“She vhas villing,” said Galen.
I left the deck for a few minutes to view the body of my poor friend in his sea-shroud. Miss Aurora sat at the table. She drummed with her brilliant fingers, and her head rested on her left hand. Her face was unusually pale; her eyes large, alarmed, and fiery, and blacker, owing to her pallor, than they commonly showed.
“What is it?” said I, conceiving that something was wrong with her.
“Ave Maria, hark!” cried she.
I heard Galloon whining and complaining. Never did a more melancholy, depressing, heart-subduing noise thread the conflicting uproar of a ship in labor. I at once let Galloon into the captain’s cabin, and paused a minute to view the shrouded figure upon which the dog had sprung; and I remember thinking to myself: “Great is the difference between the dead at sea and the dead ashore. At sea the dead man cannot be tyrannous; but ashore, how does he serve his relatives and the world which he leaves behind? A dismal funeral bell is rung for him, and the spirits of a whole district are dejected—the spirits of a wide district that may never have his name, or that, very well knowing his name, values not his loss at the paring of a finger nail, are sunk because of that dreadful knell. He obliges his survivors to draw down the blinds of the house in which he expires, and, for the inside of a week, they sit in gloom, a sort of pariahs, coming and going with fugitive swiftness, miserable all, until it is convenient to him to be buried. He defrauds his next of kin of good money by the obligation of a solemn and expensive funeral. He tyrannically robs his relatives by obliging them to put up a memorial to him. But at sea? A piece of canvas and a twenty-four pound shot; a little hole in the water, which is gone ere the eye can behold it! The dead cannot be tyrannous at sea.”
“Señor Fielding,” said my lady Aurora, rising and holding my arm as I was about to pass, “I cannot rest down here with the dead.”
She did not thus speak, but this was my interpretation of her words and signs. I regarded her and considered. Where could she lie, if not in the cabin? This, for her, was a miserable, horrible time; in as wild a passage of shipwreck and adventure as ever woman lived through, and my heart pitied her. It mattered not when the captain should be buried; and, meeting her eyes again, and beholding the superstition and fear in them, I looked up at the clock, that showed the hour to be a little after ten, and, holding up my hands and afterward two fingers, I said, “Doce de la noche—twelve of the night;” and, pointing and signing, gave her to know that at midnight we would bury the captain.
She looked at me gratefully.
“I must go,” said I.
“Stop—oh, stop a minute!” she exclaimed in English, and went to her berth, looking fearfully toward the door of the captain’s cabin as she made her way, clinging and moving slowly, for very fierce and sharp at times was the jump of the deck.