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This was all that he could gather, and he was not sure of even thus much, but he was still too much wearied and battered for any exertion of thought or even anxiety. Three days' tempest in a cockle-shell of a ship, and then three hours' tossing on a plank, had left him little but the desire of repose, and the Moors were merciful and let him alone. It was a beautiful place that he already knew.
Alone, crouching near the water's edge, she held out her cockle-shell with its blown wisp of light. "Oh Lamp of my life, flame of my heart," she addressed it, just above her breath, "sail safely through the wavelets and answer truly what fate awaits me now? Will Mai Lakshmi grant the blessing I crave?"
It was many long years since they had been men, and it was a dozen or more grinning skeletons in time-tattered garments that gazed over the galleon's faded side at the lone castaway in his cockle-shell.
And the truth is, that of all the delights of the Gardens; of the hundred thousand extra lamps, which were always lighted; the fiddlers in cocked hats, who played ravishing melodies under the gilded cockle-shell in the midst of the gardens; the singers, both of comic and sentimental ballads, who charmed the ears there; the country dances, formed by bouncing cockneys and cockneyesses, and executed amidst jumping, thumping and laughter; the signal which announced that Madame Saqui was about to mount skyward on a slack-rope ascending to the stars; the hermit that always sat in the illuminated hermitage; the dark walks, so favourable to the interviews of young lovers; the pots of stout handed about by the people in the shabby old liveries; and the twinkling boxes, in which the happy feasters made-believe to eat slices of almost invisible ham of all these things, and of the gentle Simpson, that kind smiling idiot, who, I daresay, presided even then over the place Captain William Dobbin did not take the slightest notice.
The sun declined; my shadow broadened on die waters; and now I felt that if my cockle-shell could live a little longer, why, so could I. I had got at the fowls without further hurt. Some of the bars took out, I discovered how.
It must have been aggravating to the people on board the steamer, to see that little cockle-shell of a yacht dancing safely along over the shoal on which their "leviathan" had struck, and to hear Ford Foster sing out, "If we'd known you meant to run in here, we'd have followed some other pilot."
My inanimate subject, however, proved far more troublesome to fit than my living lay figure, for the little cockle-shell ducked, and dived, and rocked, and tipped, and curtseyed, and tilted, as I knelt first on one side and then on the other fitting her, till I was almost in despair; however, I got a sort of pattern at last, and by dint of some pertinacious efforts which, in their incompleteness, did not escape some sarcastic remarks from Mr. on the capabilities of 'women of genius' applied to common-place objects the matter was accomplished, and the little Dolphin rejoiced in very tidy back and seat cushions, covered with brown holland, and bound with green serge.
Did you come out to look at the wreck?" "Do you think that I am mad?" he asked, not without indignation. "Should I make a journey at night, in a November fog, with every chance of a gale coming up, to the Sunk Rocks in this cockle-shell, and alone, merely to look at the place where, as I understood rather vaguely, a foreign tramp steamer had gone down?" "Well, it does seem rather odd.
"I've come to ask you for a passage to Jamaica, as I prefer entering Port-Royal harbour in a respectable steady-going craft like yours, rather than in such a small cockle-shell as is my little pet there!" As he spoke he pointed with a smile and such a smile! how wrinkled and crinkled did his face become to the wicked-looking little felucca.
He wanted her, after all. So, with a racing heart and flushed cheeks, she watched him. It was not until he had come much nearer that she went white with the realization of his danger not until she could see how desperately it needed all his strength and skill to keep his little cockle-shell from broaching to and being swamped.
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