“He is going in that blast,” said one of the hags, taking the pipe from her mouth, and trying vainly to rekindle it among the embers that the storm scattered about like dust; “he is going in that blast.”
“He’ll come again,” cried another Sybil, “he’ll come again—he’s not at rest!—He roams and wails about till something is told that he never could tell in his lifetime.—God save us!” she added, howling up the chimney, as if addressing the troubled spirit; “tell us what you want, and stop the blast, will ye?”—The wind came like thunder down the chimney; the hag shuddered and retreated.
“If it’s this you want—and this—and this,” cried a young female whom Melmoth had not noticed before, “take them;” and she eagerly tore the papers out of her hair, and flung them into the fire. Then Melmoth recollected a ridiculous story told him the day before of this girl, who had had the “bad luck,” as she called it, to curl her hair with some of the old and useless law-papers of the family, and who now imagined that they “who kept this dreadful pudder o’er her head,” were particularly provoked by her still retaining about her whatever belonged to the deceased; and as she flung the fragments of paper into the fire, she cried aloud, “There stop for the holy J⸺s’ sake, and let us have no more about it!—You have what you wanted, and will you have done?”
The laugh that Melmoth could hardly resist, was checked by a sound which he heard distinctly amid the storm. “Hush—silence! that was a signal gun!—there is a vessel in distress.” They all paused and listened. We have already mentioned the closeness of Melmoth’s abode to the seashore. This had well accustomed its inmates to all the terrors of shipwrecked vessels and drowning passengers. To their honour be it spoken, they never heard those sounds but as a claim, a piteous, irresistible claim on their humanity. They knew nothing of the barbarous practice on the English coast, of fastening a lantern to the limbs of a spancelled horse, whose plungings were to misdirect the wrecked and sinking wretches, in the vain hope that the light they saw was a beacon, and thus to double the horrors of death by the baffled expectation of relief.
The party in the kitchen all watched Melmoth’s countenance intently, as if its expression could have told them “the secrets of the hoary deep.” The storm ceased for a moment, and there was a deep and dreary silence of fearful expectation. The sound was heard again—it could not be mistaken. “It is a gun,” cried Melmoth; “there is a vessel in distress!” and he hurried out of the kitchen, calling on the men to follow him.
The men partook eagerly of the excitement of enterprise and danger. A storm without doors is, after all, better than a storm within; without we have something to struggle with, within we have only to suffer; and the severest storm, by exciting the energy of its victim, gives at once a stimulus to action, and a solace to pride, which those must want who sit shuddering between rocking walls, and almost driven to wish they had only to suffer, not to fear.
While the men were in search of a hundred coats, boots, and hats of their old master, to be sought for in every part of the house—while one was dragging a great coat from the window, before which it had long hung as a blind, in total default of glass or shutters—another was snatching a wig from the jack, where it had been suspended for a duster—and a third was battling with a cat and her brood of kittens for a pair of old boots which she had been pleased to make the seat of her accouchement—Melmoth had gone up to the highest room in the house. The window was driven in;—had there been light, this window commanded a view of the sea and the coast. He leaned far out of it, and listened with fearful and breathless anxiety. The night was dark, but far off, his sight, sharpened by intense solicitude, descried a light at sea. The gust drove him from the window for a moment; at returning the next, he saw a faint flash, and then the report of a gun followed.
There needed no more; and in a few moments after, Melmoth was on
