She bit her lip to enable her to speak steadily, and said: ‘Supposing there is no gold, what will be done?’
‘I cannot tell,’ I answered; ‘we may be quite certain that there is no gold. It yet remains to be seen whether even the poor wretch’s island is real.’
‘If there should be no island, Mr. Dugdale?’
‘Well, as I just now said, the men will at first suppose me wrong in my navigation, and oblige me to keep on hunting about for a bit. But such a quest will not take long to tire them, and they will probably ask me to carry them on to the coast.’
‘To what part?’
‘Valparaiso, probably. That will be a near port in those seas.’
‘At that rate,’ she exclaimed with an expression of impatience and dismay, ‘we shall be sailing about for five or six months without the least opportunity of my getting on shore, of my returning home, of my being able to obtain a change of dress.’
‘Providing nothing happens. And even assuming that you are forced to see this adventure out to the bitter end, the worst that befalls you is a disagreeably long divorce from your home, together with such discomforts as you should laugh at when you think of them side by side with the tragedy that this ramble is easily to be worked into.’
However, spite of her little effort to look the difficulty in the face, she seemed stunned. She would start sometimes whilst I talked to her, and send a wild sweeping look round the cabin, as though she could not realise her situation and sought to persuade herself that she was in a dream. I was grieved for her beyond words, yet I would not exhibit too much sympathy either, lest I should unduly accentuate the significance of our condition, and make her suppose that I believed it darker and more perilous than it really was. She had been buoyed up with a hope of escaping into another ship, or of shortly landing at Rio, and sailing home from there; and the disappointment coming on top of the perception that our adventure, harsh and soul-subduing as it had already been in some particulars, was only in reality just beginning, seemed to break her down. I did my utmost to make light of the business: said that but for my anxiety for her, I should enter upon the affair with positive relish, accepting it as a wild romance of the sea, which could seldom happen to a man in his life, and which he ought to live through and see out, if only for the sake of the memory of a stirring picturesque passage that at the longest would yet be brief.
‘As to wearing-apparel,’ I said, ‘there are needles and thread forward, and I don’t doubt that when you are put to it you will be able to manage. And then, suppose this story of the captain’s should prove true! suppose we should actually find buried in the spot he indicated a mass of gold which, when equally divided amongst us, would yield every man several thousands of pounds!’