and what more can the eye of
the most forsaken of human beings say? But she turned her back on them
as if in disdain of their fate: she had swung round, burdened, to glare
stubbornly at the new danger of the open sea which she so strangely
survived to end her days in a breaking-up yard, as if it had been her
recorded fate to die obscurely under the blows of many hammers. What
were the various ends their destiny provided for the pilgrims I am
unable to say; but the immediate future brought, at about nine o'clock
next morning, a French gunboat homeward bound from Reunion. The report
of her commander was public property. He had swept a little out of
his course to ascertain what was the matter with that steamer floating
dangerously by the head upon a still and hazy sea. There was an ensign,
union down, flying at her main gaff (the serang had the sense to make a
signal of distress at daylight); but the cooks were preparing the food
in the cooking-boxes forward as usual. The decks were packed as close
as a sheep-pen: there were people perched all along the rails, jammed on
the bridge in a solid mass; hundreds of eyes stared, and not a sound was
heard when the gunboat ranged abreast, as if all that multitude of lips
had been sealed by a spell.

'The Frenchman hailed, could get no intelligible reply, and after
ascertaining through his binoculars that the crowd on deck did not look
plague-stricken, decided to send a boat. Two officers came on board,
listened to the serang, tried to talk with the Arab, couldn't make head
or tail of it: but of course the nature of the emergency was obvious
enough. They were also very much struck by discovering a white man, dead
and curled up peacefully on the bridge. "Fort intrigues par ce cadavre,"
as I was informed a long time after by an elderly French lieutenant whom
I came across one afternoon in Sydney, by the merest chance, in a sort
of cafe, and who remembered the affair perfectly. Indeed this affair,
I may notice in passing, had an extraordinary power of defying the
shortness of memories and the length of time: it seemed to live, with
a sort of uncanny vitality, in the minds of men, on the tips of their
tongues. I've had the questionable pleasure of meeting it often, years
afterwards, thousands of miles away, emerging from the remotest possible
talk, coming to the surface of the most distant allusions. Has it not
turned up to-night between us? And I am the only seaman here. I am the
only