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Finding that the packet for France was not likely to sail immediately, we hired a boat, and proceeded down the river, to view the beautiful ruins of Netley Abbey, in the great court of which we dined, under the shade of aged limes, and amidst the flappings of its feathered and restless tenantry.
The ship came on like a black hurrying animal with froth-filled maw. The two wanderers stood up and clasped hands. Then they howled out a wild duet that rang over the wastes of sea. The cries seemed to strike the ship. Men with boots on yelled and ran about the deck. They picked up heavy articles and threw them down. They yelled more. After hideous creakings and flappings, the vessel stood still.
There were no clanking traps or sound of gunshots to account for it, yet they had died. Their crazy flappings had been in sharp contrast to their usual grace when in the air. Their actions had not been normal, and Breed someway thought of the ways of poisoned coyotes.
They entered its vast and silent halls, frightening the owls and bats that fled before them with hideous hootings and flappings of wings, and passing by a multiplicity of mouldy stairs, dank reeking roofs, and rickety corridors, at last came to an apartment which, dismal and dismantled as it was, appeared to be in rather better condition than the neighboring chambers, and they therefore selected it as their place of rest for the night.
Presently the clouds swallowed her again for a time, and then she came back to sight as a dark and whale-like monster, amidst streaming weather. The air was full of flappings and pipings, of void, gusty shouts and noises; it buffeted him and confused him; ever and again his attention became rigid a blind and deaf balancing and clutching. "Wow!"
Well I recollect the mingled disappointment and admiration of the Preventive men, as a fresh set of salvors appeared in view, in the form of a boat's crew of Clovelly fishermen; how we watched breathlessly the little black speck crawling and struggling up in the teeth of the gale, under the shelter of the land, till, when the ship had rounded a point into smoother water, she seized on her like some tiny spider on a huge unwieldy fly; and then how one still smaller black speck showed aloft on the main-yard, and another and then the desperate efforts to get the topsail set and how we saw it tear out of their hands again, and again, and again, and almost fancied we could hear the thunder of its flappings above the roar of the gale, and the mountains of surf which made the rocks ring beneath our feet; and how we stood silent, shuddering, expecting every moment to see whirled into the sea from the plunging yards one of those same tiny black specks, in each one of which was a living human soul, with sad women praying for him at home!
The most he did was to shift his perch when he was hit, which, to be sure, happened pretty often. Once he was struck so hard that he came tumbling toward the ground, and I began to think it was all over with him; but when about half-way down he recovered himself, and by dint of painful flappings succeeded in alighting just out of the reach of the crowd.
The sun of Italy had not yet browned the little children who were to become the brown fathers and mothers of the brown soldiers of Caesar's legions; and twenty miles south of Rome, in the sacred grove of Dodona, where the motions of oak boughs were auguries, and the flappings of the wings of white doves were divine messages, and the tinkling of bells in the foliage had divine meanings, in this grove the virgins of Latium, as the Greek girls of Ephesus, were once a year appointed to undergo similar rites.
Its driver barely had escaped, to return homeward afoot across country bearing dire tidings to his employer, who was reported, upon hearing the lamentable news, literally to have scrambled the air with disconsolate flappings of his hands, meanwhile uttering shrill cries of grief.
But what he did was accomplished finely. And the bird, rushing blindly into the midst of the contention, with whirrings and flappings indescribable, helped more than an army of servants, to confuse the man. Notwithstanding, it was soon over, but not before Mrs. Chatterton had wrenched her fingers free, and grasped the pistol from its loose hold in his other hand.
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