As no object could be served by keeping the sail hoisted, they hauled it down and spread a portion of it over the widow and her child. Holdsworth kept watch till ten, and then awakened Winyard, who watched till twelve; afterwards Johnson watched; and so the three men took turn and turn about, all through the long and breathless night, until daybreak, which found Winyard awake in the stern-sheets, watching the pale dawn breaking in the east.

Its approach at first was imperceptible. A faint gray mingled in the prevailing darkness, and gradually grew more defined; the stars languished, and those in the extreme east hid themselves. Then a clearer light broke stealthily about the eastern horizon; the sea caught the glimmering dawn, and mirrored a pale and sickly illumination, infinitely vague, as would be the reflection in a looking-glass of a faint light. But soon the lustre broadened, and streaks of horizontal silver floated above the deep, and stood in layers of crystalline clearness, awaiting a more ardent transformation. Then a delicate pink flushed a wide space in the eastern sky, which spread and spread until the farthermost heavens shook off the heavy curtains of the night and melted into a pale and visionary blue. Anon, upon the eastern water-line, stood a mere speck of white and exceedingly brilliant light—a pure silver point of glory—which, as the eye watched it, increased in size, flinging flake upon flake of glittering icy splendour upon the water, until, as with a sudden bound, it soared in sun-like shape and flooded the heavens and the sea with strong rejoicing light.

It awoke Holdsworth, who started up and stared around him.

“Look, sir!” said Winyard, in a whisper that sounded fierce with excitement, pointing towards the south-east, where, upon the remote horizon, stood a white speck clearly defined by the sunshine.

Holdsworth hollowed his hands tube-wise, gazed intently for some moments, and then cried, “A sail!”

“Becalmed, master, as we are!” shouted Winyard; whereat the sleepers in the boat stirred and opened their eyes.

“Out oars, my men!” sang out Holdsworth. “A sail, General! Do you see her? Look, Mrs. Tennent; follow the direction of my finger! She is becalmed! She cannot escape us! Hurrah, my lads!”

In less time than it takes me to write it, both seamen were bending to the oars like madmen, making the water break in clear lines of ripple against the boat’s bows, which headed directly for the distant sail. Language is powerless to describe the excitement of the poor creatures. Mrs. Tennent shed tears; the General, upon whose constitution, debilitated by old age, their perilous situation and the mental sufferings which accompanied it were beginning seriously to tell, stood clutching the mast, his eyes riveted upon the white speck, and his attenuated face flushed with eagerness and hope. The men, stretching to the long oars, looked from time to time over their shoulders to remark the progress they were making, and encouraged each other with cheerful cries.

They had but two oars, and the boat was heavy and moved reluctantly to the pressure of the blades; moreover, the men were weakened by exposure and want of nourishing food. Still they urged the boat through the water at pretty nearly three miles an hour; and Holdsworth repeatedly encouraged them by representing that every stroke of the oars brought the boat nearer within the range of the vision of those on board the vessel, and increased the likelihood, under God’s providence, of their rescue.

When the vessel was first sighted, she could not have been less than ten miles distant; this was made manifest by the circumstance of their continuing to row a full hour before they had exposed her large sails, and even then her hull was invisible. The ocean, meanwhile, remained perfectly polished, without a shadow anywhere upon its vast bosom to indicate the passage of wind.

The seamen presently showing symptoms of distress, Holdsworth took an oar, and bade Winyard, whom he replaced, to drink some rum, and hand a draught to Johnson. The General begged to take Johnson’s place for a time while the man rested himself; but the poor old gentleman, after rowing a few strokes, found himself utterly unequal to the weight of the oar, and he returned to his seat covered with perspiration, and breathing with difficulty and pain.

It was seven o’clock by Holdsworth’s watch before the hull of the vessel grew discernible; and then Johnson, whose sight was very keen, pronounced her to be a large three-masted brigantine. She had all her sails set, but she was still so remote as scarcely to be distinguished by an inexperienced eye from a cloud.

Winyard, who steered, asked Mrs. Tennent for her black shawl, with which he climbed up the mast and made it fast, flagwise. The motion of the boat hardly created draught enough to unfurl it; but, drooping as it did, it could scarcely fail to serve as a signal. The calm which would have disheartened them under other circumstances, as suspending all prospect of a rescue whilst it lasted, was now deeply welcome to them as a guarantee of their speedy release from the horrors of their situation. As the vessel grew in dimensions under the desperate exertions of the rowers, Mrs. Tennent became hysterical, laughed and wept at the same moment, and hugged her boy passionately to her. The old General stood up waving his handkerchief, and talking to himself, even wildly at times.

