“They knew it,” said they one to another. “No job of that sort, led by a woman, could succeed. It was against Nature, and the ways of the sea. The ship was doomed, and they were doomed, and they wished to God they had gone to their death bravely on the Swift.”
These were not brave words; but superstition has not been driven from the high seas by steam, and once the natural buoyancy of a sailor is steeped in the gloom of ill-luck, there is no brightness in his horizon. The heroism of Captain Pardoe and their comrades, who had courted destruction in the Swift, filled them, moreover, with a bitter feeling of irritation that they themselves should have been spared, and mingled with the dark prevailing tinge of superstition was an impulse of recklessness which, in the absence of any emergency, could find expression only in breaches of discipline. They lolled about in the shadow, seeking relief from the intolerable heat.
The man at the wheel gave a listless eye to the binnacle, and the Irene, battered, dirty, with fires ill-kept, ploughed slowly on, as melancholy, almost, as though she were still a derelict.
Webster took the sun at noon, and, utterly worn out, fell asleep over his reckonings, and so he was found in the afternoon by Hume, who came on deck from a long watch.
“Have I been asleep? There’s a heaviness in the air and a strange weight about my eyelids. How is she, Hume?”
“Quiet now, with the Captain’s boy at the door. Was it a month ago the Swift went down?”
“Only yesterday, Frank. My God! what a difference! The sea is not the same, nor the sky, nor the air we breathe, nor the look of anyone.”
“What an old tub this is, and do you note how the men hang about? I feel as though I cannot breathe freely. I have been thinking of your sister; it is a sad end to her waiting.”
“Ah! poor Loo,” murmured Webster. “Frank, I dare not go home with this story. I cannot. She will say I should have taken the risk myself.”
“Yet his death was worth living for.” Hume moved backward and forward by the chart house, while Webster gloomily looked at his figures. “Webster,” he said earnestly, “do you think there is any hope?”