The four hundred suckers dropped at once from the man and the rock.  The mass sank to the bottom of the water.

Nearly exhausted, Gilliatt plunged into the water to heal by friction the numberless purple swellings which were pricking all over his body.  He advanced up the recess.  Something caught his eye.  He approached nearer.  The thing was a bleached skeleton; nothing was left but the white bones.  Yes, something else.  A leather belt and a tobacco-tin.  On the belt Gilliatt read the name of Clubin; in the tobacco-tin, which he opened with his knife, he found three thousand pounds.

When Gilliatt reached his sloop, with this belt and box in his possession, he found, to his unspeakable horror, that she had been making water fast.  Had he come an hour later he would have found nothing above water but the funnel of the steamer.

He slung a tarpaulin by chains overboard and hung it over the hole.  Pressure of the sea held it tight.  The wound was stanched.  Gilliatt began to bale for dear life.  As he emptied the hole the tarpaulin bulged in, as if a fist were pushing it from outside.  He ran for his clothes; brought them, and stuffed them into the wound.

He was saved—­for a few moments.

Death was certain.  He had succeeded in the impossible, to fail in what a shipwright might have mended in a few minutes.

Upon that solitary rock he had been subjected by turns to all the varied and cruel tortures of nature.  He had conquered his isolation, conquered hunger, conquered thirst, conquered cold, conquered fever, conquered labour, conquered sleep.  A dismal irony was then the end of all.  Gilliatt climbed to the top of the rock and gazed wildly into space.  He had no clothing.  He stood naked in the midst of that immensity.

Then, overwhelmed by the sense of that unknown infinity, like one bewildered by a strange persecution, confronting the shadows of night, in the midst of the murmur of the waves, the swell, the foam, the breeze, under that vast diffusion of force, having around him and beneath him the ocean, above him the constellations, under him the great unfathomable deep, he sank, gave up the struggle, laid down upon the rock, humbled, and uplifting his joined hands towards the terrible depths, he cried aloud, “Have mercy!”

When he issued from his swoon, the sun was high in a cloudless sky.  The blessed heat had saved the poor, broken, naked man upon the rock.  He rose up refreshed, and filled with divine energy.  A day’s work sufficed to mend the gap in the sloop’s side.  On the following day, dressed in the tattered garments which had stuffed the rent, with a favourable breeze and a good sea, Gilliatt pushed off from the Douvres.

IV.—­Fate’s Last Blow

Gilliatt arrived in harbour at night.  He went ashore in his rags, and hovered for a while about the darkness of Lethierry’s house.  Then he made his way into the garden, like an animal returning to its hole.  He sat himself down and looked about him.  He saw the garden, the pathways, the beds of flowers, the house, the two windows of Derouchette’s chamber.  He felt it horrible to be obliged to breathe; he did what he could to prevent it.