CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER IV.By the time Octavius Pell had clothed, and fed, and warmed his drenched and buffeted guests, the sun was slipping out of sight, and glad to be quit of the mischief. For a minute or two, the cloud–curtain lifted over St. Albanʼs Head, and a narrow bar of lively green striped the lurid heavens. This was the critical period, and John Rosedew was aware of it, as well as Octave Pell. Either the wind would shift to south–west quicker than vanes could keep time with it, and then there would be a lively storm, with no very wide area; or else it would come on again with one impetuous leap and roar, and no change of direction, and work to the south–west gradually, blowing harder until it got there. The sea was not very heavy yet, when they went out to look at it; the rain had ceased altogether; there was not air enough to move the fur of a ladyʼs boa; but, out beyond the Atlantic offing,ridges like edges of knives were jumping, as if to look over the sky–line.“Nulla in prospectu navis,” said John Rosedew, who always talked Latin, as a matter of course, when he met an Oxford man; “at least, so far as I can see with the aid of my long–rangers.”“No,” replied Pell, “and Iʼm heartily glad that there is no ship in sight; for, unless Iʼm much mistaken—run, sir, run like lightning.Iʼve got no more dry clothes.”They ran for it, and were just in time before the fury came down again. Bob Garnet was ready to slip away, for he knew that his father would be wild about him; he had taken his drenched hat from the firetongs, and was tugging at the latch of the door. But now there was no help for it.“We are in for it now,” cried Mr. Rosedew; “I have not come down for nothing. It is, what I feared this morning, the heaviest storm that has broken upon us for at least a generation. And we are not yet in the worst of it. God grant there be no unfortunate ship making for the Needles. All our boats, you say, Pell, are in the Solent long ago. Bob, my boy, you must not expect to see your father to–night. I hope he will guess what has happened.”The beach, or pebble bank of Hurst, is a long and narrow spit of land, growing narrower every year, which forms a natural breakwater to the frith of the Solent. It curves away to the south of east from the straighter and more lofty coast of Barton,Hordle, and Rushford. Hurst Castle, in which it terminates, is the eastern horn of Christchurch Bay, as Hengistbury Head is the western. The Isle of Wight and the Needle Rocks protect this bay from the east windʼs power, but a due south wind brings in the sea, and a south–west the Atlantic. Off this coast we see at times those strange floating or rising islands known by the name of the “Shingles;” which sometimes stay above water so long, that their surface is clad with the tender green of bladderwort and samphire; but more often they disappear after taking the air for a few short hours. For several years now they have taken no air; and a boatman told me the other day, that, from the rapid strides of the sea, he thought it impossible for the “Shingles” ever to top the waves again.Up and down the Solent channel the tide pours at a furious speed; and the rush of the strong ebb down the narrows, flushed with the cross–tide from St. Helenʼs, combs and pants out into Christchurch Bay, above the floodmark of two hours since. This great eddy, or reflux, is called the “double–tide;” and an awkward power it has for any poor vessel to fall into.All that night it blew and blew, harder and harder yet; the fishermenʼs boats on the beach were caught up, and flung against the gravel–cliff; the stout men, if they ventured out, were snatched up as a mother snatches a child from the wheels of a carriage; the oaks of the wood, after wailing andhowling, as they had done to a thousand tempests, found that outcry go for nothing, and with it went themselves. Seven hundred towers of Natureʼs building showed their roots to the morning. The old moon expired at O·32; and many a gap the new moon found, where its mother threw playful shadows. The sons of Ytene are not swift–witted, nor deeply read in the calendar; yet they are apt to mark and heed the great convulsions of nature. The old men used to date their weddings from the terrible winter of 1787; the landmark of the young menʼs annals is the storm of 1859.All that night, young Robert Garnet was strung by some strange tension. Of course he could not sleep, amid that fearful uproar, although he was plunged and lost from sight in Octavius Pellʼs great chair. The only luxury Pell possessed—and that somehow by accident—was a deep, and soft, and mighty chair, big enough for three people. After one of the windows came in, which it did, with a crash, about ten oʼclock, scattering Pellʼs tobacco–jars, and after they had made it good with books and boxes and a rug, so that the wind was filtered through it, John Rosedew and his curate sat on a couple of hard old Windsors, watching the castle of Hurst. Thence would come the signal flash, if any hapless bark should be seen driving over the waters. There they sat, John Rosedew talking, as he could talk to a younger man, when his great heart was moved to its depth, and the multitude of his mind in march, and his soul anticipatingit: talking so that Octave Pell, following his silver tones, even through that turmoil, utterly forgot the tempest, and the lapse of hours, and let fall on his lap the pipe, which John had made him smoke.The thunder of the billows waxing, for the wind was now south–west, began to drown the roar of the gale, and a storm of foam was flying, when the faint gleam of a gun at sea was answered by artilleryʼs flash from the walls of old Henry the Eighth. Both men saw the landward light leap up and stream to leeward; but only the younger one descried the weak appeal from the offing.“Where is she, Pell? Have you any idea?”“She is away, sir, here to the right: dead in the eye of the wind.”“Then may our God and Father pity our brothers and our sisters!”Out ran both those strong good men, leaving poor Bob (as they thought) asleep in the depth of the easy–chair. The little cottage was partly sheltered by an elbow of the cliff; otherwise it would have been flying up the bunney long ago. The moment the men came out of the shelter, they were driven one against the other, and both against the cliff.“My castle will go at high–water,” said Pell, though none could hear him; “but I shall be back in time enough to get the old woman out.”Then, as far as Pell could make out in the fierce noise and the darkness, John Rosedew begged himto go back, while himself went on alone. For it was Johnʼs especial business; he had procured the lifeboat, chosen the crew, and kept the accounts; and he thought himself responsible for any wreck that happened. But what good on earth could Pell do, and all his chattels in danger?“No good, very likely,” Pell shouted, “and a good deal perhaps in–doors! Keep the sea out with a besom.”Octave had a dry way with him, not only when he sang, but when he thought he saw the right, and did not mean to argue it. So rector and curate, old man and young man, trudged along together, each bending low, and throwing his weight, like a quoit, against the wind; each stopping and crouching at every tenth yard, as the blast irresistible broke on them. Crusted with hunks of froth pell–mell, like a storm of eggs on the hustings, drenched by pelting sheets of spray, deafened by the thundering surf, and often obliged to fly with the wind from a wave that rushed up scolloping, they battled for that scoop of the bay where the ship must be flung by the indraught.Up to the present, Christchurch Point, and St. Albanʼs Head beyond it, broke (as the wind was westering) some little of the wildest sea–brunt. But now they stood, or rather crouched, where the mountain rollers gathering, sweeping, towering onward, avalanche upon avalanche, burst on their destined barrier. A thousand leagues ofwater, swelled by the whole weight of heaven flung on it, there leaped up on the solid earth, and to the heaven that vexed it. As a strong man in his wrath accepts his wifeʼs endorsement, so the surges took the minor passion of a fierce spring–tide, rolled it in their own, and scorned the flat land they looked down upon. Tush, the combing of their crests was bigger than any town there. On they came, too grand to be hurried even by the storm that roused them; each had a quarter of a mile to himself, and who should take it from him? The white foam fell back in the wide water valleys, and hissed and curdled away in flat loops, and the storm took the mountain ridges again and swept the leaping snow off. Anon, as it struck the shelving shore, each rolling monster tossed its crest unspeakably indignant; hung with impending volume, curling like the scroll of God; then thundered, as in judgment, down, and lashed the trembling earth.Among them, not a mile from shore, as the breaking daylight showed it, heaved, and pitched, and wallowed hog–like in the trough of waters, a large ship, swept and naked. Swept of her masts, of her canvas naked; but clad, alas! with men and women, clustering, clinging, cowering from the great white grave beneath them. As she laboured, reeled, and staggered up to the storm–rent heavens, and then plunged down the yawning chasm, every attitude, every gesture of terror,love, despair, and madness could be descried on the object–glass of the too–faithful telescope. As a ghastly wan gleam from the east lit up all that quivering horror, all that plight of anguish, John Rosedew turned away in tears, and fell upon his knees.But Pell caught up the clear Munich glass, blocked every now and then with foam; he wiped it with his cuff, and levelled it on a stony ledge. There he lay behind the pebbles, himself not out of danger, unable to move, or look away, spellbound by the awe of death in numbered moments coming. Round him many a sturdy boatman, gazing, listening, rubbing his eyes, wondering about the wives and children of the brave men there. The great disaster imminent was known all over the village, and all who dared to cross the gale had crept, under shelter, hitherwards. None was fool enough to talk of boat, or tug, or lifeboat; a child who had then first seen the sea must have known better than that. The best ship in the British navy could not have come out of the Needles in the teeth of such a hurricane.Some of the tars had brought their old Dollonds, preventive glasses long cashiered, and smugglersʼ night–rakers cheek by jowl, and every sort of “perspective,” fifty years old and upward, with the lenses cracked and rattling, and fungoid tufts in the object–glass. Nevertheless, each man would swear that his own glass was the best of the lot,and his neighbourʼs “not of much count.” To their minds, telescopes like spectacles suit the proprietor only.“By Jove, I believe sheʼll do it!” cried Pell, the chief interpreter, his glass being the only clear one.“Do what, sir? what?” asked a dozen voices, hurriedly.“Get her head round to windward, and swing into smoother water. Theyʼre in the undertow already. Oh, if they only knew it!”They knew it, he saw, in a moment. They ran up a spare sail, ere he could speak, to the stump of the mizen–mast, and a score of brave men strained on the sheets until they had braced them home. They knew that it could not stand long; it would fly away to leeward most likely when once they mounted the wave–crest; but two or three minutes might save them. With eight hands jamming the helm up, and the tough canvas tugging and bellying, the ship, with the aid of the undertow, plunged heavily to windward. All knew that the ship herself was doomed, that she never could fetch off shore; but, if she could only hold her course for some half–mile to the westward, she would turn the flank of those fearful rollers, and a good stout boat might live. For there a south–western headland broke the long fury of the sea.Every eye was intent, every bosom drew a deep breath, as the next great billow rose under the ship, and tossed her up to the tempest. They hadbrought her as near to the wind as they dared, so as still to have steerage way on her, and she took the whole force of the surge on her port bow, not on her beam, as the people on shore had feared. The sea broke bodily over her, and she staggered back from the blow, and shook through every timber, then leaped and lurched down the terrible valley, but still, with the good sail holding. She was under noble seamanship, that was clear to every one, and herself a noble fabric. If she could but surmount two billows more, without falling off from the wind, within three points of which her head lay, most of the crew might be rescued. Already a stout galley, manned with ten oars, was coming out of Christchurch Harbour, dancing like a cork on the waves, though sheltered by the headland.Our ship rode over the next billow gallantly; it was a wave that had some moderation, and the lungs of the gale for the moment were panting, just as she topped the comb of it. “Hurrah!” shouted the men ashore; “By God, sheʼll do it yet!”By God alone could she do it. But the Father saw not fit; the third billow was the largest of all that had yet rolled up from the ocean. Beam–end on she clomb the mountain, heeling over heavily, showing to the shore her deck–seams,—even the companion–finial, and the poor things clinging there; a wail broke from them as the great sea struck her, and swept away half a score of them.“Nowʼs your chance, men. D—n your eyes! She wonʼt hang there two minutes. Out with the boats you—— lubbers. Look sharp, and be d—d to you.”The ancient pilot, Thwarthawse, dancing and stamping, his blue jacket flapping in the wind, and his face of the deepest plum colour, roared to windward his whirlwind of oaths up an old split trumpet, down which the wind came bellowing harder than his voice went up it.“Stow that, Jacob!” cried an old Scotchman, survivor of many a wreck; “can ye nae see his reverence, mon? Itʼs an unco thing for an auld mon like you to swear at your mates in their shrouds, chap. I ken the skipper of that there ship, and heʼs no lubber, no more than I be.”Sandy Macbride was known to fear God, and to have fifty pounds in the savings bank. Therefore no one flouted him.“Youʼre right, Mac; youʼre right, by George!” cried Pell. “What a glorious fellow! I can see him there holding on by the stanchion, giving his orders as coolly as if for the cabin dinner. I could die with that man.”The tear in Octavius Pellʼs right eye compelled him to shift the glass a bit. He was just the man who would have done even as that captain did.“Hurrah, hurrah! theyʼve got the launch out; only she and the gig are left. Troops on the deck, drawn up in a line, and the women hoisted in first. Give them three cheers, men, though they canʼthear you! Three cheers, if you are Englishmen! Glorious, glorious! There they go; never saw such a fine thing in all my life. Oh, I wish I had been a sailor!”The tears ran down the young parsonʼs cheeks, and were blown into the eyes of old Macbride; or else he had some of his own.“Shove off, shove off; nowʼs your time, for the under–current is failing her. Both of them off, as Iʼm alive; and yet a third boat I could not see. What magnificent management! That man ought to command a fleet. Two of them off for Christchurch Harbour; away, away, while the wind lulls; but what is the third boat doing?” Every one was looking: no one answered. Old Mac knew what it was, though his eyes were too old to see much.“Captain Roberts, Iʼll go bail, at his old tricks again. And thereʼs none with the sense to mutiny on him, and lash his legs, as we did in theSamphire.”“At the side of the ship there is some dispute. The boat is laden to the waterʼs edge, and the ship paying off to leeward, for there is no man at the wheel; there goes the sail from the bolt–ropes. If they donʼt push off, ere an oarʼs length, they will all be sucked into the rollers! Good God! now I see what it is. There is only room for one more, and not one of those three will take it. Two white–haired men and a girl. Life against honour with the old men; and what is life compared with it? Both resolved not to stir a peg; now they join tomake the girl go. Her father has got her in his arms to pitch her into the boat; she clings around his neck so that both must go, or neither. He could not throw her; she falls on her knees, and clings to his legs to die with him. Smack—there, the rope is parted, and it is too late for further argument. The troops in the boat salute the officer, and he returns it as on parade.”“Name of that ship?” said Jacob, curtly, to old Sandy Macbride.“Aliwal, East India trader, Captain Roberts. Calcutta to Southampton.”“Then itʼs all up now with theAliwal, and every soul on board of her.”“Donʼt want a pilot to tell us that,” answered old Mac, testily. “Youʼve seed a many good craft, pilot, but never one as could last five minutes on the Shingle Bank, with this sea running.”“Ropes, ropes!” cried Octave Pell; “in five minutes sheʼll be ashore here.”