“Mr. Holdsworth,” said the General, “will you not let me watch whilst you get some sleep? You have been up now for nearly three nights running, and I beg you to consider the preciousness of your life to us all.”

“I am much obliged to you, General. I’ll do as you ask me. Johnson, come aft and relieve Winyard here. Keep a sharp look-out, my lads, and wake me up if the breeze freshens.” He seated himself in the bottom of the boat, rested his head upon a thwart, and in a few moments was fast asleep.

A hush fell upon the boat which nothing broke but the quick angry sousing of the bows as the boat fell with her short length into the trough of the sea. The widow had fallen asleep at last, and leaned against Johnson, who steered, whilst her boy slumbered with his head on her lap. The sailor sat motionless for fear of waking her, calling once in a whisper to Winyard to come aft and look at the little ’un, and tell him if he thought that God would let such innocence be drowned.

“He’s the image of my little Bill,” answered Winyard, stooping his bearded face low that he might see the child’s features. “I’m glad the poor lady’s sleeping. Keep steady, Dick, or you’ll wake her. She ain’t tasted a mossil of food all this blessed day, and it ’ud cut me to the heart to see the little ’un left without a mother.”

“Ay, and so it would me, Harry. May be we’ll sight a ship to-morrow. I’ve got my old woman to keep ashore, and I guess, when rent-time comes, she won’t know what to do, unless I get back.”

“I wish I had some ’baccy with me. Ain’t got a bit in all my pockets. I wonder where t’other boats have got to?”

The conversation, which had been carried on in hoarse whispers, was at this point interrupted by a movement of the little boy. Johnson raised his hand and Winyard crept forward, where he sat like a bronze statue, watching the horizon.

It was about four o’clock, as the seamen guessed, when the wind, which had been pretty steady from the south-east, lulled, and then veering northward came on to blow freshly. The men awakened Holdsworth, who went to the helm. Mrs. Tennent, who had been aroused by the withdrawal of the sailor’s shoulder, shivered with the cold and crouched down to hug herself in her clothes. Indeed, the north wind was cold enough; but Holdsworth, observing the woman’s condition, whipped off his coat without a word and buttoned it over her shoulders, silencing her protests by kindly laughter and encouraging words.

The change of wind produced a cross sea which drenched the boat and made her movements horribly uncomfortable. The wind increased, bringing up large clouds, each of which was charged with a small rain-loaded squall of its own. The sea rose, and matters began to wear an ugly look. The men close-reefed the sail, and Holdsworth finding that the boat shipped water when on the wind, let her go free; and away they scudded with a breeze growing in force every five minutes astern of them. The utmost vigilance was now needful in steering the boat. The waves were quick and irritable, and broke in noisy surfaces of foam on either gunwale, and from time to time it seemed inevitable that their curling crests must arch themselves clean into the boat and swamp her. Holdsworth parried them with the rudder like a fencer with a foil. His eye was marvellously quick, the movements of his hands delicate and unerring. What the waves were to that small open boat, the seas of the Pacific under a westerly gale are to a full-rigged ship. She sank into hollows half-mast deep, where the air was stagnant, behind and before her black walls of illuminated water, the hinder ones of which, catching her under the stern, raised her with irresistible force to a height that turned her inmates giddy and sick; and there, exposed to the wind, her sail blew out to cracking limits and hurled her madly forward—to sink into a new abysm, to experience another interval of breathless, deadly calm.

“May God have mercy upon us!” exclaimed the General, in one of these awful intervals, folding his arms tightly and fixing his eyes on a towering sea rearing astern of them like a hill.

But Holdsworth’s voice echoed cheerily: “She is a brave boat, General; and it’s not my intention to let such ripples as these” ... the rest of the sentence was drowned in the hooting of the wind, as one of these “ripples” swung the boat high in the full face of it, and the “ripple” itself broke into an acre of foam under the boat’s bows.

The two sailors sat like logs, ready for the worst; yet with a supreme confidence in Holdsworth’s skill as a steersman, which he had already illustrated in a hundred subtle ways, appreciable to none but them. St. Aubyn lay in the bottom of the boat, motionless. The General, holding on to the mast, was seated amidships, commending his soul, and the souls of his comrades, to God, in inaudible prayers. The widow crouched with her boy, who still slept, in the stern-sheets; and beside her towered the form of Holdsworth, a yoke-line in each hand, his body inclined forward, his shirt-sleeves rolled above his elbows, every nerve, every muscle in him strung to the tension of steel, his glittering eyes fixed upon the seas ahead, his whole attitude resembling a sculptured personation of audacity, skill, and the finest British courage.

