Forthwith my imagination grew sunny. Many bright and delightful ideas occurred to me. Would not my tremendous experience find a glorious crowning in the hand of this girl and her endowment by Vanderdecken, who loved her, out of those chests of treasure and coin which he had in his hold? Would it be impossible for me to persuade him, say after the next gale which blew him back from Agulhas, to put us aboard some vessel homeward bound along with a chest of treasure for his wife as an earnest of what was coming, and so enable me to convey Miss Dudley straight to Amsterdam there to await his arrival? It was but a young man's fancy, pretentious and inconsistent with my opinion of the captain's temper and his ignorance of the Curse that lay on him; and it was not perhaps strictly honest. Though if you come to consider that his doom would never suffer him to use the riches he had in his ship, nor to know whether I had faithfully carried Miss Dudley to his house on the Buitenkant--where I afterwards heard he was living when he sailed--you will not judge me harshly for thus idly and merrily dreaming.
I was in the midst of this castle-building when the hour of noon was struck by the clock. I watched the figure of Death hewing with his lance, but with an abstracted eye, my mind being full of gay and hopeful fancies. But the moment the last stroke had rung, the parrot cried out:--
with so fierce an energy that it broke up my thoughts as you destroy a spider's web by passing your finger through it, and I dropped my chin on to my breast with my spirits dashed.
PRINTED BY TILLOTSON AND SON, MAWDSLEY STREET BOLTON
Obvious punctuation errors repaired. Inconsistent hyphenation fixed.
P. 7: scare an ocean-danger -> scarce an ocean-danger.
P. 39: easy do be seen -> easy to be seen.
P. 45: most greviously -> most grievously.
P. 48: how participent of what stirs the minds -> how participant of what stirs the minds.
P. 53: the replied he did not doubt it was one of he vessels -> he replied he did not doubt it was one of the vessels.
P. 244: the the Evil Spirit -> the Evil Spirit.
P. 245: admire the patness -> admire the aptness.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Death Ship Vol. I, by W. Clark Russell