"To adopt her," he exclaimed. "She shall be a child of mine. My wife will soon love her, and she will be a sister to my daughters. She has no relatives, and such beauty and sweetness of heart as hers must be cared for, since how does the world commonly serve such graces when they meet in a friendless woman?"
Surely, thought I, he that can talk thus cannot be endevilled! And yet does not the great Milton bestow the tenderness of a sister and a daughter on Sin when she reconciles Satan and Death? Something of human nature there must ever be even in those who most strictly merit Heaven's chastisement; and the lustre of the glory in our beginning, though it wane till its glow is no brighter than the dim, fiery crawlings upon this ship's side at night, is never utterly extinguished in the blackest spirit of us all.
I had no desire to talk of Miss Dudley lest I should put him into a passion by some remark touching the number of years she had now been on board, or by blundering in some other like manner. If she was to escape through me it behoved me to keep my thoughts mighty close and secret, for let what would be the state of being he had entered into in two centuries of existence, his eyes were like a burning-glass, as though he could focus by them the fires of suspicion and scorch a hole through your body to your soul to learn what was passing there. So putting on an easy manner and throwing a glance aloft and around, I said, "I fear, mynheer, you find weather of this kind strain your ship a good deal."
"Like all vessels she will work in such seas as this," he replied.
"How often is she careened?" I asked.
"How often should she need it, think you?" he replied, with sudden temper.
I said, warily, "I cannot imagine."
"I have commanded the Braave for five voyages," said he, softening a little, "and only once—that is during the second voyage—did she prove leaky. But this voyage she has been troublesome, and I have had to careen her twice."
Twice only, thought I; but you could see that his memory had been shaped so as to fit his doom, and that remembrance of all that befell him and his crew from the time when his sentence was first pronounced faded almost as swiftly as they happened, like clouds upon the blankness of the heavens, so that the very changes that would illustrate the passage of time to you or me, such as the alteration in the rigs and shapes of the ships he met, or the growth into womanhood of the girl he had rescued, would be as unmeaning to him and his fellows as to men without memory. Yet was it manifestly part of the Curse that he should have a keen and bright recollection of his house, his family, Amsterdam, the politics and wars of his age and the like. For if the faculty was wholly dead in him, he would be but as a corpse without that craving for home which perpetuates his doom.