Well, we would exchange a few sentences after this pattern, and then fall silent for a whole hour at a time. She never closed her eyes throughout the night. Whenever I glanced at her, I met her gaze brilliant with emotion. The change was so sudden that I found it impossible to fully realise it. When I thought of Miss Temple aboard the Countess Ida, her haughtiness, her character of almost insolent reserve, how she had hardly found it in her to address me with an accent of courtesy, her ungracious treatment of me after the service I had done her in rescuing her from a perilous situation: I say when I recalled all this and a deal more, and then viewed her as she sat opposite, crouching in a corner, supporting herself by grasping the table with her heavily ringed fingers, the high-born delicate beauty of her lineaments showing like some cameo in ivory, and reflected that she and I were absolutely alone, that it might come to her owing her life to me, or that we might be doomed to miserably perish together—this girl, this unapproachable young lady, at whom I had been wont to stare furtively with fascinated eyes on board the Indiaman for long spells at a stretch—I could not bring my mind to credit the reality of our situation.
CHAPTER XX
I SEARCH THE WRECK
All night long it blew a strong wind, but shortly before daybreak it fined down on a sudden into a light air out of the south-west, leaving a troubled rolling sea behind it. It was still very thick all round the horizon, so that from the door of the deck-house my gaze scarcely penetrated a distance of two miles. It was no longer fog, however, but cloud, sullen, low-lying, here and there shaping out; a familiar tropical dawn in the parallels, though it made one think too of the smothers you fall in with on the edge of the Gulf Stream.
I stepped on deck to wait for the light to break, and Miss Temple came to the door to look also. The hull still rolled violently, but without the dangerous friskiness of the jumps, recoils, and staggering recoveries of the night when there was a sharp sea running as well as a long heaving swell. My heart was in my gaze as the dim faintness came sifting into the darkness of the east. In a few minutes it was a grey morn, the sea an ugly lead, and the horizon all round of the aspect of a drizzling November day in the English Channel. We both swept the water with our sight, again and again looking, straining our vision into the dim distances; but to no purpose.
‘Do you see anything?’ exclaimed Miss Temple.
‘No,’ I answered, ‘there is nothing in sight.’
‘Oh, my heart will break!’ she cried.
‘We must wait awhile,’ said I: ‘this sort of weather has a trick of clearing rapidly, and it may be all bright sky and wide shining surface of ocean long before noon; then we shall see the ships, and they will see us. But this is a low level. Something may heave into view from the height of that mast. I shall not be long gone. Be careful to hold on firmly, Miss Temple; nay, oblige me by sitting in the deck-house. Should you relax your grasp, a sudden roll may carry you overboard.’