Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 18

by Unknown

This paroxysm was succeeded by a kind of stupor that seized my whole mind and body. I sat down on a cot in the side of the cabin, and saw Kreutz bring in a light. The glare of it startled me; but it was only as a vision that could not awake the sleeper. They proceeded to lay out my husband on a table. They undressed him—for his clothes were still on; and I saw them take a large sheet, wrap it round him, and pin it firmly at all the folds. When their labours were finished, they took each a large portion of brandy, and Crawley came forward and offered me a portion. I had no power to push it from me. He held it to my mouth; but my lips were motionless; and, tossing it off himself, he and the others went out of the cabin. No precaution was taken to keep me within; but the frenzy that had previously impelled me to self-destruction had subsided, and I shuddered at what a few moments before appeared to me to be a source of relief. I sat for hours in the position in which they left me, gazing upon the dead body before me, but without the energy to rise and look at the features of him who had formed the object of my earliest devotions, the subject of all my fondest dreams of early youth and matured womanhood, now lying there lifeless. I had scarcely, during that period, consciousness of any object, but of a long, white figure extended on the table, with the moonlight reflected from it. The stupor left me—I cannot tell at what hour; and the first movement of living energy in my brain was a stinging impulse to rush forward and seize the body. I obeyed it, without a power to resist; and, tearing off the folds, laid bare the face, which was as placid as I had ever seen it, when, watching over him, I used to steal a look of him, during the hours of night, as he slept by my side, in the moonlight that stole through the cabin-window. In my agony, I clung to him—kissed the cold lips—called out 'George! George!'—threw the folds of the sheet over the face—again looked round me for some one to comfort me—felt the consciousness of my perilous position—and, as a kind of refuge from the despair that met me on every hand, withdrew again the folds, and acted over again the frenzied parts of a madness that mocked the miseries of the inmates of an asylum.

I must have exhausted myself by the excitement into which I was thrown; for, some time afterwards, I found myself lying upon the cot, and wakening again to a consciousness of all the ills that surrounded me. The light of the moon had given place to the dull beams of earliest dawn, which were only sufficient to shew me the extended figure on the table, and the confusion into which the furniture of the cabin was thrown. I heard the sounds of several footsteps in the cuddy. Sounds of voices struck my ear; and, rising up, I crawled forward to a situation where I could hear the communings from which my fate might be known.

'When the wind starts,' said Crawley—'it will be from the north—we should turn and make all speed for Rio, where we may dispose of the cargo, and then run the vessel to the West Indies. How do the men feel disposed, Kreutz—all braced and steady?'

'All but Wingate and Ryder, who are watched by the others,' replied the German. 'These dogs would mutiny, ha! ha!—mein gut friend Buist is against their valking the plank; but they must either come in or go out. Teufel! no mutineers aboard the Griffin.'

'Right, Hans,' said Crawley. 'Get Murdoch to knock together the boards—we will bury him to-morrow; but the wife, man, what is to be done with her?'

'Put her ashore, to be sure,' responded Kreutz. 'There is not von difficulty there. The natives will be glad of her, and we want her not. If this calm were gone, all would be gut and recht. That is the von thing only that troubles me.'

'If there is no wind,' said Crawley, 'to carry us out of the channel, there is none to bring any one to us.'

