It was immediately wanted, of course, but the man with the boathook could not get it and keep a hold of the boat, too; so another man jumped in and brought up a pocket-handkerchief.
'It's a lady's,' said the mate.
'It's Miss Vanderholt's!' exclaimed Captain Parry, observing a small 'V. V.' in the corner.
Two or three marks of blood stained it, as though the lip, nose, or ear had slightly bled.
'What does it betoken?' said Captain Parry, looking at the handkerchief, and speaking softly, as though to himself. 'If it is a memorial, why, in God's name, should it come to me blood-stained?'
They got the boat aboard; all hands, including Parry, pulling and hauling at the tackles. When she was chocked, a course was shaped for the derelict brig, according to the indication of the masthead man. It was a time of thrilling anxiety for Parry. The handkerchief was no warrant that the girl had been in the boat. They might have bound her, and drowned her at the side of the schooner, and yet a handkerchief of hers might have found its way into the boat. The handkerchief, then, proved nothing. Nevertheless, Parry found a sinister significance in the blood-marks. Was not this blood-stained token most tragically portentous, as the only relic or memorial of his love that the sea had to offer him? He looked at it, and in the wildness of his heart he made a meaning of it: it was a farewell to him, a message mute and eloquent; it said to him that her father was slain, and that she was lost to him for ever. Thus he stood interpreting the thing.
Shortly after one o'clock the derelict was in view right ahead. The telescope then easily resolved her. She was a small black brig, with her lower masts standing and bowsprit gone. She sat tolerably high, but rolled with the sickly sluggishness of the waterlogged hulk. As the schooner approached, features of the wreck grew plain. She carried a deck-load of timber, and her hold was evidently full of timber. By some desperate gale she had been wrenched till her butts started, her strong fastenings gave, her topmasts went, and the green seas rushing in, drowned her into a lifelessness of helm.
On board the schooner they could perceive no wreckage floating near. What sufferings, obscure and horrible, was that little wreck memorializing? The phantoms of the imagination peopled her. White-faced men, dying in squatting postures, were upon the sea-broken deck-load of timber. There was no captain, no command, the fingers of famine had effaced distinctions. Then one would die with a groan, falling sideways with his white eyes glazing to the sun; and another would mutter in delirium, and call upon the Lord Jesus Christ, and motion with a ghastly smile to his mother to make haste with the drink of water she was bringing him.
Phantoms or no phantoms, all were gone. The wreck lay apparently lifeless, absolutely abandoned, a yawning frame, sodden by weeks of washing to and fro. Thus it seemed to the eyes aboard the schooner as she drew closer and closer to the desolate, mournful, storm-broken fabric.
'There may be rats in that vessel,' said the mate, with a countenance made up of relief and extreme curiosity; 'but I don't see them, Captain Parry, neither do I see anything else that's living.'