My Danish Sweetheart: A Novel. Volume 3 of 3

IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. III.
On the afternoon of this same day of Tuesday, October 31, Helga having gone to her cabin, I stepped on deck to smoke a pipe—for my pipe was in my pocket when I ran to the lifeboat, and Captain Bunting had given me a square of tobacco to cut up.
We had dined at one. During the course of the meal Helga and I had said but very little, willing that the Captain should have the labour of talking. Nor did he spare us. His tongue, as sailors say, seemed to have been slung in the middle, and it wagged at both ends. His chatter was an infinite variety of nothing; but he spoke with singular enjoyment of the sound of his own voice, with ceaseless reference, besides, in his manner, to Helga, whom he continued silently and self-complacently to regard in a way that rendered her constantly uneasy, and kept her downward-looking and silent.
But nothing more at that table was said about our leaving his ship. Indeed, both Helga and I had agreed to drop the subject until an opportunity for our transference should arrive. We might, at all events, be very certain that he would not set us ashore in the Canary Islands; nor did I consider it politic to press him to land us there, for, waiving all consideration of other reasons which might induce him to detain us, it would have been unreasonable to entreat him to go out of his course to oblige us, who were without the means to repay him for his trouble and for loss of time.
He withdrew to his cabin after dinner. Helga and I sat over his draughtboard for half an hour; she then went below, and I, as I have already said, on deck, to smoke a pipe.
The wind had freshened since noon, and was now blowing a brisk and sparkling breeze out of something to the northward of east; sail had been heaped upon the barque, and when I gained the deck I found her swarming through it under overhanging wings of studdingsail, a broad wake of frost-like foam stretching behind, and many flying fish sparking out of the blue curl from the vessel's cutwater ere the polished round of brine flashed into foam abreast of the fore-rigging. Mr. Jones stumped the deck, having relieved Abraham at noon. The fierce-faced, lemon-coloured creature with withered brow and fiery glances grasped the wheel. As I crouched under the lee of the companion-hatch to light my pipe, I curiously and intently inspected him; strangely enough, finding no hindrance of embarrassment from his staring at me too; which, I take it, was owing to his exceeding ugliness, so that I looked at him as at something out of nature, whose sensibilities were not of a human sort to grieve me with a fancy of vexing them.