“I wish there was a priest on board to settle my doubts,” said he, scarcely above a whisper, and now his eyes began to look strangely again.
“What are your doubts?”
“Is there a hell, Fielding?”
“Not for sailors, captain.”
He steadied his eyes, and smiled with an odd parting of his lips, that was like the first of a gape.
“Not for sailors, sir,” said I. “Hell is here for them. There can’t be two hells for the same man.”
“I’d like to think that,” said he. “I am afraid of going to hell. I’ve been afraid of dying ever since they put the notion of the devil into my head. I told ye just now I wasn’t afraid of death. Nor am I, when I forget the devil. I forgot him then. Now he’s back again. Give me some water and open the scuttle—it’s grown blasted hot, hasn’t it?”
He sat up on a sudden, and immediately afterward sank back. Again I gave him to drink, and opened the scuttle as he desired.
He now rambled. Some of his imaginations were wild and striking. They even struck an awe into me, though perhaps much of their impressiveness lay in their falling from dying lips. His poor head ran on religion—and sometimes he was to be saved, and sometimes he was to be damned; and then he would forget, and babble about what he meant to do when he got home; how so much of his money would go in giving clothes and food to the poor, and how he’d collect many kinds of animals and use them well, fearing them, for who was to tell what souls of men they contained; and there might be a human sorrow in the bleat of a goat, and a man’s passion in the silence of a suffering horse.
I cannot tell you what he talked about. It matters not. Yet one strange thing that happened this evening let me note. It was this: he had sunk into silence, and I was about to quit his cabin for the deck. He had been talking very wildly, and sometimes, to my young, green, superstitious mind, almost terrifyingly; then had fallen still all in a moment, his eyes closed, his lips shut. I stooped to look at him, then turned to go, as I have said. My hand was on the door, when I heard his voice: