THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW.
"Ah, Miss Basset; leave us--do leave us, for Heaven's sake--this is
no scene for you!" said Heriot, half imperatively, half entreatingly.
"Ashton, I can ill spare you, but do lead her away. Tell her all, if
you choose, now. There is, I hope, no further fear."
Morley put his arms round Ethel, and lifted her back into her cabin.
Still she did not speak, though her pale lips and inquiring eyes
showed how eagerly she sought an explanation of the terrible scene
formed by the busy group; but Morley was silent, for he knew not how
to begin, and contented himself by repeating, as people usually do,
that she must compose herself, be calm, and so forth.
"Compose myself for what?" she asked, suddenly. "What has
happened?--who is injured? Not papa--not my papa, surely?"
"Yes, Ethel, your papa," replied Morley, retaining her hands firmly
in his own.
She uttered a cry, and was breaking from him, when he restrained her
in his arms.
"Pardon me, Ethel--dear Ethel, pardon me," he continued to repeat;
"your father has suffered much maltreatment at the hands of those
villains on deck; but Dr. Heriot has nearly restored him--a little
time, and he shall tell you all about it himself."
"Oh," she sobbed, and, overcome by emotion, dropped her head on
Morley's shoulder; "my father--my loved papa!"
And, as she spoke, how convulsively the white bosom heaved.
Impulsive, and wildly energetic, Rose Basset now tried to escape from
the cabin; but Morley placed his back against the door, and strove to
soothe and to retain her.
At first, it would appear that Ethel had not recognised her father in
that stripped man, whose face was swollen, streaked with blood, and
livid by recent strangulation; and thus, unobserved, she had
overlooked the operations of Heriot for nearly a minute in silent
bewilderment and alarm.
She was almost fainting again on learning that this helpless patient
was her father, but gathered courage from the energy of Rose, who
kept incessantly repeating:
"Let me out, Morley--let me go to papa! I must--I shall get out!
Mr. Ashton, will you dare to keep me from papa, who is ill?"
Then Ethel joined with her, and insisted so touchingly and so
vehemently, that Morley was compelled to yield, and they rushed to
the bedside of Mr. Basset, just as Heriot and Tom Bartelot placed him
in a comfortable sitting posture, well bolstered up, and covered with
warm blankets, where he sat breathing heavily; but with his eyes
closed, and his head reclining on the shoulder of the young doctor,
in whose face there shone a bright smile of joy and triumph.
"Papa, papa, speak to me!" cried Ethel, in a piercing voice, as she
thrust herself between Captain Phillips and Tom Bartelot, knelt by
the side of the bed--which was nearly level with the cabin-floor--and
stroked his brow with a delicate and tremulous hand, while
caressingly she drew his head upon her own breast; "you are not
dying, papa--you cannot be dying! oh, say so--speak to your own
Ethel!"
A slight quivering of the eyelids, and, if possible, a heavier
respiration, was his sole response.
Again she spoke to him more imploringly, and this time the head was
raised for a moment, but only to drop more heavily on her bosom.
"Will he die?--will he die?--speak, Leslie!" exclaimed Rose, while
wringing her hands.
"No, not if my skill, with God's blessing, can save him, Rose. He is
recovering rapidly."
"But recovering from what?" asked Ethel, shrilly; "what manner of
ailment or maltreatment is this?"
"Himself will tell you all about it to-morrow; to-day he must
sleep--I say must, my dear Miss Basset," said Heriot, in an
impressive whisper.
"Oh, that by dying I could save my papa--my own dear papa!" cried
Rose, as she rocked herself to and fro, her eyes streaming with tears
the while.
"Don't talk so, Rose," said Heriot, almost angrily; "people can do
more good by living than by dying, so, if you are determined to stay
here, let us see what a dear little nurse you can make. There is no
assistant a medical man appreciates so much as a capital nurse; so
look alive, you little fairy--end this bother, and squeeze that
sponge."
