“My dear friend,” exclaimed Mr. Sherman soothingly, “you must endeavour to control yourself. There is no danger, indeed. This uproar will cease presently. We encountered much worse weather than this in the North Atlantic, shortly after leaving Glasgow.”
“Yes, I am ashamed of my weakness; my nerves are gone,” answered the poor fellow. And then, seeing the men tumbling up aloft and laying out upon the yards, he covered his face with his hands, saying he dared not look, lest he should see them fall.
The ship was made snug presently; but the sea rose, and now and again a shower of spray came flying over the forecastle and the main-deck, which so violently agitated Holdsworth that he let go the rigging and made for the companion. He walked like a paralysed man: his hands outstretched, and his head turning about on his shoulders. He gained his cabin and laid himself down in his bunk, exquisitely alive to his pusillanimity, and weeping over his incapacity to control himself.
The skipper went up to Mr. Sherman.
“Our friend is no sailor. I think you can tell that, Mr. Sherman?”
“No; that is proved. The instincts of his old life, had he been a sailor, would have kept up his courage without respect of his memory. But let us bear in mind that his nervousness is the result of the terrible experience he has gone through. If illness—if fever, for instance—will rob us of our nerves, how much more the unspeakable agony of hunger and thirst, and the deadly, hopeless captivity and exposure in an open boat for days, and maybe for weeks! It would drive me mad!”
“Ay, that is verra true. Understand me, I am not speaking disrespectfully of the puir soul. I would only bid you obsairve by his fear that he canna hae been a tarry-breeks. The auld speerit would live in spite o’ his nerves, and would have risen to the cries of the men and the bocking o’ the water. That’s my opeenion.”
Thus we may learn how some opinions, delivered in sound earnest, are manufactured.
Not a tarry-breeks!
There had never sailed out of any port in Christendom a finer, a more courageous sailor than Holdsworth. What would Captain Duff have thought of his “opeenion,” had he been told that that same halting, crippled figure, who had hastened to his cabin with movements full of fear, had been, only a month before, an upright, handsome man, with an eye full of light and spirit, with nerves and skill equal to occasions which would have overwhelmed the honest Scotch skipper and left him nowhere, with a heart as gentle as a maiden’s and manly as Nelson’s; always foremost in the moment of danger, with the voice of a trumpet to deliver unerring commands; a leader in measures of which the peril made the stoutest-hearted tremble and stand still; scaling the dizzy heights of whirling masts and spars, to whose summits he might have beckoned in vain to those very seamen of the “Jessie Maxwell,” whose movements, now in the weakness of his crushed and broken life, he dared not even watch?