In this way the boat drifted on until the dawn broke, when the wind fell.

Johnson lifted his head and looked about him; and first for the ship that had passed them in the night—but she was nowhere visible; then at Holdsworth, whose delirium had yielded to sleep, and who slumbered with his feet on the thwart, his back arched like a bow, and his head between his knees; then at the widow, who drooped against the boat’s side, her arm over the gunwale, and her hand in the water.

The boy was wide awake, reclining in the bottom of the boat, with his head against his mother’s dress. His eyes looked large and glassy, his lips white, and his skin dusky-hued. When he met Johnson’s gaze, he smiled as though he would coax him to give him what he wanted, and tried to speak, but his lips rather formed than delivered the word “water.” The man stared at him with the insensibility of despair in his eyes: and the boy, thinking that he had not heard him, and that he would get what he desired, if he could but articulate his wish, tried to stand up, meaning to draw close to the man’s ear; but his legs sank under him, and so he remained at the bottom of the boat smiling wanly and pointing to his throat, as though such dumb-show must needs soften Johnson’s heart, and obtain some water for him.

Holdsworth awoke with a start and tried to speak; but the roof of his mouth was dry, and his tongue felt rusty like a cat’s; moreover, his throat burned, and the sounds he uttered scathed and lacerated him.

The boy, seeing him awake, turned to him as a friend who would relieve him: and moaned his distress. The spectacle of his agony, and his own sufferings, maddened Holdsworth. All along he had dreaded the temptation of the rum, the fiery quality of which, whilst it momentarily allayed, would, he was sure, aggravate tenfold the craving for water. But suffering mastered him now. He seized the pannikin and pouring out some of the liquor, put it to the boy’s dry lips. He drank greedily, but the ardent spirit checked his breath, and he struggled wildly, beating the air with his little hands.

But meanwhile Holdsworth had also drunk, and handed the remainder of the draught to Johnson, his throat softened, and his tongue capable now of articulation. Johnson drew a deep breath, and exclaimed:

“Thank God for that, master. I should have taken it before had I thought it good for me.”

Holdsworth gave the boy a biscuit, which he grabbed at, and thrust large pieces into his mouth, as though seeking to extinguish the fire that the rum had kindled.

When the pain of the burning spirit had passed, he said, “Give mamma some. When you were asleep, Mr. Holdsworth, I heard her calling for water.”

Holdsworth, thinking that she slept, would not arouse her; but noticing that her arm hung awkwardly over the boat’s side, and left the half-closed fingers trailing in the water, he raised it gently to place her hand on her lap. In doing this, he observed a lifelessness in her arm such as sleep could not induce. He peered into her face, and cried out quickly:

“O my God!”

Then bade Johnson move, that he might get beside her, and reverently lifted her head.

There was no need to glance twice at her face to know what had happened, although the heart-broken expression in it would almost suggest that she slept, and was dreaming a painful dream. Her eyes were half-closed, her under-jaw had dropped, yet she looked even in her death a sweet, long-suffering woman.

“Give her something to drink,” pleaded the little boy, passionately, imagining from her silence, and the expression on her face, that she was suffering as he had and could not speak.

“She don’t want it—she’s dead!” answered Johnson.

Holdsworth half turned, but checked the exclamation that rose to his lips, feeling that the bitter truth must be made known to the child sooner or later.

The boy did not understand the answer; he crawled upon his mother’s knee, with the pannikin in his hand, which he held out whilst he said: “Wake up, mamma! Open your eyes! Mr. Holdsworth will give you something to drink.”

Holdsworth removed the child, and seated him near the mast, and bade him stop there. He then returned, and lifting the poor woman from her seat, placed her gently in the bottom of the boat, throwing her dress over her face to hide the anguish in it, and blot out the mockery of the daylight.

The boy began to cry, and asked Mr. Holdsworth to wake his mamma up.

Neither of the men could answer him.

