The poorer passengers suffered much discomfort, and the blankets, etc., stored in Winchester’s cabin often warmed these two honest hearts, as with pitying hands they wrapped them round some shivering fellow-creature.

Off Cape Verd a heavy gale came on.  It lasted thirty-six hours, and the distress and sufferings of the over-crowded passengers were terrible.  An unpaternal government had allowed a ship to undertake a voyage of twelve thousand miles, with a short crew, short provisions, and just twice as many passengers as could be protected from the weather.

Driven from the deck by the piercing wind and the deluges of water that came on board, and crowded into the narrowest compass, many of these unfortunates almost died of sickness and polluted air; and when in despair they rushed back upon deck, horrors and suffering met them in another shape; in vain they huddled together for a little warmth and tried to shield themselves with blankets stretched to windward.  The bitter blast cut like a razor through their threadbare defenses, and the water rushed in torrents along the deck and crept cold as ice up their bodies as they sat huddled, or lay sick and despairing on the hard and tossing wood; and whenever a heavier sea than usual struck the ship a despairing scream burst from the women, and the good ship groaned and shivered and seemed to share their fears, and the blast yelled into their souls, “I am mighty as fate—­as fate.  And pitiless! pitiless! pitiless! pitiless! pitiless!”

Oh! then, how they longed for a mud cabin, or a hole picked with a pickax in some ancient city wall, or a cow-house, or a cart-shed in their native land.

But it is an ill wind that blows nobody good.  This storm raised George Fielding’s better part of man.  Integer vitae scelerisque purus was not very much afraid to die.  Once when the Phoenix gave a weather roll that wetted the foresail to the yard-arm, he said, “My poor Susan!” with a pitying accent, not a quavering one.  But most of the time he was busy crawling on all-fours from one sufferer to another with a drop of brandy in a phial.  The wind emptied a glass of the very moisture let alone the liquid in a moment.  So George would put his bottle to some poor creature’s lips, and if it was a man he would tell him in his simple way Who was stronger than the wind or the sea, and that the ship could not go down without His will.  To the women he whispered that he had just had a word with the captain, and he said it was only a gale not a tempest, as the passengers fancied, and there was no danger, none whatever.

The gale blew itself out, and then for an hour or two the ship rolled frightfully; but at last the angry sea went down, the decks were mopped, the Phoenix shook her wet feathers and spread her wings again and glided on her way.

George felt a little better; the storm shook him and roused him and did him good.  And it was a coincidence in the history of these two lovers that just as Susan under Mr. Eden’s advice was applying the healing ointment of charitable employment to her wound, George, too, was finding a little comfort and life from the little bit of good he and his friend did to the poor population in his wooden hamlet.