She said this with an exquisite artlessness, with an expression of wonderful sweetness and gentleness in her eyes, which were bravely fastened upon me, and then, suddenly catching up my hand, put her lips to it and pressed it to her heart, letting it fall as she turned her face upon the water on that side of the raft where her father's body had sunk.
My spirits, which remained tolerably buoyant while the sun stood high, sank as he declined. The prospect of another long night upon the raft, and of all that might happen in a night, was insupportable. I had securely bound the planks together, as I believed, but the constant play of the swell was sure to tell after a time. One of the ligatures might chafe through, and in a minute the whole fabric scatter under our feet like the staves of a stove boat, and leave us no more than a plank to hold on by in the midst of this great sea which all day long had been without ships. I often bitterly deplored I had not brought a sail from the barque, for the air that hung steady all day blew landwards, and there was no weight in it to have carried away the flimsiest fabric we could have erected. A sail would have given us a drift—perhaps have put us in the way of sighting a vessel, and in any case it would have mitigated the intolerable sense of helpless imprisonment which came to one with thoughts of the raft floating without an inch of way upon her, overhanging all day long, as it might have seemed, that very spot of waters in which Helga's father had found his grave.
Shortly before sundown Helga sighted a sail in the south-west. It was the merest shaft of pearl gleaming above the ocean rim, and visible to us only when the quiet heave of the sea threw us up. It was no more than a vessel's topmost canvas, and before the sun was gone the dim starlike sheen of those cloths had faded out into the atmosphere.
'You must get some rest to-night, Helga,' said I. 'Your keeping awake will not save us if we are to be drowned, and if we are to be saved then sleep will keep you in strength. It is the after-consequences of this sort of exposure and mental distress which are to be dreaded.'
'Shall I be able to sleep on this little rickety platform?' she exclaimed, running her eyes, glowing dark against the faint scarlet in the west, over the raft. 'It brings one so dreadfully near to the surface of the sea. The coldness of the very grave itself seems to come out of it.'
'You talk like a girl now that you are dressed as one, Helga. The hearty young sailor-lad that I met aboard the Anine would have found nothing more than a raft and salt water in this business, and would have "planked" it here as comfortably as in his cabin bunk.'
'It did not please you to see me in boy's clothes,' said she.
'You made a very charming boy, Helga; but I like you best as you are.'
'No stranger should have seen me dressed so,' she exclaimed in a tone of voice that made me figure a little flush in her cheeks, though there was nothing to be seen in that way by the twilight which had drawn around us. 'I did not care what the mates and the crew thought, but I could not have guessed——' she stammered and went on: 'when I saw in the bay what the weather was likely to prove, I determined to keep my boy's dress on, more particularly after that wretched man, Damm, went away with the others, for then the Anine would be very short-handed for what might happen; and how could I have been of use in this attire?' and she took hold of her dress and looked down it.
'I have heard before,' said I, 'of girls doing sailors' work, but not for love of it. In the old songs and stories they are represented as going to sea chiefly in pursuit of absconding sweethearts.'