The Phantom Death, etc.

by William Clark Russell

I said softly, “The captain and I have discovered who you are, and your relation with Charles Winthrop Sheringham. Was it you who stabbed him? Tell me if you did it. Your sufferings will be the lighter when you have eased your conscience of the weight of the dreadful secret.”

It is hard to interpret the expression of the eyes if the rest of the features do not help. I seemed to find a look of hate and contempt in hers. Her face continued marble hard. Not being able to coax a syllable out of her, though I spared nothing of professional patience in the attempt, I left the cabin, and, calling the stewardess, bade her see that the lady was kept without means to do herself a mischief.

That day and the next passed. Miss Dunbar continued dumb as a corpse. I visited her several times, and twice Captain Smallport accompanied me; but never a word would she utter. Nay, she would not even lift her eyes to look at us. I told the captain that it might be mere mulishness or a condition of mind that would end in madness. It was impossible to say. The stewardess said she ate and drank and went obediently to bed when ordered. She was as passive as a broken-spirited child, she said. For her part she didn’t believe the lady had killed the poor man.

It was on the fourth day following the murder that the glass fell; it blackened in the north-west, and came on to blow a hard gale of wind. A mountainous sea was running in a few hours upon which the ship made furious weather, clothed in flying brine to her tops, under no other canvas than a small storm main-trysail. The hatches were battened down, the decks were full of water, which flashed in clouds of glittering smoke over the lee bulwark rail. The passengers for the most part kept their cabins. The cook could do no cooking; indeed the galley fire was washed out, and we appeased our appetites with biscuit and tinned meat.

The gale broke at nine o’clock on the following morning, leaving a wild, confused sea and a scowling sky all round the horizon, with ugly yellow breaks over our reeling mastheads. I was in my gloomy quarters, whose atmosphere was little more than a green twilight, with the wash of the emerald brine swelling in thunder over the porthole, when the steward arrived to tell me that one of the passengers had met with a serious accident. I asked no questions, but instantly followed him along the steerage corridor into the cuddy, where I found a group of the saloon people standing beside the figure of the young fellow named John Burgess, who lay at his length upon the deck. I had not set eyes on him for days and days.

I thought at first he was dead. His eyes were half closed; the glaze of approaching dissolution was in the visible part of the pupils, and at first I felt no pulse. Two or three of the sailors who had brought him into the cuddy stood in the doorway. They told me that the young fellow had persisted in mounting the forecastle ladder to windward. He was hailed to come down, as the ship was pitching heavily and often dishing bodies of green water over her bows. He took no notice of the men’s cries, and had gained the forecastle-deck when an unusually heavy lurch flung him; he fell from a height of eight or nine feet, which might have broken a limb for him only; unhappily he struck the windlass end, and lay seemingly lifeless.

I bade them lift and carry him to the cabin that I might examine him, and when they had placed him in his bunk I told them to send the steward to help me and went to work to partially unclothe the lad to judge of his injuries.

On opening his coat I discovered that he was a woman.

On the arrival of the steward I told him that the young fellow called John Burgess was a girl, and I requested him to send the stewardess, and whilst I waited for her I carefully examined the unconscious sufferer, and judged that she had received mortal internal injuries. All the while that I was thus employed some extraordinary thoughts ran in my head.

The stewardess came. I gave her certain directions and went to the captain to report the matter. He was in no wise surprised to learn that a woman dressed as a man was aboard his ship; twice, he told me, had that sort of passenger sailed with him within the last four years.