Page 208 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

CHAPTER XI. LEFT

AT ‘HELL’S GATES.’

here is no need to dwell upon the mental agonies of that
Tmiserable night. Perhaps, of all the five, the one least
qualified to endure it realized the prospect of suffering
most acutely. Mrs. Vickers— lay-figure and noodle as she
was—had the keen instinct of approaching danger, which
is in her sex a sixth sense. She was a woman and a mother,
and owned a double capacity for suffering. Her feminine
imagination pictured all the horrors of death by famine,
and having realized her own torments, her maternal love
forced her to live them over again in the person of her child.
Rejecting Bates’s offer of a pea-jacket and Frere’s vague ten-
ders of assistance, the poor woman withdrew behind a rock
that faced the sea, and, with her daughter in her arms, re-
signed herself to her torturing thoughts. Sylvia, recovered
from her terror, was almost content, and, curled in her
mother’s shawl, slept. To her little soul this midnight mys-
tery of boats and muskets had all the flavour of a romance.
With Bates, Frere, and her mother so close to her, it was im-
possible to be afraid; besides, it was obvious that papa—the
Supreme Being of the settlement—must at once return and
severely punish the impertinent prisoners who had dared to
insult his wife and child, and as Sylvia dropped off to sleep,

0