“I very greatly fear that there is no mistake about it,” returned Leslie. “I have seen death, in my time, too often not to recognise it. You will observe that breathing has ceased; neither can I find any trace of a pulse, or the slightest flutter of the heart-beat. All these symptoms are, I believe, quite consistent with a state of trance; and, remembering that, we must of course be careful to do nothing precipitately. But I am convinced that the man is really dead—a very short time will suffice, in this climate, to demonstrate whether or not that is the case—and I would advise you to give immediate instructions to have the necessary preparations made for his burial. Should my surmise prove correct, you are now the master of this brig; and as such you will of course adopt such measures with regard to me, as the immediate cause of this misfortune, as you may deem fit. But there is no necessity to put me in irons; I cannot very well escape.”
“Put you in irons!” ejaculated Purchas; “I should think not. No, Mr Leslie, you had no intention of killin’ the skipper; I’ll swear to that. It was an accident; neither more nor less. How was you to know that a great strong man, like he was, was goin’ to stagger back and hit his head again’ the rail, same as he did? And he provoked you; all hands ’ll bear witness to that; he shot at ye, and you was quite justified in takin’ his revolver away from him. Oh no, there’ll be no puttin’ of you in irons so long as I’m skipper o’ this brig. But of course I shall have to make a hentry of the whole affair in the official log-book; and now you’ll have to go on with the brig to Valparaiso, whether or no, to hear what the British Consul there have got to say about it.”
“Certainly,” assented Leslie, “I shall make no difficulty about that. And I have not very much fear as to the result. But, as to Miss Trevor, I hope you will seize the first suitable opportunity that occurs to trans-ship her. She, poor girl, will now be more anxious than ever to get away from this vessel.”
“Yes, yes; of course she will,” agreed Purchas. “And I suppose, Mr Leslie,” he continued, “you won’t have any objections to continue lending me a hand to work and navigate this brig? Now that the skipper’s gone I shall need help more’n ever.”
“You may rely upon me, Mr Purchas, to do everything in my power to help you,” answered Leslie. “And now,” he continued, “while you are making the arrangements of which I just now spoke, I will go on deck and make Miss Trevor acquainted with the news of our misfortune.”
Miss Trevor received the news of Potter’s demise with a few expressions of well-bred regret, but she did not appear to be very greatly concerned at the event. It could scarcely be otherwise. In the first place, she had only been in the man’s company a very few hours; and although he had certainly picked her and Leslie up—thus saving them in all probability from a lingering and painful death—he could scarcely have acted otherwise, seeing that he had nothing to do but give orders for a few rope’s ends to be dropped over the side to them. Then, although she had given no sign of it, his manner toward her had been such as to fill her with vague fear; while his behaviour toward Leslie, when that individual had unavailingly attempted to convince him of the presence of another survivor upon the floating wreckage, was scarcely of a kind to inspire a woman with confidence or respect.
By eight bells in the afternoon watch there was no longer room for doubt that Potter was really dead; and this being the case, Purchas very wisely decided to bury the body at once, and get rid of it. At his summons, therefore, the carpenter and another man came aft with a square of canvas, palm, needle, and twine to sew up the body, and a short length of rusty chain—routed out from the fore-peak—wherewith to sink it. Meanwhile the brig’s ensign was hoisted half-mast high, and the men were ordered to “clean” themselves in readiness for the funeral—all work being knocked off for the remainder of the day. Upon being apprised of what was about to take place, Miss Trevor retired to her cabin.
The process of sewing up the body and preparing it for burial occupied about half an hour, by which time the men were all ready. Meanwhile Leslie had been coaching Purchas—who frankly confessed his ignorance—as to the part he was to perform; it being of course his duty, as master of the ship, to read the burial service.
The carpenter having reported that the body was ready, two more men came aft, bearing with them a grating which they laid down on the deck alongside the companion. They then descended to the berth wherein the dead man lay and, assisted by the carpenter and the man who had helped to sew up the body in its canvas shroud, carried the corpse, with some difficulty—owing to its weight, and the cramped dimensions of the berth and the companion-way—up on deck, where it was laid upon the grating, and a spare ensign spread over it as a pall. Then the four men raised the grating and its burden to their shoulders, and with Purchas in front reading the burial service, and Leslie following behind, all, of course, uncovered, the little procession moved slowly along the deck to the lee gangway, where the rest of the crew, also uncovered, awaited it. Arrived at the gangway, the grating was laid upon the rail, with the feet of the body pointing outboard; the carpenter and his assistant supporting the inner end of the grating.
Shorn though the ceremony necessarily was of most of the solemn formalism that characterises an interment ashore, and further marred in its effectiveness by the droning tones in which Purchas deemed it proper to read the beautiful and solemn words of the prescribed ritual, it was, nevertheless, profoundly impressive, the peculiar circumstances of the case, and the setting of the picture, so to speak—the small brig out there alone upon the boundless world of waters, the little group of weather-beaten bare-headed men surrounding the stark and silent figure upon the grating, who a few brief hours before had been the head and chief of their small community; the man to whose knowledge and skill they had willingly committed their fortunes and themselves, who had ruled them as with a rod of iron, whose will was their law, who had held their very lives in his hands, at whose caprice they were either happy or miserable, and who now lay there without the power to move so much as a finger either to help or hurt them, and whose lifeless clay they were about to launch to its last resting-place, there to repose “till the sea gives up her dead,”—this, with the wailing moan of the wind aloft, the sobbing of the water alongside, and the solemn glory of the dying day all uniting to imbue the scene and the occasion with a profundity of sadness and a sublimity that would have been impossible under other circumstances. And so deeply was Leslie moved by it that, for the first time since the words of his cruel and unjust sentence had fallen upon his ears, he once more felt, to conviction, that God the Creator, God the Ordainer, God the Father was and must be an ever-living and omnipotent entity. And for the first time, also, since then he followed the prayers that Purchas droned out with an earnest and heartfelt sincerity at which he felt himself vaguely astonished.