“No, she ‘ont, nor yet in ten,” answered his landlord, gruffly; “sheʼll fetch away to the eastward first, now she is in the tide again, specially with this gale on; and sheʼll take the ground over yonner, and go to pieces with the next breaker.”She took her course exactly as old Jacob mapped it out for her. He knew every run and flaw of the tide, and how it gets piled in the narrows by a very heavy storm, and runs back in the eddy which had saved so many lives there. This has nothing to do with the “double tide;” that comes after high–water.As the good ship traced the track of death, doing as the waves willed (like a little boyʼs boat in the Serpentine), the people on shore could see those three, who had contested the right of precedence to another world.They were all upon the quarter–deck; and three finer figures never yet came to take the air there, in the weariness of an Indian voyage. Captain Roberts, a tall, stout man, with ruddy cheeks and a broad white beard, stood with his hands in his pockets, and his feet asunder, and a sense of discipline in his face, as of a man who has done his duty, and now obeys his Maker. No sign of flinching or dismay in his weather–beaten eyes, as he watched his death roll towards him; though the gazers fancied that one tear rose, perhaps at the thought of his family just coming down–stairs at Lymington. The military man beside him faced his death quite differently; perhaps with even less of fear, but with more defiance, broken, every now and then, by anguish for his daughter. He had not learned to fear the Lord, as those men do who go down into the great deep. He looked as if he ought to be commanding–officer of the tempest. The ship, running now before wind and sea, darted along as a serpent darts over the graves in the churchyard; she did not lurch any more, or labour, but rose and fell, just showing her fore–foot or stern–post, as the billows passed under her. And so that young maiden could stand and gaze, with her fatherʼs arm thrown round her.She was worthy to be his daughter; tall, and light of form, and calm, with eyes of wondrous brightness, she was looking at her fatherʼs face to say the last good–bye. Then she flung both arms around his neck, and fondly, sadly, kissed him. Meanwhile the ship–captain turned away, and thought of Susy Roberts. Suddenly he espied a life–belt washed into the scuppers. He ran for it in a moment, came behind the maid, and, without asking her consent, threw it over her, and fastened it. There was little chance of it helping her, but that little chance she should have.“Sheʼll take the ground next biller,” cried the oracular Jacob; “stand by there with the ropes, boys.”On the back of a huge wave rose for the last time the unfortunateAliwal. Stem on, as if with strong men steering, she rushed through the foam and the white whirl, like a hearse run away with in snow–drifts. Then she crashed on the stones, and the raging sea swept her from taffrail to bowsprit, rolled her over, pitched her across, and broke her back in two moments. The shock rang through the roar of billows, as if a nerve of the earth were thrilling. Another mountain–wave came marching to the roll of the tempest–drum. It curled disdainfully over the side, like a fog sweeping over a hedgerow; swoop—it broke the timbers away, as a giant tosses a fir–cone.“I canʼt look any longer,” cried Pell; “give mesomething to feel, men. Quick, there! I see something!”He seized the bight of a rope, and rushed anyhow into the waters. But John Rosedew and the life–boatmen held hard upon the coil of it, and drew him with all their might back again. They hauled Octavius Pell up in the manner of a cod–fish, and he was so bruised and stupefied, that he could not tell what he had gone for. They only saw floating timber and gear, and wreck of every sort drifting, till just for one sight–flash a hoary head, whiter than driven waters, leaped out of the comb of the billow. A naval man, or a military—who knows, and to whom does it matter?Brave men ashore, all waiting ready, dashed down the steep of death to save him, if the great wave should toss up its plaything. All Rushford strained at the cables that held them from the savage recoil. Worse than useless; the only chance of it was to make more widows. The sea leaped at those gallant strong men; there were five on either cable; it leaped at them as the fiery furnace leaped on the plain of Dura. It struck the two ropes into one with a buffet, as a lionʼs paw shatters a cobweb; it dashed the menʼs heads together, and flung them all in a pile on a ballast–heap. Lucky for them that it fought with itself, and clashed there, and made no recoil. The white–haired corpse was seen no more; and all Rushford shrunk back in terror.The storm was now at its height; and of more than a hundred people gathered on the crown of the shore, and above the reach of the billows, not one durst stand upright. Nearer the water the wind had less power, for the wall of waves broke the full brunt of it. But there no man, unless he were most quick of eye and foot, might stand without great peril. For scarcely a single billow broke, but what, in the first rebound and toss, two churning hummocks of surf met, and flashed up the strand like a mad white horse, far in advance of the rest. Then a hissing ensued, and a roll of shingle, and the water poured huddling and lappeting back from the chine itself had crannied.As brave men fled from a rush of this sort, and cowards on the bank were laughing at them, something white was seen in the curl of the wave which was breaking behind it. The ebb of that inrush met the wave and partly took the crash of it, then the white thing was shot on the shore like a pellet, and lay one instant motionless. There was no rope there, and the men hung back; John Rosedew cried “Shame!” and ran for it; but they joined hands across and stopped him. Before they could look round again, some one had raised the body. ‘Twas young Bob Garnet, and in his arms lay the maiden senseless. She had looked at him once, and then swooned away from the whirl, and the blows, and the terror. No rope round his body, no cork, no pad; he had rushed full intothe raging waves, as he woke from his sleep of heaviness. He lifted the girl, and a bending giant hung thirty feet above them.Then a shriek, like a womanʼs, rang out on the wind, and two great arms were tossed to heaven. Bull Garnet stood there, and strove to rush on, strove with every muscle, but every nerve strove against it. He was balanced and hung on the wind for a moment, as the wave hung over his heartʼs love. Crash came the wave—what shriek should stop it, after three hundred miles of rolling?—a crash that rang in the souls of all whom youth could move or nobleness. Nothing was seen in the depth of water, the swirling, hurling whiteness, until the billow had spent its onset, and the curdle of the change was. Then Bob, swept many a fathom in–shore, but griping still that senseless thing, that should either live or die with him—Bob, who could swim as well or better than he could climb a tree, but felt that he and his load were only dolls for the wave to dandle—down he went, after showing his heels, and fought the deadly outrush. None but Natureʼs pet would have thought of, none but the favoured of God could have done, it. He felt the back–wave tugging at him, he felt that he was going; if another billow broke on him, it was all up with his work upon wire–worm. Holding his breath, he flung his right leg over the waist of the maiden, dug his two hands deep into the gravel, andclapped his feet together. Scarcely knowing what was up, he held on like grim death for life, and felt a barrowload of pebbles rolling down the small of his back. Presently he saw light again, and sputtered out salt water, and heard a hundred people screaming out “Hurrah!” and felt a strong arm thrown round him—not his fatherʼs, but John Rosedewʼs. Three senseless bodies were borne to the village—Bull Garnetʼs, and Bobʼs and the maidenʼs.CHAPTER V.Meanwhile that keen engineering firm, wind, wave, and tide, had established another little business on the coast hard by. This was the general wreck and crack–up of the stout Pell–castle, a proceeding unnoticed by any one except good mother Jacob, whose attention was drawn to it forcibly, as the head of the bed fell in upon her. Thereupon the stout dame made a rush for it, taking only her cat and spectacles, and the little teapot of money. As she started at a furious pace, and presented to the elements a large superficial area, the wind could not resist the temptation, but wafted her to the top of the bunney, without her feet so much as once a–touching the blessed earth—she goes mad if any one doubts it—and planted her in a white–thorn tree, and brought an “elam” of thatch to shelter her from her own beloved roof. There, when the wind subsided, she was happily discovered by some enterprising children; the catwas sitting at her side; in one blue hand she held her specs, and in the other a teapot.Poor Pellʼs easy–chair was thrown up, three miles to the westward, in the course of the next spring–tides, and, being well known all over the neighbourhood (from his lending it to sick people), was brought to him, with a round of cheers, by half a dozen fishermen. They refused the half–crown he offered them, and displayed the greatest anxiety lest his honour should believe it was them as had taken the shine off. The workmanship not being modern, the chair was little the worse for its voyage; only it took six months to dry, and had a fine smell of brine ever afterwards. Then, having been lent to an old saltʼs widow, it won such a reputation, all across the New Forest, as a specific for “rheumatics in the small of the back,” that old women, havingnosmall to their backs, walked all the way from Lyndhurst, “just to sot themselves down in it, and how much was to pay, please, for a quarter of an hour?” “A shilling,” said Octave Pell, “a shilling for the new lifeboat that lives under Christchurch Head.” Then they pulled out mighty silver watches, and paid the shilling at the fifteen minutes. The walk, and the thought of the miracle, and the fear of making fools of themselves, did such a deal of good, that a man got up a ‘bus for it; but Pell said, “No; none who come by ‘bus shall sit in my chair of ease.”The greedy sea returned brave Pell no otherpart of his property. His red tobacco–jar, indeed, was found by some of the dredgemen three or four years afterwards, but they did not know it was his, and sold it—crusted as it was with testacea, and ribboned with sea–weed—to the zealous secretary of—I wonʼt say what museum. “Roman, or perhaps Samian, or possibly Phœnician ware,” cried the secretary, lit with fine—though, it may be, loose—ideas; and he catalogued it: “Phœnician in the opinion of an F.A.S. There is every reason to believe it a vase for Thuricremation.” “Hollo!” cried Pell, when he went there to lecture upon cricket as played by Ulysses, “why, Iʼm blessed if you havenʼt got——” “The most undoubted Phœnician relic contained in any museum!” So he laughed with other peopleʼs cheeks, like a man of sense.All the folk of Rushford, and many too of Nowelhurst, contributed to a secret fund for refurnishing Octavius Pell. So great were the mystery and speed, and so clever the management of the dissenting parson, that two great vans were down upon Pell before he had heard a word of it. He stood at the door of the cobblerʼs shop, and tried to make a speech; but the hurrahs were too many for him, and he turned away and cried. Tell me that any man in England need be anything but popular who has a heart of his own, and is not ashamed of having it!At the Crown, where the three sick people were, a very fine trade was doing; but a finer one stillupon the beach, as the sea went down and the choice contents of theAliwalcame up. For that terrible storm began to abate about noon on the 26th. It had blown as hard for twenty–four hours as it ever does blow in any land, except in the gaps of the Andes and during cyclones of the tropics. Now the core of the storm had no more cells in it; and the puffs that came from the west and north–west, and so on till it got to the pole–star, were violent indeed, but desultory, and seemed not to know where they were going. Finally, about midnight, the wind owned that its turn was over, and sunk (well satisfied with its work) into the arms of slumber—“placidâque ibi demum morte quievit.” And its work had been done right well. No English storm since the vast typhoon of 1703—which I should like to write about some day if my little life–storm blows long enough—had wrought such glorious havoc upon that swearing beaver, man. It had routed his villages at the Landʼs End, and lifted like footstools his breakwater blocks; it had scared of their lives his Eddystone watchmen, and put out half his lighthouses; it had broken upon his royalty, and swept down the oaks of the New Forest; it had streaked with wrecks the Goodwin Sands, and washed ships out of harbours of refuge; it had leaped upon London as on a drain–trap, and jarred it as a man whistles upon his fingers; it had huddled pell–mell all the coal–trade;—saddest vaunt (though not the last), it had strewn withgashed and mangled bodies (like its own waves, countless) the coasts of Anglesea and Caernarvon.On the morning now of the 27th, with the long sullen swell gold–beater–skinned by the recovering sun, the shingle–bank was full of interest to an active trader. They had picked up several bodies with a good bit of money upon them, and the beach was strewn with oranges none the worse for a little tossing. For the stout East IndiamanAliwalhad touched at the Western Islands, and taken on board a thousand boxes of the early orange harvest. And not only oranges were rolling among the wrack, the starfish, the sharkʼs teeth, and the cuttle–eggs, but also many a pretty thing, once prized and petted by women. There were little boxes with gilt and paint, sucked heartily by the salt water, and porcupine–quills rasping up from panels of polished ebony, cracked mirrors inside them, and mother–of–pearl, and beading of scented wood; all the taste and the labour of man yawning like dead cockles, crimped backward, sodden and shredded, as hopeless a wreck as a drunkard.Then there were barrels, and heavy chests, planking already like hemp in the prison–yard, bulkheads, and bulwarks, and cordage, and reeve–blocks, and ten thousand other things, well appreciated by the wreckers, who were hauling them up the bunneys; while the Admiralty droitsmen made an accurate inventory of the bungs and the blackingbottles. Some of the sailors, and most of the passengers, who had escaped in the boats to Christchurch, came over to look for anything that might turn up of their property. Hereupon several fights ensued, and many poor fellows enjoyed opportunity for a closer inspection of the Rushford stratum than the most sanguine of their number anticipated; until the police came down in force, and extinguished at once all other rights of salvage except their own.Nevertheless there was yet one field upon which the police could not interfere; although Jack wished for nothing better than to catch the lubbers there. This was Jackʼs own domain, the sea, where an animated search was going on for the body of Colonel Nowell. His servant had hurried from Christchurch to Nowelhurst to report the almost certain death of Sir Cradockʼs only brother. He did not go first to ascertain it; for the road along the cliffs was impassable during the height of the storm. Sir Cradock received the announcement with very few signs of emotion. He had loved that Clayton in early youth, but now had almost forgotten him; and Clayton had never kept his brother at all apprised of his doings. Sir Cradock had gone into mourning for him, some three years ago; and Colonel Nowell never took the trouble to vindicate his vitality until Dr. Huttonʼs return. And, even though they had really known and loved one another as brothers, the loss would have been but a tap on the back to a manalready stabbed through the heart. Therefore Sir Cradockʼs sorrow exploded (as we love to make our griefs do, and as we so often express them) in the moneyed form. “I will give 500l.to the man who finds my poor brotherʼs body.”That little speech launched fourteen boats. What wrecker could hope for anything of a tenth part of the value? Men who had sworn that they never would pull in the same boat again together—might the Great Being, the Giver of life, strike them dead if they did!—forgot the solemn perjuration, and cried, “Give us your flipper, Ben; after all, there are worse fellows going than you, my lad:” and Ben responded, “Jump into the starn–sheets; you are just the hand as we want, Harry. Manyʼs the time Iʼve thought on you.” Even the dredging smacks hauled in–shore from their stations, and began to dredge for the Colonel; till the small boats resolved on united action, tossed oars, and held solemn council. Several speeches were made, none of them very long, but all embodying that fine sentiment, “fiat justitia, ruat cœlum,” in the form of “fair play, and be d—d to you.” Then Sandy Mac, of the practical mind, made a suggestion which was received with three wild rounds of cheers.“Give ‘em a little ballast, boys, as they be come in–shore to dredge for it.”With one consent the fourteen boats made for the shore, like the fleet of canoes described by the great Defoe. Nor long before each shallopʼs nose“grated on the golden sands.” The men in the dredging smacks looked at the sky to see if a squall was coming. And soon they got it, thick as hail, and as hot as pepper. The fourteen boats in battle array advanced upon them slowly, only two men rowing in each, all the rest standing up, and every man charged heavily. When they were at a nice wicket distance, old Mac gave the signal, and a flight of stones began, which, in the words of the ancient chroniclers, “well–nigh darkened the noonday sun.” The bravest dredger durst not show his head above the gunwale; for the Rushford stones are close of grain, and it is sweeter to start than to stop them. As for south–westers and dreadnoughts, they were no more use than vine–leaves in a storm of electric hail.