Shortly after this, the wind veered round to the north, and came on to blow in quick, fretful puffs. The sky grew cloudy, and indications were not wanting of the approach of a gale. Holdsworth took the helm, whilst Johnson lowered the sail and close-reefed it, and the quick jump of the sea, coupled with the small space of sail shown, making it impossible for them to head for the east, without driving bodily to leeward, they slackened out the sheet and let the boat run, keeping the wind about two points on her port quarter.

A squall of rain came up and wetted them. They turned their mouths in the direction whence it came, and gaped to receive the delicious drops; but it blew against their faces and slantwise along the sea, and was soon over. It left a little pool on one of the thwarts, and Holdsworth told the boy to put his lips to it. He did so, and lapped the moisture like a dog; whilst Holdsworth and Johnson removed the handkerchiefs from their necks which the rain had damped, and sucked them.

The wind increased, the sea became heavy, and the heavens overcast with a vast extent of lead-coloured cloud that stretched from horizon to horizon. At noon, when the boat was on the summit of a wave, Johnson caught sight of a vessel on their lee quarter. The boat plunged downwards, and the vessel was lost to view; but, on mounting again, they beheld the vessel, under double-reefed top-sails, standing westwards right across their stern. She was not above a mile and a half away, but she might as well have been a thousand, for the boat could no more have made for her in that sea than she could have sailed in the wind’s eye. There was a faint chance that the people on board of her might catch sight of the shawl that streamed like a black flag from the mast-head; and, each time the boat sank into a hollow, the poor men waited with wild and dreadful eagerness for her to rise, that they might observe whether the vessel had seen and was following them. But she did not alter her course, and in ten minutes’ time vanished in the haze.

Neither of the men spoke: Johnson, by the expression on his face, appeared to have resigned himself to despair, and all Holdsworth’s thoughts were concentrated in keeping the boat clear of the seas which boiled around her. He was very weak; so much so that there were moments when, a sea catching the boat under the stern, he had scarcely the power to keep the yoke square and prevent the rudder from being jammed athwart-ships upon its pintles by the pressure of the water; which, had it happened, would have swept the boat broadside on and filled her.

Added to this, the torment of thirst was again upon him. He kept the end of his handkerchief in his mouth, literally chewing it to pulp, and constantly directing thirsty glances at the clouds, and praying for another shower of rain.

His own suffering made him perceive that the rum would be a curse to them whilst it lasted, inducing them to drink it, and presently maddening them with fresh accesses of thirst. The boy was suffering again, and was crawling upon his hands and knees over the thwarts in search of some rain moisture; and presently Holdsworth saw him put his tongue against the mast and lick it. Johnson hung, with an air of despairful recklessness, over the boat’s side, dashing the water in his face, and letting the foam fly up his arm and soak his breast.

The boat presently made a plunge downwards—a long, wild, sweeping fall; the roaring of the waves sounded overhead; the sail flapped, and there was a pause of breathless calm that lasted some moments.

Holdsworth looked behind him and shrieked out: “Seize the boy, and throw yourself down!”

The man extended his hands, and, grappling the child, rolled backwards, under a thwart.

It came—a huge, green, unbroken sea, arching its emerald top on a level with the yard of the sail, and following the boat with a spring like a tiger’s. Holdsworth stretched himself out, his feet hard against the aftermost thwart, his back squared, his elbows out, his hands grasping the yoke-lines with a death grip.

Up went the boat—stem up—yet up! as though she must be flung clean over on end; then came the rush and roar of water—it fell with a weight of lead on Holdsworth’s back, and beat, with a ponderous single blow, the breath out of him, but could not root him from his seat; it broke into a vast surface of foam, divided, and swept forward, hissing, spluttering, bubbling, raging; met at an angle at the boat’s bows and half filled her! Down she swooped into another hollow, and half the water ran out over her bows, the remainder, as she rose, came rushing aft and filled the stern-sheets; and up and down, up and down, it washed.

But the boat still lived, and Holdsworth was her master.

“Bear a hand aft here and bale her out!” he shouted.

