“Do you not remember?”
“My boat! my boat!” repeated Holdsworth; but no light came into his eyes to show that he apprehended the other’s meaning.
“He has lost his memory,” said Mr. Sherman aside to the captain. And then to Holdsworth: “Do you feel as if you could eat anything?”
“Yes, I am hungry,” answered Holdsworth.
“That is a good sign!” exclaimed Mr. Sherman, cheerfully. “Captain, will you stop here a few minutes, while I ask the steward to get the soup heated?”
The skipper, being left alone, stationed himself near the door, and watched Holdsworth with mixed emotions. Brave to foolhardiness in a gale of wind, on a lee-shore, in confronting a mutinous crew, in dealing with the severest of marine exigencies, this little gentleman, in some trivial matters, was as timorous as a mouse, and would have made his escape overboard, rather than be grasped by Holdsworth, who, if he were not the dissembled madman his ragged, withered face suggested him to be, was still hedged about with enough of mysterious and secret horror to make him awful in the practical little Scotchman’s eyes.
Meanwhile, Holdsworth rested upon his pillow, casting eager and restless glances about the cabin, and at the skipper, and battling with an oblivion of the past as thick and as impenetrable as that mystery of being which the infant emerges from at its birth.
“Tell me, sir, who I am—where I have been taken from!” he exclaimed, presently, looking with imploring eyes at the skipper.
“Indeed, my man, I can’t tell you who you are,” replied the captain, wishing that Mr. Sherman would return, or that a squall would give him an excuse to withdraw. “All that I know is, we found you in a boat, and picked you up, and that the gentleman who has just gone out, saved your life.”