“Ah, little then those mellow grapes their vine–leaf shall avail,So thickly rattles onthe tilesthe pelting of the hail.”Georg.i. 448.The dredgers gave in, and hoisted a shirt as a signal for a parley. The Rushford men refused to hear a syllable about “snacks.” What they demanded was “unconditional surrender;” and the dredgers, having no cement–stones on board, were compelled to accept it. So they took up their bags, and walked the smacks off three miles away to their station, with very faint hopes indeed that the obliging body might follow them. The boatmen celebrated their victory with three loud cheers for Sandy Mac, and a glass of grog all round. Thenthey returned to the likeliest spot, and dragged hard all the afternoon.“Tarnation ‘cute body,” cried Ben, “as ever I come across. Whoʼd a thought as any perfessing Christian would have stuck to Davy Jonesʼs locker, and refooged the parson and clerk so? Spit on your grapples, my lads of wax, and better luck the cast after.”“The Lord kens the best,” replied Sandy Mac, with a long–drawn sigh, “us poor vessels canna do more than is the will of the Lord, boys. Howsomever, I brought a bit of bait, a few lug–worms, and a soft crab or two; and please the Lord Iʼll rig my line out, and see if the bass be moving. And likely there may be a tumbling cod on the run speering after the puir bodies. Ah, yes, the will of the Lord; we ates them, and they ates us.”The canny old Scotchman, without foregoing his share in the general venture—for he helped to throw the grapnels, or took a spell at the rudder—rigged out a hook on his own account, and fastened the line to the rowlocks.“Fair play, my son,” cried Ben, winking at his comrades; “us go snacks in what you catch, mind. And the will of the Lord be done.”“Dinna ye wish ye may get it?”—the old man glowered at him indignantly—“Iʼll no fish at all on that onderstanding.”“Fish away, old boy, and be blessed, then. I see he ainʼt been in the purwentive sarvice for nothing. But Iʼm blowed if heʼll get much supper,Harry, if itʼs all to come off that darned old hook.” They all laughed at old Mac, who said nothing, but regarded his line attentively.With many a joke and many an oath, they toiled away till the evening fog came down upon the waters. Then, as they turned to go home, old Mac felt a run upon his fishing–gear. Hand over hand he began to haul in, coiling the line in the stern–sheets.“Itʼs a wapping big fish, as ever I feel, mates; na, na, yeʼll no touch it, or yeʼll be claiming to come and sup wi’ me. And deil a bit—the Lord forgive me—will ye haʼ, for grinning at an auld mon the likes of that, I tell ye. Lord ha’ mercy on me, a wake and sinful crater!”They all fell back, except Macbride, as before them in the twilight rose the ashy grey face and the long white hair of Colonel Clayton Nowell.Mac stuck to his haul like a Scotchman; to him the main chance was no ghost. Many a time has he told that story, and turned his quid upon it, cleverly raining between his teeth with fine art to prolong the crisis.The line being his, and the hook being his, and the haul of his own hands only, Sandy Mac could never see why he should not have all the money. The question came close to litigation; but for that, except as a word of menace, Mac was a deal too wide awake. He compounded at last for 300l.and let the other four share the residue.So poor Colonel Nowellʼs countenance, still lookinggrand and dignified, was saved from the congers and lobsters; and he sleeps close by his nephew and namesake in Nowelhurst churchyard. The body of Captain Roberts was found a long way up the Solent. He had always carried a weather helm, and shaped a good course for harbour. May they rest in peace!I have no doubt that Captain Roberts so rests, and am fain to believe, in the mercy of God, the same of the brave old Colonel. At least, we will hope that he is not gone to that eternal punishment, whose existence our divines contend for in a manner so disinterested. He had been a harum–scarum man; and now, having drowned and buried him, we may enter upon his history with the charity due to both quick and dead, but paid to the latter only.A soldier is, in many things, by virtue of his calling, a generous, careless man. We have always credited the sailor with these popular qualities; hornpipes, national drama, and naval novels imbuing us. I doubt if the sailor be, on the whole, so careless a man as the soldier. Jack is obliged, by force of circumstance, to bottle up his money, his rollicksomeness and sentimentality, and therefore has more to get rid of, when he comes ashore once in a twelvemonth. But spread the outburst over the year, strike the average of it, and the rainfall at Aldershot will equal that at Portsmouth.Only by watching the Army List—which at length he was tired of doing—could the Englishbrother tell if the Indian brother were living. Even the most careful of us begin to feel that care is too much for the nine lives of a cat, when Fahrenheit scores 110° in the very coolest corner, and the punkah is too hot to move. So, after one or two Griffin letters, full of marvels which the writer pretended not to marvel at, a silence, as of the jungle, ensued, and Sir Cradock thought of tigers. Then the slides of his own life began to move upon him; and less and less every year he thought of the boy who had laughed and cried with him.Lieutenant Nowell was ordered suddenly to the borders of the Punjaub, and for twenty years his brother Cradock drank his health at Christmas, and wondered how about the Article against praying for the dead. The next thing he heard, though it proved his own orthodoxy, disproved it by making him swear hard. Clayton Nowell had married; married an Affghan woman, to the great disgust of his brother officers, and the furious disdain of her kinsmen. A very fine family of Affghan chiefs immediately loaded their fusils, and swore to shoot both that English dog and their own Bright Eyes of the Morning.“To think,” cried Sir Cradock Nowell, “that a brother of mine should disgrace himself, and (what matters far more) his family, by marrying a wretched low Affghan woman!”“To think,” cried Mohammed Khans, “that a sister of ours should disgrace herself, and (whatmatters far more) her family, by marrying a cursed low English dog!”Which party was in the right, judge ye who understand the matter. The officers’ wives got over their prejudice against Bright Eyes of the Morning, and matronised, and petted, and tried to make a Christian of her. Captain Nowell adored her; she was so elegant in every motion, so loving, and so simple. She quite reformed him for the time from his too benevolent anthropology, from the love of dice, and the vinous doings which the Prophet does not encourage.But the poor thing died in her first confinement, while following her husbandʼs regiment at the foot of the Himalayah, leaving her new–born babe to the care of a faithful Affghan nurse, who had kept at her dear ladyʼs side, even among the infidels. This good nurse, being great of soul, and therefore strong of faith, could not bear that the child of her mistress, the highest blood of the Affghans, should become a low Frank idolater. So she set off with it, in the dark night, crouching past the sentinels, thieves, and other camp followers, and trusted herself to the boundless jungle, with only the stars to guide her. She put the wailing child to her breast, for her own dear babe was dead, and hushed it from the vigilant ears of the man–eating tiger. Then off again for Affghanistan, six hundred miles in the distance.How this wonderful woman, soothing and coaxing the little stranger (obtrusively remarkable forthe power of her squalls), how she got on through the thorns, the fire, the famine, the jaws of the tiger, and, worse than all, the pestilent fever, bred from the rich stagnation of that alluvial soil, is more than I, or any other unversed in womanʼs unity, may pretend to show. Enough that with her eyes upon the grand religious heights—heathen high places, we should call them—she struggled along through nearly three–quarters of her pilgrimage, and then she fell among robbers. A villanous hill–tribe, of mixed origin, always shifting, never working, never even fighting when they could run away, hated and despised by the nobler mountain races, the pariahs of the Himalayah, ignorant of any good, debased as any Africans—in a single word, Rakshas, or worshippers of the devil. A nice school of education for a young lady of tender years—or rather months—to commence in.The nurse was allotted to one of their chiefs, and the babe was about to be knocked on the head, when it struck an enlightened priest that in two years’ time she would make a savoury oblation to the devil; so the Affghan woman was allowed to keep her, until she began to crawl about among the dogs and babes of the station. Here she so distinguished herself by precocious skill in thieving, that her delighted owner conferred upon her the title of “Never–spot–the–dust,” and even instructed her how to steal the high priestʼs knife of sacrifice. That last exploit saved her life. Such a geniushad never appeared in any tribe of the Rakshas until this great manifestation.So “Never–spot–the–dust” was well treated, and made much of by her owner, to whom she was quite a fortune; and soon all the band looked up to her as the future priestess of the devil. For ten years she wandered about with them, becoming every year more important, proud that none could approach her skill in stealing, lying, and perjury, utterly void of all religion, except the few snatches of Moslemism which her nurse had contrived to impart, and the vague terror of the evil spirit to whom the wild men paid their vows. But, when she was ten years old, a tall and wonderfully active child, and just about to be consecrated by the blood of inferior children, a British force drew suddenly all around the nest of robbers. Of late the scoundrels had done things that made John Bullʼs hair stand on end; and, when his hair is in that condition, sparks are apt to come out of it.Seeing no chance of escape, and having very faint hopes of quarter, the robbers fought with a bravery which quite astonished themselves; but the evil spirit was against them—a rare inconsistence on his part. Their rascally camp was burnt, which they who had burned some hundreds of villages looked upon as the grossest cruelty, and more than half of their number were sent home to their patron and guardian. Then the Affghan nurse, so faithful and so unfortunate, fled fromthe burning camp with her charge, fell before the British colonel, and poured forth all her troubles. The Englishman knew Major Nowell, and had heard some parts of his history; so he took “Never–spot–the–dust” to her father, who was amazed at once and amused with her. She could run up the punkah, and stand on the top, and twirl around on one foot; she could cross the compound in three bounds; she could jump upon her fatherʼs shoulder, and stay there with the spring of her sole; she could glide along over the floor like a serpent, and hold on with one hand to anything. And then her most wonderful lightness of touch; she had fully earned her name, she could brush the dust without marking it. She could come behind her fatherʼs back, crawling over the table, and fasten his sword–hilt to his whiskers, without his knowing a thing of it. She could pick all his pockets, of course; but that was too rude an operation for her to take any delight in it. What she delighted to do, and what even she found difficult, was to take off his shoes and stockings without his being aware of it. It was a beautiful thing to see her: consummate skill is beautiful, in whatever way it is exercised. The shoe she could get off easily enough, but the difficulty was with the stocking; and there the chief difficulty was through the sensitiveness of the skin, unaccustomed to exposure. Though she had never heard of temperature, evaporation, or anything long, her genius told her the very first time where the tug was and how to meet it. Keeping her little cornelian lips—lips which you could see through—just at theproper distance, she would breathe so softly upon the skin that the breath could not be felt, as inch by inch she lowered down the thin elastic covering. Then she would jump up out of the ground, and shout into his ears, with a voice of argute silver—“Faddery, will ‘oo have ‘oor shoe? Fear to go wiyout him?”She began to talk English, after a bit; and the weather beaten Colonel—for now he had got that far—who had never looked upon any child, except as one rupee per month—thinking of his beloved Bright Eyes of the Morning, who might, with the will of God, have made a first–rate man of him, only she was too good for him,—thinking of her, and seeing the gleam of her glorious eyes in her child, he loved that child beyond all reason, and christened her “Eoa.”He never took to bad things again. He had something now in pledge with God; a part of himself that still would live, and love him when he was skeleton. And that, his better part, should learn how lying and stealing do not lead to the right half of the other world.His ideas about that other world were as dormant as Eoaʼs; but now he began to think about it, because he wanted to see her there. So, with lots of tears, not only feminine, Eoa Nowell was sent to the best school in Calcutta, where she taught the other young ladies some very odd things indeed.Wherever she went, she must be foremost; “second to none” was her motto. Therefore shelearned with amazing quickness; but it was not so easy to unlearn.Then arose that awful mutiny, and the Colonel at Mhow was shot through the neck, and let lie, by his own soldiers. His daughter heard of it, and screamed, and no walls ever built would hold her. All the way from Calcutta, up the dreary Ganges, she forced her passage, sometimes by boat, sometimes on her weariless feet.She had never cared much for civilization, and loved every blade of the jungle. The old life revived within her, as she looked upon the broad waters, and the boundless yellow tangle, wherein glided no swifter thing, nothing more elegant, than herself.She found her darling father in some rude cantonment, prostrate, helpless, clinging faintly to the verge of death. Dead long ago he must have been but for Rufus Hutton; and dead even now he would have been but for his daughterʼs presence. His dreamy eyes went round the hut to follow her graceful movements; she alone could tend the wounds as if with the fall of gossamer, she alone could soothe and fan the intolerable aching. They looked into each otherʼs eyes and cried without thinking about it.Then, as he gradually got better, and the surge of trouble passed them, Eoa showed for his amusement all her strange accomplishments. She had not forgotten one of them in the grand school at Calcutta. They had even grown with her growth, and strengthened with her strength.She would leap over Rufus Huttonʼs head like a flash of light, and stand facing him, without a muscle moving, and on his back would be a land–crab; she would put his up–country hat on the floor, and walk on one foot round the crown of it; she would steal his case of instruments, and toss them in the air all open, and catch them all at once.By her nursing and her loving, her stealing and her mockery, she won Dr. Huttonʼs heart so entirely that he would have proposed to her, had she only been of marriageable age, or had come to think about anything.Then they had all to cut and run, with barely three hours’ notice, for the ebb of the rebellion swept through that district mightily. Eoa went to school again, and her father came to see her daily, until he was appointed to a regiment having something more than name and shadow.Now Eoa, having learned everything that they can teach in Calcutta, the Himalayah, or the jungle, was coming to England to receive the down and crown of accomplishments. Who could tell but what they might even teach her affectation? Youth is plastic and imitative; and she was sure to find plenty of models.Not that the honest Colonel wished to make a sickly humbug of her. His own views were wide and grand, only too philoprogenitive. Still, like most men of that class, who, upon sudden reformation, love Truth so much that they roll upon her, having no firm rules of his own, and being ashamedto profess anything, with the bad life fresh in memory, he took the opinion of old fogeys who had been every bit as unblest as himself, but had sown with a drill their wild oats. The verdict of all was one—“Miss Nowell must go to England.”Finding his wound still troublesome, he resolved to retire from service; he had not saved half a lac of rupees, and his pension would not be a mighty one; but, between the two, there would be enough for an old man to live upon decently, and go wherever he was told that his daughter ought to go.He had seen enough of life, and found that it only meant repentance; all that remained of it should be for the pleasure and love of his daughter. And he knew that there was a sum in England, which must have been long accumulating—a sum left on trust for him and his children, under a very old settlement. He would never touch a farthing of it; every farthing should go to Eoa. Bless her dear eyes; they had the true light of his own Bright Eyes of the Morning.

