“Do, sir; but I’m afraid you won’t make him understand. He’s too far gone for that.”
Mark went down on his knees by his officer and took his hand. Then, placing his lips close to the stricken man’s ear, he asked him again and again to give him his advice what to do, but elicited nothing but a peevish muttering, as the lieutenant tossed his head from side to side.
“What I told you, sir.”
“Then I’ll ask Dance,” cried Mark. “He is over you men, and I cannot do this without some one to share the responsibility.”
“Try him, sir; but he’s quite off his head, and if he says do, his advice ain’t worth having, for he’ll never know he said it.”
All the same, in his terrible perplexity, Mark crawled over the thwarts and between the men to where the coxswain lay muttering incessantly right forward, with his head resting against the pole of his hitcher; but in spite of appeal after appeal the man lay with his eyes fixed, quite insensible to every word addressed to him, and the midshipman crept back to where Tom Fillot sat.
“I’m nobody, sir, only a common man afore the mast, so it’s like impidence for me to offer to share the responsibility with a young gent like you. But being half as old again, I may say I know a little of what a man ought to do in a case like this; and I say that as you’re now in command, sir, it’s your duty to us, as well as to the dead.”
“No, no,” groaned Mark. “We may be overtaken by the ship at any time.”
“Look here; it’s of no use for you to shrink from it. Recollect where we are. You must.”
But still Mark shook his head.