Oh for the power of giving peace to that manly unoffending heart!
We shed tears, and well we may, God knows, over the privations of shipwrecked men, over the hunger and thirst and the mortal bodily agonies of poor souls doomed to die a lingering and shocking death in open boats, storm-tossed, or baking in breathless calms under the burning eye of the sun; but do we think of that deeper misery of theirs—that poignant mental torture compared to which the sufferings of the flesh are as naught—the thoughts of those they shall see no more—of wives, and sisters, and mothers, and little children, many of whom may perchance never hear the story of their fate, and can have no tear for the famine and the thirst that wasted the flesh off their skins and submitted them to greater torture than the heart can bear to think of?
Holdsworth had believed that the sufferings of the boy would engross all his thoughts in himself, and that though he might miss he would not cry for his mother. But he was deceived; for, no sooner had the little fellow discovered that she was gone from her place in the bottom of the boat, than he uttered a sharp cry, and asked Holdsworth where his mamma was.
Holdsworth took him upon his knee, but could not answer. The child persisted in his inquiries, looking the while suspiciously and eagerly about him, particularly over the stern, where he had remembered seeing the actor disappear.
“She is gone to God,” Holdsworth said at last. “My little man, you will meet her again.”
“To God!” cried the child. “That’s where papa is!”
He looked up with startled eyes at the sky, and then sobbed passionately, “Has she left me alone? has she left me alone?”
“No, she has left you to me. Be a good boy now, and don’t cry, and I will take care of you, and love you dearly.”
His words smote him as the idlest mockery; but apart from his mental sufferings, the mere effort of raising his voice pained him intensely. He put the child down, forcing a smile which seemed no better than a grin of pain upon his emaciated face, and then stood up to sweep the horizon, but soon sank down again with a sound as of a clanging of bells in his ears, and his throat constricted and burning with a dry, feverish heat, the pain of which was exquisite.