The dawn broke and found them swinging over an ugly sea, with the wind moderating. As the pallid light spread over the bleak surface of gray and moving waters, the weary shipwrecked men turned their eyes about in search of a vessel; but the ocean was tenantless save by its own leaping seas, which played around in an eternal mockery of a fluctuating hilly horizon.

They were now sailing due south. Holdsworth steered the boat, and Winyard baled her out; but, thanks to the wonderful skill with which the rudder was used, no single sea had been shipped, and what water there was consisted of the spray that had been blown into the boat off the crests of the waves when she was in their hollows.

The sun rose and diffused an exquisite pink through the ribbed clouds that barred the sky. His glorious light flashed jewels upon the water, and sent a message of hope among the inmates of the tiny boat striving amid the wild and throbbing wilderness of the deep.

The General stood up, and arching his hand over his eyes, gazed slowly and intently around the whole circumference of the water-line.

“We are alone,” he said; but instantly corrected himself. “No, I speak thoughtlessly. We have God with us. He has been with us all night. We thank Thee, O God,” he murmured, folding his hands and reverently lifting his face to the sky, “for Thy protection; and we humbly implore Thee not to abandon us, but to be with us in our anguish and desolation, and in Thine own good time to snatch us from the perils that encompass us.”

They all cried Amen!

“The wind’s lulling, master,” said Johnson to Holdsworth. “We’ll have the sea smooth before long.”

“Oh, Mr. Holdsworth!” exclaimed Mrs. Tennent, starting up suddenly and hurriedly removing his coat from her shoulders, “how cruelly selfish I have been to deprive you of this covering throughout the long cold night.”

“I’m better without it,” cried Holdsworth. “Even my shirt-sleeves were too heavy for me—you see I have had to turn them up. Winyard, rouse up Mr. St. Aubyn. We shall be none the worse, any of us, for a mouthful of biscuit.”

He patted the little boy with his left hand, with his right kept the boat’s head straight as a line.

“Come, sir, wake up, please. Biscuit’s going to be served out,” said Winyard, pulling the actor somewhat unceremoniously by the arm.

Both seamen thought him a white-livered gentleman, and despised him accordingly.

The poor man lay athwart the boat, his legs doubled up and his arms hiding his face. He shook his head, without raising it, when Winyard pulled him, but did not speak. The man, thinking him numbed or cramped, raised him up; whereupon St. Aubyn struggled to his feet, and looked about him with a fixed smile. That smile made his face terrible to behold, for he was deadly white, and a wild fire, with no more merriment in it than a madman’s laugh, shone in his eyes, which looked unnaturally large, and his lips were blue and thin, and laid his teeth almost bare.

“You fellows may shrug your shoulders, and some of you may hiss,” he muttered, never remitting his fixed smile, but speaking through his teeth and bringing his clenched fist upon his knee, “but you shan’t starve me, because you don’t understand what true acting means. Do you think I can’t tell what this hollowness, this sinking is, here!” laying his hand upon his stomach and sending his lustrous eyes travelling over the others, who watched him in silence. “You are starving me, you fiends, and driving a poor actor to death. But do you think you will force him into the workhouse? No, by God! He has spirit, and will seek a new home, a new country, a new world, rather! Who tells me I cannot act? Try me in farce, in comedy, in tragedy! See now—shall I play you Tony Lumpkin?” He began to sing:

“Or shall I give you Lear?” He stretched out his hands to the sea:—

Is not that fine, gentlemen? Now turn about with more shrugs, and drive me mad with your cant. Ha! ha! ha!”

His laughter was shocking. The seamen shrank away from him.

“He has gone mad with terror!” whispered the General.

The widow hid her face in her hands.

“Johnson,” said Holdsworth, “mix some rum and water in that pannikin and give it to him with a biscuit.”

The actor took both, staring first at the pannikin, then at the biscuit.

“Gentlemen!” he cried, with his wild smile, “I am Timon of Athens, sour, crusty, and” ... he stopped with a laugh. “But before his mind went, he pledged his friends, standing thus:—‘Here’s to you—dogs!’” He flung the contents of the pannikin at Holdsworth, and dashed the vessel into the boat; “and with this, I feed the winds!” and he hurled the biscuit into the sea.

