“D’you mean to say your brother has forgiven the wreck of The Witch? You must be dreaming, Summerhayes.”
“Probably I am. But as soon as you reach home, Sartoris, there’s a ship waitin’ for you. That ends the matter.”
He turned abruptly to Scarlett.
“There’s something I have to say to you, young feller. My gal, here, came to me, the night before last—when some one we know of was in a very queer street—she came to me, all of a shake, all of a tremble, unable to sleep; she came to me in the middle of the night—a thing she’d never done since she was six years old—an’ at first I thought it was the hysterics, an’ then I thought it was fever. But she spoke plain enough, an’ her touch was cool enough. An’ then she began to tell me”——
“Really, father,” Rose exclaimed, her cheeks colouring like a peony, “do stop, or you’ll drive me from the room.”
“Right, my dear: I say no more. But I ask you, sir,” he continued, turning to Scarlett. “I ask you how you diagnose a case like that. What treatment do you prescribe? What doctor’s stuff do you give?” There was a smile on the old man’s face, and his eyes sparkled with merriment. “I put it to you as a friend, I put it to you as a man who knows a quantity o’ gals. What’s the matter with my dar’ter Rose?”
For a moment, Jack looked disconcerted, but almost instantly a smile overspread his face.
“I expect it arose from a sudden outburst of affection for her father,” he said.
But here Sartoris spoilt the effect by laughing. “I suspect the trouble rose from a disturbed condition of the heart,” said he, “a complaint not infrequent in females.”
“An’ what, Cap’n, would you suggest as a cure?” asked the Pilot; his eyes twinkling, and his suppressed merriment working in him like the subterranean rumbling of an earthquake.