With the first colour in the east, Carthew awoke and sat up. A while he
gazed at the scroll of the morning bank and the spars and hanging canvas
of the brig, like a man who wakes in a strange bed, with a child's
simplicity of wonder. He wondered above all what ailed him, what he had
lost, what disfavour had been done him, which he knew he should resent,
yet had forgotten. And then, like a river bursting through a dam, the
truth rolled on him its instantaneous volume: his memory teemed with
speech and pictures that he should never again forget; and he sprang to
his feet, stood a moment hand to brow, and began to walk violently
to and fro by the companion. As he walked, he wrung his hands.
“God--God--God,” he kept saying, with no thought of prayer, uttering a
mere voice of agony.
The time may have been long or short, it was perhaps minutes, perhaps
only seconds, ere he awoke to find himself observed, and saw the captain
sitting up and watching him over the break of the poop, a strange
blindness as of fever in his eyes, a haggard knot of corrugations on his
brow. Cain saw himself in a mirror. For a flash they looked upon each
other, and then glanced guiltily aside; and Carthew fled from the eye of
his accomplice, and stood leaning on the taffrail.
An hour went by, while the day came brighter, and the sun rose and drank
up the clouds: an hour of silence in the ship, an hour of agony beyond
narration for the sufferers. Brown's gabbling prayers, the cries of the
sailors in the rigging, strains of the dead Hemstead's minstrelsy,
ran together in Carthew's mind, with sickening iteration. He neither
acquitted nor condemned himself: he did not think, he suffered. In
the bright water into which he stared, the pictures changed and were
repeated: the baresark rage of Goddedaal; the blood-red light of the
sunset into which they had run forth; the face of the babbling Chinaman
as they cast him over; the face of the captain, seen a moment since,
as he awoke from drunkenness into remorse. And time passed, and the sun
swam higher, and his torment was not abated.
Then were fulfilled many sayings, and the weakest of these condemned
brought relief and healing to the others. Amalu the drudge awoke (like
the rest) to sickness of body and distress of mind; but the habit of
obedience ruled in that simple spirit, and appalled to be so late,
he went direct into the galley, kindled the fire, and began to get
breakfast. At the rattle of dishes, the snapping of the fire, and the
thin smoke that went up straight into the air, the spell was lifted.
The condemned felt once more the good dry land of habit under foot; they
touched again the familiar guide-ropes of sanity; they were restored to
a sense of the blessed revolution and return of all things earthly. The
captain drew a bucket of water and began to bathe. Tommy sat up, watched
him awhile, and slowly followed his example; and Carthew, remembering
his last thoughts of the night before, hastened to the cabin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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