Alone on a Wide Wide Sea, Vol. 3 (of 3)

by William Clark Russell

I immediately made my way to Mrs. Lee’s cabin, but before entering I stood upon a chair that I might see the clock under the skylight. The time was a quarter to two. I was now able to read the clock, though when I had first come on board the Deal Castle, having no memory of the figures, I was unable to tell the time. I quietly opened the door and entered. Mrs. Lee was kneeling at the side of her sleeping-shelf, which was below the bunk in which her daughter lay, and she was so lost in prayer that she did not hear me enter. I crept to Alice’s side, and then her mother, perceiving me, arose.

Though the cabin lamp was turned down, there was plenty of light to see by. Alice’s eyes were closed, but after I had stood a moment or two looking at her she opened them, saw me and knew me, and a smile of touching sweetness lighted up her wasted face. She feebly moved her hand, but with a gesture which made me know she wished me to hold it. I bowed my head close to her face, and asked her in a whisper if she was in pain. She answered no; and then I asked her if she was happy, on which she looked at me and smiled. Her lips moved, but she seemed powerless to give expression to her thoughts. I bent my ear close to her mouth, and I heard her say in a whisper as dim and far off as the voice one hears in a dream:

‘I have been praying that God will give you back your memory——My beloved mother will be your friend——’

The whisper ceased, she smiled again, twitched her fingers that I might relax my hold of her hand, and looked at her mother, who took her hand and held it.

I withdrew to the chair in which I had been wont to keep a watch while Mrs. Lee slept, that the mother and daughter might, in that sacred time, be alone together. But the sweet girl never spoke again. Whilst her hand was still clasped by her mother she turned her face to the side of the ship and passed away, dying so quietly that her death was as noiseless as the fall of the leaf of a flower in the night—dying so quietly that her mother knew not when the soul of her child had fled, and continued holding her hand, with not a sound breaking the sacred stillness of that little cabin save the rippling of the water tinkling to the ear through the embrasure of the window, from whose dark disk the large golden star had gone.

‘Mark,’ says the most eloquent of divines, ‘mark the rain that falls from above, and the same shower that droppeth out of one cloud increaseth sundry plants in a garden, and severally according to the condition of every plant. In one stalk it makes a rose, in another a violet, divers in a third, and sweet in all. So the Spirit makes its multiformous effects in several complexions and all according to the increase of God.’

The rose of this fair garden was dead. But what says this same most eloquent of all divines, the rose being dead, and the perfume, which is its spirit, gone from it?

‘As when the eye meets with light it is the comfort of the eye: when the ear meets with harmony it is the comfort of the ear. What is the most transcendent consolation therefore but the union of the soul with God?’

Until long after the dawn had broken Mrs. Lee and I remained with the dead. The poor mother seemed at first stupefied. Mr. McEwan came in, looked at Alice, pronounced that all was over, and with a sigh and a gentle nod to Mrs. Lee softly quitted the cabin.

And then it was that the poor mother appeared to have been changed into stone. She held the dead girl’s hand, and kept her eyes fastened upon the averted face. At last a sob convulsed her. Another and a third followed, and, releasing her child’s hand, she threw herself into a chair, hid her face, and wept. Oh how she wept! and I feared that her heart had broken. Then, when she had calmed down somewhat, I took her hand and said whatever I thought might soothe her. But there was nothing under Heaven to soothe grief so recent as hers, with the body of her sweet daughter lying within view, though she may have found a sort of sympathy which no other person on board could have possessed for her in my own distressed condition; for from time to time as I talked she would lift her streaming eyes to my face with an expression of deep pity that for the moment overlay the look of her own grief. It was indeed as though she should say, ‘Great as is my sorrow here, seeking to comfort me is one whose sorrow may be even greater than mine.’