"Wal—I on'y hope we won't hear anythin' more of them."
For more than two hours silence was observed on board the Parson. Terry stopped all whistling, and occupied himself with scratching his bullet head. The priest sat motionless, reading his book. Jericho drew the unhappy Biler down below for safe keeping, and detained him there a melancholy prisoner. Claude and Zac stood listening, but nothing more was heard.
To Claude there seemed something weird and ghostly in this incident—a voice thus sounding suddenly forth out of nothingness, and then dying away into the silence from which it had emerged: there was that in it which made him feel a sensation of involuntary awe; and the longer the silence continued, the more did this incident surround itself with a certain supernatural element, until, at length, he began to fancy that his senses might have deceived him. Yet he knew this had not been the case. Zac had heard the voice as well as he, and the words to him had been perfectly plain. Put her head a little over this way! Singular words, too, they seemed to be, as he turned them over in his mind. Under other circumstances they might have been regarded as perfectly commonplace, but now the surroundings gave them the possibility of a varied interpretation. Who was the "her"? What was meant? Was it a ship or a woman? What could the meaning be? Or, again, might not this have been some supernatural voice speaking to them from the Unseen, and conveying to them some sentence either of good or evil omen, giving them some direction, perhaps, about the course of the schooner in which he was?
Not that Claude was what is called a superstitious man. From ordinary superstition he was, indeed, quite as free as any man of his age or epoch; not was he even influenced by any of the common superstitious fancies then prevalent. But still there is a natural belief in the unseen which prevails among all men, and Claude's fancy was busy, being stimulated by this incident, so that, as he endeavored to account for it, he was as easily drawn towards a supernatural theory as to a natural one. Hundreds of miles from land, on the broad ocean, a voice had sounded from behind the impenetrable cloud, and it was scarcely to be wondered at that he considered it something unearthly.
Under other circumstances Zac might also have yielded to superstitious fancies; but as it was, his mind had been too completely filled with the one absorbing idea of the French fleet to find room for any other thought. It was not an unsubstantial ghost which Zac dreaded, but the too substantial form of some frigate looming through the fog, and firing a gun to bring him on board. Every additional moment of silence gave him a feeling of relief, for he felt that these moments, as they passed, drew him away farther from the danger that had been so near.
At length a new turn came to the current of affairs. A puff of wind suddenly filled the sails, and at its first breath Zac started up with a low chuckle.
"I'd give ten guineas," said he, "for one good hooray—I would, by George! But bein' as it is, I'll postpone that till I haul off a few miles from this."
"Why, what's the matter?" said Claude, rousing himself out of abstraction.
"Matter?" repeated Zac. "Why, the wind's hauled round to the nor'west, and the fog's goin' to lift, an' the Parson's goin' to show her heels."
With these words, Zac hurried to the tiller, which he took from the smiling Terry, and began to being the vessel around to run her before the wind.