I continued to question with impassioned anxiety, eagerness, and grief, till I found I was likely to become an intruder in the office, on which, asking the boatswain Wall for his address, and ascertaining that he did not mean to look about him for another berth at present, I shook hands with Mr. Hobbs, and walked to my place of business in the City—a private bank near Gracechurch Street.
Sir Mortimer Otway was at this time at Paris on a visit to some friends. I had heard from him two days before, and understood that he would return on the fourth or fifth. His health was not good. Of late he had become very anxious about his daughter. He thought it was time, after six months, that he should receive news of her, or that the 'Lady Emma' should be reported. This being so, I resolved not to write, but to wait until his return, when I would tell him of the wreck of the ship, if, indeed, the account of it did not reach him through other hands, or the newspapers in Paris.
For my own part I was so shocked, so stunned, there was something so terrible to my imagination in the character of this wreck, in every circumstance of it, having regard to the loneliness of the three, the wild and stormy breast of waters where the hull had been left plunging helpless by her crew, that I could not hold up my head. I could not speak. I sat in a sort of stupor. My father reasoned with me; he pointed out that the hull was afloat, a stout, seaworthy vessel when the crew left her; that being dismasted she was less likely to beat against the ice than were she moving through the water under sail; that a vessel had been seen and pursued by the crew; that where one was there must be others; and so on, and so on.
I heard him and that was all.
I cannot tell how great was my love for Marie. I felt that I had acted as a wretch, betrayed the darling of my heart to her destruction, in sanctioning her father's scheme of sending her away alone—and she must be alone if she was without me—on a long voyage in a comparatively small sailing ship. The fancy of her in that rolling, dismasted hull was a dreadful oppression to my imagination and worked in me like madness itself. I had seen the ship, and so the figure of her as she tumbled dismasted amidst the heavy seas far south of Cape Horn was easy to paint. To think of my Marie, that delicate, fragile, timid girl, imprisoned in such a hulk, enduring hours and perhaps days of anguish in poignant suspense and heartbreaking expectation of death, all alone as she was, countless leagues away from me, from her father, with no other companion than her old nurse, who, let her devotion be what it might, must surely fail her at such a time.
My mind felt crazed. I could not lift my head nor speak.
END OF THE SECOND VOLUME