But she never came. Never, never,
never, you know. I sat here watching them come and go, and my child
sickened and died, and the summer passed, and the autumn, and all the
while I looked--looked--looked; for the brigs are all much alike; and
only her I always saw as soon as she hove in sight (because he tied a
hank of flax to her mizzen-mast); and when he was home safe and
sound I spun the hank into hose for him; that was a fancy of his, and for
eleven voyages, one on another, he had never missed to tie the flax
nor I to spin the hose. But the hank of flax I never saw this time; nor
the brave brig; nor my good man with his sunny blue eyes. Only one day in
winter, when the great blocks of ice were smashing hither and thither, a
coaster came in and brought tidings of how off in the Danish waters they
had come on a water-logged brig, and had boarded her, and had found her
empty, and her hull riven in two, and her crew all drowned and dead
beyond any manner of doubt. And on her stern there was her name painted
white, the 'Fleur d'Epine,' of Brussels, as plain as name could be; and
that was all we ever knew: what evil had struck her, or how they had
perished, nobody ever told.
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