The Man Who Laughs (Estes and Lauriat 1869)/Chapter 15
CHAPTER VI.
THEY THINK THAT HELP IS AT HAND.
THROUGH bis growing pre-occupation, the doctor dreamily reviewed the situation; and any one near him might have heard these words drop from his lips: "Too much rolling, and not enough pitching." Then he again relapsed into thought, as a miner into his shaft. His meditation in nowise interfered with his watch of the sea. The contemplation of the sea is in itself a reverie.
The travail of the eternally tortured waters was commencing. A wail of lamentation arose from the whole main. Confused and ominous preparations were going on in space. The doctor noted each detail, though there was no sign of scrutiny in his face. One does not scrutinize hell. A vast commotion, as yet half latent, but visible through the turmoils in space, increased and irritated the winds, the vapours, and the waves more and more. Nothing is so logical and yet nothing appears so erratic as the ocean. Self-dispersion is the essence of its sovereignty, and one of the elements of its redundance. The sea is ever for or against. It knots, that it may unravel itself; one of its waves attacks, the other relieves. There is nothing so truly wonderful as the waves. Who can paint the alternating hollows and elevations, the heaving bosoms, the majestic outlines? Who can describe the thickets of foam, the blendings of mountains and dreams? The indescribable is everywhere there, in the rending, in the frowning, in the anxiety, in the perpetual contradiction, in the chiaroscuro, in the pendants of the clouds, in the ever-changing curves, in the disaggregation without rupture, in the mighty uproar caused by all that overhanging tumult!
The wind had just veered around to the north, and its violence was so favourable and useful in driving them away from England that the captain of the "Matutina" had made up his mind to set all sail. The hooker dashed through the foam at a gallop, bounding from wave to wave in a gay frenzy. The fugitives were delighted, and laughed; they clapped their hands; applauded the surf, the sea, the wind, the sails, the swift progress, the flight, all unmindful of the future. The doctor seemed not to see them, and dreamed on.
Every vestige of day had faded away. This was the moment when the child, watching from the distant cliff, lost sight of the hooker. Up to that time his gaze had been riveted upon the vessel. Did that look exert any influence over the vessel's fate? When the hooker was lost to sight in the distance, and when the child could no longer see aught of it, he went north and the ship went south. Both were plunged in darkness.