Johnson let go the half-drowned child, and struggled over the thwarts, blowing and shaking his soaked hair like rope-yarns off his face, his clothes streaming with water; flopped down, found the cocoa-nut shell, and baled with fury.

The child crouched in the bows, too terrified to cry.

The boat flashed along, skimming the frothing heads of the waves; she had outlived an exceptionally heavy sea, and seemed to feel her triumph as she flew.

But, oh! the ghastly burden that she bore! the dead and dripping woman, off whose face the water had washed the covering, and left it naked to the daylight; the gaunt bearded spectre baling out the boat on his knees, his wet clothes clinging to his frame like a skin of silk, and disclosing the piteous attenuation of the body; the steersman with wild and lustrous eyes sunk deep in livid sockets, the yoke-lines writhed around his lean brown hands, his lips pale and cracked, and his long neglected hair hanging like a wet mat over his forehead and down his back; and the shivering little figure in the bows, his hands squeezed together in an attitude of prayer, and his small face glimmering with unearthly ghastliness upon the gray background of the boat’s interior.

Some flying-fish leaped out of the sea close to the boat, and buried their silver arrow-like shapes in a wave some distance ahead. Then the sun broke through a rent in the broad sombre cloud, and made the pelting ocean joyous with a snatch of cheerful light. But the strong wind lasted all the afternoon, and when it lulled just before sunset, Holdsworth was so exhausted, that in rising to give his seat to Johnson, he reeled and sank in a heap close beside the corpse at the bottom of the boat, and lay motionless and insensible. Johnson made no effort to restore him. Indeed, he thought he was dead. His own brain whirled; his tongue seemed to fill his mouth; there crept over him such a stupor as had visited Holdsworth; he let the yoke-lines go, and fixing his eyes on the sea, prepared to meet the death which his sensations led him to believe was at hand.

The boat, tossed like a cork on the troubled water, broached to; but happily the wind was momentarily dying away; her head came round to the seas and she rode with as much safety as if Holdsworth were at the helm.

For a whole hour the interior of the boat presented the same scene; the men motionless as the dead body, the boy squatting in the bows with nothing seemingly alive about him but his eyes, which winked as he rolled them seawards, where the sun shone on the water. Then Holdsworth began to groan and stir; whereupon Johnson fixed his dull eyes upon him, and watched him without any curiosity, without any sympathy, without any interest—indeed, scarcely, I might say, with human intelligence.

The boy, seeing Holdsworth move, came creeping aft and remained on his knees, first looking at the man awaking to consciousness, and then at his mother, whose motionlessness and drowned aspect, and face made unfamiliar to him by its total want of expression, terrified him.

Holdsworth raised his head and looked about him in bewilderment.

“Where have I been? What has happened?” he cried.

He fixed his eyes on the dead woman, his glance reverted to the boy, and then consciousness fully awoke. He rose wearily to his feet, and sank with a heavy sigh near Johnson, at whom he looked, scarcely knowing whether the man slept or was dead.

The boy begged for water.

“Water!” exclaimed Holdsworth in a choking voice; “there is none.”

But there was biscuit, and he turned to the locker to give him one, thinking that the food might relieve the child’s thirst. He stretched out his arm to lift the seat of the locker and found the locker filled with salt water. With a cry of despair he dragged out a bag streaming with wet, and thrusting his hand into it found its contents soaked into pulp. The other bag was in the same condition; and to make matters worse, of the three bottles of rum that had been in the locker, one only was left; the other two were cracked and empty.

It was easy to understand how this had happened. A sea breaking over the boat’s stern could not have filled the locker; the water which the boat had shipped over her bows had come rushing aft when the boat mounted the next wave, and filling the stern-sheets, raised the seat that formed the lid of the locker, and poured over the biscuit, at the same time forcing the bottles against each other and breaking them.

“Do you see what has happened?” exclaimed Holdsworth, grasping Johnson’s arm. The man looked over his shoulder, shook his head, and muttered, “We’re doomed to die. There’s no hope, master.”