At this moment, I thought they heard some movements, produced by a nervous trembling that came over me, and forced me to hold by a chair. Some whisperings followed. Kreutz went away, and Crawley entered. I had just time to retreat to the other side of the body of my husband. His manner was now that which was natural to him—harsh and repulsive. He ordered me peremptorily to the lower cabin. I had no power to resist, or even to speak; but I saw, in the order, the eternal separation of me and George; and, rushing forward, I withdrew the covering from his face, to take the last look—to imprint the last kiss on his cold lips. The act operated like the stirrings of conscience on the cowardly man of blood. His averted eye glanced for an instant on the body, and, seizing the coverlet, he wrapped up the countenance, and, taking me by the arm, hurried me down to the apartment set apart for passengers. This cabin was darker than the captain's, from some of the windows having been changed into dead lights; and I considered myself pent up in a dungeon. Hitherto my feelings had been, in a great measure, the result of existing moving circumstances; but now I was left to reflection, in so far as that act of the mind could be concerned in the attempt to picture the extremities of a fate that seemed as unavoidable as unparalleled. The diseased visions that had distracted me before any real evil occurred, were changed, from their dreamy, shadowy character, to realities. The lengthened trains of images that were required to satisfy the cravings of hypochondria, fled; and, in their place, there was one general, overwhelming fear, that seemed to engross all my thinking energies, and left no power to particularize the visions of danger that awaited me among the savages. There was only one presiding, prevailing idea that served as the rallying point of my terrors; and that was the dead body of George, with the white sheet in which he was swathed, and the peculiarly-formed oaken table on which he was placed, and at which we used to dine upon all the dainties to be found on board an Indiaman. It was the steadfastness of this idea that excluded the images of the fearful deep recesses—the Bacchanalian orgies of the savages—their anthropophagous rites, their midnight revels; but retained, as it were, hanging round it, the fear they had engendered, as a more complex feeling. After Crawley had left me, I had thrown myself down on a couch—an act of which I retained no consciousness; for afterwards, when daylight began to break in through the only window that was not closed up, I started to my feet, and did not know, for some time, that I was separated from the corpse; the vision of which had, during the interval, been so vivid, that it combined the conditions of figure and locality as perfectly as if the object had been before me.

On the deck I now heard the sound of several loud voices, and afterwards a scuffle, accompanied with the tramping of feet. There was then silence for a time; but my ears were stung, on a sudden, by a scream, succeeded by a plash, as if some one had been precipitated into the sea. A gurgling noise, as if the individual were drowning, followed; and the suspicion rushed into my mind, that they had made an example (to terrify the others) of one of the men who had rebelled against the authority of the mutineers. A silence, as deep as that of death, succeeded, which lasted about an hour, at the end of which period the sound of the saw and hammer were distinctly heard. I recollected the orders of Crawley, for Murdoch, the carpenter, to prepare George's coffin. The knocking continued for a considerable time, and produced such an effect upon me that the ideas, which had been, as it were, chained up by the freezing influence of the prevailing vision of the extended and rolled-up body, broke away and careered through my mind with the velocity, unconnectedness, and intensity, that belong to certain states of excited mania. Images of the past and the future were mixed up in confusion; and every succeeding thought stung me with increased pain, till the idea of suicide again suggested itself, bringing in its train that which destroyed it—the terror of an avenging God, who will pass judgment on the takers of their own lives. I started, and sought forgiveness; and, for the first time under this agony, felt the soft action of the balm of a confided trust in Him who has mercy in endless stores for the good, but who poured his fury even upon the house of Israel, for the blood they shed upon the land. But, must I confess it, the relief I felt from this high source was immediately again lost in the cold shiverings of instinctive fear, as I heard the knocking cease, knew the coffin was finished, and perceived, from the sounds in the cabin off the cuddy, that they were putting the body into the rudely constructed box, with a view of burying him in the deep sea.

Some indescribable emotion, at this time, forced me towards the cabin window, although the sight of the water was frightful to me. It was still and calm as ever, and the light was already sufficient to enable me to see far down in its green recesses. I could not take my eye from it. There were numerous creatures swimming about in it, some of which I had got described to me, but many of them I had never seen before. They seemed more hideous to me now than they had ever appeared when, on former occasions, I sat and watched their motions. The large bull-mouthed shark was there, rolling his huge body in apparent lethargy, and turning up his white belly in grim playfulness, as if in mockery of my misery. It had a charm about its truculent savageness that riveted my attention, while it shook my frame. It was connected in my mind with the fate of George's body, which, every moment, I expected to hear plash in the sea, in the midst of that shoal of creatures with strange forms and ravenous maws. An exacerbation of these sickly feelings made me lift my eyes; but it was only to fix them on the not less fearful island that lay before in the far distance, and now, in the fogs of the morning, through which the red sun struggled to send his beams, appeared a huge mass of inspissated vapour lying motionless on the surface of the sea. The very indistinctness of this hazy vision stimulated my fancy to its former morbid activity, and I saw again the mystic wooded ravines, sacred to the rights of cannibalism, of which I myself was doomed to be the object.