CHAPTER XIX.

THE MEETING.

How shall I describe the almost mute meeting between Ethel Basset and Morley Ashton? or shall I omit it altogether?

Instinctively, and with proper good taste, all in the cabin left them to themselves for a time; and even Rose--the saucy and impulsive Rose--who looked just as Morley had last seen her when playing at croquet in Acton Chase, with her pretty straw hat, her green zouave jacket, and tiny bronzed Balmoral boots, after rushing back to give him one kiss more, tripped upstairs on deck to join the doctor.

Mr. Basset had managed to break the matter--the vast secret--to Ethel skilfully and gently, by saying that the wrecked men could afford some information concerning Morley Ashton; that they knew where he was, that one had seen him lately, that he was alive and well, and so forth. Thus there was no scene, no screaming, no fainting for joy, and certainly no dying of that pleasant emotion. Such a climax as the latter would have put the narrator of these events very much about indeed, for, our story being a true one, this little romantic portion of it dovetails with the rest--rather flatly, perhaps, because it is _true_.

For a time neither could exactly "realise" (to use a good Americanism) that they were reunited--Ethel, that Morley lived; Morley, that he should so suddenly find himself by the side of her whom he had been pursuing through the deep, reunited, and on board the _Hermione_, of London.

Again and again she fell upon his breast, repeating, in a voice that was almost breathless, but exquisitely touching:

"My darling--oh, my darling! can this be possible? Is this reality?"

Their poor hearts were too full to permit much to be said; nor would it be fair to them, or interesting to others, to rehearse all the little that they did say then. But how much had they to ask, to relate, to explain, and to deplore?

Morley had undergone so much, he had seen so many strange faces, and places too--Rio de Janeiro, with bay, mountains, and isles; Tristan d'Acunha, with its cliffs and mighty cone; Diego Alvarez, with its sea-elephants and fur seals; the Island of the Hermit, with its strange story of old Don Pedro de Barradas. He had encountered, moreover, so many gales of wind, the wreck, with all its contingent woes and horrors, and so forth, that Laurel Lodge, and Ethel's face, figure, and whole image had seemed ten years off--at least, ten years appeared to have elapsed since their sudden separation.

To poor Ethel the intervening blank had seemed greater, for Morley had lived with hope, while she had none; and, to understand and conceive her utter bewilderment, we must bear in mind all she had undergone.

The sudden and unaccountable disappearance of Morley, and the supposed mode of his death (for it was only supposed, after all), had occasioned a more bitter sorrow, a keener and more protracted agony, than she could have endured by weeping at his deathbed, and afterwards knowing that he was at rest in a grave she could see, where she might plant flowers and drop her tears.

To have seen him borne forth from Laurel Lodge to Acton churchyard, amid all the real and paid-for pageantry of woe, would have been actual contentment, when contrasted with all she had suffered--doubt, uncertainty, despair!

Oh, she felt how deeply she must loathe Hawkshaw as the author of all their woe!

But now Morley was beside her, with her hands in his, looking lovingly into her loving eyes, drinking in her murmured words, sitting close, very close, to her, so this reunion was as stunning and bewildering in its own way as their separation had been.

They were dearer to each other now by a thousand degrees than ever they were before, even after Morley's absence in Africa.

"It is good sometimes to be absent," says a graceful writer, truthfully; "better still to be dead, as regards our own imperfections and our equally imperfect friends. How they rise up and praise us for virtues we never possessed, and benignly pardon us for sins we never committed. How tender over our memories grow those who, living, worried our lives out, and might do so again, if we were alive, to-morrow."

They had none of those upbraiding thoughts to recall. Can it be reality, this happiness? was the uppermost idea in both their minds.

It was indeed Ethel whose head reclined upon his breast. She was changed since last they met at peaceful Laurel Lodge, among its rose-bowers, its giant laurels and stately sycamores; and yet how lovely she was--lovelier even now than then.

