Chapter 12

THE EPISODE OF THE DEAD MAN WHO SPOKE

I will not trouble you with details of those three terrible days and
nights when we drifted helplessly about at the mercy of the currents
on our improvised life-raft up and down the English Channel. The first
night was the worst. Slowly after that we grew used to the danger, the
cold, the hunger, and the thirst. Our senses were numbed; we passed
whole hours together in a sort of torpor, just vaguely wondering whether
a ship would come in sight to save us, obeying the merciful law that
those who are utterly exhausted are incapable of acute fear, and
acquiescing in the probability of our own extinction. But however
slender the chance--and as the hours stole on it seemed slender
enough--Hilda still kept her hopes fixed mainly on Sebastian. No
daughter could have watched the father she loved more eagerly and
closely than Hilda watched her life-long enemy--the man who had wrought
such evil upon her and hers. To save our own lives without him would be
useless. At all hazards, she must keep him alive, on the bare chance of
a rescue. If he died, there died with him the last hope of justice and
redress.

As for Sebastian, after the first half-hour, during which he lay white
and unconscious, he opened his eyes faintly, as we could see by the
moonlight, and gazed around him with a strange, puzzled state of
inquiry. Then his senses returned to him by degrees. "What! you,
Cumberledge?" he murmured, measuring me with his eye; "and you, Nurse
Wade? Well, I thought you would manage it." There was a tone almost of
amusement in his voice, a half-ironical tone which had been familiar to
us in the old hospital days. He raised himself on one arm and gazed at
the water all round. Then he was silent for some minutes. At last he
spoke again. "Do you know what I ought to do if I were consistent?" he
asked, with a tinge of pathos in his words. "Jump off this raft, and
deprive you of your last chance of triumph--the triumph which you have
worked for so hard. You want to save my life for your own ends, not for
mine. Why should I help you to my own undoing?"

Hilda's voice was tenderer and softer than usual as she answered: "No,
not for my own ends alone, and not for your undoing, but to give you one
last chance of unburdening your conscience. Some men are too small to be
capable of remorse; their little souls have no room for such a feeling.
You are great enough to feel it and to try to crush it down. But you
CANNOT crush it down; it crops up in spite of you. You have tried to
bury it in your soul, and you have failed. It is your remorse that has
driven you to make so many attempts against the only living souls who
knew and understood. If ever