Heriot's cheerful and confident manner did more to soothe and reassure Ethel and Rose than all the friendly hopes expressed by the others—even by Morley Ashton. Ethel patted him on the cheek and kissed him, and bluff Captain Phillips too; which made old Noah Gawthrop's eyes begin to twinkle, and he wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket, and thrust his quid of pigtail into a remote corner of his jaws, in the hope that his turn would come in time.
"There is a crisis in the life of everybody;" Ethel Basset had passed that crisis, but it had been one of woe and terror. She had passed, as it were, through a tempest of emotions and alarms of late—emotions that had separated her from her girlish life, strengthened her mental powers, and developed her faculties. So she sought to brace up her energies for trials that might yet be to come—to be a woman of action, rather than, like poor little Rose, a girl of thoughts and tears.
So now she bent all the energies of life and affection to nursing her father, upon whom, as the evening deepened, a heavy slumber stole; thus, left by his side, alone—Rose had fallen asleep, exhausted—she sat and watched, heedless of her friends, who were occupied elsewhere, and heedless whether the ship was becalmed, or rushing before a gale of wind.
Ethel remembered the death of her mother, and the dull stunning sense of a mighty and unwonted calamity and loss—the yawning of a chasm that never more would close; the hushing of a familiar voice that would never more be heard; the passing away of a beloved face, that would never more be seen; and she remembered the calm aspect of the corpse disposed in its coffin, lined with white satin, laid on her own bed, with white curtains, draped up—the same bed in which all her children had been born, around which they had all hovered for weeks in the close atmosphere of a sick room, hushed into silence and on tiptoe, and about which they had all knelt with bowed heads, as the spirit that had lingered for hours between eternity and time fled at last on its mysterious and unknown journey; and Ethel felt that then she could pray.
Now she knelt by her father's side, in that little and confined cabin, where no sound reached her but his deep breathing, and the jarring of the night-lamp that swung from the beam above, and swayed to and fro as the ship rolled, casting weird gleams alike on the pale face of the watcher, and the discoloured features of the sleeper; but she, more stunned and more bewildered than ever, had neither words nor language, nor, at times, coherent thought in her soul, yet that soul was full of a dumb, despairing entreaty of Heaven, but in what form she neither knew nor felt, and scarcely did the chaos of her mind enable her to know what she would ask.
Rose was not with her now, we have said.
Poor child, her grief was noisy, and full of tears, so she had long since cried herself to sleep beside old Nance Folgate.
"Is not all this some phantasmagoria, or am I turning mad?" thought Ethel. "Why am I so far away from Laurel Lodge—far away upon this world of waters, and enduring all these miseries? Ah, my God! if all these should be but the dreams of insanity?"
She feared this all the more that, by some idiosyncrasy of the human mind, amid the horror of her great grief, she was haunted, almost tormented, by a frivolous song and air she used to sing at home.
Why was this, and how was this? The number of brass rings on the curtain rods, the gyrations of the flies, that buzzed about the night-lamp and clustered on the beams overhead, the knots in the wainscot, that seemed, especially when in shadow, to become quaint and freakish faces, all mingled with the memory of this song, which struggled for mastery with the prayers she sought to say, and with the awful idea that her father was dying, and that he and she were alone together in that fatal ship upon the midnight sea.