Miranda of the Balcony: A StoryMason, A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley)
General
Miranda of the Balcony: A Story
Mason, A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley)
Fiction
"You!" interrupted Isaacs, with a blunt contempt; "you are blind!" And
M. Fournier, before anyone could guess his intention, flung himself
upon Isaacs and jammed the tiller hard over to port. The boat came
broadside to the wind, heeled over, and in a second the water was
pouring in over the gunwale. Zebedee wrenched the main sheet off the
pin, and let the big sail fly; another loosed the jib. The promptitude
of these two men saved the boat. It ran its head up into the wind,
righted itself upon its keel, and lay with flapping sails and
shivered.
Isaacs without a word caught hold of M. Fournier and shook him like a
rat; and every man of the crew in violent tones expounded to the
Belgian the enormity of his crime. Fournier was himself well-nigh
frantic with excitement. He was undaunted by any threats of violence;
neither the boat, nor the sea, nor the crew had any terrors for him.
"There is a ship!" he screamed. "The fog was vanished--just for a
second it was vanished, and I have seen it. There may be men alive on
that rock--starving, perishing, men of the sea like you. You will not
leave them. But you shall not!" And clinging to the mast he stamped
his feet. "But you shall not!"
"And by the Lord he's right," said the lighthouse-keeper, gravely--so
gravely that complete silence at once fell upon the crew. One man
stood up in the bows, a second knelt upon the thwarts, a third craned
his body out beyond the stern, and all with one accord stared towards
Rosevear. The screen of haze was drawn aside, and quite clear to the
view over a low rock, rose the mast and tangled cordage of a wreck.
The sheets were made fast without a word. Without a word, Zebedee
Isaacs put the boat about and steered it into the Neck between
Rosevear and Rosevean. As they passed along that narrow channel, no
noise was heard but the bustle of the tide. For at the western end
they saw the bows of a ship unsteadily poised upon a ledge. There was
a breach amidships, the stern was under water, only the foremast
stood; and nowhere was there any sign of life.
Isaacs brought the boat to in a tiny creek, some distance from the
wreck.
"We can land here," he said, and the lighthouse-keeper and Fournier
stepped ashore.
On the instant that quiet, silent islet whirred into life and noise.
So startling was the change that M. Fournier jumped backwards while
his heart jerked within him.
"What's that?" he cried, and then laughed as he understood. For a
cloud of puffins, gulls, kittiwakes and shearwaters whirled upwards
from that nursery of sea-birds and circled above his head, their cries
sounding with infinite melancholy, their wings flickering like silver
in that grey and desolate light.
"It's so like your Robinson Crusoe," said M. Fournier.
"It is more like our islands of Scilly," said the lighthouse-keeper,
as he looked towards the wreck.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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