But the barque was drawing near her journey’s end, in long. 120°. The pale outline of Van Diemen’s land must heave in sight shortly away on the port bow.
They were now in the beginning of November, and had been seventy-two days from Glasgow. One bright morning Holdsworth was seated on the skylight, with his eyes on a book that had been lent him, but with his mind groping, as it more or less always was, in the darkness that hid the past from his sight. There was a blind man’s look on his face when he was thus thinking, that was more conclusive of the ghastly sincerity of his intellectual bereavement than anything that could be said or done. You saw by the blank expression in his eyes that his gaze was turned inwards, and by his general air that the search he was making was a fruitless one.
He had been taken out of the boat a ghost—a gray skeleton; he had picked up a little since that time, but his present aspect was merely a slight improvement on the forlorn image he had presented when rescued. The familiar picture of a broad-shouldered, hearty, vigorous, handsome young man, smooth-cheeked, clear-eyed, was gone; in its place was a wasted shadow, a drooping, hesitating figure, with a characterisation of deformity in its movements, though there was no positive deformity; thin, feeble hands whitened by sickness, and a pale face hollowed in the eyes, and made ragged with a growth of black beard and moustache.[1]
The change was altogether too remarkable to have been effected by physical suffering only; the heart had worked the deeper transformation—the soft, tender, womanly heart brought face to face with sufferings it was constrained to contemplate, to hearken to murmurs of agony it could not soothe nor silence. Consider, I pray you consider, that he had beheld five shocking deaths, each one accompanied by circumstances of unspeakable horror or misery. Stretched over a longer space of time, they might, by giving his heart breathing-spaces between, have inured it to the inevitable scenes; but crowding upon him one after the other in quick succession, they ground his sensibility to dust, and though he had now no memory whereby to renew the sufferings of these ten days, its blighting effect was not the less clearly visible in him, its operation had not been the less complete.
Whilst he thus sate, as lonely now in a ship full of men as ever he had been in the boat with Johnson dying under the thwart, Mr. Sherman came on deck and took a seat at his side. Holdsworth was so engrossed that he did not perceive his companion, and Mr. Sherman, unwilling to break in upon his thoughts, remained silent, watching him.
Suddenly Holdsworth turned; the blank dead look went out of his eyes, and he smiled.
“So memory still defies you?” said Mr. Sherman kindly, and with just as much anxiety as would let his companion understand the sincerity of the interest taken in him.
“Yes,” answered Holdsworth, the smile fading off his face. “Once—once only, just now, a fancy came into my mind—I cannot explain its nature, or what it betokened, but it vanished the instant I attempted to grapple with it.”
“Did it leave no impression—no idea whatever?”