Heriot's cheerful and confident manner did more to soothe and
reassure Ethel and Rose than all the friendly hopes expressed by the
others--even by Morley Ashton. Ethel patted him on the cheek and
kissed him, and bluff Captain Phillips too; which made old Noah
Gawthrop's eyes begin to twinkle, and he wiped his mouth with the
sleeve of his jacket, and thrust his quid of pigtail into a remote
corner of his jaws, in the hope that his turn would come in time.
"There is a crisis in the life of everybody;" Ethel Basset had passed
that crisis, but it had been one of woe and terror. She had passed,
as it were, through a tempest of emotions and alarms of
late--emotions that had separated her from her girlish life,
strengthened her mental powers, and developed her faculties. So she
sought to brace up her energies for trials that might yet be to
come--to be a woman of action, rather than, like poor little Rose, a
girl of thoughts and tears.
So now she bent all the energies of life and affection to nursing her
father, upon whom, as the evening deepened, a heavy slumber stole;
thus, left by his side, alone--Rose had fallen asleep, exhausted--she
sat and watched, heedless of her friends, who were occupied
elsewhere, and heedless whether the ship was becalmed, or rushing
before a gale of wind.
Ethel remembered the death of her mother, and the dull stunning sense
of a mighty and unwonted calamity and loss--the yawning of a chasm
that never more would close; the hushing of a familiar voice that
would never more be heard; the passing away of a beloved face, that
would never more be seen; and she remembered the calm aspect of the
corpse disposed in its coffin, lined with white satin, laid on her
own bed, with white curtains, draped up--the same bed in which all
her children had been born, around which they had all hovered for
weeks in the close atmosphere of a sick room, hushed into silence and
on tiptoe, and about which they had all knelt with bowed heads, as
the spirit that had lingered for hours between eternity and time fled
at last on its mysterious and unknown journey; and Ethel felt that
then she could pray.
Now she knelt by her father's side, in that little and confined
cabin, where no sound reached her but his deep breathing, and the
jarring of the night-lamp that swung from the beam above, and swayed
to and fro as the ship rolled, casting weird gleams alike on the pale
face of the watcher, and the discoloured features of the sleeper; but
she, more stunned and more bewildered than ever, had neither words
nor language, nor, at times, coherent thought in her soul, yet that
soul was full of a dumb, despairing entreaty of Heaven, but in what
form she neither knew nor felt, and scarcely did the chaos of her
mind enable her to know what she would ask.
Rose was not with her now, we have said.
Poor child, her grief was noisy, and full of tears, so she had long
since cried herself to sleep beside old Nance Folgate.
"Is not all this some phantasmagoria, or am I turning mad?" thought
Ethel. "Why am I so far away from Laurel Lodge--far away upon this
world of waters, and enduring all these miseries? Ah, my God! if all
these should be but the dreams of insanity?"
She feared this all the more that, by some idiosyncrasy of the human
mind, amid the horror of her great grief, she was haunted, almost
tormented, by a frivolous song and air she used to sing at home.
Why was this, and how was this? The number of brass rings on the
curtain rods, the gyrations of the flies, that buzzed about the
night-lamp and clustered on the beams overhead, the knots in the
wainscot, that seemed, especially when in shadow, to become quaint
and freakish faces, all mingled with the memory of this song, which
struggled for mastery with the prayers she sought to say, and with
the awful idea that her father was dying, and that he and she were
alone together in that fatal ship upon the midnight sea.
Anon, the singular and most unwonted silence that reigned around her,
the absence of all sounds in the cabin, roused her at last to
external objects.
She looked out of the little state-room in which her father lay; the
cabin was empty; Morley, Bartelot, Captain Phillips, and all were
gone!
She looked at her watch; the time was a quarter to twelve. Midnight
was at hand.
New and vague terrors seized her; she ran to her own cabin, and found
Rose still asleep beside their old nurse.
"Morley!" cried Ethel, in great alarm; "Morley! where are you?"
But the cabin was dark; she received no answer, and heard no sound
but the regulated clatter of the rudder in its case, and the wind
whistling drearily through the mizzentop.
Ere this a great change had taken place on board the _Hermione_; but
the relation of what had occurred deserves a chapter to itself.