Chapter Thirty Five.
Conclusion
“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.
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.