Sylvius Hogg, without taking time to read the rest of the letter, drew the paper from the envelope. He looked at it; he turned it over.
It was a lottery ticket bearing the number 9672.
On the other side of the ticket were the following lines:
“Dearest Hulda—The Viking is going down. I have only this ticket left of all I hoped to bring back to you. I entrust it to God’s hands, hoping that it may reach you safely; and as I shall not be there, I beseech you to be present at the drawing. Accept the ticket with my last thought of you. Hulda, do not forget me in your prayers. Farewell, my beloved, farewell!
XII
So this was the young man’s secret! This was the source from which he expected to derive a fortune for his promised bride—a lottery ticket, purchased before his departure. And as the Viking was going down, he enclosed the ticket in a bottle and threw it into the sea with the last farewell for Hulda.
This time Sylvius Hogg was completely disconcerted. He looked at the letter, then at the ticket. He was speechless with dismay. Besides, what could he say? How could anyone doubt that the Viking had gone down with all on board?
While Sylvius Hogg was reading the letter Hulda had nerved herself to listen, but after the concluding words had been read, she fell back unconscious in Joel’s arms, and it became necessary to carry her to her own little chamber, where her mother administered restoratives. After she recovered consciousness she asked to be left alone for awhile, and she was now kneeling by her bedside, praying for Ole Kamp’s soul.
Dame Hansen returned to the hall. At first she started toward the professor, as if with the intention of speaking to him, then suddenly turning toward the staircase, she disappeared.
Joel, on returning from his sister’s room, had hastily left the house. He experienced a feeling of suffocation in the dwelling over which such a dense cloud of misfortune seemed to be hanging. He longed for the outer air, the fierce blast of the tempest, and spent a part of the night in wandering aimlessly up and down the banks of the Maan.
Sylvius Hogg was therefore left alone. Stunned by the stroke at first, he soon recovered his wonted energy. After tramping up and down the hall two or three times, he paused and listened, in the hope that he might hear a summons from the young girl, but disappointed in this, he finally seated himself at the table, and abandoned himself to his thoughts.
“Can it be possible that Hulda is never to see her betrothed again?” he said to himself. “No; such a misfortune is inconceivable. Everything that is within me revolts at the thought! Even admitting that the Viking has gone to the bottom of the ocean, what conclusive proof have we of Ole’s death? I cannot believe it. In all cases of shipwreck time alone can determine whether or not anyone has survived the catastrophe. Yes; I still have my doubts, and I shall continue to have them, even if Hulda and Joel refuse to share them. If the Viking really foundered, how does it happen that no floating fragments of the wreck have been seen at sea—at least nothing except the bottle in which poor Ole placed his last message, and with it all he had left in the world.”
Sylvius Hogg had the ticket still in his hand, and again he looked at it, and turned it over and held it up between him and the waning light—this scrap of paper upon which poor Ole had based his hopes of fortune.
But the professor, wishing to examine it still more carefully, rose, listened again to satisfy himself that the poor girl upstairs was not calling her mother or brother, and then entered his room.
The ticket proved to be a ticket in the Christiania Schools Lottery—a very popular lottery in Norway at that time. The capital prize was one hundred thousand marks; the total value of the other prizes, ninety thousand marks, and the number of tickets issued, one million, all of which had been sold.
Ole Kamp’s ticket bore the number 9672; but whether this number proved lucky or unlucky, whether the young sailor had any secret reason for his confidence in it or not, he would not be present at the drawing, which was to take place on the fifteenth of July, that is to say, in twenty-eight days; but it was his last request that Hulda should take his place on that occasion.
By the light of his candle, Sylvius Hogg carefully reread the lines written upon the back of the ticket, as if with the hope of discovering some hidden meaning.
The lines had been written with ink, and it was evident that Ole’s hand had not trembled while tracing them. This showed that the mate of the Viking retained all his presence of mind at the time of the shipwreck, and that he was consequently in a condition to take advantage of any means of escape that might offer, such as a floating spar or plank, in case the raging waters had not swallowed up everything when the vessel foundered.
Very often writings of this kind that are recovered from the sea state the locality in which the catastrophe occurred; but in this neither the latitude nor longitude were mentioned; nor was there anything to indicate the nearest land. Hence one must conclude that no one on board knew where the Viking was at the time of the disaster. Driven on, doubtless, by a tempest of resistless power, the vessel must have been carried far out of her course, and the clouded sky making a solar observation impossible, there had been no way of determining the ship’s
