Hildebrand--whose face had been turned the other way--started round directly.
“Well done, my brave Senhor!” he exclaimed, with an earnest smile, at the same time clasping the cavalier’s extended hand, “I am right merry to see thee up again.”
Before Don Rafaele could make any reply, Master Halyard, hearing the salutation of his captain, also turned round, and caught up his other hand.
“Shiver my topsail!” cried the honest tar, in an odd mixture of Spanish and English phrases, “but I be heartily glad to see thee afloat again, Master Don. ’Tis sheer idling to lay long on one’s beam-ends. Life is but short; let us live well on the road, says the gentle Shepherd of Salisbury Plain.”
“I thank you both, fair gentlemen,” answered Don Rafaele. “I now feel quite strong again, though, having the heart of a landsman, I still long for the shore. But have we the breeze with us?” he added, with that curiosity about the wind, which, whatever may be our situation, one always feels at sea, and is never inclined to check.
“Right heartily,” replied Hildebrand. “Mark how gallantly we buffet the waves!”
Don Rafaele, with a smile, raised his eyes, and swept them eagerly around.
When we behold ourselves out of sight of land for the first time, with no horizon, as far as the eye can any way pierce, but the unbroken sky, rising from the water’s edge in gradual and inseparable lines, and covering the vast circle we move in with its eternal dome--which, shoot forward as we may, still presents the same circuit, and seems to hold us ever in its centre;--when we view such a prospect for the first time, the heart feels, in the surrounding immensity, a keener sense of its own littleness, and of its insignificance in the scale of the creation, than in any other situation that life affords. The black waves, mounting in a hundred heads, and then falling under one crowning swell, which, rolling forward, is itself overtopped, and lost in its successor:--the black waves, thus rushing by, remind one of the onward course of life, of the mutability of human fortunes, and the briefness of mortality.
Such was the reflection that rose in the mind of the young Spaniard. But it passed away directly, and the more cheerful features of the scene--for it was not without cheerful features--engaged his whole attention.