he windy night like a fiend
possessed, and men got up hastily to ask what was the matter. Another
launch put out from Williamstown, and a police boat from Sandridge, and
the anchored ships awoke and hailed them. Soon half-a-dozen boats were
tossing about the spot; they tossed for two hours, and Bill Hardacre
dived seven times with a rope round his waist, while the widowed young
husband lay on the cabin floor between two doctors, the baby and the
landlady's cousin keening over him.
"Well," said Dugald Finlayson, as at last they headed for Williamstown
through the now lessening storm, with a bundle in tarpaulin beside
them, "it do seem as if the Powers above take a pleasure in tripping us
up when we least expect it."
"Aye," said Bill Hardacre, sitting crying in his wet clothes, "he said
as we were starting he'd got all he wanted now. I thinks to myself at
the time, thinks I, 'That's an unlucky thing to say.'" But who is to
judge luck in this world? Poor little Lily Harrison was a helpless
creature, and had almost 'nothing in her' except vanity.
CHAPTER II.
Sincerely he believed, when he was on his feet again, that his life was
wrecked for ever. He did suffer from insomnia, even with his splendid
sea-seasoned constitution, for months, which proved the poignant
insistency of his grief, making thinking a disease instead of a healthy
function. He performed his duties mechanically, rigidly, like an engine
stoked from the outside. He no longer had pleasure or interest in them.
The flavour was gone from life; it had become a necessary burden, to be
borne as best he could. At one time he even questioned the right of the
Moral Law to ask him to bear it, under the circumstances. He used to
look at the blue water beneath him, and long to be beneath it, sharing
the fate of his loved and lost. He did not want to live without her--he
wanted to die. At twenty-one!
At twenty-three he was a man again, physically and mentally sound,
doing all reverence to the memory of his dead wife--a flawless angel in
the retrospect--while finding natural solace in the company of living
women who were also young and fair. The living women were much in
evidence from the first; nothing but the sea could keep them from
trying to comfort him. A big fellow, with a square, hard face, and a
fist to fell an ox--that was just the kind of man to call for coddling,
apart from the fact that he was a widower--had been married for as long
as five we
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