Next morning we went to church, and kneeling side by side, we offered up the thanks of our deeply grateful hearts for our preservation from the many dark and deadly perils we had encountered, and for our restoration, sound in health and limb, to a land we had often talked of and had as often feared we should never again behold.
It was a quiet holiday with us afterwards: a brief passage of hours whose happiness was alloyed only by anxiety to get news of my mother. Our love for each other was true and deep—how true and deep I am better able to know now than I did then, before time had tested the metal of our hearts. I was proud of my Danish sweetheart, of her heroic nature, of her many endearing qualities of tenderness, goodness, simple piety, of her girlish gentleness of character, which, in the hour of trial and of danger, could harden into the courage of the lioness, without loss, as I knew, of the sweetness and the bloom of her maidenhood. I felt, too, she was mine in a sense novel indeed in the experiences of love-making; I mean, by the right of having saved her life, of plucking her, as it were, out of the fury of the sea; for we were both very conscious that, but for my having been aboard the Anine, she must have perished, incapable of leaving her dying father even had she been able with her girl's hands alone to save herself, as between us we had saved ourselves.
But not to dwell upon this, nor to recount our walks on that quiet November Sabbath day, our exquisite and impassioned enjoyment of the scenes and sights and aromas of this favoured space of land after our many privations and after the sickening iteration of the ocean girdle, flawless for days and making our sight ache with gazing and with expectation: not to dwell upon this and much more that memory loves to recall, Monday morning's post brought me a letter from Mr. Trembath. My mother was well—he had told her I was at Falmouth—I was to come to her without delay. It was a long letter, full of congratulations, of astonishment, but—my mother was well! She knew I was at Falmouth! All the rest was idle words to my happiness, full of news as the letter was, too. Helga laughed and cried and kissed me, and an hour later we were in a railway carriage on our way to Tintrenale.
On our arrival we immediately proceeded to the house of Mr. Trembath. We were on foot, and on our way from the railway station, as we turned the corner of the hilly road that led to the town, the whole view of the spacious bay opened upon our eyes. We instantly stopped, and I grasped Helga's hand while we stood looking. It was a keen bright blue morning, the air of a frosty, of an almost prismatic brilliance of purity owing to the shining ranges of snow upon the slopes and downs of the headlands of the cliffs. The Twins and the Deadlow Rock showed their black fangs with a recurrent flash of light as the sun smote them while wet from the lift of the swell that was rolling into the bay.
'Yonder is where the Anine brought up. Do you remember?'
White gulls were hovering off the pier. To the right was the lifeboat house out of which we had launched on that dark and desperate night of October 21. The weather-cock crowning the tall spire of St. Saviour's was glowing like fire in the blue. Far off, at the foot of Hurricane Point, was the cloudy glimmer of boiling water, the seething of the Atlantic fold recoiling from the giant base. A smart little schooner lay half a mile out on a line with the pier, and, as she rolled, her copper glistened ruddily upon the dark-blue surface. Sounds of life arose from the town: the ringing of bells, the rattling of vehicles, the cries of the hawker.
'Come, my darling!' said I, and we proceeded.
I shall never forget the look of astonishment with which Mr. Trembath received us. We were shown into his study—his servant was a new hand and did not know me; she admitted us as a brace of parishioners, I dare say. 'Great Heaven! it is Hugh Tregarthen!' he cried, starting out of his chair as though a red-hot iron had been applied to him. He wrung both my hands, overwhelming me with exclamations. I could not speak. He gave me no opportunity to introduce Helga. Indeed, he did not seem sensible of her presence.
'Alive, after all! A resurrection, in good faith! What a night it was, d'ye remember? Ha! ha!' he cried, clinging to my hands and staring, with the wildest earnestness of expression, into my face, while his eyes danced with congratulation and gratification. 'We gave you up. You ought to be dead—not a doubt of it! No young fellow should return to life who has been mourned for as you were!' Thus he rattled on.
'But my mother—my mother, Mr. Trembath! How is my mother?'