tunately the wind was with them, and Nancolas could relinquish his oars for a time, as he threw his oilskin coat around the lad, and patting him on the head bade him keep a good heart. In searching his pocket for the muffler that he usually wore, his hand came in contact with the wicker-bottle.
He took it out, and looked at it, by the sickly light of the lantern which he held; the boy was cold—a drop would warm him—must do him good. He hesitated a moment, then with his teeth he drew the cork.
“Here, Jimmy lad, take a sup o’ that; it’ll keep thee heart up, and sarve to keep out cold.”
The boy—half-wondering, half-unconsciously—took a deep draught, and putting it from him, gasped for breath.
“It’s so strong, I feel ill—where’s father?”
“He’s not come yet,” replied Nancolas, anxious to conceal his own anxiety on the subject, and to calm the boy.
As he spoke his glance rested on the wicker-bottle; it was with a strange feeling of awe that, as he looked, he remembered the last words of the fisherman—“The cork won’t be drawn afore I sees it agen!”
He pictured to himself the sneer that would rise to every face as he returned the bottle; he heard the laugh which would greet his account of having given it to the boy. The reputation which was the result of so much self-sacrifice and labour was destroyed; when the story was told he would be mistrusted, as the man who could be sober only when temptation was beyond his reach. “So then” (he muttered) “the work of years destroyed in a moment!”
Enlarging by his imagination the sneer, the laugh, the derisive jest, the loss of the friendship of those whom he most esteemed, calling to mind his desolate life of the past, again his brutal nature struggled hard for mastery, and he became in that short hour a desperate man. The wind had changed, and the fishing-boat was like a toy tossed on the great black waters: blackness was on the sea, blackness in the heavens, so dense he knew not where he was; his hopes were darkened like the night, whose very colour seemed in unison with his heart.
“Laughed at, as drunk!” he murmured, as he endeavoured to reef the sail—“not master of myself—laughed at as a boy that couldn’t command himself—I may as well be bad as be thought so!”
His courage, too, seemed to fail him with his hopes; and after a short pause, to renew his energy, he put the bottle to his lips.
The smell of blood will whet the appetite of the tamest beast; the taste of liquor aroused the worst passions of that man, and in one half-hour his better nature had fled.
But an hour before the peril to which he had exposed the boy, the absence of his partner, the coming storm, and their lonely situation, had filled him with gloomy fears and dark forebodings; but the draughts he imbibed from time to time from his friend’s wicker-bottle made him so forgetful of the past, so callous to the future, that he took little heed of either his own peril or of that in which he had placed the boy; and with an equal disregard for the fury of the elements, his fellow-partner’s return, the comfort or safety of his little charge—who, drenched and shivering, lay half-stupified by the gin he had imbibed in the forepart of the vessel—Nancolas stretched himself at full length, preparing for a heavy sleep.
Meanwhile the heart of the boy beat high as wave after wave tossed the boat as if it were a plaything on the broad ocean; but amidst the roaring of the water, the vivid lightning, the rolling thunder, and the increasing gloom, the child’s only fear was for the safety of his missing father: the darkness and storm were terrible to him, but only as he thought of their gathering around his father’s boat.
Once, and once only, did he hear the husky voice of his drunken guide, and that but indistinctly.
“Jemmy, boy! keep a sharp lookout, and wake me when thee sees feyther coming.”
The voice that answered his was choked and full of sobs.
“My father! He’s not come yet! he’s not come yet!”
“Ho! ho!” laughed the fisherman, as he turned away and applied himself once more to his friend’s wicker-bottle. “Not come yet! A brave night for a fisherman—a jolly storm for a boatman’s son!”
And with the puny boat tossing upon the giant waves, the black water roaring against the blacker night, Nancolas sank into a drunken slumber.
****
“He’s not come yet!”
Nancolas opened his large heavy eyes, and passing his hand across his bushy eyebrows, in the first awakening from his lethargy, looked round. In the east a few grey streaks were lighting up the horizon, and the cold fresh breeze, that passed like a spirit-hand over his features, heralded the approach of day. Not a sound was to be heard; the sea, that had ran so high but a few hours before, was almost as calm as the sands that it covered, and not a vessel dotted the vast horizon.
“He’s not come yet!”
The voice was low and faint; but even Nancolas, half-stupified as he was by drink, recognised it as that of the lad.
“Not come yet,” muttered the fisherman, half raising himself up on one arm, and looking for the first time towards the forepart of the boat. “Not!”
He sat up and stared for a moment or so in drunken stupidity—then starting up he stood transfixed: his eyes were riveted on an object that made his flesh creep—it was the oilskin coat in which he had wrapped the boy, which was lying partly over the side. The coat was there, but the boy was gone!
At noon on the day that followed that sad night that fisherman knelt down in the market-place at Falmouth, and in the midst of a crowd, who gazed with wondering eyes upon him and upon a poor palefaced weeping woman who stood near him, he swore before his Eternal God that