“It comes hard to see your father drop like that,” he said. “But it’s better so. He’s just spared a bit of the trouble we may have to face.”
“It is not that,” wailed the girl brokenly. “I’m thinking of my mother. She will never know. Oh, if I could only make her understand, I would not care!”
A strange answer, the sailor deemed it, most probably. At that instant he caught the captain’s eye. Both men had the same thought. The dead should be thrown overboard and thus lessen the weight supported by the one stanchion on the port side.
But of what avail were such precautions? They might as well all go together, the quick and the dead. Why should any of them wish to live on until the sea rose again in the small hours of the morning?
The girls were crying in each other’s arms. Two of the men lifted Gray’s body and placed it with four others. Five gone out of twelve!
The captain, speaking in the most matter-of-fact way, suggested that they should open and drink the last bottle of claret before the light failed.
“It’s a poor substitute for a meal,” he said, “but it’s the only thing we can lay hands on.”
The chief officer nodded his head towards the grief-stricken sisters.
“Maybe we can wait a bit longer,” he said. “You couldn’t persuade them to touch it just now.... What’s that, sir? Did you hear anything?”
“No. What could we possibly hear?”