ared white as snow against the grey, cloudy sky,
swooped down abruptly, and as though skipping from wave to wave,
departed again and vanished like silvery flecks in the strips of
swirling foam. Some of them, I noticed, circled persistently around a
large isolated boulder which rose aloft in the midst of the monotonous
expanse of sandy shores. Coarse seaweed grew in uneven tufts on one side
of the rock; and at the point where its tangled stems emerged from the
yellow salt-marsh, there was something black, and long, and arched, and
not very large.... I began to look more intently.... Some dark object
was lying there--lying motionless beside the stone.... That object
became constantly clearer and more distinct the nearer I approached....

I was only thirty paces from the rock now.... Why, that was the outline
of a human body! It was a corpse; it was a drowned man, cast up by the
sea! I went clear up to the rock.

It was the corpse of the baron, my father! I stopped short, as though
rooted to the spot. Then only did I understand that ever since daybreak
I had been guided by some unknown forces--that I was in their
power,--and for the space of several minutes there was nothing in my
soul save the ceaseless crashing of the sea, and a dumb terror in the
presence of the Fate which held me in its grip....

XV

He was lying on his back, bent a little to one side, with his left arm
thrown above his head ... the right was turned under his bent body. The
sticky slime had sucked in the tips of his feet, shod in tall sailor's
boots; the short blue pea-jacket, all impregnated with sea-salt, had not
unbuttoned; a red scarf encircled his neck in a hard knot. The swarthy
face, turned skyward, seemed to be laughing; from beneath the upturned
upper lip small close-set teeth were visible; the dim pupils of the
half-closed eyes were hardly to be distinguished from the darkened
whites; covered with bubbles of foam the dirt-encrusted hair spread out
over the ground and laid bare the smooth forehead with the purplish line
of the scar; the narrow nose rose up like a sharp, white streak between
the sunken cheeks. The storm of the past night had done its work.... He
had not beheld America! The man who had insulted my mother, who had
marred her life, my father--yes! my father, I could cherish no doubt as
to that--lay stretched out helpless in the mud at my feet. I experienced
a sense of satisfied vengeance, and compassion, and repulsion,