She's All the World to Me

by Sir Hall Caine

The stars died off, the darkness came again, and then, far on in the night, the first gray streaks stretching along the east foretold the dawn. Over the confines of another night the soft daylight was breaking, but more utterly lonely, more void, more full of dread and foreboding, was the great waste of waters now that the striding light was chasing the curling mists than when the night was dead and darkness covered the sea. On one side of them no other object on the waters was visible until sky and ocean met in that great half-circle far away. On the other side was the land which they called home—from which they had fled, to which they dared not return.

Still not a breath of wind. The boat was drifting south. The men came up from below. The cold white face on the deck looked up at them, and at heaven. "We must put it away," said one, in a low murmur. "Aye," said another. Not a second word was spoken. A man went below and brought up an old sail. Two heavy iron weights, used for holding down the nets, were fetched up from the hold. There was no singing out. They took up what lay there cold and stiff, and wrapped it in the canvas, putting one of the weights at the head and another at the feet. Silently one man sat down with a sail-maker's needle and string, and began to stitch it up.

"Will the string hold?" asked another; "is it strong enough?"

"It will last him this voyage out—it's a short one, poor fellow."

Awe and silence sat on the crew.

Danny, his eyes suffused with an unearthly light, watched their movements from the bow. When he was lifted aboard last night a dull, dense aching at his heart was all the consciousness he had, and then the world was dead to him. Later on a fluttering within him preceded the return of an agonizing sense. Had he not sent his uncle to perdition? That he had taken a warm human life; that Kisseck, who had been alive, lay dead a few feet away from him—this was as nothing to the horrible thought that his uncle, a hard man, a brutal man, a sinful man, had been sent by his hand, hot and unprepared, to an everlasting hell. "Oh, can this have happened?" his bewildered mind asked itself a thousand times, as it awoke as often from the half-dream of a stunned and paralyzed consciousness. Yes, it was true that such a thing had occurred. No, it was not a nightmare. He would never, never awake in the morning sunlight and smile to know that it was not true. No, no—true, true; true it was even until the day of judgment, and he and Kisseck stood once more face to face.

Danny watched the old man when he whispered into the dead ear the words of the mystic charm. He turned his eyes to the sinuous trail of light behind him. All night long he lay on deck with only the dead for company. He saw the other men, but did not speak to them. It was as though he himself were already a being of another world, and could hold no commerce with his kind.

He thought of Mona, and then his heart was near to breaking. With a dumb longing his eyes turned through the darkness toward the land. The boat that was sailing before the wind was carrying him away from her forever. To his spiritualized sense the water that divided them was as the river that would flow for all eternity between the blessed and the damned.

The last ray of hope was flying away. It had once visited him, like a gleam of sunlight, that though he might never clasp her hand on earth, in heaven she would yet be his, to love forever and ever. But now between them the great gulf was fixed.

When the gray dawn came in the east, Danny still lay in the bow, haggard and pale. The unearthly light that now fired his eyes was the first word of a fearful tale. A witch's Sabbath, a devil's revelry, had begun in his distracted brain. In a state of wild hallucination he saw his own spectre. It had gone into the body of Kisseck, and it was no longer his uncle but himself who lay there dead. He was cold; his face was white, and it stared straight up at the sky. He watched with quick eyes the movements of the crew. He saw them bring up the canvas and the weights. He knew what they were going to do; they were going to bury him in the sea.