CHAPTER IV.By the time Octavius Pell had clothed, and fed, and warmed his drenched and buffeted guests, the sun was slipping out of sight, and glad to be quit of the mischief. For a minute or two, the cloud–curtain lifted over St. Albanʼs Head, and a narrow bar of lively green striped the lurid heavens. This was the critical period, and John Rosedew was aware of it, as well as Octave Pell. Either the wind would shift to south–west quicker than vanes could keep time with it, and then there would be a lively storm, with no very wide area; or else it would come on again with one impetuous leap and roar, and no change of direction, and work to the south–west gradually, blowing harder until it got there. The sea was not very heavy yet, when they went out to look at it; the rain had ceased altogether; there was not air enough to move the fur of a ladyʼs boa; but, out beyond the Atlantic offing,ridges like edges of knives were jumping, as if to look over the sky–line.“Nulla in prospectu navis,” said John Rosedew, who always talked Latin, as a matter of course, when he met an Oxford man; “at least, so far as I can see with the aid of my long–rangers.”“No,” replied Pell, “and Iʼm heartily glad that there is no ship in sight; for, unless Iʼm much mistaken—run, sir, run like lightning.Iʼve got no more dry clothes.”They ran for it, and were just in time before the fury came down again. Bob Garnet was ready to slip away, for he knew that his father would be wild about him; he had taken his drenched hat from the firetongs, and was tugging at the latch of the door. But now there was no help for it.“We are in for it now,” cried Mr. Rosedew; “I have not come down for nothing. It is, what I feared this morning, the heaviest storm that has broken upon us for at least a generation. And we are not yet in the worst of it. God grant there be no unfortunate ship making for the Needles. All our boats, you say, Pell, are in the Solent long ago. Bob, my boy, you must not expect to see your father to–night. I hope he will guess what has happened.”The beach, or pebble bank of Hurst, is a long and narrow spit of land, growing narrower every year, which forms a natural breakwater to the frith of the Solent. It curves away to the south of east from the straighter and more lofty coast of Barton,Hordle, and Rushford. Hurst Castle, in which it terminates, is the eastern horn of Christchurch Bay, as Hengistbury Head is the western. The Isle of Wight and the Needle Rocks protect this bay from the east windʼs power, but a due south wind brings in the sea, and a south–west the Atlantic. Off this coast we see at times those strange floating or rising islands known by the name of the “Shingles;” which sometimes stay above water so long, that their surface is clad with the tender green of bladderwort and samphire; but more often they disappear after taking the air for a few short hours. For several years now they have taken no air; and a boatman told me the other day, that, from the rapid strides of the sea, he thought it impossible for the “Shingles” ever to top the waves again.Up and down the Solent channel the tide pours at a furious speed; and the rush of the strong ebb down the narrows, flushed with the cross–tide from St. Helenʼs, combs and pants out into Christchurch Bay, above the floodmark of two hours since. This great eddy, or reflux, is called the “double–tide;” and an awkward power it has for any poor vessel to fall into.All that night it blew and blew, harder and harder yet; the fishermenʼs boats on the beach were caught up, and flung against the gravel–cliff; the stout men, if they ventured out, were snatched up as a mother snatches a child from the wheels of a carriage; the oaks of the wood, after wailing andhowling, as they had done to a thousand tempests, found that outcry go for nothing, and with it went themselves. Seven hundred towers of Natureʼs building showed their roots to the morning. The old moon expired at O·32; and many a gap the new moon found, where its mother threw playful shadows. The sons of Ytene are not swift–witted, nor deeply read in the calendar; yet they are apt to mark and heed the great convulsions of nature. The old men used to date their weddings from the terrible winter of 1787; the landmark of the young menʼs annals is the storm of 1859.All that night, young Robert Garnet was strung by some strange tension. Of course he could not sleep, amid that fearful uproar, although he was plunged and lost from sight in Octavius Pellʼs great chair. The only luxury Pell possessed—and that somehow by accident—was a deep, and soft, and mighty chair, big enough for three people. After one of the windows came in, which it did, with a crash, about ten oʼclock, scattering Pellʼs tobacco–jars, and after they had made it good with books and boxes and a rug, so that the wind was filtered through it, John Rosedew and his curate sat on a couple of hard old Windsors, watching the castle of Hurst. Thence would come the signal flash, if any hapless bark should be seen driving over the waters. There they sat, John Rosedew talking, as he could talk to a younger man, when his great heart was moved to its depth, and the multitude of his mind in march, and his soul anticipatingit: talking so that Octave Pell, following his silver tones, even through that turmoil, utterly forgot the tempest, and the lapse of hours, and let fall on his lap the pipe, which John had made him smoke.The thunder of the billows waxing, for the wind was now south–west, began to drown the roar of the gale, and a storm of foam was flying, when the faint gleam of a gun at sea was answered by artilleryʼs flash from the walls of old Henry the Eighth. Both men saw the landward light leap up and stream to leeward; but only the younger one descried the weak appeal from the offing.“Where is she, Pell? Have you any idea?”“She is away, sir, here to the right: dead in the eye of the wind.”“Then may our God and Father pity our brothers and our sisters!”Out ran both those strong good men, leaving poor Bob (as they thought) asleep in the depth of the easy–chair. The little cottage was partly sheltered by an elbow of the cliff; otherwise it would have been flying up the bunney long ago. The moment the men came out of the shelter, they were driven one against the other, and both against the cliff.“My castle will go at high–water,” said Pell, though none could hear him; “but I shall be back in time enough to get the old woman out.”Then, as far as Pell could make out in the fierce noise and the darkness, John Rosedew begged himto go back, while himself went on alone. For it was Johnʼs especial business; he had procured the lifeboat, chosen the crew, and kept the accounts; and he thought himself responsible for any wreck that happened. But what good on earth could Pell do, and all his chattels in danger?“No good, very likely,” Pell shouted, “and a good deal perhaps in–doors! Keep the sea out with a besom.”Octave had a dry way with him, not only when he sang, but when he thought he saw the right, and did not mean to argue it. So rector and curate, old man and young man, trudged along together, each bending low, and throwing his weight, like a quoit, against the wind; each stopping and crouching at every tenth yard, as the blast irresistible broke on them. Crusted with hunks of froth pell–mell, like a storm of eggs on the hustings, drenched by pelting sheets of spray, deafened by the thundering surf, and often obliged to fly with the wind from a wave that rushed up scolloping, they battled for that scoop of the bay where the ship must be flung by the indraught.Up to the present, Christchurch Point, and St. Albanʼs Head beyond it, broke (as the wind was westering) some little of the wildest sea–brunt. But now they stood, or rather crouched, where the mountain rollers gathering, sweeping, towering onward, avalanche upon avalanche, burst on their destined barrier. A thousand leagues ofwater, swelled by the whole weight of heaven flung on it, there leaped up on the solid earth, and to the heaven that vexed it. As a strong man in his wrath accepts his wifeʼs endorsement, so the surges took the minor passion of a fierce spring–tide, rolled it in their own, and scorned the flat land they looked down upon. Tush, the combing of their crests was bigger than any town there. On they came, too grand to be hurried even by the storm that roused them; each had a quarter of a mile to himself, and who should take it from him? The white foam fell back in the wide water valleys, and hissed and curdled away in flat loops, and the storm took the mountain ridges again and swept the leaping snow off. Anon, as it struck the shelving shore, each rolling monster tossed its crest unspeakably indignant; hung with impending volume, curling like the scroll of God; then thundered, as in judgment, down, and lashed the trembling earth.Among them, not a mile from shore, as the breaking daylight showed it, heaved, and pitched, and wallowed hog–like in the trough of waters, a large ship, swept and naked. Swept of her masts, of her canvas naked; but clad, alas! with men and women, clustering, clinging, cowering from the great white grave beneath them. As she laboured, reeled, and staggered up to the storm–rent heavens, and then plunged down the yawning chasm, every attitude, every gesture of terror,love, despair, and madness could be descried on the object–glass of the too–faithful telescope. As a ghastly wan gleam from the east lit up all that quivering horror, all that plight of anguish, John Rosedew turned away in tears, and fell upon his knees.But Pell caught up the clear Munich glass, blocked every now and then with foam; he wiped it with his cuff, and levelled it on a stony ledge. There he lay behind the pebbles, himself not out of danger, unable to move, or look away, spellbound by the awe of death in numbered moments coming. Round him many a sturdy boatman, gazing, listening, rubbing his eyes, wondering about the wives and children of the brave men there. The great disaster imminent was known all over the village, and all who dared to cross the gale had crept, under shelter, hitherwards. None was fool enough to talk of boat, or tug, or lifeboat; a child who had then first seen the sea must have known better than that. The best ship in the British navy could not have come out of the Needles in the teeth of such a hurricane.Some of the tars had brought their old Dollonds, preventive glasses long cashiered, and smugglersʼ night–rakers cheek by jowl, and every sort of “perspective,” fifty years old and upward, with the lenses cracked and rattling, and fungoid tufts in the object–glass. Nevertheless, each man would swear that his own glass was the best of the lot,and his neighbourʼs “not of much count.” To their minds, telescopes like spectacles suit the proprietor only.“By Jove, I believe sheʼll do it!” cried Pell, the chief interpreter, his glass being the only clear one.“Do what, sir? what?” asked a dozen voices, hurriedly.“Get her head round to windward, and swing into smoother water. Theyʼre in the undertow already. Oh, if they only knew it!”They knew it, he saw, in a moment. They ran up a spare sail, ere he could speak, to the stump of the mizen–mast, and a score of brave men strained on the sheets until they had braced them home. They knew that it could not stand long; it would fly away to leeward most likely when once they mounted the wave–crest; but two or three minutes might save them. With eight hands jamming the helm up, and the tough canvas tugging and bellying, the ship, with the aid of the undertow, plunged heavily to windward. All knew that the ship herself was doomed, that she never could fetch off shore; but, if she could only hold her course for some half–mile to the westward, she would turn the flank of those fearful rollers, and a good stout boat might live. For there a south–western headland broke the long fury of the sea.Every eye was intent, every bosom drew a deep breath, as the next great billow rose under the ship, and tossed her up to the tempest. They hadbrought her as near to the wind as they dared, so as still to have steerage way on her, and she took the whole force of the surge on her port bow, not on her beam, as the people on shore had feared. The sea broke bodily over her, and she staggered back from the blow, and shook through every timber, then leaped and lurched down the terrible valley, but still, with the good sail holding. She was under noble seamanship, that was clear to every one, and herself a noble fabric. If she could but surmount two billows more, without falling off from the wind, within three points of which her head lay, most of the crew might be rescued. Already a stout galley, manned with ten oars, was coming out of Christchurch Harbour, dancing like a cork on the waves, though sheltered by the headland.Our ship rode over the next billow gallantly; it was a wave that had some moderation, and the lungs of the gale for the moment were panting, just as she topped the comb of it. “Hurrah!” shouted the men ashore; “By God, sheʼll do it yet!”By God alone could she do it. But the Father saw not fit; the third billow was the largest of all that had yet rolled up from the ocean. Beam–end on she clomb the mountain, heeling over heavily, showing to the shore her deck–seams,—even the companion–finial, and the poor things clinging there; a wail broke from them as the great sea struck her, and swept away half a score of them.“Nowʼs your chance, men. D—n your eyes! She wonʼt hang there two minutes. Out with the boats you—— lubbers. Look sharp, and be d—d to you.”The ancient pilot, Thwarthawse, dancing and stamping, his blue jacket flapping in the wind, and his face of the deepest plum colour, roared to windward his whirlwind of oaths up an old split trumpet, down which the wind came bellowing harder than his voice went up it.“Stow that, Jacob!” cried an old Scotchman, survivor of many a wreck; “can ye nae see his reverence, mon? Itʼs an unco thing for an auld mon like you to swear at your mates in their shrouds, chap. I ken the skipper of that there ship, and heʼs no lubber, no more than I be.”Sandy Macbride was known to fear God, and to have fifty pounds in the savings bank. Therefore no one flouted him.“Youʼre right, Mac; youʼre right, by George!” cried Pell. “What a glorious fellow! I can see him there holding on by the stanchion, giving his orders as coolly as if for the cabin dinner. I could die with that man.”The tear in Octavius Pellʼs right eye compelled him to shift the glass a bit. He was just the man who would have done even as that captain did.“Hurrah, hurrah! theyʼve got the launch out; only she and the gig are left. Troops on the deck, drawn up in a line, and the women hoisted in first. Give them three cheers, men, though they canʼthear you! Three cheers, if you are Englishmen! Glorious, glorious! There they go; never saw such a fine thing in all my life. Oh, I wish I had been a sailor!”The tears ran down the young parsonʼs cheeks, and were blown into the eyes of old Macbride; or else he had some of his own.“Shove off, shove off; nowʼs your time, for the under–current is failing her. Both of them off, as Iʼm alive; and yet a third boat I could not see. What magnificent management! That man ought to command a fleet. Two of them off for Christchurch Harbour; away, away, while the wind lulls; but what is the third boat doing?” Every one was looking: no one answered. Old Mac knew what it was, though his eyes were too old to see much.“Captain Roberts, Iʼll go bail, at his old tricks again. And thereʼs none with the sense to mutiny on him, and lash his legs, as we did in theSamphire.”“At the side of the ship there is some dispute. The boat is laden to the waterʼs edge, and the ship paying off to leeward, for there is no man at the wheel; there goes the sail from the bolt–ropes. If they donʼt push off, ere an oarʼs length, they will all be sucked into the rollers! Good God! now I see what it is. There is only room for one more, and not one of those three will take it. Two white–haired men and a girl. Life against honour with the old men; and what is life compared with it? Both resolved not to stir a peg; now they join tomake the girl go. Her father has got her in his arms to pitch her into the boat; she clings around his neck so that both must go, or neither. He could not throw her; she falls on her knees, and clings to his legs to die with him. Smack—there, the rope is parted, and it is too late for further argument. The troops in the boat salute the officer, and he returns it as on parade.”“Name of that ship?” said Jacob, curtly, to old Sandy Macbride.“Aliwal, East India trader, Captain Roberts. Calcutta to Southampton.”“Then itʼs all up now with theAliwal, and every soul on board of her.”“Donʼt want a pilot to tell us that,” answered old Mac, testily. “Youʼve seed a many good craft, pilot, but never one as could last five minutes on the Shingle Bank, with this sea running.”“Ropes, ropes!” cried Octave Pell; “in five minutes sheʼll be ashore here.”“No, she ‘ont, nor yet in ten,” answered his landlord, gruffly; “sheʼll fetch away to the eastward first, now she is in the tide again, specially with this gale on; and sheʼll take the ground over yonner, and go to pieces with the next breaker.”She took her course exactly as old Jacob mapped it out for her. He knew every run and flaw of the tide, and how it gets piled in the narrows by a very heavy storm, and runs back in the eddy which had saved so many lives there. This has nothing to do with the “double tide;” that comes after high–water.As the good ship traced the track of death, doing as the waves willed (like a little boyʼs boat in the Serpentine), the people on shore could see those three, who had contested the right of precedence to another world.They were all upon the quarter–deck; and three finer figures never yet came to take the air there, in the weariness of an Indian voyage. Captain Roberts, a tall, stout man, with ruddy cheeks and a broad white beard, stood with his hands in his pockets, and his feet asunder, and a sense of discipline in his face, as of a man who has done his duty, and now obeys his Maker. No sign of flinching or dismay in his weather–beaten eyes, as he watched his death roll towards him; though the gazers fancied that one tear rose, perhaps at the thought of his family just coming down–stairs at Lymington. The military man beside him faced his death quite differently; perhaps with even less of fear, but with more defiance, broken, every now and then, by anguish for his daughter. He had not learned to fear the Lord, as those men do who go down into the great deep. He looked as if he ought to be commanding–officer of the tempest. The ship, running now before wind and sea, darted along as a serpent darts over the graves in the churchyard; she did not lurch any more, or labour, but rose and fell, just showing her fore–foot or stern–post, as the billows passed under her. And so that young maiden could stand and gaze, with her fatherʼs arm thrown round her.She was worthy to be his daughter; tall, and light of form, and calm, with eyes of wondrous brightness, she was looking at her fatherʼs face to say the last good–bye. Then she flung both arms around his neck, and fondly, sadly, kissed him. Meanwhile the ship–captain turned away, and thought of Susy Roberts. Suddenly he espied a life–belt washed into the scuppers. He ran for it in a moment, came behind the maid, and, without asking her consent, threw it over her, and fastened it. There was little chance of it helping her, but that little chance she should have.“Sheʼll take the ground next biller,” cried the oracular Jacob; “stand by there with the ropes, boys.”On the back of a huge wave rose for the last time the unfortunateAliwal. Stem on, as if with strong men steering, she rushed through the foam and the white whirl, like a hearse run away with in snow–drifts. Then she crashed on the stones, and the raging sea swept her from taffrail to bowsprit, rolled her over, pitched her across, and broke her back in two moments. The shock rang through the roar of billows, as if a nerve of the earth were thrilling. Another mountain–wave came marching to the roll of the tempest–drum. It curled disdainfully over the side, like a fog sweeping over a hedgerow; swoop—it broke the timbers away, as a giant tosses a fir–cone.“I canʼt look any longer,” cried Pell; “give mesomething to feel, men. Quick, there! I see something!”He seized the bight of a rope, and rushed anyhow into the waters. But John Rosedew and the life–boatmen held hard upon the coil of it, and drew him with all their might back again. They hauled Octavius Pell up in the manner of a cod–fish, and he was so bruised and stupefied, that he could not tell what he had gone for. They only saw floating timber and gear, and wreck of every sort drifting, till just for one sight–flash a hoary head, whiter than driven waters, leaped out of the comb of the billow. A naval man, or a military—who knows, and to whom does it matter?Brave men ashore, all waiting ready, dashed down the steep of death to save him, if the great wave should toss up its plaything. All Rushford strained at the cables that held them from the savage recoil. Worse than useless; the only chance of it was to make more widows. The sea leaped at those gallant strong men; there were five on either cable; it leaped at them as the fiery furnace leaped on the plain of Dura. It struck the two ropes into one with a buffet, as a lionʼs paw shatters a cobweb; it dashed the menʼs heads together, and flung them all in a pile on a ballast–heap. Lucky for them that it fought with itself, and clashed there, and made no recoil. The white–haired corpse was seen no more; and all Rushford shrunk back in terror.The storm was now at its height; and of more than a hundred people gathered on the crown of the shore, and above the reach of the billows, not one durst stand upright. Nearer the water the wind had less power, for the wall of waves broke the full brunt of it. But there no man, unless he were most quick of eye and foot, might stand without great peril. For scarcely a single billow broke, but what, in the first rebound and toss, two churning hummocks of surf met, and flashed up the strand like a mad white horse, far in advance of the rest. Then a hissing ensued, and a roll of shingle, and the water poured huddling and lappeting back from the chine itself had crannied.As brave men fled from a rush of this sort, and cowards on the bank were laughing at them, something white was seen in the curl of the wave which was breaking behind it. The ebb of that inrush met the wave and partly took the crash of it, then the white thing was shot on the shore like a pellet, and lay one instant motionless. There was no rope there, and the men hung back; John Rosedew cried “Shame!” and ran for it; but they joined hands across and stopped him. Before they could look round again, some one had raised the body. ‘Twas young Bob Garnet, and in his arms lay the maiden senseless. She had looked at him once, and then swooned away from the whirl, and the blows, and the terror. No rope round his body, no cork, no pad; he had rushed full intothe raging waves, as he woke from his sleep of heaviness. He lifted the girl, and a bending giant hung thirty feet above them.Then a shriek, like a womanʼs, rang out on the wind, and two great arms were tossed to heaven. Bull Garnet stood there, and strove to rush on, strove with every muscle, but every nerve strove against it. He was balanced and hung on the wind for a moment, as the wave hung over his heartʼs love. Crash came the wave—what shriek should stop it, after three hundred miles of rolling?—a crash that rang in the souls of all whom youth could move or nobleness. Nothing was seen in the depth of water, the swirling, hurling whiteness, until the billow had spent its onset, and the curdle of the change was. Then Bob, swept many a fathom in–shore, but griping still that senseless thing, that should either live or die with him—Bob, who could swim as well or better than he could climb a tree, but felt that he and his load were only dolls for the wave to dandle—down he went, after showing his heels, and fought the deadly outrush. None but Natureʼs pet would have thought of, none but the favoured of God could have done, it. He felt the back–wave tugging at him, he felt that he was going; if another billow broke on him, it was all up with his work upon wire–worm. Holding his breath, he flung his right leg over the waist of the maiden, dug his two hands deep into the gravel, andclapped his feet together. Scarcely knowing what was up, he held on like grim death for life, and felt a barrowload of pebbles rolling down the small of his back. Presently he saw light again, and sputtered out salt water, and heard a hundred people screaming out “Hurrah!” and felt a strong arm thrown round him—not his fatherʼs, but John Rosedewʼs. Three senseless bodies were borne to the village—Bull Garnetʼs, and Bobʼs and the maidenʼs.

