Then I resolved to wait, and at the last moment, when we entered on the final stretch, to take her in my arms and proclaim my love, and, with her in my embrace, to make the desperate struggle and die.
Instinctively we drew closer together in the bottom of the boat.I felt her mittened hand come out to mine.And thus, without speech, we waited the end.We were not far off the line the wind made with the western edge of the promontory, and I watched in the hope that some set of the current or send of the sea would drift us past before we reached the surf.
"We shall go clear," I said, with a confidence which I knew deceived neither of us.
"By God, we will go clear!" I cried, five minutes later.
The oath left my lips in my excitement -- the first, I do believe, in my life, unless "trouble it," an expletive of my youth, be accounted an oath.
"I beg your pardon," I said.
"You have convinced me of your sincerity," she said, with a faint smile.
"I do know, now, that we shall go clear."I had seen a distant headland past the extreme edge of the promontory, and as we looked we could see grow the intervening coast- line of what was evidently a deep cove.At the same time there broke upon our ears a continuous and mighty bellowing.It partook of the magnitude and volume of distant thunder, and it came to us directly from leeward, rising above the crash of the surf and travelling directly in the teeth of the storm.
As we passed the point the whole cove burst upon our view, a half-moon of white sandy beach upon which broke a huge surf, and which was covered with myriads of seals.It was from them that the great bellowing went up.
"A rookery!" I cried."Now are we indeed saved.There must be men and cruisers to protect them from the seal-hunters.Possibly there is a station ashore."But as I studied the surf which beat upon the beach, I said, "Still bad, but not so bad.And now, if the gods be truly kind, we shall drift by that next headland and come upon a perfectly sheltered beach, where we may land without wetting our feet."And the gods were kind.The first and second headlands were directly in line with the southwest wind; but once around the second, -- and we went perilously near, -- we picked up the third headland, still in line with the wind and with the other two.But the cove that intervened! It penetrated deep into the land, and the tide, setting in, drifted us under the shelter of the point.Here the sea was calm, save for a heavy but smooth ground-swell, and I took in the sea-anchor and began to row.From the point the shore curved away, more and more to the south and west, until, at last, it disclosed a cove within the cove, a little land-locked harbor, the water level as a pond, broken only by tiny ripples where vagrant breaths and wisps of the storm hurtled down from over the frowning wall of rock that backed the beach a hundred feet inshore.
Here were no seals whatever.The boat's stem touched the hard shingle.
I sprang out, extending my hand to Maud.The next moment she was beside me.As my fingers released hers, she clutched for my arm hastily.At the same moment I swayed, as about to fall to the sand.This was the startling effect of the cessation of motion.We had been so long upon the moving, rocking sea that the stable land was a shock to us.We expected the beach to lift up this way and that, and the rocky walls to swing back and forth like the sides of a ship; and when we braced ourselves, automatically, for these various expected movements, their non-occurrence quite overcame our equilibrium.
"I really must sit down," Maud said, with a nervous laugh and a dizzy gesture, and forthwith she sat down on the sand.
I attended to ****** the boat secure and joined her.Thus we landed on Endeavor Island, as we came to it, land-sick from long custom of the sea.