Long grieving had imparted a sweet Madonna-like sadness to the soft features; her cheeks were thin, and Morley's affectionate eye could see two white hairs amid the deep black braiding of the young girl's head; and he saw, too, that her broad, low brow, had an impress of care and sorrow--sorrow for him, even now, when her dark eyes were flashing through their tears of joy.

It was indeed she, that beloved one, whose name he had so dotingly murmured to himself a thousand times, in the lonely watches of the night, when treading the ship's deck under the sparkling stars of the tropics, when the glorious planets of the Southern Cross--fabled by the devout mariners of the old Spanish Argosies to be "a brooch taken from the breast of the blessed _Madre de Dios_"--looked close and nigh, so close as to cast the ship's shadow on the rolling waters.

It was she whom he had imagined in those wild dreams by day, when the dreams of the waking are wilder by far than those of the sleeper.

She was beside him again, and they were hand in hand as of old, eye bent on eye, lip meeting lip. Ethel, his own Ethel--after all they had undergone--was beside him, so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that it seemed indeed a dream, or like a set scene, the plot or conception of a sensational romance or playwright--a trafficker in plots, contrivances, and _situations_.

It was so, and truth proved stronger than fiction after all!

And so, forgetful of others, forgetful assuredly of breakfast, till Joe in the steerage and Quaco in the galley were in despair about the eggs and coffee, they would have sat till the sun that now shone through amber clouds so merrily ahead to the eastward had beamed his farewell rays in crimson through the stern-windows from the westward, had not Joe's bell, rung vigorously and impatiently for the third time, brought the whole party, including Mr. Foster, who had no sympathy whatever for lovers, and who felt famished, having had charge of the deck since 4 to 8 A.M.--the morning watch--and it was now half-past 10, alike by his appetite and the captain's chronometer.

All oblivious of the unhappy wretch who was "chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy" aloft in the fore-crosstrees (where the swaying of the mast made the rolling of the ship seem so much greater than below) jovial indeed was the party which assembled at the sound of Joe's bell, and how curly-headed Joe's honest English face shone as he handed round coffee and tea, with whipped eggs for cream, or as he skipped about with hot water, and handed to the ladies preserves in tin cans, midshipmen's nuts and American biscuits in a silver bread-barge, a spotless white towel thrown over the sleeve of his round jacket the while, for Joe was something of a hybrid, half waiter and half seaman.

Under the cheering influence of Ethel's presence Morley's features soon became less haggard, and the keen, hawk-like expression of his dark eyes--an expression the result of suffering, danger, and of being long menaced by death--rapidly softened and passed away.

But with breakfast untasted, or feigning only to partake thereof, Ethel, pale and feverish, sat like one in a dream.

For this sudden restoration of Morley to life and to her, as it would seem from the bosom of the deep--from the greedy waves of that vast ocean which they had been traversing for more than three months--was more difficult of realisation than the horror of his disappearance and of his supposed dreadful death.

But she, and Rose too, seemed so forgetful of every one present, save Morley, that worthy young Dr. Leslie Heriot, F.R.C.S.E., actually envied him--envied the earlier intimacy he could claim with these two charming sisters, and felt almost jealous of the deep interest they evinced for our poor waif of the sea.

"And so you are indeed Miss Ethel Basset?" said Tom Bartelot, surveying the lovely girl with honest admiration and kindliness, when he was introduced to her.

"I am, sir," replied Ethel, smiling at his manner; "and a very old friend of Mr. Ashton's."

"I can scarcely regret the loss of my ship, the poor _Princess_" said Tom, gallantly, "or my own suffering and misfortune, when I consider that all have been but the means to a happy end."

"Sir?" said Ethel, blushing a little, and looking down. "You mean----"

"That they have been the means of bringing you and my old chum and schoolfellow, Mr. Ashton, together again," continued Tom, blundering still more by his straightforward inferences.

"You are very kind, sir, in saying so," replied Ethel, as her colour came and went.