By the time Octavius Pell had clothed, and fed, and warmed his drenched and buffeted guests, the sun was slipping out of sight, and glad to be quit of the mischief. For a minute or two, the cloud–curtain lifted over St. Albanʼs Head, and a narrow bar of lively green striped the lurid heavens. This was the critical period, and John Rosedew was aware of it, as well as Octave Pell. Either the wind would shift to south–west quicker than vanes could keep time with it, and then there would be a lively storm, with no very wide area; or else it would come on again with one impetuous leap and roar, and no change of direction, and work to the south–west gradually, blowing harder until it got there. The sea was not very heavy yet, when they went out to look at it; the rain had ceased altogether; there was not air enough to move the fur of a ladyʼs boa; but, out beyond the Atlantic offing,ridges like edges of knives were jumping, as if to look over the sky–line.

“Nulla in prospectu navis,” said John Rosedew, who always talked Latin, as a matter of course, when he met an Oxford man; “at least, so far as I can see with the aid of my long–rangers.”

“No,” replied Pell, “and Iʼm heartily glad that there is no ship in sight; for, unless Iʼm much mistaken—run, sir, run like lightning.Iʼve got no more dry clothes.”

They ran for it, and were just in time before the fury came down again. Bob Garnet was ready to slip away, for he knew that his father would be wild about him; he had taken his drenched hat from the firetongs, and was tugging at the latch of the door. But now there was no help for it.

“We are in for it now,” cried Mr. Rosedew; “I have not come down for nothing. It is, what I feared this morning, the heaviest storm that has broken upon us for at least a generation. And we are not yet in the worst of it. God grant there be no unfortunate ship making for the Needles. All our boats, you say, Pell, are in the Solent long ago. Bob, my boy, you must not expect to see your father to–night. I hope he will guess what has happened.”

The beach, or pebble bank of Hurst, is a long and narrow spit of land, growing narrower every year, which forms a natural breakwater to the frith of the Solent. It curves away to the south of east from the straighter and more lofty coast of Barton,Hordle, and Rushford. Hurst Castle, in which it terminates, is the eastern horn of Christchurch Bay, as Hengistbury Head is the western. The Isle of Wight and the Needle Rocks protect this bay from the east windʼs power, but a due south wind brings in the sea, and a south–west the Atlantic. Off this coast we see at times those strange floating or rising islands known by the name of the “Shingles;” which sometimes stay above water so long, that their surface is clad with the tender green of bladderwort and samphire; but more often they disappear after taking the air for a few short hours. For several years now they have taken no air; and a boatman told me the other day, that, from the rapid strides of the sea, he thought it impossible for the “Shingles” ever to top the waves again.

Up and down the Solent channel the tide pours at a furious speed; and the rush of the strong ebb down the narrows, flushed with the cross–tide from St. Helenʼs, combs and pants out into Christchurch Bay, above the floodmark of two hours since. This great eddy, or reflux, is called the “double–tide;” and an awkward power it has for any poor vessel to fall into.

All that night it blew and blew, harder and harder yet; the fishermenʼs boats on the beach were caught up, and flung against the gravel–cliff; the stout men, if they ventured out, were snatched up as a mother snatches a child from the wheels of a carriage; the oaks of the wood, after wailing andhowling, as they had done to a thousand tempests, found that outcry go for nothing, and with it went themselves. Seven hundred towers of Natureʼs building showed their roots to the morning. The old moon expired at O·32; and many a gap the new moon found, where its mother threw playful shadows. The sons of Ytene are not swift–witted, nor deeply read in the calendar; yet they are apt to mark and heed the great convulsions of nature. The old men used to date their weddings from the terrible winter of 1787; the landmark of the young menʼs annals is the storm of 1859.

All that night, young Robert Garnet was strung by some strange tension. Of course he could not sleep, amid that fearful uproar, although he was plunged and lost from sight in Octavius Pellʼs great chair. The only luxury Pell possessed—and that somehow by accident—was a deep, and soft, and mighty chair, big enough for three people. After one of the windows came in, which it did, with a crash, about ten oʼclock, scattering Pellʼs tobacco–jars, and after they had made it good with books and boxes and a rug, so that the wind was filtered through it, John Rosedew and his curate sat on a couple of hard old Windsors, watching the castle of Hurst. Thence would come the signal flash, if any hapless bark should be seen driving over the waters. There they sat, John Rosedew talking, as he could talk to a younger man, when his great heart was moved to its depth, and the multitude of his mind in march, and his soul anticipatingit: talking so that Octave Pell, following his silver tones, even through that turmoil, utterly forgot the tempest, and the lapse of hours, and let fall on his lap the pipe, which John had made him smoke.

The thunder of the billows waxing, for the wind was now south–west, began to drown the roar of the gale, and a storm of foam was flying, when the faint gleam of a gun at sea was answered by artilleryʼs flash from the walls of old Henry the Eighth. Both men saw the landward light leap up and stream to leeward; but only the younger one descried the weak appeal from the offing.

“Where is she, Pell? Have you any idea?”

“She is away, sir, here to the right: dead in the eye of the wind.”

“Then may our God and Father pity our brothers and our sisters!”

Out ran both those strong good men, leaving poor Bob (as they thought) asleep in the depth of the easy–chair. The little cottage was partly sheltered by an elbow of the cliff; otherwise it would have been flying up the bunney long ago. The moment the men came out of the shelter, they were driven one against the other, and both against the cliff.

“My castle will go at high–water,” said Pell, though none could hear him; “but I shall be back in time enough to get the old woman out.”

Then, as far as Pell could make out in the fierce noise and the darkness, John Rosedew begged himto go back, while himself went on alone. For it was Johnʼs especial business; he had procured the lifeboat, chosen the crew, and kept the accounts; and he thought himself responsible for any wreck that happened. But what good on earth could Pell do, and all his chattels in danger?

“No good, very likely,” Pell shouted, “and a good deal perhaps in–doors! Keep the sea out with a besom.”

Octave had a dry way with him, not only when he sang, but when he thought he saw the right, and did not mean to argue it. So rector and curate, old man and young man, trudged along together, each bending low, and throwing his weight, like a quoit, against the wind; each stopping and crouching at every tenth yard, as the blast irresistible broke on them. Crusted with hunks of froth pell–mell, like a storm of eggs on the hustings, drenched by pelting sheets of spray, deafened by the thundering surf, and often obliged to fly with the wind from a wave that rushed up scolloping, they battled for that scoop of the bay where the ship must be flung by the indraught.

Up to the present, Christchurch Point, and St. Albanʼs Head beyond it, broke (as the wind was westering) some little of the wildest sea–brunt. But now they stood, or rather crouched, where the mountain rollers gathering, sweeping, towering onward, avalanche upon avalanche, burst on their destined barrier. A thousand leagues ofwater, swelled by the whole weight of heaven flung on it, there leaped up on the solid earth, and to the heaven that vexed it. As a strong man in his wrath accepts his wifeʼs endorsement, so the surges took the minor passion of a fierce spring–tide, rolled it in their own, and scorned the flat land they looked down upon. Tush, the combing of their crests was bigger than any town there. On they came, too grand to be hurried even by the storm that roused them; each had a quarter of a mile to himself, and who should take it from him? The white foam fell back in the wide water valleys, and hissed and curdled away in flat loops, and the storm took the mountain ridges again and swept the leaping snow off. Anon, as it struck the shelving shore, each rolling monster tossed its crest unspeakably indignant; hung with impending volume, curling like the scroll of God; then thundered, as in judgment, down, and lashed the trembling earth.

Among them, not a mile from shore, as the breaking daylight showed it, heaved, and pitched, and wallowed hog–like in the trough of waters, a large ship, swept and naked. Swept of her masts, of her canvas naked; but clad, alas! with men and women, clustering, clinging, cowering from the great white grave beneath them. As she laboured, reeled, and staggered up to the storm–rent heavens, and then plunged down the yawning chasm, every attitude, every gesture of terror,love, despair, and madness could be descried on the object–glass of the too–faithful telescope. As a ghastly wan gleam from the east lit up all that quivering horror, all that plight of anguish, John Rosedew turned away in tears, and fell upon his knees.

But Pell caught up the clear Munich glass, blocked every now and then with foam; he wiped it with his cuff, and levelled it on a stony ledge. There he lay behind the pebbles, himself not out of danger, unable to move, or look away, spellbound by the awe of death in numbered moments coming. Round him many a sturdy boatman, gazing, listening, rubbing his eyes, wondering about the wives and children of the brave men there. The great disaster imminent was known all over the village, and all who dared to cross the gale had crept, under shelter, hitherwards. None was fool enough to talk of boat, or tug, or lifeboat; a child who had then first seen the sea must have known better than that. The best ship in the British navy could not have come out of the Needles in the teeth of such a hurricane.

Some of the tars had brought their old Dollonds, preventive glasses long cashiered, and smugglersʼ night–rakers cheek by jowl, and every sort of “perspective,” fifty years old and upward, with the lenses cracked and rattling, and fungoid tufts in the object–glass. Nevertheless, each man would swear that his own glass was the best of the lot,and his neighbourʼs “not of much count.” To their minds, telescopes like spectacles suit the proprietor only.

“By Jove, I believe sheʼll do it!” cried Pell, the chief interpreter, his glass being the only clear one.

“Do what, sir? what?” asked a dozen voices, hurriedly.

“Get her head round to windward, and swing into smoother water. Theyʼre in the undertow already. Oh, if they only knew it!”

They knew it, he saw, in a moment. They ran up a spare sail, ere he could speak, to the stump of the mizen–mast, and a score of brave men strained on the sheets until they had braced them home. They knew that it could not stand long; it would fly away to leeward most likely when once they mounted the wave–crest; but two or three minutes might save them. With eight hands jamming the helm up, and the tough canvas tugging and bellying, the ship, with the aid of the undertow, plunged heavily to windward. All knew that the ship herself was doomed, that she never could fetch off shore; but, if she could only hold her course for some half–mile to the westward, she would turn the flank of those fearful rollers, and a good stout boat might live. For there a south–western headland broke the long fury of the sea.

Every eye was intent, every bosom drew a deep breath, as the next great billow rose under the ship, and tossed her up to the tempest. They hadbrought her as near to the wind as they dared, so as still to have steerage way on her, and she took the whole force of the surge on her port bow, not on her beam, as the people on shore had feared. The sea broke bodily over her, and she staggered back from the blow, and shook through every timber, then leaped and lurched down the terrible valley, but still, with the good sail holding. She was under noble seamanship, that was clear to every one, and herself a noble fabric. If she could but surmount two billows more, without falling off from the wind, within three points of which her head lay, most of the crew might be rescued. Already a stout galley, manned with ten oars, was coming out of Christchurch Harbour, dancing like a cork on the waves, though sheltered by the headland.

Our ship rode over the next billow gallantly; it was a wave that had some moderation, and the lungs of the gale for the moment were panting, just as she topped the comb of it. “Hurrah!” shouted the men ashore; “By God, sheʼll do it yet!”

By God alone could she do it. But the Father saw not fit; the third billow was the largest of all that had yet rolled up from the ocean. Beam–end on she clomb the mountain, heeling over heavily, showing to the shore her deck–seams,—even the companion–finial, and the poor things clinging there; a wail broke from them as the great sea struck her, and swept away half a score of them.

“Nowʼs your chance, men. D—n your eyes! She wonʼt hang there two minutes. Out with the boats you—— lubbers. Look sharp, and be d—d to you.”

The ancient pilot, Thwarthawse, dancing and stamping, his blue jacket flapping in the wind, and his face of the deepest plum colour, roared to windward his whirlwind of oaths up an old split trumpet, down which the wind came bellowing harder than his voice went up it.

“Stow that, Jacob!” cried an old Scotchman, survivor of many a wreck; “can ye nae see his reverence, mon? Itʼs an unco thing for an auld mon like you to swear at your mates in their shrouds, chap. I ken the skipper of that there ship, and heʼs no lubber, no more than I be.”

Sandy Macbride was known to fear God, and to have fifty pounds in the savings bank. Therefore no one flouted him.

“Youʼre right, Mac; youʼre right, by George!” cried Pell. “What a glorious fellow! I can see him there holding on by the stanchion, giving his orders as coolly as if for the cabin dinner. I could die with that man.”

The tear in Octavius Pellʼs right eye compelled him to shift the glass a bit. He was just the man who would have done even as that captain did.

“Hurrah, hurrah! theyʼve got the launch out; only she and the gig are left. Troops on the deck, drawn up in a line, and the women hoisted in first. Give them three cheers, men, though they canʼthear you! Three cheers, if you are Englishmen! Glorious, glorious! There they go; never saw such a fine thing in all my life. Oh, I wish I had been a sailor!”

The tears ran down the young parsonʼs cheeks, and were blown into the eyes of old Macbride; or else he had some of his own.

“Shove off, shove off; nowʼs your time, for the under–current is failing her. Both of them off, as Iʼm alive; and yet a third boat I could not see. What magnificent management! That man ought to command a fleet. Two of them off for Christchurch Harbour; away, away, while the wind lulls; but what is the third boat doing?” Every one was looking: no one answered. Old Mac knew what it was, though his eyes were too old to see much.

“Captain Roberts, Iʼll go bail, at his old tricks again. And thereʼs none with the sense to mutiny on him, and lash his legs, as we did in theSamphire.”

“At the side of the ship there is some dispute. The boat is laden to the waterʼs edge, and the ship paying off to leeward, for there is no man at the wheel; there goes the sail from the bolt–ropes. If they donʼt push off, ere an oarʼs length, they will all be sucked into the rollers! Good God! now I see what it is. There is only room for one more, and not one of those three will take it. Two white–haired men and a girl. Life against honour with the old men; and what is life compared with it? Both resolved not to stir a peg; now they join tomake the girl go. Her father has got her in his arms to pitch her into the boat; she clings around his neck so that both must go, or neither. He could not throw her; she falls on her knees, and clings to his legs to die with him. Smack—there, the rope is parted, and it is too late for further argument. The troops in the boat salute the officer, and he returns it as on parade.”

“Name of that ship?” said Jacob, curtly, to old Sandy Macbride.

“Aliwal, East India trader, Captain Roberts. Calcutta to Southampton.”

“Then itʼs all up now with theAliwal, and every soul on board of her.”

“Donʼt want a pilot to tell us that,” answered old Mac, testily. “Youʼve seed a many good craft, pilot, but never one as could last five minutes on the Shingle Bank, with this sea running.”

“Ropes, ropes!” cried Octave Pell; “in five minutes sheʼll be ashore here.”

“No, she ‘ont, nor yet in ten,” answered his landlord, gruffly; “sheʼll fetch away to the eastward first, now she is in the tide again, specially with this gale on; and sheʼll take the ground over yonner, and go to pieces with the next breaker.”

She took her course exactly as old Jacob mapped it out for her. He knew every run and flaw of the tide, and how it gets piled in the narrows by a very heavy storm, and runs back in the eddy which had saved so many lives there. This has nothing to do with the “double tide;” that comes after high–water.As the good ship traced the track of death, doing as the waves willed (like a little boyʼs boat in the Serpentine), the people on shore could see those three, who had contested the right of precedence to another world.

They were all upon the quarter–deck; and three finer figures never yet came to take the air there, in the weariness of an Indian voyage. Captain Roberts, a tall, stout man, with ruddy cheeks and a broad white beard, stood with his hands in his pockets, and his feet asunder, and a sense of discipline in his face, as of a man who has done his duty, and now obeys his Maker. No sign of flinching or dismay in his weather–beaten eyes, as he watched his death roll towards him; though the gazers fancied that one tear rose, perhaps at the thought of his family just coming down–stairs at Lymington. The military man beside him faced his death quite differently; perhaps with even less of fear, but with more defiance, broken, every now and then, by anguish for his daughter. He had not learned to fear the Lord, as those men do who go down into the great deep. He looked as if he ought to be commanding–officer of the tempest. The ship, running now before wind and sea, darted along as a serpent darts over the graves in the churchyard; she did not lurch any more, or labour, but rose and fell, just showing her fore–foot or stern–post, as the billows passed under her. And so that young maiden could stand and gaze, with her fatherʼs arm thrown round her.

She was worthy to be his daughter; tall, and light of form, and calm, with eyes of wondrous brightness, she was looking at her fatherʼs face to say the last good–bye. Then she flung both arms around his neck, and fondly, sadly, kissed him. Meanwhile the ship–captain turned away, and thought of Susy Roberts. Suddenly he espied a life–belt washed into the scuppers. He ran for it in a moment, came behind the maid, and, without asking her consent, threw it over her, and fastened it. There was little chance of it helping her, but that little chance she should have.

“Sheʼll take the ground next biller,” cried the oracular Jacob; “stand by there with the ropes, boys.”

On the back of a huge wave rose for the last time the unfortunateAliwal. Stem on, as if with strong men steering, she rushed through the foam and the white whirl, like a hearse run away with in snow–drifts. Then she crashed on the stones, and the raging sea swept her from taffrail to bowsprit, rolled her over, pitched her across, and broke her back in two moments. The shock rang through the roar of billows, as if a nerve of the earth were thrilling. Another mountain–wave came marching to the roll of the tempest–drum. It curled disdainfully over the side, like a fog sweeping over a hedgerow; swoop—it broke the timbers away, as a giant tosses a fir–cone.

“I canʼt look any longer,” cried Pell; “give mesomething to feel, men. Quick, there! I see something!”

