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In quick succession, the pink shaded to rose, the rose to crimson and scarlet splendor; and then the sun came leaping above the horizon, to flood sea and sky with its dazzling effulgence. Captain Meggs had entered the pilot house in the blackness of night. He came out in the full glare of day. Lord James had turned his back to the sun.
He was staring at the bank of white mist that, less than two miles to westward, shrouded the swampy coast. Meggs had brought out two pairs of binoculars, one of which he handed to his charterer. "Your lordship sees," he remarked. "We're none too far out from the reefs." "Beastly mist!" complained Lord James, his handsome high-bred face creased with impatience and anxiety.
Men who had to work went about their toil moistly, their minds far away in shady public-houses. But Mr Meggs, in his study, was cool both in mind and body. Before him, on the desk, lay six little slips of paper. They were bank-notes, and they represented, with the exception of a few pounds, his entire worldly wealth. Beside them were six letters, six envelopes, and six postage stamps.
I am only a working-girl Mr Meggs, who had fallen back against the desk as a stricken pugilist falls on the ropes, pulled himself together to protest. 'Miss Pillenger, he cried, aghast, 'you misunderstand me. I had no intention 'Misunderstand you? Bah! I am only a working-girl 'Nothing was farther from my mind 'Indeed! Nothing was farther from your mind!
Such was Miss Pillenger. She was the last of a long line of unprotected English girlhood which had been compelled by straitened circumstances to listen for hire to the appallingly dreary nonsense which Mr Meggs had to impart on the subject of British Butterflies.
The following morning Mr Meggs awoke from a dreamless sleep with a feeling that some curious change had taken place in him. He was abominably stiff, and to move his limbs was pain, but down in the centre of his being there was a novel sensation of lightness. He could have declared that he was happy. Wincing, he dragged himself out of bed and limped to the window. He threw it open.
Mr Meggs's point, the main plank, as it were, in his suicidal platform, was that with him it was beside the question whether or not it was nobler to suffer in the mind. The mind hardly entered into it at all. What he had to decide was whether it was worth while putting up any longer with the perfectly infernal pain in his stomach. For Mr Meggs was a martyr to indigestion.
See how the pigeons follow her. She has been gathering raspberries, and I promised she should make all she could pick into jelly for poor old Tobitha Meggs. How pure and fair she looks in her white dress! Dear little thing! Sometimes I am wicked enough to wish she had no mother, for then she would be wholly ours, and we could keep her always. Listen, she is singing Schubert's 'Ave Maria'."
By this time the constable, though age had to some extent dimmed his sight, had recognized beneath the perspiration, features which, though they were distorted, were nevertheless those of one whom he respected as a leading citizen. 'Why, Mr Meggs! he said. This identification by one in authority calmed, if it a little disappointed, the crowd.
But d' you make out how that cloth is lashed to the bamboo? It was knotted on by a landsman. We'll find neither officers nor crew among the survivors." The steamer was now opposite the face of the headland, Meggs sprang into the pilot house. Within the next few moments the speed of the vessel fell off to less than a knot.
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