CHAPTER VI.

THEY THINK THAT HELP IS AT HAND.

Through his growing preoccupation the doctor in some sort reviewed the situation; and any one near to him might have heard these words drop from his lips,—­

“Too much rolling, and not enough pitching.”

Then recalled to himself by the dark workings of his mind, he sank again into thought, as a miner into his shaft.  His meditation in nowise interfered with his watch on the sea.  The contemplation of the sea is in itself a reverie.

The dark punishment of the waters, eternally tortured, was commencing.  A lamentation arose from the whole main.  Preparations, confused and melancholy, were forming in space.  The doctor observed all before him, and lost no detail.  There was, however, no sign of scrutiny in his face.  One does not scrutinize hell.

A vast commotion, yet half latent, but visible through the turmoils in space, increased and irritated, more and more, the winds, the vapours, the waves.  Nothing is so logical and nothing appears so absurd as the ocean.  Self-dispersion is the essence of its sovereignty, and is one of the elements of its redundance.  The sea is ever for and against.  It knots that it may unravel itself; one of its slopes attacks, the other relieves.  No apparition is so wonderful as the waves.  Who can paint the alternating hollows and promontories, the valleys, the melting bosoms, the sketches?  How render the thickets of foam, blendings of mountains and dreams?  The indescribable is everywhere there—­in the rending, in the frowning, in the anxiety, in the perpetual contradiction, in the chiaroscuro, in the pendants of the cloud, in the keys of the ever-open vault, in the disaggregation without rupture, in the funereal tumult caused by all that madness!

The wind had just set due north.  Its violence was so favourable and so useful in driving them away from England that the captain of the Matutina had made up his mind to set all sail.  The hooker slipped through the foam as at a gallop, the wind right aft, bounding from wave to wave in a gay frenzy.  The fugitives were delighted, and laughed; they clapped their hands, applauded the surf, the sea, the wind, the sails, the swift progress, the flight, all unmindful of the future.  The doctor appeared not to see them, and dreamt on.

Every vestige of day had faded away.  This was the moment when the child, watching from the distant cliff, lost sight of the hooker.  Up to then his glance had remained fixed, and, as it were, leaning on the vessel.  What part had that look in fate?  When the hooker was lost to sight in the distance, and when the child could no longer see aught, the child went north and the ship went south.

All were plunged in darkness.

CHAPTER VII.

SUPERHUMAN HORRORS.

On their part it was with wild jubilee and delight that those on board the hooker saw the hostile land recede and lessen behind them.  By degrees the dark ring of ocean rose higher, dwarfing in twilight Portland, Purbeck, Tineham, Kimmeridge, the Matravers, the long streaks of dim cliffs, and the coast dotted with lighthouses.