CHAPTER VI.
THEY THINK THAT HELP IS AT HAND.
Through his growing preoccupation the doctor in some sort reviewed thesituation; and any one near to him might have heard these words dropfrom his lips,--
"Too much rolling, and not enough pitching."
Then recalled to himself by the dark workings of his mind, he sank againinto thought, as a miner into his shaft. His meditation in nowiseinterfered with his watch on the sea. The contemplation of the sea is initself a reverie.
The dark punishment of the waters, eternally tortured, was commencing. Alamentation arose from the whole main. Preparations, confused andmelancholy, 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 inspace, increased and irritated, more and more, the winds, the vapours,the waves. Nothing is so logical and nothing appears so absurd as theocean. Self-dispersion is the essence of its sovereignty, and is one ofthe elements of its redundance. The sea is ever for and against. Itknots that it may unravel itself; one of its slopes attacks, the otherrelieves. No apparition is so wonderful as the waves. Who can paint thealternating hollows and promontories, the valleys, the melting bosoms,the sketches? How render the thickets of foam, blendings of mountainsand dreams? The indescribable is everywhere there--in the rending, inthe frowning, in the anxiety, in the perpetual contradiction, in thechiaroscuro, in the pendants of the cloud, in the keys of the ever-openvault, in the disaggregation without rupture, in the funereal tumultcaused by all that madness!
The wind had just set due north. Its violence was so favourable and souseful in driving them away from England that the captain of the_Matutina_ had made up his mind to set all sail. The hooker slippedthrough the foam as at a gallop, the wind right aft, bounding from waveto wave in a gay frenzy. The fugitives were delighted, and laughed; theyclapped their hands, applauded the surf, the sea, the wind, the sails,the swift progress, the flight, all unmindful of the future. The doctorappeared 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 thenhis 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 inthe distance, and when the child could no longer see aught, the childwent north and the ship went south.
All were plunged in darkness.