Captain Burke carefully and closely swept the horizon, then replaced the telescope.
'A few hours often make a mighty difference at sea,' said he. 'By this time tomorrow we may be towing northwards.'
'Have the men gone away without a compass?' said Mrs. Burke.
'The bo'sun owned a compass that was a curiosity of casting and graving: I remember he showed it to the mate. They'll have taken that with them. And now,' said he, speaking with more cheerfulness than I had observed in him for some days, 'let us go below and get something to eat. There's fuel enough to keep the stove going for a long spell. The hull's as staunch as she was on the day we sailed. Any moment you may see something that will look like ice climbing the sea into a whaler's breast of topsail and stump topgallant masts. So call things at their worst, miss,' said he, 'for then we may believe that their mending's at hand.'
Mrs. Burke and I went below; the captain remained on deck. Between us we dressed the dinner table. She did not want me to help her. She said it was her duty and joy to wait upon me. 'To think of Miss Marie Otway,' she exclaimed, 'laying a table-cloth and putting knives and forks upon the table that a plain merchant-skipper and his wife may dine.'
I kissed and went on helping her; any sort of occupation was welcome: for, argue as the captain and Mrs. Burke might, the abandonment of the wreck by the whole of the sailors had raised a horror in me, and filled my heart with deep secret distress and dread; so that, whenever I thought of our situation, it was with a shudder at the emptiness of the rolling broken hull.
I believe the hour was not far from two o'clock. Already the gloom of the early antarctic night was in the cabin, but the lamp swung in flashes through the shadow, and you could only have told that the gloom was gathering when you looked at the portholes. We sat beside the stove waiting for Captain Burke; by-and-bye his wife grew uneasy, and went on deck to seek him and call him down to dinner.
I was then alone, and sat very cold and wretched. I had been alone in this cabin before—that is, since the masts had gone; but then there had been the tread of feet overhead, the knowledge of a plentiful, hearty life in the ship. Now all was as hushed as the tomb in that way.
After I had been waiting four or five minutes, I saw two small points of light in the gloom where a locker ended, and where some few feet of ship's wall ran clear. I stared, suspecting an illusion, and then believed it was phosphorus or something jewelled with light by decay as rotten timber is. But on a sudden the two shining spots came stealing out into the whiskers and ribbed shape of a huge lean, grey rat. I jumped up with a shriek and the thing vanished.
My nerves gave way, and, marvelling at Captain and Mrs. Burke's absence, I went on deck to look for them, trembling with disgust and terror.