What was to be done? Holdsworth thought that if the biscuits could be dried in the sun they might be fit to eat, and endeavoured to spread some of them along the thwart; but the stuff squeezed up in his hand like thick paste. He tasted a little and found it no better than salt, and he flung the bag down with a groan that seemed to express the extinction of his last faint hope.

But there was a bottle of rum left. He prised out the cork with the blade of his knife, and gave a spoonful to the boy diluted with two or three drops of sea water. He then set the pannikin to Johnson’s lips, who sucked the hard metal rim as a baby might. Finally moistening his own throat with a small quantity of the liquor, he carefully corked the bottle and stowed it away.

No! To say that hope had entirely abandoned him would not be true. Whilst the heart continues to pulsate hope will still be found to live, however faintly, in its throbs, though each moment be heavy with pain, and nothing seem sure but anguish and death.

The wind had died away, but the boat rose and sank to the long and heavy swell that billowed the gleaming surface of the sea to the horizon. Far away in the south was an expanse of gray cloud with slanting lines radiating to the sea from it, and a bright square of rainbow embedded in its shadow. It was travelling eastwards, and the rain would not touch the boat. Elsewhere the sky was a bright blue, with here and there clouds of glorious whiteness and majestic bulk—mountains with shining defiles and a splendour of sunshine in their skirts—hanging their swelling forms over the sea. The sun was hot, but then, ever since they had been in the boat, they had been steering more or less south, and, taking the parallels in which the ship had foundered as a starting-point, every degree the boat made southwards would furnish an appreciable change of temperature.

The rum had worked beneficially in Johnson, who now began to stretch his body and look about him.

“Another calm, master,” he said, in a voice to which the dryness of his throat imparted a harsh unnatural tone. “I thought I was dead and gone just now. God help us! I don’t think none of us three’ll live to talk of this here time!”

“We must put that poor body overboard,” said Holdsworth. “It isn’t fit that her child should see her like that. Will you take him for’ard and stand between him and me, so that he can’t see what I’m doing, and talk to him a bit? I almost wish they had both died together. The sight of his sufferings makes mine more than I can bear.”

He stifled a sob, and Johnson getting up languidly and holding on to the gunwale of the boat with one hand, took the boy by the arm and led him into the bows.

Holdsworth slackened off the halliards to lower the sail and screen the after part of the boat from the boy’s sight. He then, with what strength he had, and as quickly as he could, raised the dead body and let it slip over the stern, muttering a simple prayer as he did so, that God would let her meet her child in heaven, where they would never more be parted; and then turned his back upon the water and hid his face in his hands.

At the end of five minutes he stole a glance astern—the body had disappeared.

“Four,” he muttered, “and three more to go! O God, what work—what work this has been!”

His thoughts went to Dolly. If he died, what would become of her? Not for many days yet, even supposing the other boats should make their way to land or be rescued by a passing ship, would the news of the “Meteor’s” loss reach her; and he thought of her praying night and morning for him, straining her fond eyes into the dim future, where the coming summer was, with all its flowers and its sunshine; where the happy day was that should bring him to her. If the news of the shipwreck ever reached her, how would her gentle spirit support the blow! But worse would it be if she remained ignorant of her loss; because in that case she would live on in hope for months and months, wakening every morning with the idea that—To-day he may come! to-day he may come! until hope sickened and despair should bring cruel assurance of eternal separation—the more unendurable because she should not know why he did not come—whether he were living or dead—whether he were true or false to her!

Oh for the power of giving peace to that manly unoffending heart!

We shed tears, and well we may, God knows, over the privations of shipwrecked men, over the hunger and thirst and the mortal bodily agonies of poor souls doomed to die a lingering and shocking death in open boats, storm-tossed, or baking in breathless calms under the burning eye of the sun; but do we think of that deeper misery of theirs—that poignant mental torture compared to which the sufferings of the flesh are as naught—the thoughts of those they shall see no more—of wives, and sisters, and mothers, and little children, many of whom may perchance never hear the story of their fate, and can have no tear for the famine and the thirst that wasted the flesh off their skins and submitted them to greater torture than the heart can bear to think of?

