This is a thing easy to recall, but how am I to convey the reality of it? What is there in ink to put before you that wide scene of starlighted gloom, the dusky shapes of swell for ever running noiselessly at us—no sounds save the occasional creaking of the raft as she was swayed—the motionless, black outlines of Helga and myself overhanging the pallid streak of cot—at intervals a low sob breaking from the girl's heart, and the overwhelming sense of present danger, of hopelessness, made blacker yet by the night? And amid all this the crazy babbling of the dying Dane, now in English and now in his native tongue!
It was just upon the stroke of one o'clock in the morning when he died. I had brought my watch to the lamp, when he fetched a sort of groaning breath, of a character that caused me to bend my ear to his lips: and I found that he had ceased to breathe. I continued to listen, and then, to make sure, cast the light of the lamp upon him.
'He has gone!' cried Helga.
'God has taken him,' said I. 'Come to this side, and sit by me!'
She did as I asked, and I took her hand. I knew by her respiration that she was weeping, and I held my peace till her grief should have had some vent. I then spoke of her father, represented that his ailments must in all probability have carried him off almost as swiftly ashore; that he had died a peaceful death, with his daughter beside him, and his wife and home present in a vision to his gaze; and said that, so far from grieving, we should count it a mercy that he had been called away thus easily, for who was to imagine what lay before us—what sufferings, which must have killed him certainly later on?
'His heart broke when his barque sank,' said she. 'I heard it in his cry.'
This might very well have been too.
Never was there so long a night. The moon was behind the sea, and after she was gone the very march of the stars seemed arrested, as though nature had cried 'Halt!' to the universe. Having run the lamp aloft, I resolved to leave it there, possessed now with such a superstitious notion as might well influence a shipwrecked man, that if I lowered it again no vessel would appear. Therefore, to tell the time, I was obliged to strike a match, and whenever I did this I would stare at my watch and put it to my ear and doubt the evidence of my sight, so inexpressibly slow was the passage of those hours.
Helga's sobs ceased. She sat by my side, speaking seldom after we had exhausted our first talk on her coming round to where I was. I wished her to sleep, and told her that I could easily make a couch for her, and that my oilskin would protect her from the dew. I still held her hand as I said this, and I felt the shudder that ran through her when she replied that she could not lie down, that she could not sleep. Perhaps she feared I would disturb her father's body to make a bed for her; and, indeed, there was nothing on the raft, but the poor fellow's cloak and his pillows and blankets, out of which I could have manufactured a bed.
Had I been sure that he was dead, I should have slipped the body overboard while it remained dark, so that Helga should not have been able to see what I did; but I had not the courage to bury him merely because I believed he was dead, because he lay there motionless; and I was constantly thinking how I should manage when the dawn came—how I was so to deal with the body as to shock and pain poor Helga as little as possible.