He started up and looked sharply round, trembling violently; and then wiped his forehead with his hand.
“This will not do!” he muttered. “I mustn’t show the white feather. I’ve got nothing to fear. Nothing at all. Why should I have? It was an accident; I didn’t mean it. No: wouldn’t hurt a hair of the old man’s head—no, not a hair. Yes: it was an accident.”
He drew up his head and picked up the cigar he had thrown down, re-lit it, and after a puff or two, threw it down once more.
“Wretched trash!” he muttered, taking out his case and fiercely biting the end off another. One of Gellow’s best. “Ah,” he cried, as he brought down his fist upon the table heavily. “Only let me once get clear of that man! And I might have done it so easily,” he continued, as he lit the cigar, “so very easily, and been free of that cursed incubus for a time.”
He let his cigar go out again, and his head sank upon his hands as he stared in a maundering way at the cabin door.
“But it’s always my luck—always my luck; and I’m the most miserable wretch that ever crawled.”
There was no one present to endorse his words, as the maudlin tears rose to his eyes and dripped slowly down between his feet, nature seeming to distil the wine and spirits he had been imbibing all the morning ever since he had left the cot in which he had lain tossing in a fever of fear all through the night.
But after a time champagne and brandy had their effect, and the abject shivering man of half-an-hour before seemed to have grown defiant as to the future.
He was in the act of snapping his fingers with a half-tipsy laugh, when a boat bumped up against the side, and he heard a trampling on the deck, and the buzz of voices.
“What’s that?” he panted, completely sobered now, and trembling violently, as he suddenly turned to one of the most abject-looking and white-faced creatures it is possible to imagine. “What’s that?” he panted, with his voice trembling; and he took up the brandy to help himself again. “Bah! some boat has struck us. That’s all.”