking through a window on to the decks beyond, where a multitude of the emigrant or third-class passengers were assembled.
I held my head bowed, for I was ashamed to be seen. The stewardess took me to her berth, and when I had entered it I sat down, and putting my hands to my heart I rocked myself and tried to weep, for my heart felt swollen as though it would burst, and my head felt full, and my breathing was difficult; but the tears would not flow. Many hours of anguish had I passed since consciousness had returned to me on board the brig, but more exquisite than all those hours of anguish put together was the agony my spirit underwent as I sat in the stewardess’s berth rocking myself. No light! no light! Oh, I had hoped for some faint illumination from the questions which had been asked me, from the sentences which the captain and the surgeon had exchanged about me. The blackness was as impenetrable as ever it had been. I groped with my inward vision over the thick dark curtain, but no glimmer of light crossed it, no fold stirred. The silence and the blackness were of the tomb. It was as though I had returned to life to find myself in a coffin, there to lie straining my eyes against the impenetrable darkness, and there, in the grave, to lie hearkening to the awful hush of death.
‘Come, cheer up, dear,’ said the stewardess, putting her hand upon my shoulder. ‘Stay, I have something that will do you good,’ and going to a shelf she took down a little decanter of cherry-brandy and gave me a glassful.
‘They told me things that may be true, and I do not know whether they are true or not,’ said I.