CHAPTER XXVI.

     “Oh! many a dream was in the ship
     An hour before her death;
     And sight of home, with sighs disturbed
     The sleeper’s long-drawn breath.”

     WILSON.

Raoul soon decided on his course.  While he was consoling Clinch, orders had been sent to Pintard to look for the other gig; but a few minutes’ search under the cliffs satisfied those on deck that she was not to be found; and the fact was so reported below.  Nor could all Ithuel’s ingenuity extract from the captured boat’s crew any available information on the subject.  There was an esprit de corps among the Proserpines, as between their own ship and le Feu-Follet, which would have withstood, on an occasion like this, both threats and bribes; and he of the Granite State was compelled to give the matter up as hopeless; though, in so doing, he did not fail to ascribe the refusal to betray their shipmates, on the part of these men, to English obstinacy, rather than to any creditable feeling.  The disposition to impute the worst to those he hated, however, was not peculiar to Ithuel or his country; it being pretty certain he would have fared no better on board the English frigate, under circumstances at all analogous.

Satisfied, at length, that the other boat had escaped him, and feeling the necessity of getting out of the Bay while it was still dark, Raoul reluctantly gave the order to bear up, and put the lugger dead before the wind, wing-and-wing.  By the time this was done, the light craft had turned so far to windward as to be under the noble rocks that separate the piano of Sorrento from the shores of Vico; a bold promontory that buttresses the sea, with a wall of near or quite a thousand feet in perpendicular height.  Here she felt the full force of the land-wind; and when her helm was put up, and her sheets eased off, a bird turning on the wing would not have come round more gracefully, and scarcely with greater velocity.  The course now lay from point to point, in order to avoid being becalmed within the indentations of the coast.  This carried the lugger athwart the cove of Sorrento, rather than into it, and, of course, left Yelverton, who had landed at the smaller marina, quite out of the line of her course.

So swift was the progress of the little craft that, within fifteen minutes after bearing up, Raoul and Ithuel, who again occupied their stations on the forecastle, saw the headland where they had so lately been concealed, and ordered the helm a-port in order to sheer out and give it a berth.  Then rock was passed after rock, cove after cove, and village after village, until the entrance between Capri and Campanella was again reached.  In sweeping down the shore in this manner, the intention was to pick up any boat that might happen to be in the lugger’s track; for, while Raoul was disposed to let his prisoner go, he had a strong desire to seize any other officers of the frigate that might fall in his way.  The search was ineffectual, however; and when the lugger came out into the open sea, all expectation of further success, of this nature, was reluctantly abandoned.