He seized the bight of a rope, and rushed anyhow into the waters. But John Rosedew and the life–boatmen held hard upon the coil of it, and drew him with all their might back again. They hauled Octavius Pell up in the manner of a cod–fish, and he was so bruised and stupefied, that he could not tell what he had gone for. They only saw floating timber and gear, and wreck of every sort drifting, till just for one sight–flash a hoary head, whiter than driven waters, leaped out of the comb of the billow. A naval man, or a military—who knows, and to whom does it matter?

Brave men ashore, all waiting ready, dashed down the steep of death to save him, if the great wave should toss up its plaything. All Rushford strained at the cables that held them from the savage recoil. Worse than useless; the only chance of it was to make more widows. The sea leaped at those gallant strong men; there were five on either cable; it leaped at them as the fiery furnace leaped on the plain of Dura. It struck the two ropes into one with a buffet, as a lionʼs paw shatters a cobweb; it dashed the menʼs heads together, and flung them all in a pile on a ballast–heap. Lucky for them that it fought with itself, and clashed there, and made no recoil. The white–haired corpse was seen no more; and all Rushford shrunk back in terror.

The storm was now at its height; and of more than a hundred people gathered on the crown of the shore, and above the reach of the billows, not one durst stand upright. Nearer the water the wind had less power, for the wall of waves broke the full brunt of it. But there no man, unless he were most quick of eye and foot, might stand without great peril. For scarcely a single billow broke, but what, in the first rebound and toss, two churning hummocks of surf met, and flashed up the strand like a mad white horse, far in advance of the rest. Then a hissing ensued, and a roll of shingle, and the water poured huddling and lappeting back from the chine itself had crannied.

As brave men fled from a rush of this sort, and cowards on the bank were laughing at them, something white was seen in the curl of the wave which was breaking behind it. The ebb of that inrush met the wave and partly took the crash of it, then the white thing was shot on the shore like a pellet, and lay one instant motionless. There was no rope there, and the men hung back; John Rosedew cried “Shame!” and ran for it; but they joined hands across and stopped him. Before they could look round again, some one had raised the body. ‘Twas young Bob Garnet, and in his arms lay the maiden senseless. She had looked at him once, and then swooned away from the whirl, and the blows, and the terror. No rope round his body, no cork, no pad; he had rushed full intothe raging waves, as he woke from his sleep of heaviness. He lifted the girl, and a bending giant hung thirty feet above them.

Then a shriek, like a womanʼs, rang out on the wind, and two great arms were tossed to heaven. Bull Garnet stood there, and strove to rush on, strove with every muscle, but every nerve strove against it. He was balanced and hung on the wind for a moment, as the wave hung over his heartʼs love. Crash came the wave—what shriek should stop it, after three hundred miles of rolling?—a crash that rang in the souls of all whom youth could move or nobleness. Nothing was seen in the depth of water, the swirling, hurling whiteness, until the billow had spent its onset, and the curdle of the change was. Then Bob, swept many a fathom in–shore, but griping still that senseless thing, that should either live or die with him—Bob, who could swim as well or better than he could climb a tree, but felt that he and his load were only dolls for the wave to dandle—down he went, after showing his heels, and fought the deadly outrush. None but Natureʼs pet would have thought of, none but the favoured of God could have done, it. He felt the back–wave tugging at him, he felt that he was going; if another billow broke on him, it was all up with his work upon wire–worm. Holding his breath, he flung his right leg over the waist of the maiden, dug his two hands deep into the gravel, andclapped his feet together. Scarcely knowing what was up, he held on like grim death for life, and felt a barrowload of pebbles rolling down the small of his back. Presently he saw light again, and sputtered out salt water, and heard a hundred people screaming out “Hurrah!” and felt a strong arm thrown round him—not his fatherʼs, but John Rosedewʼs. Three senseless bodies were borne to the village—Bull Garnetʼs, and Bobʼs and the maidenʼs.

CHAPTER V.Meanwhile that keen engineering firm, wind, wave, and tide, had established another little business on the coast hard by. This was the general wreck and crack–up of the stout Pell–castle, a proceeding unnoticed by any one except good mother Jacob, whose attention was drawn to it forcibly, as the head of the bed fell in upon her. Thereupon the stout dame made a rush for it, taking only her cat and spectacles, and the little teapot of money. As she started at a furious pace, and presented to the elements a large superficial area, the wind could not resist the temptation, but wafted her to the top of the bunney, without her feet so much as once a–touching the blessed earth—she goes mad if any one doubts it—and planted her in a white–thorn tree, and brought an “elam” of thatch to shelter her from her own beloved roof. There, when the wind subsided, she was happily discovered by some enterprising children; the catwas sitting at her side; in one blue hand she held her specs, and in the other a teapot.Poor Pellʼs easy–chair was thrown up, three miles to the westward, in the course of the next spring–tides, and, being well known all over the neighbourhood (from his lending it to sick people), was brought to him, with a round of cheers, by half a dozen fishermen. They refused the half–crown he offered them, and displayed the greatest anxiety lest his honour should believe it was them as had taken the shine off. The workmanship not being modern, the chair was little the worse for its voyage; only it took six months to dry, and had a fine smell of brine ever afterwards. Then, having been lent to an old saltʼs widow, it won such a reputation, all across the New Forest, as a specific for “rheumatics in the small of the back,” that old women, havingnosmall to their backs, walked all the way from Lyndhurst, “just to sot themselves down in it, and how much was to pay, please, for a quarter of an hour?” “A shilling,” said Octave Pell, “a shilling for the new lifeboat that lives under Christchurch Head.” Then they pulled out mighty silver watches, and paid the shilling at the fifteen minutes. The walk, and the thought of the miracle, and the fear of making fools of themselves, did such a deal of good, that a man got up a ‘bus for it; but Pell said, “No; none who come by ‘bus shall sit in my chair of ease.”The greedy sea returned brave Pell no otherpart of his property. His red tobacco–jar, indeed, was found by some of the dredgemen three or four years afterwards, but they did not know it was his, and sold it—crusted as it was with testacea, and ribboned with sea–weed—to the zealous secretary of—I wonʼt say what museum. “Roman, or perhaps Samian, or possibly Phœnician ware,” cried the secretary, lit with fine—though, it may be, loose—ideas; and he catalogued it: “Phœnician in the opinion of an F.A.S. There is every reason to believe it a vase for Thuricremation.” “Hollo!” cried Pell, when he went there to lecture upon cricket as played by Ulysses, “why, Iʼm blessed if you havenʼt got——” “The most undoubted Phœnician relic contained in any museum!” So he laughed with other peopleʼs cheeks, like a man of sense.All the folk of Rushford, and many too of Nowelhurst, contributed to a secret fund for refurnishing Octavius Pell. So great were the mystery and speed, and so clever the management of the dissenting parson, that two great vans were down upon Pell before he had heard a word of it. He stood at the door of the cobblerʼs shop, and tried to make a speech; but the hurrahs were too many for him, and he turned away and cried. Tell me that any man in England need be anything but popular who has a heart of his own, and is not ashamed of having it!At the Crown, where the three sick people were, a very fine trade was doing; but a finer one stillupon the beach, as the sea went down and the choice contents of theAliwalcame up. For that terrible storm began to abate about noon on the 26th. It had blown as hard for twenty–four hours as it ever does blow in any land, except in the gaps of the Andes and during cyclones of the tropics. Now the core of the storm had no more cells in it; and the puffs that came from the west and north–west, and so on till it got to the pole–star, were violent indeed, but desultory, and seemed not to know where they were going. Finally, about midnight, the wind owned that its turn was over, and sunk (well satisfied with its work) into the arms of slumber—“placidâque ibi demum morte quievit.” And its work had been done right well. No English storm since the vast typhoon of 1703—which I should like to write about some day if my little life–storm blows long enough—had wrought such glorious havoc upon that swearing beaver, man. It had routed his villages at the Landʼs End, and lifted like footstools his breakwater blocks; it had scared of their lives his Eddystone watchmen, and put out half his lighthouses; it had broken upon his royalty, and swept down the oaks of the New Forest; it had streaked with wrecks the Goodwin Sands, and washed ships out of harbours of refuge; it had leaped upon London as on a drain–trap, and jarred it as a man whistles upon his fingers; it had huddled pell–mell all the coal–trade;—saddest vaunt (though not the last), it had strewn withgashed and mangled bodies (like its own waves, countless) the coasts of Anglesea and Caernarvon.On the morning now of the 27th, with the long sullen swell gold–beater–skinned by the recovering sun, the shingle–bank was full of interest to an active trader. They had picked up several bodies with a good bit of money upon them, and the beach was strewn with oranges none the worse for a little tossing. For the stout East IndiamanAliwalhad touched at the Western Islands, and taken on board a thousand boxes of the early orange harvest. And not only oranges were rolling among the wrack, the starfish, the sharkʼs teeth, and the cuttle–eggs, but also many a pretty thing, once prized and petted by women. There were little boxes with gilt and paint, sucked heartily by the salt water, and porcupine–quills rasping up from panels of polished ebony, cracked mirrors inside them, and mother–of–pearl, and beading of scented wood; all the taste and the labour of man yawning like dead cockles, crimped backward, sodden and shredded, as hopeless a wreck as a drunkard.Then there were barrels, and heavy chests, planking already like hemp in the prison–yard, bulkheads, and bulwarks, and cordage, and reeve–blocks, and ten thousand other things, well appreciated by the wreckers, who were hauling them up the bunneys; while the Admiralty droitsmen made an accurate inventory of the bungs and the blackingbottles. Some of the sailors, and most of the passengers, who had escaped in the boats to Christchurch, came over to look for anything that might turn up of their property. Hereupon several fights ensued, and many poor fellows enjoyed opportunity for a closer inspection of the Rushford stratum than the most sanguine of their number anticipated; until the police came down in force, and extinguished at once all other rights of salvage except their own.Nevertheless there was yet one field upon which the police could not interfere; although Jack wished for nothing better than to catch the lubbers there. This was Jackʼs own domain, the sea, where an animated search was going on for the body of Colonel Nowell. His servant had hurried from Christchurch to Nowelhurst to report the almost certain death of Sir Cradockʼs only brother. He did not go first to ascertain it; for the road along the cliffs was impassable during the height of the storm. Sir Cradock received the announcement with very few signs of emotion. He had loved that Clayton in early youth, but now had almost forgotten him; and Clayton had never kept his brother at all apprised of his doings. Sir Cradock had gone into mourning for him, some three years ago; and Colonel Nowell never took the trouble to vindicate his vitality until Dr. Huttonʼs return. And, even though they had really known and loved one another as brothers, the loss would have been but a tap on the back to a manalready stabbed through the heart. Therefore Sir Cradockʼs sorrow exploded (as we love to make our griefs do, and as we so often express them) in the moneyed form. “I will give 500l.to the man who finds my poor brotherʼs body.”That little speech launched fourteen boats. What wrecker could hope for anything of a tenth part of the value? Men who had sworn that they never would pull in the same boat again together—might the Great Being, the Giver of life, strike them dead if they did!—forgot the solemn perjuration, and cried, “Give us your flipper, Ben; after all, there are worse fellows going than you, my lad:” and Ben responded, “Jump into the starn–sheets; you are just the hand as we want, Harry. Manyʼs the time Iʼve thought on you.” Even the dredging smacks hauled in–shore from their stations, and began to dredge for the Colonel; till the small boats resolved on united action, tossed oars, and held solemn council. Several speeches were made, none of them very long, but all embodying that fine sentiment, “fiat justitia, ruat cœlum,” in the form of “fair play, and be d—d to you.” Then Sandy Mac, of the practical mind, made a suggestion which was received with three wild rounds of cheers.“Give ‘em a little ballast, boys, as they be come in–shore to dredge for it.”With one consent the fourteen boats made for the shore, like the fleet of canoes described by the great Defoe. Nor long before each shallopʼs nose“grated on the golden sands.” The men in the dredging smacks looked at the sky to see if a squall was coming. And soon they got it, thick as hail, and as hot as pepper. The fourteen boats in battle array advanced upon them slowly, only two men rowing in each, all the rest standing up, and every man charged heavily. When they were at a nice wicket distance, old Mac gave the signal, and a flight of stones began, which, in the words of the ancient chroniclers, “well–nigh darkened the noonday sun.” The bravest dredger durst not show his head above the gunwale; for the Rushford stones are close of grain, and it is sweeter to start than to stop them. As for south–westers and dreadnoughts, they were no more use than vine–leaves in a storm of electric hail.“Ah, little then those mellow grapes their vine–leaf shall avail,So thickly rattles onthe tilesthe pelting of the hail.”Georg.i. 448.The dredgers gave in, and hoisted a shirt as a signal for a parley. The Rushford men refused to hear a syllable about “snacks.” What they demanded was “unconditional surrender;” and the dredgers, having no cement–stones on board, were compelled to accept it. So they took up their bags, and walked the smacks off three miles away to their station, with very faint hopes indeed that the obliging body might follow them. The boatmen celebrated their victory with three loud cheers for Sandy Mac, and a glass of grog all round. Thenthey returned to the likeliest spot, and dragged hard all the afternoon.“Tarnation ‘cute body,” cried Ben, “as ever I come across. Whoʼd a thought as any perfessing Christian would have stuck to Davy Jonesʼs locker, and refooged the parson and clerk so? Spit on your grapples, my lads of wax, and better luck the cast after.”“The Lord kens the best,” replied Sandy Mac, with a long–drawn sigh, “us poor vessels canna do more than is the will of the Lord, boys. Howsomever, I brought a bit of bait, a few lug–worms, and a soft crab or two; and please the Lord Iʼll rig my line out, and see if the bass be moving. And likely there may be a tumbling cod on the run speering after the puir bodies. Ah, yes, the will of the Lord; we ates them, and they ates us.”The canny old Scotchman, without foregoing his share in the general venture—for he helped to throw the grapnels, or took a spell at the rudder—rigged out a hook on his own account, and fastened the line to the rowlocks.“Fair play, my son,” cried Ben, winking at his comrades; “us go snacks in what you catch, mind. And the will of the Lord be done.”“Dinna ye wish ye may get it?”—the old man glowered at him indignantly—“Iʼll no fish at all on that onderstanding.”“Fish away, old boy, and be blessed, then. I see he ainʼt been in the purwentive sarvice for nothing. But Iʼm blowed if heʼll get much supper,Harry, if itʼs all to come off that darned old hook.” They all laughed at old Mac, who said nothing, but regarded his line attentively.With many a joke and many an oath, they toiled away till the evening fog came down upon the waters. Then, as they turned to go home, old Mac felt a run upon his fishing–gear. Hand over hand he began to haul in, coiling the line in the stern–sheets.“Itʼs a wapping big fish, as ever I feel, mates; na, na, yeʼll no touch it, or yeʼll be claiming to come and sup wi’ me. And deil a bit—the Lord forgive me—will ye haʼ, for grinning at an auld mon the likes of that, I tell ye. Lord ha’ mercy on me, a wake and sinful crater!”They all fell back, except Macbride, as before them in the twilight rose the ashy grey face and the long white hair of Colonel Clayton Nowell.Mac stuck to his haul like a Scotchman; to him the main chance was no ghost. Many a time has he told that story, and turned his quid upon it, cleverly raining between his teeth with fine art to prolong the crisis.The line being his, and the hook being his, and the haul of his own hands only, Sandy Mac could never see why he should not have all the money. The question came close to litigation; but for that, except as a word of menace, Mac was a deal too wide awake. He compounded at last for 300l.and let the other four share the residue.So poor Colonel Nowellʼs countenance, still lookinggrand and dignified, was saved from the congers and lobsters; and he sleeps close by his nephew and namesake in Nowelhurst churchyard. The body of Captain Roberts was found a long way up the Solent. He had always carried a weather helm, and shaped a good course for harbour. May they rest in peace!I have no doubt that Captain Roberts so rests, and am fain to believe, in the mercy of God, the same of the brave old Colonel. At least, we will hope that he is not gone to that eternal punishment, whose existence our divines contend for in a manner so disinterested. He had been a harum–scarum man; and now, having drowned and buried him, we may enter upon his history with the charity due to both quick and dead, but paid to the latter only.A soldier is, in many things, by virtue of his calling, a generous, careless man. We have always credited the sailor with these popular qualities; hornpipes, national drama, and naval novels imbuing us. I doubt if the sailor be, on the whole, so careless a man as the soldier. Jack is obliged, by force of circumstance, to bottle up his money, his rollicksomeness and sentimentality, and therefore has more to get rid of, when he comes ashore once in a twelvemonth. But spread the outburst over the year, strike the average of it, and the rainfall at Aldershot will equal that at Portsmouth.Only by watching the Army List—which at length he was tired of doing—could the Englishbrother tell if the Indian brother were living. Even the most careful of us begin to feel that care is too much for the nine lives of a cat, when Fahrenheit scores 110° in the very coolest corner, and the punkah is too hot to move. So, after one or two Griffin letters, full of marvels which the writer pretended not to marvel at, a silence, as of the jungle, ensued, and Sir Cradock thought of tigers. Then the slides of his own life began to move upon him; and less and less every year he thought of the boy who had laughed and cried with him.Lieutenant Nowell was ordered suddenly to the borders of the Punjaub, and for twenty years his brother Cradock drank his health at Christmas, and wondered how about the Article against praying for the dead. The next thing he heard, though it proved his own orthodoxy, disproved it by making him swear hard. Clayton Nowell had married; married an Affghan woman, to the great disgust of his brother officers, and the furious disdain of her kinsmen. A very fine family of Affghan chiefs immediately loaded their fusils, and swore to shoot both that English dog and their own Bright Eyes of the Morning.“To think,” cried Sir Cradock Nowell, “that a brother of mine should disgrace himself, and (what matters far more) his family, by marrying a wretched low Affghan woman!”“To think,” cried Mohammed Khans, “that a sister of ours should disgrace herself, and (whatmatters far more) her family, by marrying a cursed low English dog!”Which party was in the right, judge ye who understand the matter. The officers’ wives got over their prejudice against Bright Eyes of the Morning, and matronised, and petted, and tried to make a Christian of her. Captain Nowell adored her; she was so elegant in every motion, so loving, and so simple. She quite reformed him for the time from his too benevolent anthropology, from the love of dice, and the vinous doings which the Prophet does not encourage.But the poor thing died in her first confinement, while following her husbandʼs regiment at the foot of the Himalayah, leaving her new–born babe to the care of a faithful Affghan nurse, who had kept at her dear ladyʼs side, even among the infidels. This good nurse, being great of soul, and therefore strong of faith, could not bear that the child of her mistress, the highest blood of the Affghans, should become a low Frank idolater. So she set off with it, in the dark night, crouching past the sentinels, thieves, and other camp followers, and trusted herself to the boundless jungle, with only the stars to guide her. She put the wailing child to her breast, for her own dear babe was dead, and hushed it from the vigilant ears of the man–eating tiger. Then off again for Affghanistan, six hundred miles in the distance.How this wonderful woman, soothing and coaxing the little stranger (obtrusively remarkable forthe power of her squalls), how she got on through the thorns, the fire, the famine, the jaws of the tiger, and, worse than all, the pestilent fever, bred from the rich stagnation of that alluvial soil, is more than I, or any other unversed in womanʼs unity, may pretend to show. Enough that with her eyes upon the grand religious heights—heathen high places, we should call them—she struggled along through nearly three–quarters of her pilgrimage, and then she fell among robbers. A villanous hill–tribe, of mixed origin, always shifting, never working, never even fighting when they could run away, hated and despised by the nobler mountain races, the pariahs of the Himalayah, ignorant of any good, debased as any Africans—in a single word, Rakshas, or worshippers of the devil. A nice school of education for a young lady of tender years—or rather months—to commence in.The nurse was allotted to one of their chiefs, and the babe was about to be knocked on the head, when it struck an enlightened priest that in two years’ time she would make a savoury oblation to the devil; so the Affghan woman was allowed to keep her, until she began to crawl about among the dogs and babes of the station. Here she so distinguished herself by precocious skill in thieving, that her delighted owner conferred upon her the title of “Never–spot–the–dust,” and even instructed her how to steal the high priestʼs knife of sacrifice. That last exploit saved her life. Such a geniushad never appeared in any tribe of the Rakshas until this great manifestation.So “Never–spot–the–dust” was well treated, and made much of by her owner, to whom she was quite a fortune; and soon all the band looked up to her as the future priestess of the devil. For ten years she wandered about with them, becoming every year more important, proud that none could approach her skill in stealing, lying, and perjury, utterly void of all religion, except the few snatches of Moslemism which her nurse had contrived to impart, and the vague terror of the evil spirit to whom the wild men paid their vows. But, when she was ten years old, a tall and wonderfully active child, and just about to be consecrated by the blood of inferior children, a British force drew suddenly all around the nest of robbers. Of late the scoundrels had done things that made John Bullʼs hair stand on end; and, when his hair is in that condition, sparks are apt to come out of it.Seeing no chance of escape, and having very faint hopes of quarter, the robbers fought with a bravery which quite astonished themselves; but the evil spirit was against them—a rare inconsistence on his part. Their rascally camp was burnt, which they who had burned some hundreds of villages looked upon as the grossest cruelty, and more than half of their number were sent home to their patron and guardian. Then the Affghan nurse, so faithful and so unfortunate, fled fromthe burning camp with her charge, fell before the British colonel, and poured forth all her troubles. The Englishman knew Major Nowell, and had heard some parts of his history; so he took “Never–spot–the–dust” to her father, who was amazed at once and amused with her. She could run up the punkah, and stand on the top, and twirl around on one foot; she could cross the compound in three bounds; she could jump upon her fatherʼs shoulder, and stay there with the spring of her sole; she could glide along over the floor like a serpent, and hold on with one hand to anything. And then her most wonderful lightness of touch; she had fully earned her name, she could brush the dust without marking it. She could come behind her fatherʼs back, crawling over the table, and fasten his sword–hilt to his whiskers, without his knowing a thing of it. She could pick all his pockets, of course; but that was too rude an operation for her to take any delight in it. What she delighted to do, and what even she found difficult, was to take off his shoes and stockings without his being aware of it. It was a beautiful thing to see her: consummate skill is beautiful, in whatever way it is exercised. The shoe she could get off easily enough, but the difficulty was with the stocking; and there the chief difficulty was through the sensitiveness of the skin, unaccustomed to exposure. Though she had never heard of temperature, evaporation, or anything long, her genius told her the very first time where the tug was and how to meet it. Keeping her little cornelian lips—lips which you could see through—just at theproper distance, she would breathe so softly upon the skin that the breath could not be felt, as inch by inch she lowered down the thin elastic covering. Then she would jump up out of the ground, and shout into his ears, with a voice of argute silver—“Faddery, will ‘oo have ‘oor shoe? Fear to go wiyout him?”She began to talk English, after a bit; and the weather beaten Colonel—for now he had got that far—who had never looked upon any child, except as one rupee per month—thinking of his beloved Bright Eyes of the Morning, who might, with the will of God, have made a first–rate man of him, only she was too good for him,—thinking of her, and seeing the gleam of her glorious eyes in her child, he loved that child beyond all reason, and christened her “Eoa.”He never took to bad things again. He had something now in pledge with God; a part of himself that still would live, and love him when he was skeleton. And that, his better part, should learn how lying and stealing do not lead to the right half of the other world.His ideas about that other world were as dormant as Eoaʼs; but now he began to think about it, because he wanted to see her there. So, with lots of tears, not only feminine, Eoa Nowell was sent to the best school in Calcutta, where she taught the other young ladies some very odd things indeed.Wherever she went, she must be foremost; “second to none” was her motto. Therefore shelearned with amazing quickness; but it was not so easy to unlearn.Then arose that awful mutiny, and the Colonel at Mhow was shot through the neck, and let lie, by his own soldiers. His daughter heard of it, and screamed, and no walls ever built would hold her. All the way from Calcutta, up the dreary Ganges, she forced her passage, sometimes by boat, sometimes on her weariless feet.She had never cared much for civilization, and loved every blade of the jungle. The old life revived within her, as she looked upon the broad waters, and the boundless yellow tangle, wherein glided no swifter thing, nothing more elegant, than herself.She found her darling father in some rude cantonment, prostrate, helpless, clinging faintly to the verge of death. Dead long ago he must have been but for Rufus Hutton; and dead even now he would have been but for his daughterʼs presence. His dreamy eyes went round the hut to follow her graceful movements; she alone could tend the wounds as if with the fall of gossamer, she alone could soothe and fan the intolerable aching. They looked into each otherʼs eyes and cried without thinking about it.Then, as he gradually got better, and the surge of trouble passed them, Eoa showed for his amusement all her strange accomplishments. She had not forgotten one of them in the grand school at Calcutta. They had even grown with her growth, and strengthened with her strength.She would leap over Rufus Huttonʼs head like a flash of light, and stand facing him, without a muscle moving, and on his back would be a land–crab; she would put his up–country hat on the floor, and walk on one foot round the crown of it; she would steal his case of instruments, and toss them in the air all open, and catch them all at once.By her nursing and her loving, her stealing and her mockery, she won Dr. Huttonʼs heart so entirely that he would have proposed to her, had she only been of marriageable age, or had come to think about anything.Then they had all to cut and run, with barely three hours’ notice, for the ebb of the rebellion swept through that district mightily. Eoa went to school again, and her father came to see her daily, until he was appointed to a regiment having something more than name and shadow.Now Eoa, having learned everything that they can teach in Calcutta, the Himalayah, or the jungle, was coming to England to receive the down and crown of accomplishments. Who could tell but what they might even teach her affectation? Youth is plastic and imitative; and she was sure to find plenty of models.Not that the honest Colonel wished to make a sickly humbug of her. His own views were wide and grand, only too philoprogenitive. Still, like most men of that class, who, upon sudden reformation, love Truth so much that they roll upon her, having no firm rules of his own, and being ashamedto profess anything, with the bad life fresh in memory, he took the opinion of old fogeys who had been every bit as unblest as himself, but had sown with a drill their wild oats. The verdict of all was one—“Miss Nowell must go to England.”Finding his wound still troublesome, he resolved to retire from service; he had not saved half a lac of rupees, and his pension would not be a mighty one; but, between the two, there would be enough for an old man to live upon decently, and go wherever he was told that his daughter ought to go.He had seen enough of life, and found that it only meant repentance; all that remained of it should be for the pleasure and love of his daughter. And he knew that there was a sum in England, which must have been long accumulating—a sum left on trust for him and his children, under a very old settlement. He would never touch a farthing of it; every farthing should go to Eoa. Bless her dear eyes; they had the true light of his own Bright Eyes of the Morning.

