“She didn’t think I was good enough,” explained Harper hastily.
“She told ye that!--oh, Lord! They ‘ve been at her about that pious psalm-singer Clement Scott. Ye try again when we get ashore. She’s goin’ to stop a bit wi’ Aunt Barnes, at South Yarra, this Christmas. T’ auld girl hates t’ psalm-singer, an’ she ‘ll do the job for ye. Oh, Lord! oh, Lord! I ‘m starved wi’ the cold.”
“It ‘s not so long now,” said Harper, and suddenly he felt as if the night were stretching itself into interminable years. The bar that Susy had thought so hopeless, so insurmountable, was it really but a thing of straw? Was there really a chance for him yet? Was there really anything in the lad’s careless words? And hope awoke again in his breast, and with the hope a raging bitterness against the fate that was putting a barrier once more between him and the attainment of those hopes. She loved him, she had acknowledged that she loved him, and now to be free to win her! The eagerness for life awoke in him again. Who said the world was dreary? Who said life was not worth living? A bright, fair world stretched enticingly before him, and he was dying. Yes, dying--they were all dying, the old ship was breaking up fast, and if succour did not come quickly--He drew a long breath and looked down through the rain, that was falling in torrents now, at the decks below. One moment all was hidden by the raging seas, the next by the faint moonlight he saw the cracks widening--widening--then came another great sea, and he felt the ship bump heavily on the rocks. No, it was the poorest chance that she should last till morning, they--these men hanging to the rigging--had no chance whatever of living in the sea that boiled around them. Wider and wider grew the cracks on deck, the water was pouring into the hold, and the cargo was being washed out of her. One bale of wool--two--three--rose up on the next wave. A bale of wool! What is a bale against a man’s life? And yet the skipper was moaning pitifully over their loss.
“My great Scott! eighteen hundred bales of wool gone! What will the owners say? The poor old barkie! The poor old barkie! How shall I face the owners?”
So! so! and his chances of facing those owners seemed so pitifully small, and yet the old man’s thoughts were full of it. Sometimes he moaned over the wife and children in faraway England, but not as one who gives up all hopes of seeing them again, only as one who maybe had brought them to bitter poverty and pain by his mischance, for would the owners give him another ship, now he had lost the old _Vanity?_ “Hardly likely,” he muttered to himself. “Hardly likely.” And so the bitter night wore on. There was nothing to mark the hours as they passed. Now a man moaned a little, now another cried aloud that he could hold on no longer, that he must fall and die before morning. Always there was the sea, sweeping over the decks and halfway up the mast towards them, with wearisome monotony. Great squalls of rain came up every now and then, blotting out all else and making all round inky-black; then they passed, and the pale and watery moon showed them the shore quite close, and the raging waters between. The tongue of the ship’s bell had broken loose somehow, and the wash of the sea made it toll with mournful cadence. It rose clear and loud, even above the shrieking of the gale, and Harper fitted its notes to his own words. “Never more,” it seemed to say; and then, as a heavier sea than usual swept over the wreck, shaking her down to her very keel, “Never, never more.”