'Well,' said he, gathering my meaning even from my pause, 'I should say, sir, that a man would know his own child. Old Mr. Hoskins assured me, whilst telling his story, with the tears standing in his eyes, that the portrait sent him was the likeness of Mrs. Ollier, his daughter. That being so, it's reasonable you should ask questions about the wreck.'
'Would Mr. Hoskins show me those portraits, do you think?'
'Show them? Why, yes, sir. When he hears the story, he'll be glad to be of use. If you'll stop here, I'll go and manage the matter out of hand for you.'
I continued alone for some time with my mind tormented by anxiety and expectation. Though old Mr. Hoskins declared the portraits to be his daughter's, yet he might very well be mistaken, too. I waited in dread. The distress of expectation and suspense was complicated by the fear that the action of the sea, the convulsion and agony of drowning, had so wrought as to make a cheat of the face: to the old man it was to be his child, and to me it was to plead dimly as Marie out of its shrunk, ghastly looks! How should we decide then? Indeed, none might ever get to certainly know _who_ it was, and I should go home fancying I had viewed the face of my beloved in death, and fancying, too, for months to come, that she had been rescued and, by the many strange crosses of travel and adventure, detained, but that she was coming and I should hear.
Thus I sat, my mind in anguish, starting up sometimes to pace the few feet of charterhouse deck, then flinging myself down miserable and mad with thought.
A canary suddenly sang loudly in a cage under the clock; in every plank was the pulse of the engines, like a tingling of blood in veins; from over the side came a note of stealthy hissing, subtly threading the noises of the deck like someone in a theatre low hissing through the voices of the actors.
In about twenty minutes the captain arrived with Mr. Hoskins. He brought the old gentleman in and hooked the door ajar.
Mr. Hoskins was a fresh-coloured old man, white bearded, with intensely black eye brows curling like moustaches over his glittering black eyes; he was dressed in black. I had observed in him a patient way of looking, of speaking; his voice was a little tremulous with time--he was probably sixty-five years of age.