I went back to hang over the bulwarks and lose myself among the stars.
And so we made our way athwart the world. Each evening every one went to scan the chart where the little “atom’s” progress was marked with, to us, an all too short pen-stroke, showing the distance covered in the last twenty-four hours. And in time the sad South Atlantic broke up the exquisite blue weather of the Tropics.
The diary goes on: “To-night we saw the Pole Star set for the last time. A profound melancholy—a sense of losing a life-companion—falls on the mind. The child who has just seen its old nurse turn a bend in the road and disappear looks with rueful eyes on the bright newcomer. The Southern Cross and all the new stars will never fill the void left by the constellations which I have watched above the beloved scenes of the Northern World. My thoughts follow the Pole Star beyond the dark rim of the horizon. Dear old friend! I shall not feel content, no matter how beautiful I shall find the Southern heavens, till the joyful night when the captain of the Homeward Bound tells us we shall see thee rise. When will that be—in two—in three—years?”
I spoke just now of the “sad” South Atlantic. To me it will always be the saddest part of the world. The sky above it loses the transparent and radiant quality of blue (“less blue than radiant,” Mrs. Browning happily says of the Florentine sky) and takes more of a cobalt quality, and the tone of the sea follows suit. The effect of the diminishing warmth also chills one morally and physically, and one knows that the best is passed. The phrase, “a waste of waters,” comes constantly to the mind.
The following extract from the diary will show how this mournful sentiment of the South Atlantic was one day accentuated—stamped, as it were, with the seal of sorrow, on our return voyage, four days from Cape Town. “We had a burial at sea, the forlornest thing I have ever witnessed. A poor consumptive governess, travelling alone, died last night, who must have been far too ill to be put on board ship. She was buried at eleven this morning.
“We were kneeling near the body, which lay on a bier shaped like a tray, covered with the Union Jack, at the open gangway overhanging the dreary tossing waters. Not a glimpse of blue sky above, the dense clouds shut it out. As she belonged to our Church, W., in uniform, read the prayers and Captain C. the responses. When the prayers were ended the bier was tilted by the six sailors who had been grasping it all through the service. The poor little body, sewn up in sacking, darted out, with a rattle of the leaden weights, from under the covering flag and fell with a loud splash into the black ocean; the flowers that had been placed on it scattered on the foam, and, as the ship scarcely stopped, these were soon left behind to sink and disappear. He who read the prayers said to me when all was over, ‘Christ walks the waters as well as the land.’”
Two days after I read: “A concert this evening, with some comic songs. I noticed the piano was draped with the same Union Jack that covered the poor girl two days ago.”
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One can hardly realize what a sailing voyage of this magnitude must have been in the old days. Our modern impatience can hardly endure the thought. The announcement one evening that at dawn we should sight Table Mountain was extremely pleasant. The arrival had the never-fading charm. “I see papa!” sang out little M. “How are the children?” hailed papa from the quay. “All well!” And we land on utterly new ground to begin a new experience. A short train journey, turning the flank of Table Mountain, brings us to our new home at Rosebank, where I find a pair of shapely Cape ponies harnessed to the Victoria awaiting us at the station.
