My hysteric fit sobered down and I fell to sharply thinking. The nearest refuge was Simon's Bay, and that would lie some three or four hundred miles distant. How long would it take me to sail the boat there? Why, 'twas a thing idle to calculate. Give me steady favourable winds and smooth seas and I could answer; but here was a boat that, like the ship she belonged to, was fit only to be blown along. She could not beat, she had no keel for holding to the water. Hence progress, if any was to be made, was so utterly a matter of chance that conjecture fell dead to the first effort of thought. If I was blown out to sea we might be picked up by a ship; if we were blown ashore I might contrive to find a smooth spot for landing; if the wind came away from the east and south it might, if it hung there, drive me round Agulhas and perhaps to Simon's Bay. That's how it stood—no better anyhow; but how much worse you may reckon when you reflect in what part of the ocean we were, when you consider the season of the year, how few in comparison with the mighty expanse of those waters were the ships which sailed upon it, how worthless the boat as a sea-going fabric, how huge the billows which the gales raised, how murderous the shore to which the breakers, roaring on it, might forbid escape.
Twice my darling moaned for water. Each time she thanked me with a smile, but the mere task of swallowing seemed to rob her lips of the power of pronouncing words. The moon went down in the west towards the black line of land, and when it hung a rusty-red over the ebon shadow under which trickled the blood-like flakes of its reflection, the dawn broke. For above an hour I had not been able to see Imogene, so faint had fallen the light of the westering orb, and for longer than that time had she neither moaned, nor whispered, nor stirred.
I directed my burning eyes into the east for the sun, and when the pink of him was in the sky, ere yet his brow had levelled the first flashing beam of day, I looked at Imogene.
I looked, and yet looked; then knelt. She was smiling, and by that I believed she lived; but when I peered into the half-closed lids—oh, great God! The sun flamed out of the sea in a leap then, and I sprang to my feet and cursed him with a scorching throat for finding me alone!
The sequel to this extraordinary narrative must be told by another pen.
On the morning of the second day of October, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-six, the full-rigged ship Mary and James, bound from Tonquin to London, dropped anchor in Table Bay. She had scarcely swung to her cable when the gig was lowered, and her master, Captain William Thunder, a small, bow-legged man, with a fiery nose and a brown wig, entered her and was rowed ashore. He marched, or rather rolled, into the town, which in those days was formed of a mere handful of low-roofed, strongly-built houses, and knocking at one of them, situated not a musket shot distant from the grounds of the building of the Dutch East India Company, inquired for Mr. Van Stadens. The coloured slave, or servant, showed him into a parlour, and presently Mr. Van Stadens, an extremely corpulent Dutchman, entered.
They talked awhile of business, for Van Stadens was the South African agent for the owner of the Mary and James, and then said Captain Thunder:
"Mr. Van Stadens, I'm going to tell you the most wonderful thing you ever heard in all your life."