CHAPTER XXIII
CAPTAIN BRAINE
After three days of sailors’ biscuit and strong cheese and marmalade of the flavour of foot sugar, the lump of cold salt beef that the captain’s man set before me ate to my palate with a relish that I had never before found in the choicest and most exquisitely cooked meat; and a real treat, too, to my shipwrecked sensibilities, was the inspiration of home and civilisation in the tumbler of foaming London stout. Miss Temple seemed too harassed, too broken down in mind, to partake of food; but by dint of coaxing and entreating I got her to taste a mouthful, and then put her lips to a glass of stout; and presently she appeared to find her appetite by eating, as the French say, and ended with such a repast as I could have wished to see her make.
When the man put the tray down, he went out, and the girl and I were alone during the meal. Now that I had recovered from the first heart-subduing shock of the discovery that the hull was on fire, and could realise that, even supposing she had not been set on fire, we had still been delivered from what in all probability must have proved a long, lingering, soul-killing time of expectation, dying out into hopelessness and into a period of famine, thirst, and death: I say now that I could realise our rescue from these horrors, my spirits mounted, my joy was an intoxication, I could have cried and laughed at the same time, like one in hysteria. I longed to jump from my chair and dance about the cabin that I might vent the oppression of my transports by movement. I was but a young man, and life was dear to me, and we had been in dire peril, and were safe. What a paradise was this cosy little cabin after that ghost-haunted, narrow crib of a deck-house! How soothing beyond all words to the nerves was the light floating rolling of the graceful little snow-white barque, under control of her helm, and vitalised in every plank by the impulse of her airy soaring canvas, compared with the jerky, feverish, staggering, tumblefication of the wreck, with its deadly deck leaning at desperate angles to the fang-like remnants of the crushed bulwarks, and its uncovered hatches yawning to the heavens, as though in a dumb mouthing of entreaty for extinction!
‘Oh! Miss Temple,’ I cried, ‘I cannot bring my mind to believe in our good fortune! This time yesterday! how hopeless we were! And now we are safe! I thank God, I most humbly thank God, for His mercy! Your lot would soon have become a frightful one aboard that wreck.’
‘Yet what would I give,’ she exclaimed, ‘if this ship were the Countess Ida! What is to become of us? For how long are we to wander about in a state of destitution, Mr. Dugdale—mere beggars, without apparel, without conveniences, dependent for our very meals upon the bounty of strangers?’ and she brought her eyes, with the old flash in them, from the table to my face, at which she gazed with an expression of temper and mortification.
‘You would not be a woman,’ said I, ‘if you did not think of your dress. But, pray, consider this: that your baggage is now recoverable; whereas, but for this Lady Blanche——’
‘Oh! but it would have been so happy a thing, that might so easily have happened too, had this vessel been the Indiaman.’
‘Cannot you summon a little patience to your aid?’ said I. ‘Our strange-eyed captain spoke with judgment when he suggested the probability of your exchanging his ship for the Countess Ida within a week.’