ake me?"
But all this never would be said except in dreams; it was too late! Yann
would not hear her. Try and talk to him a second time? Oh, no! what kind
of a creature would he take her then to be? She would rather die.
Yet to-morrow they would all start for Iceland. The whitish February
daylight streamed into her fine room. Chill and lonely she fell upon
one of the chairs along the wall. It seemed to her as if the whole world
were crashing and falling in around her. All things past and present
were as if buried in a fearful abyss, which yawned on all sides of her.
She wished her life would end, and that she were lying calm beneath some
cold tombstone, where no more pain might touch her.
But she had sincerely forgiven him, and no hatred mingled with her
desperate love.
CHAPTER XII--STRIKING THE ROCK UNKNOWN
The sea, the gray sea once more, where Yann was gently gliding along its
broad, trackless road, that leads the fishermen every year to the Land
of Ice.
The day before, when they all had set off to the music of the old hymns,
there blew a brisk breeze from the south, and all the ships with their
outspread sails had dispersed like so many gulls; but that breeze had
suddenly subsided, and speed had diminished; great fog-banks covered the
watery surface.
Yann was perhaps quieter than usual. He said that the weather was too
calm, and appeared to excite himself, as if he would drive away some
care that weighed upon him. But he had nothing to do but be carried
serenely in the midst of serene things; only to breathe and let himself
live. On looking out, only the deep gray masses around could be seen; on
listening, only silence.
Suddenly there was an almost imperceptible rumbling, which came from
below, accompanied by a grinding sensation, as when a brake comes hard
down on carriage wheels. The _Marie_ ceased all movement. They had
struck. Where, and on what? Some bank off the English coast probably.
For since overnight they had been able to see nothing, with those
curtains of mist.
The men ran and rushed about, their bustle contrasting strongly with
the sudden rigidity of their ship. How had the _Marie_ come to a stop in
that spot? In the midst of that immensity of fluid in this dull weather,
seeming to be almost without consistence, she had been seized by some
resistless immovable power hidden beneath the waves; she was tight in
its grasp, and might perish there.
Who has not seen poor birds caugh
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