The barque floated at about a cable's length distant from us, a dark mass, rolling in a strangling manner, as I might know by the sickly slide of the stars in the squares of her rigging and along the pallid lines of the canvas stowed upon her yards. There was more tenacity of life in her than I should have believed possible, and I said to Helga:
'If this raft were a boat, I would board the barque and set her on fire. She may float through the night, for who is to know but that one of her worse leaks may have got choked, and the blaze she would make might bring us help.'
The Captain uttered some exclamation in Danish, in a small but vehement and shrill tone. He had not spoken for above an hour, and I had believed him sleeping or dying and speechless.
'What does he say?' I called across softly to Helga.
'That the Anine might have been saved had we stood by her,' she answered, struggling, as I could hear by the tremor in her voice, to control her accents.
'No, no!' said I, almost gruffly, I fear, with the mood that was upon me of helplessness, despair, and the kind of rage that comes with perception that one is doomed to die like a rat, without a chance, without a soul of all those one loves knowing one's fate. 'No, no!' I cried, 'the Anine was not to be saved by us two, nor by twenty like us, Helga. You know that—for it is like making me responsible for our situation here to doubt it.'
'I do not doubt it,' she answered firmly and reproachfully.
Captain Nielsen muttered in his native tongue; but I did not inquire what he said, and the hush of the great ocean night, with its delicate threading of complaining wind, fell upon us.
My temper of despair was not to be soothed by recollection of this time yesterday, by perception of the visible evidence of God's mercy in this tranquillity of sky and sea, at a time when, but for the change of weather, we had certainly been doomed. I was young; I passionately desired to live. Had death been the penalty of the lifeboat attempt, I might, had time been granted me, have contemplated my end with the fortitude that springs from the sense of having done well. But what was heroic in this business had disappeared out of it when the lifeboat capsized and left me safe on board. It was now no more than a vile passage of prosaic shipwreck, with its attendant horror of lingering death, and nothing noble in what had been done, or that might yet have to be done, to prop up my spirits. Thus I sat, full of wretchedness, and miserably thinking, mechanically eyeing the dusky heap of barque; then breaking away from my afflicting reverie, I stood up, holding by the mast, to carefully sweep the sea, with a prayer for the sight of the coloured gleams of a steamer's lights, since there was nothing to be expected in the way of sail in this calm that was upon the water.
I was thus occupied, when I was startled by a strange cry—I cannot describe it. It resembled the moan of a wild creature wounded to death, but with a human note in it that made the sound something not to be imagined. For an instant I believed it came from the sea, till I saw by the dim light of the starshine the figure of Captain Nielsen, in a sitting-posture, pointing with the whole length of his arm in the direction of his barque. I looked, and found the black mass of hull gone, and nothing showing but the dark lines of spars and rigging that melted out of my sight as I watched. A noise of rending, intermingled with the shock of an explosion, came from where she had disappeared. It signified no more than the blowing up of the decks as she sank; but the star-studded vastness of gloom made the sound appalling beyond language to convey.