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

by Unknown

From this dream I was roused by the loud tread of men's feet over my head, as if the individuals were bearing a load that increased the heaviness of their steps. I was at no loss for the cause—they were carrying the coffin with the body in it to midship, where it was to be let down into its watery grave. In a short time afterwards, a gurgling of the waters met my ear, and, struggling to the foot of the companion ladder, I would have rushed upon deck if my strength would have permitted; but I fell upon the steps, and, lying there, heard a cry from some of them. I gathered, from the detached words I heard, that the bottom of the coffin had given way, from its insufficiency and the weight that had been put in it to make it sink; and that the body had gone down, while the chest swam on the surface. Several feet were now heard rapidly in motion, and the voice of Kreutz, who was running aft, fell on my ear.

'Teufel!' I heard him say, 'we shall have that grim corpse when the gallenblase—ha!—ha!—the gall bladder has burst, rising like von geist from the bottom of the deep sea, and staring at us. Hell take the stumper, Murdoch!'

These words, uttered by the German, were followed by some expression from Crawley, no part of which I could make out, except the oaths directed against the carpenter. The sounds died away; but I heard enough to satisfy me of the fact that George's body had been consigned to the deep with only the shroud to defend it against the attacks of the ravenous creatures I had been contemplating. My mind was again forced, and with increased energy, into the train of gloomy meditations suggested by what I had heard; and so vivid were the visions that obeyed the excited powers of my imagination, that I forgot, as I lay brooding over them on the sofa to which I had staggered, the danger that next awaited myself. I could not now look at the sea, for I feared to meet the fact which would add probation to my imaginations—that the animals I had seen there had disappeared to crowd round the prey that had been given to them. Yet the actual vision of that dear form, mutilated, torn, and devoured, could not, I am satisfied, have produced more insufferable agony, than accompanied and resulted from the diseased imaginings in which my fancy was engaged. The process that I pictured going on in the bottom of the sea, was coloured by hues so sickly, and attended by circumstances so distorted and grim, that all natural appearances, however harrowing, must have fallen short of the power they exercised over me. The positions in which I imagined him to be placed, were varied in a greater degree than ever I had seen the human body; the expressions of the countenance, though fixed by death, and not likely to be changed, became as Protean as the changing postures of the limbs; and the marine monsters that gambolled or fought around him for the prize, were invested with forms, colours, and attributes, of a kind not limited to what I had ever seen in the deep. The only idea that seemed to remain stationary, and not liable to the mutations into which all the others were every moment gliding, was the colour of the body, which was that of the green medium in which he lay. That sickly hue pervaded all parts; and even the dark or light colours of the inhabitants of the deep, partook, more or less, of the prevailing tint. It seemed to be the universal of all particulars, as time or space is the medium or condition of existence of all thought and matter; I felt the impossibility of any idea being true that did not partake of it; and, so strongly was the feeling of the ex-natural that accompanied it, that even now I cannot look at anything green without shuddering.

I cannot tell how long I was under the dominion of this train of thought. I was, in a manner, torn from it by the entrance of Kreutz with some food for me. He growled out a few words of mixed German and English, and left it on the table. It is needless to say that I could eat nothing. Even before these misfortunes overtook me, my appetite had left me; but now I loathed all edibles. After having been roused from the train of morbid imaginings in which I had been engaged, and which I clung to as if they imparted to me some unnatural satisfaction, I felt (and it is a curious fact) a recoiling disinclination to resume the grim subject, and even resorted to some imbecile and despairing efforts to avoid it. It was not that I expected any relief from forbearing: every other subject that could be suggested by my position was equally fraught with tears and pains; but that having, as I now suppose, exhausted, for the time, the diseased workings, the view of an effort to call up again the thoughts that had been as it were supplied by disease, penetrated me with a sensation beyond the powers of endurance. For two or three hours afterwards, my attention was directed to the proceedings upon deck; but I could hear little beyond indistinct mutterings, and occasional sounds of the treading of feet over me. The calm, which had lasted for many days, still continued; and, until a wind sprung up, no effort could be made by the mutineers to retrace their progress through the channel, and proceed to their projected destination. At last the shades of night began to fall; exhausted nature claimed some relief from her sufferings; but the drowsiness that overcame me, was only a medium of a new series of imaginings still more grotesque and unnatural than those that had haunted me during the day.

When the morning dawned, I expected every moment the execution of the purpose I had heard declared by Crawley, to put me ashore on the island; and, during moments of more rational reflection, I could not account for my not having been disposed of in this way on the previous day. The terrors of that destiny were as strong upon me as ever; but, I must confess, that the view of real evil, almost unprecedented, as it seemed, in its extent and peculiarity, produced feelings entirely different from what resulted from the prior musings of my hypochondriac fancy: I would not be believed were I to say that the expected reality was not much more painful than the sickly vision. The miseries were of different kinds, proceeding from different causes, operating upon a mind in two different states. There was something in my own power. I was not justified in committing suicide as a mode of escape from an affliction that God might have seen meet to put upon me; but all my reasonings on this subject fled before the view of this next calamity that awaited me. An extraordinary thought seized me, that I was not bound to hold life, when, through my own body and sensibilities, God's laws were to be overturned, and my sufferings were to be made a shame in the face of heaven. I secreted a knife in my bosom, and sat in silent expectation of the issue. I was again supplied with meat; but, on this occasion, Crawley brought it to me—and here began a new evil. He resumed, partially, his former dastardly sneaking manner; made love to me; offered me the honour of being still a captain's wife, and accompanied the offer with, obliquely-hinted threats of a due consequence of my rejection of his suit. I spurned him; but I cannot dwell on the details of this proceeding. His suit was persisted in for two or three days, when, roused to madness, he told me, that next day, if I consented not, I would be wedded to the natives of Madagascar. I traced the outline of the knife through the covering of my bosom, and defied him.