Holdsworth was now steering, and he bent eager glances in search of some signal, some flag whose spot of colour would surely be visible even at that distance, to tell them they were seen.

Suddenly he cried out:

“Johnson—Winyard! Look! tell me what you can see?”

The men rested on their oars simultaneously and turned their heads towards the vessel. A silence ensued, lasting some moments. Then Johnson exclaimed:

“There’s smoke coming out of her. Don’t you see it, like a blue line between her fore and main masts?”

“Maybe they’re boiling the pitch-kettle abaft the galley, as we used aboard the ‘Mary Ann,’” said Winyard, wiping his forehead with his bare arm; “let’s make for her, boys.”

And he fell to his oar again.

The water rippled round the boat’s sides once more, and the shawl at the mast-head fluttered.

Five minutes passed; and then Holdsworth, whose eyes never wandered from the vessel, saw something black pass up her sails, rise over her masts and there hang. Another followed; another yet; volumes now, and each volume denser, blacker than its predecessor.

“She’s on fire!” he shouted; at which the men tilted up their oars and stood up.

Quicker and quicker the black volumes, like balls growing in size as they mounted, were vomited up, and resembled an endless series of balloons rising from the deck; they met when they reached a short height above the masts, mingled and formed into a livid line which gradually stretched north and south, but very slowly. The spectators in the boat were paralysed; but their emotions were too various and conflicting to permit the deeper, deadlier ones of disappointment and despair to make themselves felt as yet.

Holdsworth broke a long silence by exclaiming, “Can you see them putting off?”

“No—I see nothing. I reckon she’s abandoned hours ago,” answered Winyard.

The General sank upon his knees with a groan, clutching the gunwale and staring at the burning vessel over his knuckles. There was no sign of a boat anywhere—no sign of living creature being on board the doomed craft. The smoke, which appeared to have been pent up in the hold, had now escaped on a sudden; and thick and thicker yet it mounted, marking an ugly stain upon the pure morning sky, and hanging sombre and menacing over the smouldering vessel like a thunder-cloud. Soon a short tongue of flame protruded; then came another and a longer one, which seemed to whiz with a yellow radiance up the rigging and bury itself in the smoke. Then the fire burst out in all directions; in the time it would take you to count ten, the vessel was a mass of flame, keen, brilliant, coiling, with streams of thin blue smoke sailing out of each yellow ray, mingled with particles of burning matter that winked among the heavy cloud like fireflies in a dark evening. She was four or five miles off; a mere toy on the surface of the sea; and yet those who watched her from the boat could distinctly hear the crackling of the fire, and the seething of her flaming spars as they fell into the water. Anon the fires flickered, and up drove new volumes of smoke, which paled and thinned as the rekindled flames burst forth again and darted their spear-shaped fangs into the smoke-hidden sky.

For above an hour this terrible and magnificent spectacle lasted, during which not a word escaped the lips of the inmates of the boat. Their minds seemed incapable of understanding the extinction of the hope that had sustained them since sunrise, by a catastrophe so unexpected, by a horror which united the extreme of sublimity with the extreme of misfortune, and which appeared scarcely more than a vision—so unforeseen, so incredible, so illusive, so ghastly, so terrific was it.

By this time the whole of the upper masts were gone, adding fuel to the interior furnace of the hull, and the three lower masts were burning stumps. Suddenly the blazing mass appeared to rise in the air; the fires went out as if by magic, and an opaque cloud, burnished a livid blue by the sunshine, floated on the water. Not for many moments after the flames had vanished came a concussion that rent the air, loud and violent as a thunder-clap among mountains. The cloud lifted, and where the vessel had been the sea was a smooth outline, reflecting only the dark shadow of the slowly-mounting smoke, and dotted here and there with black remnants of the wreck.

“Mr. Holdsworth,” said the General in a faint voice, sinking backwards against a thwart, “I am dying.”

His hands were pressed to his heart; he was breathing quickly and convulsively, and his face was bloodless. His exclamation broke the spell that held the others gazing in the direction of the smoke. They turned quickly, and Holdsworth jumped over to the old man and supported his head on his knee.

“No, no, General; don’t say that. This is a bitter disappointment; but we believe in God’s goodness. He cannot mean that we should perish. Johnson, pour some rum into the pannikin. Mrs. Tennent, dip your handkerchief into the sea and kindly pass it here.”

They put the spirit to the old man’s lip, and he drank a little, but gasped for breath when he had swallowed it and clenched his hands. They spread the wet handkerchief over his forehead and loosened his cravat.

