Heart of Oak: A Three-Stranded Yarn, vol. 2.

by William Clark Russell

The emotion of light-heartedness was ended; it had been but as the gleam of a star in black water on a cloudy night—the sky was folded up, my heart was dark again, I found no light nor life of hope in it. They say that hope springs eternal; I vow to God then I felt as hopeless as if my end was at hand whilst I sat alone when they had gone to show a light on the hull. I closed my eyes that I might not see the rat should it come, and so, sitting with the glow of the fire upon my face, I beheld a vision of my house: it rose upon my darkened gaze; I saw the wintry scene of Channel waters, the glance of foam through the flying clouds of snow; I saw myself walking with my sweetheart upon the stretch of sands, pausing to gaze at the beauty of the forming breaker and to hearken to the cries of the skyful of blown gulls. I saw my father; but what I chiefly remembered was the sensation of bitter cold which had sunk chill to heart and marrow, when I entered for the first time the cabin I was now occupying.

I shivered and buried my face and rocked myself, my eyes still sealed. I may have lost thought of time in musing; I started, looked round, and found by the hour that they had been on deck nigh twenty minutes. I thought this was a long time for Captain Burke to keep his wife exposed, and still I concluded that the job of securing a lantern to the bowsprit might run into time aboard a dancing, jumping, slippery hulk; so I continued to wait, all the while straining my ears, till hearing was made an anguish of by the constant cheats of sound.

I could bear it no longer. They had been absent half an hour and five minutes. I did not expect to hear their footfalls through the frozen snow on the planks; nor would their voices reach me if they remained forward; but why did not they come? I waited another ten minutes, then went on deck.

I looked, and was almost paralysed with terror; had I been an instant sooner, an instant later, it could not have been; but my eye went to it as I rose through the hatch at the breathless moment of its happening—and this was it: low over the sea in some quarter I could not name hung the moon, red as the sun in fog; she had just broken out through a mass of heavy black vapour; a ragged edge as of scud was floating off her upper limb like a last lingering shadow of eclipse, as I looked; and right athwart the orb, centering it, was the body of a bird, doubtless an albatross; and the instant picture was that of some wondrous, gigantic, glowing shield hanging over the sea, and approaching the hull on the back of a huge seafowl. But in a heart's beat the deception went: the bird whose distance created that marvellous illusive perspective curved in its flight and winged out of the illuminated circle and was gone, and in the next breath a lift of black stuff like the dingy smouldering of a candle-wick overspread the moon and hid her.

I looked along the deck, and as before, so now, I beheld nothing moving. I tried to reason with my terrors by supposing that the captain had again gone below to shovel up more coal, and that his wife waited in the forecastle to help him. But whilst I looked and strained my ears I heard a moan; again and yet again it came; I could not be mistaken. I went forward and heard the moaning whilst I advanced, and when I was close to the galley I saw a figure on the forecastle and heard the moaning again.

I stepped close, my heart almost stopped, my blood almost frozen. The white of the deck made a light of its own, as I have told you, and I saw Mrs. Burke lying on her side. She lay close to the fluke of an anchor that was stowed upon the forecastle on the starboard, or right-hand side. She moaned and continued to moan; I dropped on my knees, and grasping her hand cried, with my face close to hers to see if her eyes were open, for her moaning was that of a dying person: 'It is I. What has happened? Are you ill? Where's your husband?'

She answered feebly, moaning at every other word:

'He has fallen overboard. He went on to the bowsprit with a lantern and slipped. Oh, God, my heart breaks, my heart breaks! I ran and fell and I cannot rise. I have lost him—oh, my heart!'

I cried in a passion of horror and terror, 'Captain Burke drowned!' and then, figuring him battling for life alongside, I sprang to my feet and went to the rail and looked over. But there was nothing to be seen save an inky cloudiness of moving waters, shaping and dissolving, and a dim light of foam when the ship's bows pitched, and there was no other sound but that of the washing of brine pouring along the side, and a noise of wind overhead.