It is strange to think that the sea, the wind, space, the ebb and flow of the tide, storms, calms, breezes, should have given themselves so much trouble to bestow happiness on a scoundrel.  That co-operation had continued for fifteen years.  Mysterious efforts!  During fifteen years the ocean had never for an instant ceased from its labours.  The waves transmitted from one to another the floating bottle.  The shelving rocks had shunned the brittle glass; no crack had yawned in the flask; no friction had displaced the cork; the sea-weeds had not rotted the osier; the shells had not eaten out the word “Hardquanonne;” the water had not penetrated into the waif; the mould had not rotted the parchment; the wet had hot effaced the writing.  What trouble the abyss must have taken!  Thus that which Gernardus had flung into darkness, darkness had handed back to Barkilphedro.  The message sent to God had reached the devil.  Space had committed an abuse of confidence, and a lurking sarcasm which mingles with events had so arranged that it had complicated the loyal triumph of the lost child’s becoming Lord Clancharlie with a venomous victory:  in doing a good action, it had mischievously placed justice at the service of iniquity.  To save the victim of James II. was to give a prey to Barkilphedro.  To reinstate Gwynplaine was to crush Josiana.  Barkilphedro had succeeded, and it was for this that for so many years the waves, the surge, the squalls had buffeted, shaken, thrown, pushed, tormented, and respected this bubble of glass, which bore within it so many commingled fates.  It was for this that there had been a cordial co-operation between the winds, the tides, and the tempests—­a vast agitation of all prodigies for the pleasure of a scoundrel; the infinite co-operating with an earthworm!  Destiny is subject to such grim caprices.

Barkilphedro was struck by a flash of Titanic pride.  He said to himself that it had all been done to fulfil his intentions.  He felt that he was the object and the instrument.

But he was wrong.  Let us clear the character of chance.

Such was not the real meaning of the remarkable circumstance of which the hatred of Barkilphedro was to profit.  Ocean had made itself father and mother to an orphan, had sent the hurricane against his executioners, had wrecked the vessel which had repulsed the child, had swallowed up the clasped hands of the storm-beaten sailors, refusing their supplications and accepting only their repentance; the tempest received a deposit from the hands of death.  The strong vessel containing the crime was replaced by the fragile phial containing the reparation.  The sea changed its character, and, like a panther turning nurse, began to rock the cradle, not of the child, but of his destiny, whilst he grew up ignorant of all that the depths of ocean were doing for him.