The next night was clear, and somewhat chill—indications of a cessation of the calm. The rudeness of Crawley had had the effect of keeping my mind from falling into the grasp of the demon of diseased fantasy; but, now my fate was fixed, I had no more to fear from him; and towards midnight, I fell again into the train of imaginings that had formerly haunted me. I had opened the cabin window for air—having felt a suffocating oppression of the chest during the day, proceeding from the extreme heat and the confined apartment. My eyes were again fixed in the direction of the island. I could see the dark shade of the land lying upon the gilded waters. All was still; my thoughts sought again the deep—the grave of George, the fancied condition of his body; and, as my ideas diverged to the calm scene around, it appeared to me as if all nature were dead, and that my own pulsations were the only living movements on earth. Lights now began to move along the shore, and then a fire blazed up into the firmament. The bodies of the savages flitted before it; I had seen the same appearances before; but I was now connected with these orgies in a more real manner than formerly. They ceased, and my mind again sought the recesses of the green deep, where all I loved on earth lay engulfed. My eye at times wandered over the surface of the waters; but I feared to look downwards into their bosom. My attention was suddenly fixed by an object in the sea. I put up my hands and rubbed my eyes. Was I deceived by a fancy? No! a dead body was there, not four yards distant from where I sat. It was that of my husband, rolled up in the same white sheet in which I had seen him extended on the oak table, and with his head raised somewhat above the surface, by the weights placed in the shroud having, as I afterwards thought, descended to the feet. A part of the sewing had been torn off the head, which was bare—the face was openly exposed to me, the moon shone upon it; I could perceive the very features, and even the lustreless eyes, that seemed fixed on the ship. There was not a breath of wind to ruffle the surface of the sea, which shone with a blue lustre in the light of the moon; and the body was as motionless as if it had been fixed on the earth. I have described, hitherto, what actually befell me, with the various states of my mind under extraordinary circumstances of pain and depression. My fancies belonged as much to nature as the facts which excited and nourished them, and must be believed by those who have studied the workings of the mind, even unconnected with the principles and facts of pathology. This was, however, no vision of the fancy, but a reality resulting from well-known physical laws. I sat, fixed immovably, at the window, and felt no more power of receding from it, than I formerly had of resigning my musings. My eyes were fixed upon that countenance which had been the beau ideal of love's idolatry—the fairest thing on earth, and the archetype of my dreams of heaven. I could not fly from it, horrible as it seemed in its blue glare and ghastly expression. I loved it while it shocked me; and all my powers of thinking were bound up in freezing terror. I felt the hair on my head move as the shrivelling skin became corrugated over my temples. That, and the occasional throbbings of my heart, were the only motions of any part of my being; but the body I gazed at seemed to be as immovable, and its eyes seemed not less steadfastly fixed on me than mine were on it.

How long I sat in this position I know not. There was no internal impulse that moved me to desist. I could, I thought, have looked for ever. Certain fearful objects possess a charm over the mind—and this was one of them; but I have sometimes thought that the power lay in producing the negative state of mental paralysis; for the instant my attention was called to a strange noise upon the deck, I was suddenly recalled to a natural sense of the fear it inspired. The sounds I heard were a mixture of exclamations and objections, pronounced in tones of fear and anger. I turned away my face from the dead body, with a strong feeling of repugnance to contemplate it again; and, groping my way to the companion-ladder, listened to what was going on above. Kreutz and Crawley were in communication.

'There is more than chance in that frightful appearance,' I heard Crawley say. 'And this calm too—it will never end. God have mercy on us! Is there no man that will undertake to sink the body? I cannot stand the gaze of these white balls. See! the face is directed towards me; and yet I did not do the deed, though I authorized it. Will no one save me from the glare of the grim avenger? I will give twenty gold pieces to the man who will remove it to the deep. Go forward, Kreutz, and try if you can prevail upon a bold heart to undertake the task!'

'Pho, man!' responded the German—'all von phantasy—anybody would have risen in the same way—Teufel! I heed it not von peterpfenning. But the men are alarmed, and begin to say that the captain has not got fair play. Hush! seize your degen. There is von commotion before the mast.'

I now heard a tumult in the fore part of the vessel and began to suspect that the crew had been led to believe that George had died a natural death, and had been by some means prevailed upon to work the vessel, when the wind rose in another direction, under the command of Crawley. The noise increased, and with it the fears of the cowardly villain whose conscience had been awakened by such strange means. Kreutz had left him to try to pacify the men; and the tones of his terror-struck voice continued to murmur around.