The World of Ice | Page 7

herself, so she glanced towards the mastiff for help.
Buzzby felt that it devolved upon him to afford consolation under the circumstances, but Mrs Bright's mind was of that peculiar stamp which repels advances in the way of consolation unconsciously, and Buzzby was puzzled. He screwed up first the right eye and then the left, and smote his thigh repeatedly; and assuredly, if contorting his visage could have comforted Mrs Bright, she would have returned home a happy woman, for he made faces at her violently for full five minutes; but it did her no good, perhaps because she didn't see him, her eyes being suffused with tears.
"Ah! yes," resumed Mrs Bright, with another burst, "I know they will never come back, and your silence shows that you think so too; and to think of their taking two years' provisions with them in case of accidents!--doesn't that prove that there are going to be accidents? and didn't I hear one of the sailors say that she was a crack ship, a number one? I don't know what he meant by a number one; but if she's a cracked ship I know she will never come back; and although I told my dear brother of it, and advised him not to go, he only laughed at me, which was very unkind, I'm sure--"
Here Mrs Bright's feelings overcame her again.
"Why, Aunt," said Fred, scarce able to restrain a laugh, despite the sadness that lay at his heart, "when the sailor said it was a crack ship, he meant that it was a good one, a first-rate one."
"Then why did he not say what he meant? But you are talking nonsense, boy; do you think that I will believe a man means to say a thing is good when he calls it cracked? and I'm sure nobody would say a cracked tea-pot was as good as a whole one; but tell me, Buzzby, do you think they ever will come back?"
"Why, ma'am, in coorse I do," replied Buzzby vehemently; "for why? if they don't, they're the first that ever went out o' this port in my day as didn't. They've a good ship and lots o' grub, and it's like to be a good season; and Captain Ellice has, for the most part, good luck; and they've started with a fair wind, and kep' clear of a Friday, and what more could ye wish? I only wish as I was aboard along with them, that's all."
Buzzby delivered himself of this oration with the left eye shut and screwed up, and the right one open. Having concluded, he shut and screwed up the right eye, and opened the left--he reversed the engine, so to speak, as if he wished to back out from the scene of his triumph, and leave the course clear for others to speak. But his words were thrown away on Mrs Bright, who was emphatically a weak-minded woman, and never exercised her reason at all, except in a spasmodic, galvanic sort of way, when she sought to defend or to advocate some unreasonable conclusion of some sort, at which her own weak mind had arrived somehow. So she shook her head, and sobbed good-bye to Buzzby, as she ascended the sloping avenue that led to her pretty cottage, on the green hill that overlooked the harbour and the sea beyond.
As for John Buzzby, having been absent from home full half an hour beyond his usual dinner-hour, he felt that, for a man who had lashed his helm amidships, he was yawing alarmingly out of his course, so he spread all the canvas he could carry, and steered, right before the wind, towards the village, where, in a little, whitewashed, low-roofed, one-doored and two-little-windowed cottage, his spouse (and dinner) awaited him.
To make a long story short, three years passed away, but the Pole Star did not return, and no news of her could be got from the various whale-ships that visited the port of Grayton. Towards the end of the second year Buzzby began to shake his head despondingly; and as the third drew to a close, the expression of gloom never left his honest, weather-beaten face. Mrs Bright too, whose anxiety at first was only half genuine, now became seriously alarmed, and the fate of the missing brig began to be the talk of the neighbourhood. Meanwhile Fred Ellice and Isobel grew and improved in mind and body, but anxiety as to his father's fate rendered the former quite unable to pursue his studies, and he determined at last to procure a passage in a whale-ship, and go out in search of the brig.
It happened that the principal merchant and ship-owner in the town, Mr Singleton by name, was an intimate friend and old school-fellow of Captain Ellice, so Fred went