scarce bearable, when the two men came on deck, had the boat manned,

and

passed down, one after another, into the stern-sheets. A white shirt at

the end of an oar served as a flag of truce; and the men, by direction,

and to give it the better chance to be observed, pulled with extreme

slowness. The isle shook before them like a place incandescent; on

the face of the lagoon blinding copper suns, no bigger than sixpences,

danced and stabbed them in the eyeballs; there went up from sand and

sea, and even from the boat, a glare of scathing brightness; and as they

could only peer abroad from between closed lashes, the excess of light

seemed to be changed into a sinister darkness, comparable to that of a

thundercloud before it bursts.

The captain had come upon this errand for any one of a dozen reasons,

the last of which was desire for its success. Superstition rules all

men; semi-ignorant and gross natures, like that of Davis, it rules

utterly. For murder he had been prepared; but this horror of the

medicine in the bottle went beyond him, and he seemed to himself to be

parting the last strands that united him to God. The boat carried him

on to reprobation, to damnation; and he suffered himself to be carried

passively consenting, silently bidding farewell to his better self

and his hopes. Huish sat by his side in towering spirits that were not

wholly genuine. Perhaps as brave a man as ever lived, brave as a weasel,

he must still reassure himself with the tones of his own voice; he must

play his part to exaggeration, he must out-Herod Herod, insult all

that was respectable, and brave all that was formidable, in a kind of

desperate wager with himself.

186

The Ebb-Tide