Holdsworth had believed that the sufferings of the boy would engross all his thoughts in himself, and that though he might miss he would not cry for his mother. But he was deceived; for, no sooner had the little fellow discovered that she was gone from her place in the bottom of the boat, than he uttered a sharp cry, and asked Holdsworth where his mamma was.

Holdsworth took him upon his knee, but could not answer. The child persisted in his inquiries, looking the while suspiciously and eagerly about him, particularly over the stern, where he had remembered seeing the actor disappear.

“She is gone to God,” Holdsworth said at last. “My little man, you will meet her again.”

“To God!” cried the child. “That’s where papa is!”

He looked up with startled eyes at the sky, and then sobbed passionately, “Has she left me alone? has she left me alone?”

“No, she has left you to me. Be a good boy now, and don’t cry, and I will take care of you, and love you dearly.”

His words smote him as the idlest mockery; but apart from his mental sufferings, the mere effort of raising his voice pained him intensely. He put the child down, forcing a smile which seemed no better than a grin of pain upon his emaciated face, and then stood up to sweep the horizon, but soon sank down again with a sound as of a clanging of bells in his ears, and his throat constricted and burning with a dry, feverish heat, the pain of which was exquisite.

He was now sensible that his memory was going, for in trying to think of the child’s name he found that he could not recall it. But this, somehow, gave him no concern, for his whole physical being was in perfect accord with such lapses of the intellectual faculties, and the discovery bred not the lightest movement of surprise or apprehension in his mind.

At noon, Johnson asked for more rum, and Holdsworth measured out a small quantity for the three of them, diluting the draught, as he had before done, with a few drops of salt water.

The boy never moved from the seat where he had been placed by Holdsworth; he knew not, in reality, where his mother had gone, but there was plainly a suspicion in him that she was in the sea, and he kept his eyes fixed on the water, as though in expectation of her rising at the side of the boat. He shed no more tears; indeed, physical weakness had so far conquered him, that it had rendered him incapable of tears. The sight of his white, young, piteous face, his head moving on his shoulders in convulsive jerks, and his helpless down-hanging arms, was enough to make one pray to God that death might remove him speedily, if the term of horrible misery were not to be ended at once.

The afternoon passed, and the sun went down behind a calm sea. While the crimson flush still lived in the sky, a flock of sea birds came from the south, and hovered awhile over the boat, as though irresolute to quit it for their further destination. They were at too great an elevation to enable the men to judge what birds they were; but they emitted harsh sounds, resembling in some measure the cry of gulls, mixed with the rough intonation of rooks. After this pause, they pursued their flight, and soon winged themselves out of view, but not without leaving behind them a species of desolate hope, such as would be excited in the minds of men who had been long banished from the sight of living things, and by whom the most trivial incident would be interpreted as an auspicious omen.

Holdsworth and Johnson drew together and spoke of what these birds portended. The wildest phantasies were begotten, and they sought to encourage themselves with dreams which a listener would have shuddered over as the babbling of delirium. Their thoughts being loosened, they presently began to complain of hunger; and Johnson took up a piece of the pulpy biscuit which lay on a thwart and which the sun had hardened, and bit it, but instantly ejected it, saying that it was bitterer than gall. Indeed, had there been more light they would have seen the frost-like crystals of salt which had been dried into the biscuit by the sun’s action. However, their hunger was not so fierce but that they could endure it yet awhile.

The night came down, quite radiant with stars, with not a cloud in all the great dome of glittering sky. The two men were now so regardless of their fate that they entered into no arrangement as to keeping watch, but folded their arms upon their breasts and slept or fell into a semi-unconscious state—lethargies so sinister that it was hard to tell whether they were not the sloping ways to death. Fitful cries sometimes broke from them, resembling the echoes which are awakened in the caverns of a bird-frequented cliff; but with notes of human anguish in them that made the glory of the stars a hellish mockery.

The boy slipped from his seat and lay prone at the bottom of the boat, unheeded by either Holdsworth or Johnson.

So passed the night.