Meanwhile that keen engineering firm, wind, wave, and tide, had established another little business on the coast hard by. This was the general wreck and crack–up of the stout Pell–castle, a proceeding unnoticed by any one except good mother Jacob, whose attention was drawn to it forcibly, as the head of the bed fell in upon her. Thereupon the stout dame made a rush for it, taking only her cat and spectacles, and the little teapot of money. As she started at a furious pace, and presented to the elements a large superficial area, the wind could not resist the temptation, but wafted her to the top of the bunney, without her feet so much as once a–touching the blessed earth—she goes mad if any one doubts it—and planted her in a white–thorn tree, and brought an “elam” of thatch to shelter her from her own beloved roof. There, when the wind subsided, she was happily discovered by some enterprising children; the catwas sitting at her side; in one blue hand she held her specs, and in the other a teapot.

Poor Pellʼs easy–chair was thrown up, three miles to the westward, in the course of the next spring–tides, and, being well known all over the neighbourhood (from his lending it to sick people), was brought to him, with a round of cheers, by half a dozen fishermen. They refused the half–crown he offered them, and displayed the greatest anxiety lest his honour should believe it was them as had taken the shine off. The workmanship not being modern, the chair was little the worse for its voyage; only it took six months to dry, and had a fine smell of brine ever afterwards. Then, having been lent to an old saltʼs widow, it won such a reputation, all across the New Forest, as a specific for “rheumatics in the small of the back,” that old women, havingnosmall to their backs, walked all the way from Lyndhurst, “just to sot themselves down in it, and how much was to pay, please, for a quarter of an hour?” “A shilling,” said Octave Pell, “a shilling for the new lifeboat that lives under Christchurch Head.” Then they pulled out mighty silver watches, and paid the shilling at the fifteen minutes. The walk, and the thought of the miracle, and the fear of making fools of themselves, did such a deal of good, that a man got up a ‘bus for it; but Pell said, “No; none who come by ‘bus shall sit in my chair of ease.”

The greedy sea returned brave Pell no otherpart of his property. His red tobacco–jar, indeed, was found by some of the dredgemen three or four years afterwards, but they did not know it was his, and sold it—crusted as it was with testacea, and ribboned with sea–weed—to the zealous secretary of—I wonʼt say what museum. “Roman, or perhaps Samian, or possibly Phœnician ware,” cried the secretary, lit with fine—though, it may be, loose—ideas; and he catalogued it: “Phœnician in the opinion of an F.A.S. There is every reason to believe it a vase for Thuricremation.” “Hollo!” cried Pell, when he went there to lecture upon cricket as played by Ulysses, “why, Iʼm blessed if you havenʼt got——” “The most undoubted Phœnician relic contained in any museum!” So he laughed with other peopleʼs cheeks, like a man of sense.

All the folk of Rushford, and many too of Nowelhurst, contributed to a secret fund for refurnishing Octavius Pell. So great were the mystery and speed, and so clever the management of the dissenting parson, that two great vans were down upon Pell before he had heard a word of it. He stood at the door of the cobblerʼs shop, and tried to make a speech; but the hurrahs were too many for him, and he turned away and cried. Tell me that any man in England need be anything but popular who has a heart of his own, and is not ashamed of having it!

At the Crown, where the three sick people were, a very fine trade was doing; but a finer one stillupon the beach, as the sea went down and the choice contents of theAliwalcame up. For that terrible storm began to abate about noon on the 26th. It had blown as hard for twenty–four hours as it ever does blow in any land, except in the gaps of the Andes and during cyclones of the tropics. Now the core of the storm had no more cells in it; and the puffs that came from the west and north–west, and so on till it got to the pole–star, were violent indeed, but desultory, and seemed not to know where they were going. Finally, about midnight, the wind owned that its turn was over, and sunk (well satisfied with its work) into the arms of slumber—“placidâque ibi demum morte quievit.” And its work had been done right well. No English storm since the vast typhoon of 1703—which I should like to write about some day if my little life–storm blows long enough—had wrought such glorious havoc upon that swearing beaver, man. It had routed his villages at the Landʼs End, and lifted like footstools his breakwater blocks; it had scared of their lives his Eddystone watchmen, and put out half his lighthouses; it had broken upon his royalty, and swept down the oaks of the New Forest; it had streaked with wrecks the Goodwin Sands, and washed ships out of harbours of refuge; it had leaped upon London as on a drain–trap, and jarred it as a man whistles upon his fingers; it had huddled pell–mell all the coal–trade;—saddest vaunt (though not the last), it had strewn withgashed and mangled bodies (like its own waves, countless) the coasts of Anglesea and Caernarvon.

On the morning now of the 27th, with the long sullen swell gold–beater–skinned by the recovering sun, the shingle–bank was full of interest to an active trader. They had picked up several bodies with a good bit of money upon them, and the beach was strewn with oranges none the worse for a little tossing. For the stout East IndiamanAliwalhad touched at the Western Islands, and taken on board a thousand boxes of the early orange harvest. And not only oranges were rolling among the wrack, the starfish, the sharkʼs teeth, and the cuttle–eggs, but also many a pretty thing, once prized and petted by women. There were little boxes with gilt and paint, sucked heartily by the salt water, and porcupine–quills rasping up from panels of polished ebony, cracked mirrors inside them, and mother–of–pearl, and beading of scented wood; all the taste and the labour of man yawning like dead cockles, crimped backward, sodden and shredded, as hopeless a wreck as a drunkard.

Then there were barrels, and heavy chests, planking already like hemp in the prison–yard, bulkheads, and bulwarks, and cordage, and reeve–blocks, and ten thousand other things, well appreciated by the wreckers, who were hauling them up the bunneys; while the Admiralty droitsmen made an accurate inventory of the bungs and the blackingbottles. Some of the sailors, and most of the passengers, who had escaped in the boats to Christchurch, came over to look for anything that might turn up of their property. Hereupon several fights ensued, and many poor fellows enjoyed opportunity for a closer inspection of the Rushford stratum than the most sanguine of their number anticipated; until the police came down in force, and extinguished at once all other rights of salvage except their own.

Nevertheless there was yet one field upon which the police could not interfere; although Jack wished for nothing better than to catch the lubbers there. This was Jackʼs own domain, the sea, where an animated search was going on for the body of Colonel Nowell. His servant had hurried from Christchurch to Nowelhurst to report the almost certain death of Sir Cradockʼs only brother. He did not go first to ascertain it; for the road along the cliffs was impassable during the height of the storm. Sir Cradock received the announcement with very few signs of emotion. He had loved that Clayton in early youth, but now had almost forgotten him; and Clayton had never kept his brother at all apprised of his doings. Sir Cradock had gone into mourning for him, some three years ago; and Colonel Nowell never took the trouble to vindicate his vitality until Dr. Huttonʼs return. And, even though they had really known and loved one another as brothers, the loss would have been but a tap on the back to a manalready stabbed through the heart. Therefore Sir Cradockʼs sorrow exploded (as we love to make our griefs do, and as we so often express them) in the moneyed form. “I will give 500l.to the man who finds my poor brotherʼs body.”

