However dangerous our situation might have been, I should still have known how to comfort and encourage her.
But—her father was dead!
This was a blow I could not avert—a sorrow no labour could remit. It struck home hard to me.
I took her hand and raised her, and entered the cabin hand in hand with her. The moisture of the deck dulled the transparency of the bull's-eye, but sufficient light was admitted through the port-hole to enable me to see him. He was as white as a sheet, and his hair frosted his head, and made him resemble a piece of marble carving. His under jaw had dropped, and that was the great and prominent signal of the thing that had come to him.
Poor old man! lying dead under the coarse blanket, with his thin hands folded, as though he had died in prayer, and a most peaceful holy calm in his face!
Was it worth while bringing him from the wreck for this?
"God was with him when he died," I said, and I closed his poor eyes as tenderly as my rough hands would let me.
She looked at him, speechless with grief, and then burst into an uncontrollable fit of crying.
My love and tenderness, my deep pity of her lonely helplessness, were all so great an impulse in me that I took her in my arms and held her whilst she sobbed upon my shoulder. I am sure that she knew my sorrow was deep and real, and that I held her to my heart that she might not feel her loneliness.
When her great outburst of grief was passed, I made her sit; and then she told me that when she had left the deck, she had looked at her father before lying down, and thought him sleeping very calmly. He was not dead then. Oh, no! she had noticed by the motion of the covering on him that he was breathing peacefully. Being very tired she had fallen asleep quickly, and slept soundly. She awoke, not half an hour before she heard me trying the handle of the door. The rolling and straining of the ship frightened her, and she heard one of the masts go overboard. She got out of bed, meaning to call her father, so that he might be ready to follow her, if the ship were sinking (as she believed it was), on to the deck, but could not wake him. She took him by the arm, and this bringing her close to his face, she saw that he was dead. She would have called me, but dreaded to leave the cabin lest she should be separated from her father. Meanwhile she heard the fall of another mast alongside, and the ship at the moment rolling heavily, she believed the vessel actually sinking, and flung herself upon her father's body, praying to God that her death might be mercifully speedy, and that the waves might not separate them in death.