He was right.  He heard the dull sound of the unmooring as the vessel fell away from the wharf.  Abaft on the poop a man, the skipper, no doubt, just come from below, was standing.  He had slipped the hawser and was working the tiller.  Looking only to the rudder, as befitted the combined phlegm of a Dutchman and a sailor, listening to nothing but the wind and the water, bending against the resistance of the tiller, as he worked it to port or starboard, he looked in the gloom of the after-deck like a phantom bearing a beam upon its shoulder.  He was alone there.  So long as they were in the river the other sailors were not required.  In a few minutes the vessel was in the centre of the current, with which she drifted without rolling or pitching.  The Thames, little disturbed by the ebb, was calm.  Carried onwards by the tide, the vessel made rapid way.  Behind her the black scenery of London was fading in the mist.

Ursus went on talking.

“Never mind, I will give her digitalis.  I am afraid that delirium will supervene.  She perspires in the palms of her hands.  What sin can we have committed in the sight of God?  How quickly has all this misery come upon us!  Hideous rapidity of evil!  A stone falls.  It has claws.  It is the hawk swooping on the lark.  It is destiny.  There you lie, my sweet child!  One comes to London.  One says:  What a fine city!  What fine buildings!  Southwark is a magnificent suburb.  One settles there.  But now they are horrid places.  What would you have me do there?  I am going to leave.  This is the 30th of April.  I always distrusted the month of April.  There are but two lucky days in April, the 5th and the 27th; and four unlucky ones—­the 10th, the 20th, the 29th, and the 30th.  This has been placed beyond doubt by the calculations of Cardan.  I wish this day were over.  Departure is a comfort.  At dawn we shall be at Gravesend, and to-morrow evening at Rotterdam.  Zounds!  I will begin life again in the van.  We will draw it, won’t we, Homo?”

A light tapping announced the wolf’s consent.

Ursus continued,—­

“If one could only get out of a grief as one gets out of a city!  Homo, we must yet be happy.  Alas! there must always be the one who is no more.  A shadow remains on those who survive.  You know whom I mean, Homo.  We were four, and now we are but three.  Life is but a long loss of those whom we love.  They leave behind them a train of sorrows.  Destiny amazes us by a prolixity of unbearable suffering; who then can wonder that the old are garrulous?  It is despair that makes the dotard, old fellow!  Homo, the wind continues favourable.  We can no longer see the dome of St. Paul’s.  We shall pass Greenwich presently.  That will be six good miles over.  Oh!  I turn my back for ever on those odious capitals, full of priests, of magistrates, and of people.  I prefer looking at the leaves rustling in the woods.  Her forehead is still in perspiration.  I don’t like those great violet veins in her arm.  There is fever in them.  Oh! all this is killing me.  Sleep, my child.  Yes; she sleeps.”