‘And if we picks up that there “Shark” and recovers the lady afore we git to the Cape, shall we keep all on or shift our hellum for Southamptin again?’
‘Captain Finn will be able to tell you more about it than I,’ I responded in a tone that silenced him, though his tiny eyes looked athirst for information as he regarded me aslant over one of his huge whiskers.
The height from which I surveyed the vast plain of sea, the spirit of whose loneliness seemed to find the one touch of emphasis it needed to render its magnitude realisable by human instincts in that remote flaw of ship’s canvas which broke the continuity of the boundless horizon filled me with a feeling of exhilaration I cannot express; the sweet mild ocean breeze high on that slender yard sank through and through me, and vitality to its most secret recesses was quickened by it into a very intoxication of life, new, free, ardent; the air hummed gently in a vibratory metallic note as though it were some echo of a distant concert of harps and violins; far down the hull of the yacht, plentiful as was her beam in reality, looked like a long slender plank rounded at the bows, the whiteness of the deck showing with a sort of radiance as though it were thinly sheeted with crystal upon which the shadows of the rigging, masts, and canvas lay dark and beautifully clear, with a fitful swaying of them to the heave of the fabric, off polished and brilliant things such as the skylight or the brass decorations, when flashes of fire would leap forth to be veiled again in the violet gloom of the recurrent shade. The thin curve of foam on either hand the cutwater looked like frosted silver; my eye went to the airy confines of the ocean spreading out into a delicate haze of soft azure light where it washed the marble of that magnificent morning firmament, and then it was that, sharper than ever I had before felt it, there rose the perception in me of the incalculable odds against our sighting the yacht we were in pursuit of, so measureless did the ocean distance appear when with the gaze going from the ‘Bride’s’ masthead I thought of the distance that made the visible and compassable sphere, big as it was, as little as a star compared with the heavenly desert it floats in.
When I looked down again I observed Miss Jennings watching me from the gangway with her hand shading her eyes. I raised my hat and she bowed, and being wistful of her company I bade my friend Jack keep his eyes polished, as the piece that was nailed to the mast would help to lessen the loss that his sweetheart had occasioned him, and descended, hearing him rumbling in his gizzard as I got off the foot rope, though what he said I did not catch.
‘What is there to be seen, Mr. Monson?’ was Miss Jennings’ first question, with a delicate fire of timorous expectation in her eyes.
‘Only a ship,’ said I.
‘Not—not——’
‘No! not the “Shark” yet,’ I exclaimed smiling.
‘I am stupid to feel so nervous. I dare say I am as passionately anxious as Wilfrid to see my sister in this vessel safe—and separated from—from’—she faltered and quickly added, bringing her hands together and locking them, ‘but I dread the moment to arrive when the “Shark” will be reported in sight.’
‘Well, if we are to pick up that craft,’ said I, ‘we shall do so and then there’ll be an end on’t. But I give you my word, Miss Jennings, the ocean looks a mighty big place from that bit of a stick up there.’