“I——I know not what this giddiness may mean,” the General stammered, while the lustre faded out of his eyes. “If it is death ... I am ready to meet it. God is merciful and good. His Son is my Redeemer ... He will take me to Himself ... how faint! how faint! But I have eaten nothing”...

He ceased with a sudden gasp.

“You will feel better presently,” said Holdsworth, while Mrs. Tennent took the old man’s hand and fanned his face. “The shock of the burning ship has been too great for you. But you will live to recall this time. You have as manly a heart as ever God blessed His creatures with. Don’t let it fail you now.”

“I have ... I have striven to do my duty,” murmured the old man, so faintly that his words were scarcely audible. “I have served my country ... she is a great empire ... a great empire ... and my heart is with old England, too;” forcing a smile, “we should know each other better, sir, and our prejudices would leave us, for .... for.... See! yonder is Charleston!” he suddenly exclaimed, his eyes kindling, and drawing his hand from Mrs. Tennent’s, to point with it into the infinite horizon. “Do you see that house on the left, there, with the green facing it? I was born there, sir. Observe the barberry-bushes with the red fruit on them—just there I fought my cousin, when we were boys ... he’s a senator now, and they tell me a good speaker. Oh, how the time goes!” he sighed wearily. “But there’s my wife ... she is holding the little one by the hand, and nodding to me to attend her.... A moment, Sarah, a moment! Gentlemen, farewell. I beg your kind word in my favour among your countrymen, whom I honour. I am a plain American gentleman—a general, gentlemen ... but tell them that my sword was never drawn from its scabbard for any cause but a good one, and ... Ah, farewell! You see, gentlemen, my wife awaits me, and the little one beckons.”

He made a gesture as though he would bow; his venerable and honoured head sank upon his bosom; then he started, looked about him with a glazing eye, and smiling sweetly, whispered, “Sarah, I am coming,” lay back and spoke no more.

When, after long watching him, they knew that he was dead, they covered him over with the sail, meaning to commit him to the sea when the widow should be asleep.

Holdsworth was so greatly overcome that for many minutes he could not raise his head nor speak. The widow, with her eyes fixed on the water, sat motionless, a fixed image of despair. Her boy crept about the bottom of the boat at her feet, with somewhat weakly movements, though his body had not yet suffered enough to kill the infancy in his mind. The sailors, made selfish by the bitter disappointment of the morning, talked of their chances of rescue, and discussed the subject of the burning ship. Johnson probably solved the mystery of the deserted vessel when he suggested that during the night the hands had found the cargo on fire—and he judged by the blaze she made, and the smoke, and the long time she was smouldering, that she was freighted with cotton or coal—and had battened down the hatches; but not having the means of getting the fire under, they struck and took to the boats, obliging the skipper to go along with them, and left the vessel to her fate. Just such another case happened to a messmate of his in the Bay of Biscay. The crew left their ship smouldering under battened hatches. But she was boarded by a Frenchman, who smothered the fire and towed her into Bordeaux.

“Where was the brigantine’s crew, now?” Winyard wondered.

“I wish we could fall in with them, if only for company’s sake,” replied Johnson.

But of that there was very little chance.

All the afternoon the calm lasted, with light mists hanging in wreaths upon the horizon. But about the hour of sunset the smoke that had risen from the burning ship, and which had not drifted more than a couple of miles to the southward throughout the day, came sailing slowly towards the boat and passed high overhead, thinning its bulk as it travelled in an easterly direction. A light breeze heralded it; they hoisted the sail, put the boat’s head round, and stood east-south-east.

The night fell, but the light breeze held steady. When they thought Mrs. Tennent was asleep, they raised the body of the General in their arms from the bottom of the boat. The night was lustrous with yellow stars, which diffused sufficient light to enable them to see the old man’s face. The eyes were closed, and, though the under-jaw was fallen, there yet lingered an expression both of firmness and sweetness about the mouth. The draught under the sail moved his white hairs.

“Mates,” said Holdsworth in a whisper, “we pray that God has taken this noble gentleman’s soul to Himself, and that, though his body be dispersed in the sea, it will rise again at the Day of Judgment, in the shape we now behold it, to become a partaker of life everlasting, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

The two sailors answered Amen!

All three of them then tenderly handed the body, over the boat’s side, and let it gently slip into the water. The white hair glimmered for a brief moment on the dark surface, and then the body sank or was swallowed up in the gloom; and the boat rippled onwards, cutting the star flakes in the sea with her stem, and leaving them glittering in silver fragments in her wake.