Had there been any one, among those who watched him with curiosity, who had known him as the chief mate of the “Meteor,” he could scarcely have contemplated this wreck of a man without deep emotion. Conceive, if you can, a face with every characteristic that had once contributed to give it manly beauty, wrung out of it by sufferings which had left ineffaceable marks on every inch of the whole surface of the countenance. Conceive a stooped and trembling figure, the shoulders forward so as to hollow the chest, and the back bowed like an old man’s, the arms lengthened by the abnormal attitude and defeating every faint suggestion of symmetry which the eye might still hope to find. But this expresses nothing of the real transformation that had been wrought; of that subtle modification of expression, of the spiritual conditions of the face, of changes achieved by the most delicate strokes, but which were as effectual as a recasting of the whole figure and countenance could have been. He was dressed partly in his own clothes, partly in some of the clothes belonging to the second mate, who was a slight man, but whose garments hung loosely on Holdsworth. He wore his own coat, which formerly had buttoned tight across his chest, and which his muscular arms had filled out, as the fingers a glove; and he could now have buttoned it nearly twice around him. The ring that he had worn on his left hand had slipped from his skeleton finger long ago, when he had been splashing the sea-water over his face in vain endeavour to quench the burning agony in his head and throat. He might have worn Dolly’s wedding-ring on his middle finger now, for his hands were indeed scarcely more than bone.
Mr. Sherman eyed him anxiously as he stood tottering at the companion-hatchway. It seemed as if the long-desired revelation had come to the suffering man, and that he could now remember.
“Look about you,” he said, “and tell me if there is anything you see that recalls old impressions.”
“I see nothing that does this,” replied Holdsworth in a low voice. “Where is the boat I was taken from?”
“On the main-deck yonder.”
“I should like to see her,” said Holdsworth eagerly. “One idea may light up all.”
They walked slowly forward. Here and there a seaman repairing a sail, or working in the lower shrouds, or doing one of the endless jobs of splicing, whipping, tarring, cleaning, which are so many conditions of the maritime life, looked at Holdsworth earnestly, but never intrusively; and when he was at the boat some of the hands came up to him with a spokesman, a middle-aged sailor in ear-rings, who said:
“Beg pardon, sir, but all hands wishes to say as they’re werry glad to see you up and doing; and if there’s e’er a thing any man among us can do in helping to make you comfortable while you’re with us, they’ll do it and welcome; and no liberty is intended.”
“Thank you, and God bless you!” answered Holdsworth, greatly moved by this speech, and with an expression on his face that could hardly fail to let the honest seamen know that their goodwill was not the less appreciated because it provoked no lengthened reply. The men retired, saying among themselves that, “though the gentleman warn’t a sailor, he ought to be one; and though he was nothing but a skeleting, he had as honest a face on him as ever they seed.”