The captain went on deck, and sent the second mate, Foster, below, in a not very enviable frame of mind, after hearing what was on the tapis, for, like Mr. Quail—
"He, poor fellow! had a wife and children—
Two things for dying people quite bewildering."
So, with a beating and anxious heart, he lay down on a locker, with a sharp hatchet under him—the only weapon that came to hand.
The ship was still going large, with the breeze abaft the beam, and the fore and main studding-sails set. Joe, the steward, was at the wheel; the light in the forecastle bunks was extinguished now, and the watch on deck were all grouped, in silence apparently, to leeward of the long-boat.
All seemed still for that night, or rather the remainder of the morning, when the captain warned the miserable Mr. Basset to take the next "spell," or watch, as sentinel at the cabin door.
Pale and sleepless, with bloodshot eyes, the poor man received the loaded revolver, with all the timidity and awkwardness of one who had never handled such a weapon before, and dreading lest it might explode of its own accord, like a loaded fire-wheel, and thus shoot himself and everybody else; but anon the thought of his daughters nerved his heart and steadied his hand.
Slowly, as if Time stood still, the minutes passed; and when, as usual, the ship's bell clanged at each half-hour on deck, it sounded in his ears and in his soul like the knell of doom!
So the poor father continued to watch in breathless anxiety; now pacing the carpeted cabin in miserable restlessness, then seating himself upon the stern locker, with the revolver on his knee, and his hands over his face, breathing an unuttered prayer for his darling daughters; now listening, keenly as a hunted hare, at the door of their little cabin, to hear their soft, low breathing. Anon, seeking the companion-way, as if the confined air of the ship stifled him, and looking up at the mizzen-rigging towering into the starry sky, where the mizzen-topsail, topgallantsail, and the driver, with the boom and gaff, spread between him and heaven like a broad gray cloud of canvas.
Then the thought of his dead wife, and their once dear happy home in England far away.
By a freak of memory, past hours of happiness, of joviality and frivolity—hours spent amid the flowery and leafy seclusion of Laurel Lodge, came crowding on him, with faces of friends, their voices, smiles, and little episodes; the green sunny lawn, the stately chase of Acton-Rennel, the Norman cross on Cherrytree Hill, and the great yew that shaded his wife's grave in that quiet old English churchyard, where he might never lie: all these came before him now, and he marvelled in his aching breast if the horrors that overhung him now were not a nightmare, and all a dreadful dream!