An Ocean Tragedy

by William Clark Russell

‘I was afraid that Muffin would not suit you,’ she exclaimed, quietly. ‘I told you so, I remember. Those yellow, hollow men are miserable sailors. He has all good qualities as a valet on shore, but——’ she was proceeding when he interrupted her.

‘I say, Laura, isn’t this breeze magnificent, eh? Think, my dear—ten knots an hour! We are sweeping through it as though we were in tow of a comet. Why, if the devil himself were ahead we should overhaul him at this pace.’

He dropped his knife and fork as though to rub his hands—an action common to him when gratified—but his face darkened, a wild expression came into it with a sudden savage protrusion of his projecting under-lip to the bitter sneer of the upper one; he fell again to eating in a hurry, breathing short and masticating viciously with now and again a shake of the head, until all at once, ere he had half made an end of what was before him, he pushed his plate violently away and lay back in his chair, with his arms tightly folded upon his breast and his gaze intently fixed downwards, in a way to make me think of that aunt of his whom the old earl had pointed out to his father as she paced the green sward betwixt two keepers.

With the easiest air imaginable, though it was impossible that she could effectually blind to my sight the mingled expression of worry and dismay in her eyes as she directed them at me, Miss Jennings, making the breakfast upon the table her text, prattled about the food one gets on board ship, seizing, as it seemed to me, the first common-place topic she could think of.

I took an askant view of the stewards to see if they noticed Sir Wilfrid, but could find nothing to interpret in their wooden, waiting faces. After a little he seemed to wake up, coming back to his mind, as it were, with a long, tremulous sigh, and a puzzled look round at the table as though wondering whether he had breakfasted or not. Miss Jennings and I chatted common-places. He called for a cup of tea, and then, after listening with plenty of intelligence in his manner to a little experience I was relating to Miss Laura concerning the recovery of a captain’s pig that had been washed overboard in a sudden squall, he described a gale of wind he had encountered off Agulhas whilst on a voyage to India, during which the cuddy front was stove in, and an immense sow and her young, along with a fine specimen of an English cart-horse and a cow, washed bodily aft, and swept in thunder down the broad staircase in the saloon that conducted to the berths and living-room for what were then termed the steerage passengers. No story was ever more graphically related. He described the panic amongst the passengers, the horrible concert produced by the screams of the pigs and the terrified moaning and bellowing of the cow, the uproar of the cart-horse’s plunging hoofs against the resonant bulkheads, mingled with the shrieks of the people who were in bed and imagined the ship to be already under water; I say he described all this so well, with so keen an appreciation of the humour, as well as of the horror of the scene, with a delivery so free from all excitement, that it seemed almost incredible he should be the same man that just now sat fixed in the posture of a melancholy madman with a face, as I might have thought, dark with the shadow of eclipsed reason.

Breakfast ended, he quitted the table to fetch his pipe.

‘I had better have come without a man, after all,’ said he, laughing; ‘one condition of sea-going should be that a fellow must help himself; and, upon my word, it comes to it no matter how many servants he brings with him. ’Tis the same ashore too, after all. It is the mistress who does most of the waiting’; and thus pleasantly speaking he went to his cabin.

Miss Laura made as if to rise.

‘An instant, Miss Jennings,’ said I. ‘I have seen nothing of Wilfrid of late years. You, on the other hand, have been a good deal thrown with him during the last three months. Tell me, then, what you think of his manner and language just now—that piece of behaviour, I mean, from which he started, so to speak, into perfect rationality?’