The Honour of the Flag

by William Clark Russell

"Good gracious!" I cried to myself, instantly, "the woman's asleep! This, then, is the ghost that frightened the Dane. And this, too, was the hand that murdered the captain!"

I stood motionless watching her. Presently, taking her hand off the table, she turned her face aft, and with a wonderfully subtle, stealthy, sneaking gait, reminding one strangely of the folding motion of the snake, she made for the captain's cabin.

Now, that cabin, ever since Griffith's death, I had occupied, and you may guess the sensations with which I followed the armed and murderous sleep-walker as she glided to what I must call my berth, and noiselessly opened the door of it. The moment she was in the cabin her motions grew amazingly swift. She stepped to the side of the bunk I was in the habit of using, and lifting the knife plunged it once, deep and hard—then came away, so nimbly that it was with difficulty I made room for her in the doorway to pass. I heard her breathe hard and fast as she swept by, and I stood in the doorway of my cabin watching her till her figure disappeared in her own berth.

So, then, the mystery was at an end. Poor Captain Griffith's murderess was his adored sweetheart! She had killed him in her sleep, and knew it not. In the blindness of slumber she had repeated the enormous tragedy, as sinless nevertheless as the angel who looked down and beheld her and pitied her!

I went on deck and sent for the doctor, to whom I communicated what I had seen, and he at once repaired to Miss Le Grand's berth accompanied by the stewardess, and found her peacefully resting in her bunk. No knife was to be seen. However, next morning, the young lady being then on deck, veiled as she always now went, and sitting in a retired part of the poop, the second mate, the doctor, and the stewardess again thoroughly searched Miss Le Grand's berth, and they found in a hollow in the ship's side, a sort of scupper in fact for the porthole, a carving knife, rusted with old stains of blood. It had belonged to the ship, and it was a knife the steward had missed on the day the captain was killed.

Since the whole ghastly tragedy was a matter of somnambulism, all points of it were easily fitted by the doctor, who quickly understood that the knife had been taken by the poor girl in her sleep just as it had been murderously used. What horrible demon governed her in her slumber, who shall tell? For my part I put it down to Mrs. Burney and a secret feeling of jealousy which had operated in the poor soul when sense was suspended in her by slumber.

We tried to keep the thing secret, taking care to lock Miss Le Grand up every night without explaining our motive; but the passengers got wind of the truth and shrunk from her with horror. It came, in fact, to their waiting upon me in a body and insisting upon my immuring her in the steerage in company with one of the 'tween-deck's passengers, a female who had offered her services as a nurse for hire. This action led to the poor girl herself finding out what had happened. God knows who told her or how she managed to discover it; but 't is certain she got to learn it was her hand that in sleep had killed her lover, and she went mad the selfsame day of her understanding what she had done.

Nor did she ever recover her mind. She was landed mad, and sent at once to an asylum, where she died, God rest her poor soul! exactly a year after the murder, passing away, in fact, at the very hour the deed was done, as I afterwards heard.

The Ship Seen on the Ice.

In the middle of April, in the year 1855, the three-masted schooner Lightning sailed from the Mersey for Boston with a small general cargo of English manufactured goods. She was commanded by a man named Thomas Funnel. The mate, Salamon Sweers, was of Dutch extraction, and his broad-beamed face was as Dutch to the eye as was the sound of his name to the ear. Yet he spoke English with as good an accent as ever one could hear in the mouth of an Englishman; and, indeed, I pay Salamon Sweers no compliment by saying this, for he employed his h's correctly, and the grammar of his sentences was fairly good, albeit salt: and how many Englishmen are there who correctly employ the letter h, and whose grammar is fairly good, salt or no salt?