CHAPTER XXVIII MR. MOORE ENDS HIS STORY
I took her by the hands and looked her in the face, and brought her to my heart, and a sob shook me as I kissed her. For some moments she merely pronounced my name, straining from my grasp to look at me. There was something wild in the light of her soft eyes then. Maybe the passions and sensations which in a sudden surprise of meeting would have forced us into transports had abated; we had long both known that we were near to each other, she that I had come to rescue her, I that she was alive on that wreck up there. But for all that, and as long as they were bringing the man from the wreck, it remained a sort of unreality, a mission too marvellous to have been fulfilled, a hope too daring, too defiant of death itself and all the terrors of this barbarous, savage scene, to have been humanly possible.
A wonder, too, lay in her beauty and healthful looks. My imaginations of her state, now as lying in her coffin at Cape Town, now as dead of the cold in that same wreck we had brought her from, had coloured to me a ghastly portrait of my memory of her; or, even when figuring her alive in the hull, I conceived her bloodless, gaunt, sunk-eyed, a sad, heart-sickening spectre of herself. Instead I found her fairer, healthier, plumper by a hundredfold than she had shown when she left England. She was dressed in furs: her hat was a turban of sealskin; her hair was a little wild, but its dishevelment was a grace.
When at last I began to speak to her, it was in mere ejaculation, a babble of joy and devotion—that I should have got her;—that I should be holding her after months of fearing and of believing that she was dead; that God should have directed me through thousands of leagues of sea to this lonely scene of ice; and so on, and so on; whilst her speech was little more than exclamation too. For, put yourself in our place and judge how it would go with your heart, and tongue, till use had softened amazement and incredulity, sobering the flow of feeling into a gentle language of passion and pleasure.
Meanwhile they were bringing the man to the boat. The cask travelled safely to the bows: he sprang out with the assistance of a man's hand, and then stood on a thwart looking about him for a minute with a face of ecstasy.
Now it was I grew a bit rational, and said to Marie:
'Who is he?'
'Mr. Selby. His conduct has been noble. Oh, Archie, his manly treatment of me, his patient care, the encouragement, the encouragement!'