A Psychological Shipwreck - 2

For a moment she was silent, with averted¹ face, and I began to fear I had been extremely rude and indelicate; then she fixed² her eyes gravely on my own. In an instant my mind was dominated by as strange a fancy as ever entered human consciousness. It seemed as if she were looking at me, not with, but through, those eyes -- from an immeasurable distance behind them -- and that a number of other persons, men, women and children, upon whose faces I caught strangely familiar evanescent（容易消散的） expressions, clustered about her, struggling with gentle eagerness to look at me through the same orbs⁴. Ship, ocean, sky -- all had vanished. I was conscious of nothing but the figures in this extraordinary and fantastic scene. Then all at once darkness fell upon me, and anon（时或） from out of it, as to one who grows accustomed by degrees to a dimmer light, my former surroundings of deck and mast and cordage（绳索） slowly resolved themselves. Miss Harford had closed her eyes and was leaning back in her chair, apparently⁵ asleep, the book she had been reading open in her lap. Impelled⁶ by surely I cannot say what motive⁷, I glanced at the top of the page; it was a copy of that rare and curious work, Denneker's meditations⁸, and the lady's index finger rested on this passage:

'To sundry⁹ it is given to be drawn¹⁰ away, and to be apart from the body for a season; for, as concerning rills which would flow across each other the weaker is borne along by the stronger, so there be certain of kin³ whose paths intersecting（交叉的） , their souls do bear company, the while their bodies go foreappointed ways, unknowing.'

Miss Harford arose, shuddering¹¹; the sun had sunk below the horizon, but it was not cold. There was not a breath of wind; there were no clouds in the sky, yet not a star was visible. A hurried tramping sounded on the deck; the captain, summoned from below, joined the first officer, who stood looking at the barometer¹². 'Good God!' I heard him exclaim.

An hour later the form of Janette Harford, invisible in the darkness and spray, was torn from my grasp by the cruel vortex（涡流，漩涡） of the sinking ship, and I fainted in the cordage of the floating mast to which I had lashed¹³ myself.