That little speech launched fourteen boats. What wrecker could hope for anything of a tenth part of the value? Men who had sworn that they never would pull in the same boat again together—might the Great Being, the Giver of life, strike them dead if they did!—forgot the solemn perjuration, and cried, “Give us your flipper, Ben; after all, there are worse fellows going than you, my lad:” and Ben responded, “Jump into the starn–sheets; you are just the hand as we want, Harry. Manyʼs the time Iʼve thought on you.” Even the dredging smacks hauled in–shore from their stations, and began to dredge for the Colonel; till the small boats resolved on united action, tossed oars, and held solemn council. Several speeches were made, none of them very long, but all embodying that fine sentiment, “fiat justitia, ruat cœlum,” in the form of “fair play, and be d—d to you.” Then Sandy Mac, of the practical mind, made a suggestion which was received with three wild rounds of cheers.

“Give ‘em a little ballast, boys, as they be come in–shore to dredge for it.”

With one consent the fourteen boats made for the shore, like the fleet of canoes described by the great Defoe. Nor long before each shallopʼs nose“grated on the golden sands.” The men in the dredging smacks looked at the sky to see if a squall was coming. And soon they got it, thick as hail, and as hot as pepper. The fourteen boats in battle array advanced upon them slowly, only two men rowing in each, all the rest standing up, and every man charged heavily. When they were at a nice wicket distance, old Mac gave the signal, and a flight of stones began, which, in the words of the ancient chroniclers, “well–nigh darkened the noonday sun.” The bravest dredger durst not show his head above the gunwale; for the Rushford stones are close of grain, and it is sweeter to start than to stop them. As for south–westers and dreadnoughts, they were no more use than vine–leaves in a storm of electric hail.

“Ah, little then those mellow grapes their vine–leaf shall avail,

So thickly rattles onthe tilesthe pelting of the hail.”

Georg.i. 448.

The dredgers gave in, and hoisted a shirt as a signal for a parley. The Rushford men refused to hear a syllable about “snacks.” What they demanded was “unconditional surrender;” and the dredgers, having no cement–stones on board, were compelled to accept it. So they took up their bags, and walked the smacks off three miles away to their station, with very faint hopes indeed that the obliging body might follow them. The boatmen celebrated their victory with three loud cheers for Sandy Mac, and a glass of grog all round. Thenthey returned to the likeliest spot, and dragged hard all the afternoon.

“Tarnation ‘cute body,” cried Ben, “as ever I come across. Whoʼd a thought as any perfessing Christian would have stuck to Davy Jonesʼs locker, and refooged the parson and clerk so? Spit on your grapples, my lads of wax, and better luck the cast after.”

“The Lord kens the best,” replied Sandy Mac, with a long–drawn sigh, “us poor vessels canna do more than is the will of the Lord, boys. Howsomever, I brought a bit of bait, a few lug–worms, and a soft crab or two; and please the Lord Iʼll rig my line out, and see if the bass be moving. And likely there may be a tumbling cod on the run speering after the puir bodies. Ah, yes, the will of the Lord; we ates them, and they ates us.”

The canny old Scotchman, without foregoing his share in the general venture—for he helped to throw the grapnels, or took a spell at the rudder—rigged out a hook on his own account, and fastened the line to the rowlocks.

“Fair play, my son,” cried Ben, winking at his comrades; “us go snacks in what you catch, mind. And the will of the Lord be done.”

“Dinna ye wish ye may get it?”—the old man glowered at him indignantly—“Iʼll no fish at all on that onderstanding.”

“Fish away, old boy, and be blessed, then. I see he ainʼt been in the purwentive sarvice for nothing. But Iʼm blowed if heʼll get much supper,Harry, if itʼs all to come off that darned old hook.” They all laughed at old Mac, who said nothing, but regarded his line attentively.

With many a joke and many an oath, they toiled away till the evening fog came down upon the waters. Then, as they turned to go home, old Mac felt a run upon his fishing–gear. Hand over hand he began to haul in, coiling the line in the stern–sheets.

“Itʼs a wapping big fish, as ever I feel, mates; na, na, yeʼll no touch it, or yeʼll be claiming to come and sup wi’ me. And deil a bit—the Lord forgive me—will ye haʼ, for grinning at an auld mon the likes of that, I tell ye. Lord ha’ mercy on me, a wake and sinful crater!”

They all fell back, except Macbride, as before them in the twilight rose the ashy grey face and the long white hair of Colonel Clayton Nowell.

Mac stuck to his haul like a Scotchman; to him the main chance was no ghost. Many a time has he told that story, and turned his quid upon it, cleverly raining between his teeth with fine art to prolong the crisis.

The line being his, and the hook being his, and the haul of his own hands only, Sandy Mac could never see why he should not have all the money. The question came close to litigation; but for that, except as a word of menace, Mac was a deal too wide awake. He compounded at last for 300l.and let the other four share the residue.

So poor Colonel Nowellʼs countenance, still lookinggrand and dignified, was saved from the congers and lobsters; and he sleeps close by his nephew and namesake in Nowelhurst churchyard. The body of Captain Roberts was found a long way up the Solent. He had always carried a weather helm, and shaped a good course for harbour. May they rest in peace!

I have no doubt that Captain Roberts so rests, and am fain to believe, in the mercy of God, the same of the brave old Colonel. At least, we will hope that he is not gone to that eternal punishment, whose existence our divines contend for in a manner so disinterested. He had been a harum–scarum man; and now, having drowned and buried him, we may enter upon his history with the charity due to both quick and dead, but paid to the latter only.

A soldier is, in many things, by virtue of his calling, a generous, careless man. We have always credited the sailor with these popular qualities; hornpipes, national drama, and naval novels imbuing us. I doubt if the sailor be, on the whole, so careless a man as the soldier. Jack is obliged, by force of circumstance, to bottle up his money, his rollicksomeness and sentimentality, and therefore has more to get rid of, when he comes ashore once in a twelvemonth. But spread the outburst over the year, strike the average of it, and the rainfall at Aldershot will equal that at Portsmouth.

Only by watching the Army List—which at length he was tired of doing—could the Englishbrother tell if the Indian brother were living. Even the most careful of us begin to feel that care is too much for the nine lives of a cat, when Fahrenheit scores 110° in the very coolest corner, and the punkah is too hot to move. So, after one or two Griffin letters, full of marvels which the writer pretended not to marvel at, a silence, as of the jungle, ensued, and Sir Cradock thought of tigers. Then the slides of his own life began to move upon him; and less and less every year he thought of the boy who had laughed and cried with him.

Lieutenant Nowell was ordered suddenly to the borders of the Punjaub, and for twenty years his brother Cradock drank his health at Christmas, and wondered how about the Article against praying for the dead. The next thing he heard, though it proved his own orthodoxy, disproved it by making him swear hard. Clayton Nowell had married; married an Affghan woman, to the great disgust of his brother officers, and the furious disdain of her kinsmen. A very fine family of Affghan chiefs immediately loaded their fusils, and swore to shoot both that English dog and their own Bright Eyes of the Morning.

“To think,” cried Sir Cradock Nowell, “that a brother of mine should disgrace himself, and (what matters far more) his family, by marrying a wretched low Affghan woman!”

“To think,” cried Mohammed Khans, “that a sister of ours should disgrace herself, and (whatmatters far more) her family, by marrying a cursed low English dog!”

Which party was in the right, judge ye who understand the matter. The officers’ wives got over their prejudice against Bright Eyes of the Morning, and matronised, and petted, and tried to make a Christian of her. Captain Nowell adored her; she was so elegant in every motion, so loving, and so simple. She quite reformed him for the time from his too benevolent anthropology, from the love of dice, and the vinous doings which the Prophet does not encourage.

But the poor thing died in her first confinement, while following her husbandʼs regiment at the foot of the Himalayah, leaving her new–born babe to the care of a faithful Affghan nurse, who had kept at her dear ladyʼs side, even among the infidels. This good nurse, being great of soul, and therefore strong of faith, could not bear that the child of her mistress, the highest blood of the Affghans, should become a low Frank idolater. So she set off with it, in the dark night, crouching past the sentinels, thieves, and other camp followers, and trusted herself to the boundless jungle, with only the stars to guide her. She put the wailing child to her breast, for her own dear babe was dead, and hushed it from the vigilant ears of the man–eating tiger. Then off again for Affghanistan, six hundred miles in the distance.

How this wonderful woman, soothing and coaxing the little stranger (obtrusively remarkable forthe power of her squalls), how she got on through the thorns, the fire, the famine, the jaws of the tiger, and, worse than all, the pestilent fever, bred from the rich stagnation of that alluvial soil, is more than I, or any other unversed in womanʼs unity, may pretend to show. Enough that with her eyes upon the grand religious heights—heathen high places, we should call them—she struggled along through nearly three–quarters of her pilgrimage, and then she fell among robbers. A villanous hill–tribe, of mixed origin, always shifting, never working, never even fighting when they could run away, hated and despised by the nobler mountain races, the pariahs of the Himalayah, ignorant of any good, debased as any Africans—in a single word, Rakshas, or worshippers of the devil. A nice school of education for a young lady of tender years—or rather months—to commence in.

The nurse was allotted to one of their chiefs, and the babe was about to be knocked on the head, when it struck an enlightened priest that in two years’ time she would make a savoury oblation to the devil; so the Affghan woman was allowed to keep her, until she began to crawl about among the dogs and babes of the station. Here she so distinguished herself by precocious skill in thieving, that her delighted owner conferred upon her the title of “Never–spot–the–dust,” and even instructed her how to steal the high priestʼs knife of sacrifice. That last exploit saved her life. Such a geniushad never appeared in any tribe of the Rakshas until this great manifestation.

So “Never–spot–the–dust” was well treated, and made much of by her owner, to whom she was quite a fortune; and soon all the band looked up to her as the future priestess of the devil. For ten years she wandered about with them, becoming every year more important, proud that none could approach her skill in stealing, lying, and perjury, utterly void of all religion, except the few snatches of Moslemism which her nurse had contrived to impart, and the vague terror of the evil spirit to whom the wild men paid their vows. But, when she was ten years old, a tall and wonderfully active child, and just about to be consecrated by the blood of inferior children, a British force drew suddenly all around the nest of robbers. Of late the scoundrels had done things that made John Bullʼs hair stand on end; and, when his hair is in that condition, sparks are apt to come out of it.

Seeing no chance of escape, and having very faint hopes of quarter, the robbers fought with a bravery which quite astonished themselves; but the evil spirit was against them—a rare inconsistence on his part. Their rascally camp was burnt, which they who had burned some hundreds of villages looked upon as the grossest cruelty, and more than half of their number were sent home to their patron and guardian. Then the Affghan nurse, so faithful and so unfortunate, fled fromthe burning camp with her charge, fell before the British colonel, and poured forth all her troubles. The Englishman knew Major Nowell, and had heard some parts of his history; so he took “Never–spot–the–dust” to her father, who was amazed at once and amused with her. She could run up the punkah, and stand on the top, and twirl around on one foot; she could cross the compound in three bounds; she could jump upon her fatherʼs shoulder, and stay there with the spring of her sole; she could glide along over the floor like a serpent, and hold on with one hand to anything. And then her most wonderful lightness of touch; she had fully earned her name, she could brush the dust without marking it. She could come behind her fatherʼs back, crawling over the table, and fasten his sword–hilt to his whiskers, without his knowing a thing of it. She could pick all his pockets, of course; but that was too rude an operation for her to take any delight in it. What she delighted to do, and what even she found difficult, was to take off his shoes and stockings without his being aware of it. It was a beautiful thing to see her: consummate skill is beautiful, in whatever way it is exercised. The shoe she could get off easily enough, but the difficulty was with the stocking; and there the chief difficulty was through the sensitiveness of the skin, unaccustomed to exposure. Though she had never heard of temperature, evaporation, or anything long, her genius told her the very first time where the tug was and how to meet it. Keeping her little cornelian lips—lips which you could see through—just at theproper distance, she would breathe so softly upon the skin that the breath could not be felt, as inch by inch she lowered down the thin elastic covering. Then she would jump up out of the ground, and shout into his ears, with a voice of argute silver—

“Faddery, will ‘oo have ‘oor shoe? Fear to go wiyout him?”

She began to talk English, after a bit; and the weather beaten Colonel—for now he had got that far—who had never looked upon any child, except as one rupee per month—thinking of his beloved Bright Eyes of the Morning, who might, with the will of God, have made a first–rate man of him, only she was too good for him,—thinking of her, and seeing the gleam of her glorious eyes in her child, he loved that child beyond all reason, and christened her “Eoa.”

He never took to bad things again. He had something now in pledge with God; a part of himself that still would live, and love him when he was skeleton. And that, his better part, should learn how lying and stealing do not lead to the right half of the other world.

His ideas about that other world were as dormant as Eoaʼs; but now he began to think about it, because he wanted to see her there. So, with lots of tears, not only feminine, Eoa Nowell was sent to the best school in Calcutta, where she taught the other young ladies some very odd things indeed.

Wherever she went, she must be foremost; “second to none” was her motto. Therefore shelearned with amazing quickness; but it was not so easy to unlearn.

Then arose that awful mutiny, and the Colonel at Mhow was shot through the neck, and let lie, by his own soldiers. His daughter heard of it, and screamed, and no walls ever built would hold her. All the way from Calcutta, up the dreary Ganges, she forced her passage, sometimes by boat, sometimes on her weariless feet.

She had never cared much for civilization, and loved every blade of the jungle. The old life revived within her, as she looked upon the broad waters, and the boundless yellow tangle, wherein glided no swifter thing, nothing more elegant, than herself.

She found her darling father in some rude cantonment, prostrate, helpless, clinging faintly to the verge of death. Dead long ago he must have been but for Rufus Hutton; and dead even now he would have been but for his daughterʼs presence. His dreamy eyes went round the hut to follow her graceful movements; she alone could tend the wounds as if with the fall of gossamer, she alone could soothe and fan the intolerable aching. They looked into each otherʼs eyes and cried without thinking about it.

Then, as he gradually got better, and the surge of trouble passed them, Eoa showed for his amusement all her strange accomplishments. She had not forgotten one of them in the grand school at Calcutta. They had even grown with her growth, and strengthened with her strength.

She would leap over Rufus Huttonʼs head like a flash of light, and stand facing him, without a muscle moving, and on his back would be a land–crab; she would put his up–country hat on the floor, and walk on one foot round the crown of it; she would steal his case of instruments, and toss them in the air all open, and catch them all at once.

By her nursing and her loving, her stealing and her mockery, she won Dr. Huttonʼs heart so entirely that he would have proposed to her, had she only been of marriageable age, or had come to think about anything.

Then they had all to cut and run, with barely three hours’ notice, for the ebb of the rebellion swept through that district mightily. Eoa went to school again, and her father came to see her daily, until he was appointed to a regiment having something more than name and shadow.

Now Eoa, having learned everything that they can teach in Calcutta, the Himalayah, or the jungle, was coming to England to receive the down and crown of accomplishments. Who could tell but what they might even teach her affectation? Youth is plastic and imitative; and she was sure to find plenty of models.

Not that the honest Colonel wished to make a sickly humbug of her. His own views were wide and grand, only too philoprogenitive. Still, like most men of that class, who, upon sudden reformation, love Truth so much that they roll upon her, having no firm rules of his own, and being ashamedto profess anything, with the bad life fresh in memory, he took the opinion of old fogeys who had been every bit as unblest as himself, but had sown with a drill their wild oats. The verdict of all was one—“Miss Nowell must go to England.”

Finding his wound still troublesome, he resolved to retire from service; he had not saved half a lac of rupees, and his pension would not be a mighty one; but, between the two, there would be enough for an old man to live upon decently, and go wherever he was told that his daughter ought to go.

He had seen enough of life, and found that it only meant repentance; all that remained of it should be for the pleasure and love of his daughter. And he knew that there was a sum in England, which must have been long accumulating—a sum left on trust for him and his children, under a very old settlement. He would never touch a farthing of it; every farthing should go to Eoa. Bless her dear eyes; they had the true light of his own Bright Eyes of the Morning.

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