Chapter 26

"Oh! many a dream was in the ship
An hour before her death;
And sight of home, with sighs disturbed
The sleeper's long-drawn breath."

WILSON.

Raoul soon decided on his course. While he was consoling Clinch, orders
had been sent to Pintard to look for the other gig; but a few minutes'
search under the cliffs satisfied those on deck that she was not to be
found; and the fact was so reported below. Nor could all Ithuel's
ingenuity extract from the captured boat's crew any available
information on the subject. There was an _esprit de corps_ among the
Proserpines, as between their own ship and le Feu-Follet, which would
have withstood, on an occasion like this, both threats and bribes; and
he of the Granite State was compelled to give the matter up as hopeless;
though, in so doing, he did not fail to ascribe the refusal to betray
their shipmates, on the part of these men, to English obstinacy, rather
than to any creditable feeling. The disposition to impute the worst to
those he hated, however, was not peculiar to Ithuel or his country; it
being pretty certain he would have fared no better on board the English
frigate, under circumstances at all analogous.

Satisfied, at length, that the other boat had escaped him, and feeling
the necessity of getting out of the Bay while it was still dark, Raoul
reluctantly gave the order to bear up, and put the lugger dead before
the wind, wing-and-wing. By the time this was done, the light craft had
turned so far to windward as to be under the noble rocks that separate
the piano of Sorrento from the shores of Vico; a bold promontory that
buttresses the sea, with a wall of near or quite a thousand feet in
perpendicular height. Here she felt the full force of the land-wind; and
when her helm was put up, and her sheets eased off, a bird turning on
the wing would not have come round more gracefully, and scarcely with
greater velocity. The course now lay from point to point, in order to
avoid being becalmed within the indentations of the coast. This carried
the lugger athwart the cove of Sorrento, rather than into it, and, of
course, left Yelverton, who had landed at the smaller marina, quite out
of the line of her course.

So swift was the progress of the little craft that, within fifteen
minutes after bearing up, Raoul and Ithuel, who again occupied their
stations on the forecastle, saw the headland where they had so lately
been concealed, and ordered the helm a-port in order to sheer out and
give it a berth. Then rock was passed after rock, cove after cove, and
village after village, until the entrance between Capri and Campanella
was again reached. In sweeping down the shore in this manner, the
intention was to pick up any boat that might