'Very well,' said Captain Burke; 'in the first dog watch, if you please.'
It was at that hour almost calm, with a broad road of hot red light, billowing snakelike from the ship's side over the soft undulations of the western swell towards the rayless sun that still floated at some height in the sky. I stood beside Mrs. Burke on the quarter-deck, prayer-book in hand; the sailors came in a body from forward, and amongst them they bore the corpse—an outline of tragic suggestion under the large red ensign that hid it. They lifted out a portion of the gangway and rested one end of the plank in the gap, and the captain began to read.
What is there in shore-going ceremony to compare in solemnity, in pathos, in all the deepest of the meanings which are interpretable out of human forms and customs, with the simple burial at sea? All was as silent upon the water as the sinking of the sun himself into the broadening road of gold under him. Aloft was a gentle sound of winnowing canvas; a sob of the sea from alongside sometimes broke in upon the captain's delivery.
The expressions on the faces of the rough seamen were for the most part fixed. How many shipmates and messmates had they helped bury in their time? How should they be concerned by death? themselves having the Skeleton at their heels every hour of their existence at sea, allowed but a crooked finger for their own lives, all the remainder of their hands being their owner's!
Now, knowing sailors as I do, I can read those seamen's faces by the aid of memory, and almost tell their thoughts as they stood there near the gangway.
'Well, poor Bill, there he lies.'—'My turn next perhaps.'—'What's that yarn the skipper's a-reading? A blooming good job for them it's true of! No call to talk of souls at sea. It's work hard, live hard, and die hard here; and what's arterwards there's Bill there to say.'
At a signal the flag was withdrawn, the stitched hammock was revealed, the plank was tilted, and the grim parcel despatched.
The night that followed was breathless and beautiful. In the south-east under the moon the water stretched in a stainless field of light, flashing, but still as a sheet of looking-glass; our sails glowed blandly like starlight itself as they rose one above another into the whitened gloom in whose clear profound many meteors were darting, leaving a smoke of spangles for all the world like sky-rockets under the large trembling stars. Lovely they were: but for the moon I think many had studded the water with points of light, to ride and widen upon the black and noiseless lift of swell, thick and sluggish as though it were oil that ran, and scarcely putting three moons'-breadth of motion into our mastheads, though it sweetened the air with the rain of dew it softly beat out of the canvas.
The cabin was too hot to sit in. There was no magic in two windsails and a wide skylight to cool it. I had played at cribbage with Mrs. Burke till, with a yawn, the hour being about half-past nine, I proposed that we should go on deck. The steward followed us with a tray of refreshments; the captain and Mr. Owen joined us, pipes in mouth, and we sat, nothing betwixt us and the stars but the moonlit shadow of the night through which we saw them.
Four bells were struck, ten o'clock; there was no light forward saving a little sheen of the forecastle lamp round about the fore-scuttle, like a dim luminous mist there. But the moon lay bright upon the white planks of the deck, and though the rigging rose pale as tarnished silver to the mastheads it made a network of shadows black as ebony, which swung with the roll of the ship as though they kept time to music.