Volume III Part 8 (1/2)

'A fine time to tell you such a thing! Does that sort of sea-captain wait for a gale of wind to propose to a girl?' I exclaimed, with a sudden irritation of jealousy tingling through me, and I looked at her closely and suspiciously.

'I wanted to be angry, but could not,' said she. 'I hate the man, yet I could not be angry with him. He spoke of his daughter--he did not talk through his nose--he did not cant at all. Is ”cant” the right word? I felt sorry; I had not the heart to answer him in rudeness, and to have risen and left him whilst he was speaking would have been rudeness.'

I made a slight effort to disengage my arm from her clasp.

'He told me--no doubt you heard him,' said I--'he told me he believed there would be no necessity to keep me long. He is a clever man--a shrewd man. Well, after this I shall believe in all the proverbs about women.'

'What do you mean?' she exclaimed in a startled voice, letting fall her hands and staring at me.

'What do _you_ mean?'

'Why, that I am sorry for the man, and hate him.'

'Oh! if you keep sorry long you will soon cease to hate him.'

'No, no!' she cried with a little pa.s.sion, making as if to clasp my arm afresh, and then shrinking. 'I could not help his coming here and speaking to me.'

'That is true.'

'Why are you angry?'

Her gaze pleaded, her lips twitched, even as she looked at me her blue eyes filled. Her grieved, pretty face, her wistful, tender, tearful face, must have transformed my temper into impa.s.sioned pity, into self-reproach, into keen self-resentment, even had there been solid ground for vexation. I took her hand and lifted it to my lips.

'Forgive me; we have been much together. Our a.s.sociation and your father's dying words make me think of you as mine until--until--the long and short of it is, Helga, I am jealous!'

An expression of delight entered and vanished from her face. She stood thoughtfully looking down on the deck. Just then Punmeamootty entered to prepare the table for supper, and Helga again went to the cabin window and stood looking out, lightly, with unconscious ease and grace, swaying to the stormy heave of the deck, with her hands clasped behind her in a posture of meditation.

CHAPTER IV.

A NIGHT OF HORROR.

The gale broke on the morning of Thursday, November 2. The compacted heaven of cloud scattered in swelling cream-coloured ma.s.ses; the sun shone out of the wide lakes of moist blue, and the sea turned from the cold and sickly gray of the stormy hours into a rich sapphire, with a high swell and a plentiful chasing of foaming billows. By four o'clock in the afternoon the ocean had smoothed down into a tropical expanse of quietly rising and falling waters, with the hot sun sliding westwards and the barque stemming the sea afresh under all cloths which could be piled upon her, the wind a small breeze, about west, and the sea-line a flawless girdle.

The evening that followed was one of quiet beauty. There was a young moon overhead, with power enough to drop a little trickling of silver into the dark sea under her; the clouds had vanished, and the stars shone brightly with a very abundant showering of meteoric lights above the trucks of the silent swaying masts.

As we paced the deck the Captain joined us. Short of going to our respective cabins, there was no means of getting rid of him; so we continued to patrol the planks, with him at Helga's side, talking, talking--oh, Heaven! how he talked! His manner was distressingly caressing. Helga kept hold of my arm, and meanwhile I, true to that posture I had maintained for the past three days, listened or sent my thoughts elsewhere, rarely speaking. In the course of his ceaseless chatter he struck upon the subject of his crew and their victuals, and told us he was sorry that we were not present when Nakier and two other coloured men came aft into the cuddy after he had taken sights and gone below.

'I am certain,' he exclaimed, smiting his leg, 'that I have made them reflective! I believe I could not mistake. Nakier in particular listened with attention, and looked at his mates with an expression as though conviction were being slowly borne in upon him.'

I p.r.i.c.ked up my ears at this, for here was a matter that had been causing me some anxious thought, and I broke away from my sullen, resentful behaviour to question him.

'What brought the men aft?'

'The same tiresome story,' he answered, speaking loudly, and seemingly forgetful of or indifferent to the pair of yellow ears which, I might warrant him, were thirstily listening at the helm. 'They ask for beef, for beef, for nothing but beef, and I say yes--beef one day, pork another; beef for your bodies and pork for your souls. I shall conquer them; and what a triumph it will be! Though I should make no further progress with them, yet I could never feel too grateful for a decisive victory over a gross imbecile superst.i.tion that, like a shutter, though it be one of many, helps to keep out the light.'

He then went on to tell us what he had said, how he had reasoned, and I shall not soon forget the unctuous, self-satisfied chuckle which broke from the folds of his throat as he paused before asking Helga what she thought of _that_ as an example of pure logic. I listened, wondering that a man who could talk as he did could be crazy enough to attempt so perilous an experiment as the attempting to win his crew over to his own views of religion by as dangerous an insult as his fanatical mind could have lighted upon. It was the more incomprehensible to me in that the fellow had started upon his crude missionary scheme when there were but two whites in the s.h.i.+p to eleven believers in the Prophet.

I waited until his having to fetch breath enabled me to put in a word. I then briefly and quietly related what had pa.s.sed in the forecastle as described to me by Jacob Minnikin.