"We therefore commit her body to the deep..."
The voice of the captain of the _Launceston Castle_ takes on more than
the ordinary solemnity which almost invariably comes into the voice of
the nonprofessional reader of that most solemn office, the Burial of the
Dead at Sea. The demeanour, too, of his audience--officers, crew,
passengers alike--is more than ordinarily solemn, while many of the
female portion of it are sobbing aloud. There is something so pathetic,
so heart-rending in this last stage of a terrible drama of the sea--the
only survivor of a terrible tragedy being thus cast up in their midst:
this royally beautiful form, a noble embodiment of youth and health and
grace, found floating, lashed to the ring-bolts of a ship's hatch; alone
in the immensity of ocean; rescued from the deep, only to return
immediately to the deep again. For Mona is dead. Her overwhelming
agony of grief, combined with her recent terrors and exhaustion, had
done its work; and no sooner had they safely lifted her to the deck of
the _Launceston Castle_ than the spirit fled, leaving a name trembling
upon the lips of its forsaken tenement, and that name they who stood by
could hear.
Yet it was a name which, coupled with many a passionate adjuration, had
been heard already and many times by some. When the hatch, lightened of
its double weight, rose above the surface, its dark oblong at once
attracted the eyes of the look-out on board the _Launceston Castle_,
outward bound. At the same time the wild, pealing cry of agony and
despair came faintly yet distinctly to horror-stricken ears.
The officer in charge of the boat which took off the frenzied, delirious
castaway from her frail support, was able to glean, amid those most
awesome revelations of a wandering mind, not only the heart-rending
outlines of a life's drama and a deliberate and exalted act of
self-sacrifice, but a very fair inkling of the nature and magnitude of
the hideous catastrophe which had befallen; and as a direct result the
ship was enabled, within a day or so, to pick up two boatloads of the
survivors of the ill-fated _Scythian_.
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And now the flag drooping at half-mast, the propeller of the _Launceston
Castle_, slowed down almost to stopping point, beating drearily in the
depths as though in sombre and measured dirge, amid the sobs of women
and the husky and suspicious clearing of male throats, the grizzled
captain, his book trembling in his bronzed, knotted grasp, pronounces
the commendatory words:
"`We therefore commit her body to the deep--to be turned into
corruption--looking for the resurrection of the body--when the Sea shall
give up her dead...'"
There is a hollow, splashless plunge. All is over.
Far down into the dim, waveless, rayless depths, Mona has gone. And
there, where he who gave his life for her, and gave it in vain, has
already gone, she will rest--they both will rest--until the Sea shall
give up her dead.
The End.