"That poor lad loves you as his very life," continued Tom, warming with his subject; "aye, far beyond it, for, when compared with you, he don't value it more than a bit of old rope-yarn! Many an hour has he walked the deck by my side, speaking of you, and praising you; and even when he didn't speak, by his silence and his sighs, I knew well enough that he was thinking all the deeper."

"My poor Morley?" said Ethel, who heard all this with joyous tears in her eyes.

As soon as they came on deck, Noah Gawthrop presented himself in his peculiar attire, the black dress-coat and crimson vest, and doffing his sou'-wester at the break of the quarter-deck, twitched his grizzled forelock, and beckoned Morley.

"Mr. Ashton," said he, in a stage whisper, "wot's this I hear forward among that rum lot in the fok'stle?"

"Really, Noah, I cannot say. What have you heard?"

"Why, sir, they says as your sweetheart, Miss Basset--she you were always raving about on the wreck--is aboard o' this here craft."

"Yes, Noah, she is," replied Morley, laughing.

"Is that dainty little 'un her?"

"Which?"

"She with the pork-pie hat, red stockings, and red cheeks, the jigamaree jacket, and crinnyline?" said Noah.

"No; the taller lady."

"Smite my timbers! A regular-built stunner! Wot a wonderful coinsiddins!--wot a cannondrum! as the player chaps say, when they go bouncing about to the fiddles and blue fire!"

"It is destiny, Noah."

"Jest wot they says too! Well, I have given over sweethearting now; but I have shared my pay with many o' that sort o' ware in my time. The best of 'em all--here's her photograff done in gunpowder by the cook's mate of the _Haurora_, as we were a working out of the harbour of Odessa. Many a mouthful of salt-water I've swallowed, and many a whistling Dick I've heard since that was done," said Noah, pointing to the tattooing visible on his breast when his check shirt was open. "But won't you introdooce me as an old shipmate? 'Mornin' marm, 'mornin'," he added, sweeping the deck with his sou'-wester, as Ethel came frankly forward; "I'm one o' them as took Mr. Ashton off the cliffs, and sailed with him to Rio Janairey, in South 'Meriky, in the old _Princess_ as was."

"Indeed--oh, I am most happy to see you, sir," replied Ethel.

"Call me Noah, marm--Noah Gawthrop; I ain't used to being sir'd," said he, smoothing down his gray hair.

"Well, my good friend Noah," said Ethel, her eyes beaming, as she presented her little white hand to Gawthrop, who looked at his own hard palm, rubbed it well on his trousers as if to clean it, and then shook hers gently and kindly, not crushing it up as the tars do invariably in the play.

"Such a dear old thing it is!" said Rose, laughing, as she observed this interview.

"I've made a man of him for you, Miss Ethel--I knows your name, you see; one couldn't be long with Mr. Ashton, keeping watch and watch, without finding out that--but I have made a man of him for you, marm. He wasn't worth a tobacco-stopper at first; but I've taught him to becket a royal, and send it down, yard and all, in a stiff topgallant breeze, or a regular squall; to slush a mast from the truck-head downward; to haul out to leeward when on the yard-arm, and if that ain't summut towards making him a good husband for you, and one as will, through the voyage of life, keep a firm hand on your rudder, and trim you nicely by the starn, I don't know wot is."

Noah's praises and rough congratulations were unintelligible to Ethel; but as they were calculated to excite laughter, and as some of his adjectives applicable to the "shark up aloft in the fore-cross-trees" were neither elegant nor euphonious, he was speedily sent forward by Tom Bartelot.

Rose, perceiving that Ethel was deadly pale, for the events of the morning proved rather too much for her strength, took her below for a little time, by Mr. Basset's suggestion. Morley affectionately, and tenderly handed her down the companion-stair--not a glance of his the while, not an emotion or movement being unnoticed by Hawkshaw, who, like a hawk, or rather like a tree-tiger robbed of his prey, was still perched alone in the fore-crosstrees.