THEY THINK THAT HELP IS AT HAND.
Through his growing preoccupation the doctor in some sort reviewed the
situation; and any one near to him might have heard these words drop
from his lips,--
“Too much rolling, and not enough pitching.”
Then recalled to himself by the dark workings of his mind, he sank again
into thought, as a miner into his shaft. His meditation in nowise
interfered with his watch on the sea. The contemplation of the sea is in
itself a reverie.
The dark punishment of the waters, eternally tortured, was commencing. A
lamentation arose from the whole main. Preparations, confused and
melancholy, were forming in space. The doctor observed all before him,
and lost no detail. There was, however, no sign of scrutiny in his face.
One does not scrutinize hell.
A vast commotion, yet half latent, but visible through the turmoils in
space, increased and irritated, more and more, the winds, the vapours,
the waves. Nothing is so logical and nothing appears so absurd as the
ocean. Self-dispersion is the essence of its sovereignty, and is one of
the elements of its redundance. The sea is ever for and against. It
knots that it may unravel itself; one of its slopes attacks, the other
relieves. No apparition is so wonderful as the waves. Who can paint the
alternating hollows and promontories, the valleys, the melting bosoms,
the sketches? How render the thickets of foam, blendings of mountains
and dreams? The indescribable is everywhere there--in the rending, in
the frowning, in the anxiety, in the perpetual contradiction, in the
chiaroscuro, in the pendants of the cloud, in the keys of the ever-open
vault, in the disaggregation without rupture, in the funereal tumult
caused by all that madness!
The wind had just set due north. Its violence was so favourable and so
useful in driving them away from England that the captain of the
_Matutina_ had made up his mind to set all sail. The hooker slipped
through the foam as at a gallop, the wind right aft, bounding from wave
to wave in a gay frenzy. The fugitives were delighted, and laughed; they
clapped their hands, applauded the surf, the sea, the wind, the sails,
the swift progress, the flight, all unmindful of the future. The doctor
appeared not to see them, and dreamt on.
Every vestige of day had faded away. This was the moment when the child,
watching from the distant cliff, lost sight of the hooker. Up to then
his glance had remained fixed, and, as it were, leaning on the vessel.
What part had that look in fate? When the hooker was lost to sight in
the distance, and when the child could no longer see aught, the child
went north and the ship went south.
All were plunged in darkness.