About this hour Mrs. Lee lifted her head from her pillow, then arose, and after gazing silently for awhile at her child, she approached me, put her lips to my ear, and bade me in almost breathless accents take the sleep I needed. I answered in a whisper that I could not sleep, and asked her to allow me to go on deck to breathe the cool air for a quarter of an hour or so, telling her where she would find me. She acquiesced with a motion of her head, and catching up a shawl I noiselessly passed out from the cabin.
The saloon lamps had long been extinguished, but a plentiful haze of starlight floated through the open skylights. Not knowing but that Mr. Harris might have charge of the ship, and desiring to avoid him, though even if he were on the poop and saw me there I did not suppose he would address me, I passed through the saloon on to the quarter-deck, and seated myself half-way up one of the ladders which conducted to the poop, and, my attire being dark, and the darkness where I sat being deep, there was small chance of my being observed unless someone came to the ladder to mount or descend it.
The night air was delicious. Low over the sea on my left hand side was a dark red scar of moon; it was floating slowly up out of the east with its fragment of disk large and distorted by the hot atmosphere through which it stared. The sails of the ship rose pale, and the topmost of them looked so high up that the faint pallid spaces seemed to be hovering cloud-like close under the stars. The faint breeze held the canvas motionless, and not a sound came from those airy heights.
The figure of a man moved on the forecastle; otherwise the decks—so much of them, at least, as my sight commanded—were tenantless. The night was the more peaceful for the soft air that blew. The delicate noise of rippling waters lulled the senses, and at another time I should have fallen asleep to that gentle music of the sea, but my heart was too full to suffer me to slumber then; the tears fell from my eyes. A sweet girl was dying; the gentlest heart that ever beat in a woman’s breast might even now, as I sat thinking, have ceased to throb; one whom I dearly loved, whose tenderness for me had been that of a sister, was dying, might even now be dead, and as I sat thinking of her I wept.
I looked up at the sky; it was crowded with stars, and many meteors glanced in the dark heights. I asked myself, ‘Where is Heaven?’ We look upwards and think that Heaven is where we direct our eyes, but I knew that even as I looked the prospect of the stars was slowly changing, so that if Heaven were there where I was now gazing it would not be there presently. Where then was Heaven? And when the soul of the sweet girl who was dying in her cabin quitted her body whither would it fly? Then I remembered that she herself had told me that we looked upwards when we thought of Heaven because the light was there, the light of the sun, and the moon, and the stars, but that God whom she had taught me to remember and to pray to was everywhere.
This thought of God’s presence—for if He was everywhere He must be where I now was—awed me, and, rising from the step upon which I was seated, I knelt and prayed, weeping bitterly as I uttered the words which arose from my heart. I prayed that my memory might be restored to me; I prayed that, if I were a wife and a mother, the image of my husband and my children would be presented to me that I might know them and return to them. But I did not pray for Alice Lee. She was already His to whom I knelt, and I knew in my heart that even if it had been in the power of prayer to save her she would not desire another hour of life unless—and here I turned my head and looked at the dark surface of sea and thought of it as her grave.
I resumed the seat I had arisen from in order to kneel, and again surrendered myself to thought. I heard the measured tread of a man upon the poop-deck that stretched above and behind me. He came to the rail, and stood at the head of the steps which lay opposite to those on which I was seated. His figure showed black against the starless sky, and I saw that he was not Mr. Harris, but Mr. ——, the second officer of the vessel. He whistled softly to himself as he stood awhile surveying the sea and the ship.
One reads often in poetry and in stories of the loneliness of the night watch on the ocean; but one should bear a secret part in such a watch—a part such as I was now bearing, with a heart of lead and with eyes which burnt with recent tears—to compass what is meant when the loneliness of the night watch at sea is sung or written of. Nobody stirred upon the ship but the figure of this second officer and some dim shadowy shape far forward on the forecastle, flitting among and blending with the deep masses of dye cast upon the atmosphere there by the sails. Not a sound was to be heard saving the sigh of the faint wind in the rigging, and the tinkling noise of rippling water. The fragment of moon was still red in the east, and as yet without power to touch the dark ocean under it with light. Two bells were struck on some part of the deck, and the tremulous chimes went floating up into the hollows of the sails, and trembled in the pallid concavities in echoes. The figure of the second officer moved away from the rail; and now, though a little while before I had believed myself sleepless, my head insensibly sank forward, my eyes closed, and I slumbered.
I was awakened by a hand laid upon my shoulder. I started with a cry, and gazed around me. No situation would more bewilder one new to the sea than the being suddenly aroused and finding oneself on the deck of a ship, with the stars shining and the tall sails spreading over one, and the night wind of the deck blowing upon one’s face. The person who had awakened me was Mr. McEwan.
‘This is a strange bed for a lady to be sleeping upon at this hour of the night,’ said he; ‘but I have no heart and no time now to represent the folly ye commeet in sleeping in such a dew as is falling. I have been to see Miss Alice Lee; she is dying. She will be gone before that moon there has climbed to over our mast-heads. She wishes to see you, and her mother asked me to find and send you to her. Go and comfort the puir old lady. God knows she needs comfort! There is nothing I can do for the girl,’ and he abruptly quitted me, and disappeared in the gloom of the saloon.