An Ocean Tragedy

by William Clark Russell

I was standing with my back to the companion hatch; my eyes were rooted upon the white form which in a few moments now would be tilted and sent flashing with a heavy cannon-ball at its feet into the black depths on which we were floating. The man, in life, had acted a scoundrel’s part, and had richly merited the end he had met; but he lay dead; his grave was this mighty wilderness of waters; not a hole in the earth to which those who mourned him could repair and say, pointing downwards, ‘What remains of him is here;’ but a tomb rivalling the heavens in immensity, a material eternity that would absorb him and his memory as though his form, waiting there to be launched, was but a drop of the dew that glittered in the moonshine upon the grating that supported him.

That bundle was a text to fill me with melancholy musings, and I was thinking of the man as I beheld him in the morning, worn indeed by shipwreck and privation, but stately, erect, soldierly; his cheek crimsoning to the blow that Wilfrid had dealt him; life and passion strong in him; when I was startled out of my thoughts by Finn ceasing to read. I glanced at him and observed that he was peering over the top of his book, goggling some object with eyes that protruded from their sockets. I looked to see what had called off his attention, and remarked a tall female figure attired in a light dress, but with her face concealed by a long dark veil, standing close beside the head of the grating, perfectly motionless, save for such movements as came to her by the swaying of the yacht. She had appeared amongst us with the stealthiness of a ghost, and she looked like one in that conflicting light, with the faint gleam of her eyes showing through the veil, and the stitched-up form on the grating to give a darker and more thrilling accentuation to her presence than she could have got from an empty grave or a ruptured coffin. The sailors backed away from her, shouldering one another into the gloom with much wiping of their leather lips upon the backs of their hands. I was startled on beholding her, but quickly rallied to a sense of deep disgust that possessed me on contrasting this illustration of emotion with her language and treatment of Wilfrid that morning.

‘Proceed,’ I exclaimed to Finn. ‘Read on man, and shorten the service, too, if you can.’

He croaked out afresh, but the poor fellow was exceedingly nervous. The ceremony, so far as it had gone, had been chill, doleful, depressing enough before; but a character almost of horror to my mind now came into it with the tall, stately, motionless apparition that stood—scarce won by the lamplight and the moonlight from the shadowiness that clothed her with unreality—at the head of that ashen-tinctured length lying prone and resembling a hammock upon the grating. It was the moral her ladyship’s presence put into the occasion that made the ceremony all on a sudden so hideously gaunt, so wild, so inhuman, striking ice-like to the heart. For this she had quitted her child, as she believed, for ever; for this she had abandoned her husband, had pricked the bubble of her honour, extinguished the inspiration of her womanhood’s purest, truest, deepest, holiest feelings! What but an affrighting vision could that dead man wrapped in his sea-shroud convert her ladyship’s dream of passion and pleasure into! Something, one should think, to blind the very eyes of her soul. But, Lord, how I hated her then for the base dishonour she did herself by this subtle, sneaking attendance at the funeral of her shame with the ghost of it to slip with her to her cabin again, and to act, maybe, as a sentinel to her for the rest of her natural life, stalking close at her heels, so steadfast there as to make her presently dread to look behind her!

Finn’s croaking delivery ceased.

‘Overboard with it,’ he rumbled, for his gesture to tilt the grating had been unobserved by the two men who held it, or else not understood.

The sailors raised their arms; the glimmering bundle sped like a small cloud of smoke from the side to the accompaniment of the noise of a long creaming wash of water simmering aft from the bow, through which I caught the note of a half-stifled shriek from Lady Monson. She flung her hands to her face and reeled, as if she would fall. I sprang to her assistance, but on freeing her eyes and seeing who I was, she waved me from her with a motion of which the passionate haughtiness, disdain, and dislike were too strong for me to miss, confusing as the lights were. She then walked slowly aft.

I believed she was going below again, and said to Finn, ‘Shut the book. Make an end now. The man is buried, and thank God for it.’

Lady Monson, however, walked to the extreme end of the vessel, kneeled upon the little grating abaft the wheel, and overhung the taffrail, apparently gazing into the obscurity astern where the Colonel’s body was sinking and where the white wake of the yacht was glittering like a dusty summer highway running ivory-like through a dark land on a moonlit night. I watched her with anxiety, but without daring to approach her. The sailors unhitched the lanterns and took them forward along with the grating.

I said to Finn: ‘I hope she does not mean to throw herself overboard.’