“Seize him!” shrieked Holdsworth, noticing a quick movement on the actor’s part. The men sprang forward, but too late to catch him. He leaped on to the thwart and bounded overboard with a peal of laughter, ere you could have cried “Hold!” and vanished under the crest of a wave that was breaking at the moment under the boat.

“See!” cried the General; “he has come to the surface! There is his head! He may be saved yet!”

But the boat was foaming through the water at six or seven knots an hour; the sea was still so lively that to broach her to would have been to capsize her in an instant.

“We cannot save him!” exclaimed Holdsworth, bitterly, grasping the situation at once; and kept the boat’s head doggedly away.

Those who watched the drowning man, saw him, a mere dot, on the tumbling waters, heaved high on the summit of a wave, with both his arms upraised; then down he sank into the trough of the sea, the next wave boiled over him, and they beheld him no more.

The General covered his face with his hands and wept aloud. The widow was so sick and faint with the horror of the scene, that she leaned back, white and motionless, with her eyes closed. Johnson came aft and put some rum to her lips, which revived her, and then she began to weep silently, casting shuddering backward glances at the sea, and hugging her boy to her passionately. She had become, during the night, the very ghost of her former self; her complexion was ashen, her eyes hollow, her countenance gaunt with a hard, weird look of old age upon it. Holdsworth noticed that her dress was wet with salt water and clung to her legs; but this it was impossible to remedy. Infinite pity smote him as he gazed from her to her child, and he handed her a biscuit, entreating her to eat it. The boy ate his allowance quickly; but even out of him something of the youthfulness and freshness of his infancy had passed; a perception of their danger and misery appeared to have visited him; and he clung to his mother’s side, holding her dress with one hand whilst he ate the biscuit, and gazing about him with puzzled eyes, in which was mixed up a strong expression of terror.

The impression produced by the sudden and tragical death of the actor was more lasting on the widow and the General than on the sailors, who were too sensible of their own peril to find more than a passing occasion of horror in the scene they had witnessed. They and Holdsworth ate a biscuit apiece and drank their allowance of water mixed with rum; but the General turned, with an expression of loathing in his face, from the food, and Mrs. Tennent could not be induced to eat more than a few mouthfuls. Both drank of the water.

The waves were still lively enough to demand the utmost care in the steering of the boat; but Winyard had proved himself a smart steersman, and Holdsworth, whose hands were cramped and blue with long grasping of the yoke-lines, gladly surrendered his place to the sailor.

“Strange,” muttered the General, “that we sight no ships!”

“Our course is east,” said Holdsworth. “If the wind would haul round a few points to the west, I’d out reefs and bear up.”

The breeze held until twelve o’clock, when it slackened. The sea having grown smoother during the morning, Holdsworth hauled the sheet of the sail aft and steered south-east by the compass, which was as close to the sea as he deemed it advisable to sail the boat. The sun now shone hot overhead, which greatly comforted Mrs. Tennent and revived the spirits of her boy, who pulled a piece of string from his pocket, to which he fastened a crooked pin, and began to fish. As the afternoon advanced, the wind gradually died away, and a thin haze settled upon the southern horizon, portending both heat and calm. The water’s surface turned to an aspect of polished steel; the boat rose and sank to the swell, easily and with a soothing motion, and the sail flapped idly against the mast.

During the afternoon, some porpoises came to the surface of the water, about a stone’s throw from the boat, rolling their gleaming black bodies in a southerly direction.

“They always make for the quarter the wind’s coming from,” said Winyard.

“I am afraid we shall have no wind to-night,” answered Holdsworth; “the weather looks too settled.”

They watched the fish turning their solemn somersaults until they were out of sight, and then, as though to meet hope half-way, Holdsworth swarmed up the boat’s mast and swept the horizon with piercing eyes, but saw nothing but the boundless water-line paling away against the sky.

The sun went down in glorious majesty, burnishing the deep, and dazzling the eye with a splendour of small radiant clouds, pierced with threads of glory, and momentarily changing their brilliant hues until the orb was under the sea, when they turned a bright red colour. The twilight followed fast, the stars came out, and the darkness of night fell upon the lonely deep.