VERY HARD CASH.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND."

CHAPTER XVI.

THE subsiding sea was now a liquid Paradise:
its great pellucid braes and hillocks shone with
the sparkle, and the hues, of all the jewels in an
emperor's crown. Imagine—after three days of
inky sea, and pitchy sky, and Death's deep jaws
snapping and barely missing with a click—ten
thousand great slopes of emerald, aquamarine,
amethyst, and topaz, liquid, alive, and dancing
jocundly beneath a gorgeous sun: and you will
have a faint idea of what met the eyes and hearts
of the rescued looking out of that battered,
jagged, ship, upon ocean smiling back to smiling
Heaven.

Yet one man felt no buoyancy, nor gush of joy.
He leaned against a fragment of the broken
bulwark, confused between the sweetness of life
preserved, and the bitterness of treasure lost, his
wife's and children's treasured treasure;
benumbed at heart, and almost weary of the
existence he had battled for so stoutly. He
looked so moody, and answered so grimly and
unlike himself, that they all held aloof from him;
heavy heart among so many joyful ones, he was in
true solitude; the body in a crowd, the soul
alone. And he was sore as well as heavy: for, of
all the lubberly acts he had ever known, the way
he had lost his dear ones' fortune seemed to him
the worst.

A voice sounded in his ear: "Poor thing; she
has foundered!"

It was Fullalove scanning the horizon with his
famous glass.

"Foundered? Who?" said Dodd; though he
did not care much who sank, who swam. Then
he remembered the vessel, whose flashing guns
had shed a human ray on the unearthly horror
of the black hurricane. He looked all round.

Blank!

Ay, she had perished with all hands. The sea
had swallowed her, and spared him; ungrateful.

This turned his mind sharply. Suppose the
Agra had gone down, the money would be lost
as now, and his life into the bargain, a life dearer
to all at home than millions of gold: he prayed
inwardly to Heaven for gratitude, and goodness
to feel its mercy. This softened him a little; and
his heart swelled so, he wished he was a woman
to cry over his children's loss for an hour, and
then shake all off and go through his duty somehow;
for now he was paralysed, and all seemed
ended. Next, nautical superstition fastened on
him. That pocket-book of his was Jonah; It
had to go or else the ship; the moment It did
go, the storm had broken as by magic.

Now Superstition is generally stronger than
rational Religion, whether they lie apart, or
together in one mind: and this superstitious
notion did something toward steeling the poor
man. "Come," said he to himself, "my loss has
saved all these poor souls on board this ship. So
be it! Heaven's will be done! I must bustle, or
else go mad."

He turned to and worked like a horse: and
with his own hands helped the men to rig parallel
ropes—a substitute for bulwarks—till the
perspiration ran down him.

Bayliss now reported the well nearly dry, and
Dodd was about to bear up and make sail again,
when one of the ship-boys, a little fellow with a
bright eye and a chin like a monkey's, came up
to him and said,

"Please, captain!" Then glared with awe at
what he had done, and broke down.

"Well, my little man?" said Dodd, gently.

Thus encouraged, the boy gave a great gulp,
and burst in a brogue: "Och your arnr, sure
there's no rudder on her at all barrin the tiller."

"What d'ye mean?"

"Don't murrder me, your arnr, and I'll tell
ye. It's meself looked over the starrn just now;
and I seen there was no rudder at all at all:
Mille diaoul, sis I; ye old bitch I'll tell his arnr
what y'are after, slipping your rudder like my
granny's list shoe, I will."

Dodd ran to the helm and looked down; the
brat was right: the blows which had so
endangered the ship, had broken the rudder, and
the sea had washed it away in pieces. The
sight and the reflection made him faintish for a
moment. Death passing so very close to a man
sickens him afterwards; unless he has the luck to
be brainless.

"What is your name, urchin?"

"Ned Murphy, sir."

"Very well, Murphy, then you are a fine little
fellow, and have wiped all our eyes in the ship:
run and send the carpenter aft."