Jude grinned kindly, and they pushed off, the boat a strake lower in the water with their loot.
The fat-faced Simmons watched them with the appearance of a man just released from mesmerism.
“That chap would talk the hat off one’s head,” said he. “I’ll have h—l to pay with Norton over that paint; most likely I’ll have to put my hand in my own pocket for it. But he’s a decent chap, that fellow, but sharp—the way he landed me with that fish for a bait!”
“He’s all there,” said Ratcliffe.
“So’s the boy,” said Simmons. “Come alongside after you’d gone, to say you were staying to breakfast with them. Told him to mind and not damage the paint. Let out like a bargee at me—and Sir William Skelton listening!”
“Where’s Sir William now, Simmons? He wasn’t in the saloon when I’d finished dressing.”
“I expect he’s in his cabin,” said Simmons.
Ratcliffe got a book and, taking his seat under the double awning sheltering the quarterdeck, tried to read. He had chosen a History of the West Indies, the same book most likely from which Skelton had “cadged” his information of the night before. The printed page was dull, however, compared to the spoken word, and he found himself wondering how it was that Skelly could have warmed him up so to all this stuff and yet be such an angular stick-in-the-mud in ordinary life. What made him such a superior person? What made him at thirty look forty, sometimes fifty, and what made him, Ratcliffe, fear Skelly sometimes, just as a schoolboy fears a master?
He guessed he was in for a wigging now for cutting breakfast and appearing like a guy before the officers, and he knew instinctively the form the wigging would take,—a chilly manner and studious avoidance of the subject, that would be all,—Christchurch on a wet Sunday for forty-eight hours, with the Oxford voice and the Oxford manner accentuated and thrown in.
At this moment Sir William Skelton, Bart., came on deck,—a tall, thin man, clean shaved, like a serious-minded butler in a yachting suit of immaculate white drill. His breeding lay chiefly in his eyes: they were half-veiled by heavy lids. He had an open mother-of-pearl-handled penknife in his hand.