I was aroused from the stupor that had come over me, the effect of excessive emotion, by Miss Robertson putting her hand in mine.
"Be brave!" she whispered, with her mouth close to my ear. "God is with us still. My dead father would not deceive me. We shall be saved yet. Have courage, and be your own true self again!"
I looked into her shining eyes, out of which all the excitement that had fired them while the Russian remained hove to, had departed. There was a beautiful tranquillity, there was a courage heaven-inspired, there was a soft and hopeful smile upon her pale face, which fell upon the tempest in my breast and stilled it.
God had given her this influence over me, and I yielded to it as though He Himself had commanded me.
All her own troubles came before me, all her own bitter trials, her miserable bereavement; and as I heard her sweet voice bidding me have courage, and beheld her smiling upon me out of her deep faith in her simple, sacred dream, I caught up both her hands and bent my head over them and wept.
"Cornish!" I cried, recovering myself, and seizing the man by the arm as he stood shouting at the fast-lessening ship, "what is the use of those oaths? let them go their ways—the pitiless cowards. We are Englishmen, and our lives are still our own. Come, brave companion! we have all undergone too much to permit this trial to break us. See this lady! she swears that we shall be saved yet. Be of her heart and mine and the bo'sun's there, and help us to make another fight for it. Come!"
He suffered me to pull him off his perilous perch, and then sat himself down upon a coil of rope trembling all over, and hid his face in his hands.
But a new trouble awaited me.
At this moment the steward came staggering up the companion ladder, his face purple, his eyes protruding, and talking loudly and incoherently. He clasped the sea-chest belonging to himself, which certainly was of greater weight than he in his enfeebled state would have been able to bear had he not been mad. The chest was corded, and he had no doubt packed it.
He rushed to the ship's side and pitched the chest overboard, and was in the act of springing on to the rail, meaning to fling himself into the sea, when I caught hold of him, and using more force than I was conscious of, dragged him backward so violently that his head struck the deck like a cannon shot, and he lay motionless and insensible.