“I come, Miss Howard,” said Dillon, “by the commands of your uncle, and, permit me to add, by my own—”
“May Heaven shield us!” exclaimed Cecilia, clasping her hands in affright, and rising involuntarily from her couch, “are we, too, to be imprisoned and murdered?”
“Surely Miss Howard will not impute to me—” Dillon paused, observing that the wild looks, not only of Cecilia, but of Katherine and Alice Dunscombe, also, were directed at some other object, and turning, to his manifest terror he beheld the gigantic frame of the cockswain, surmounted by an iron visage fixed in settled hostility, in possession of the only passage from the apartment.
“If there's murder to be done,” said Tom, after surveying the astonished group with a stern eye, “it's as likely this here liar will be the one to do it, as another; but you have nothing to fear from a man who has followed the seas too long, and has grappled with too many monsters, both fish and flesh, not to know how to treat a helpless woman. None, who know him, will say that Thomas Coffin ever used uncivil language, or unseamanlike conduct, to any of his mother's kind.”
“Coffin!” exclaimed Katherine, advancing with a more confident air, from the corner into which terror had driven her with her companions.
“Ay, Coffin,” continued the old sailor, his grim features gradually relaxing, as he gazed on her bright looks; “'tis a solemn word, but it's a word that passes over the shoals, among the islands, and along the cape, oftener than any other. My father was a Coffin, and my mother was a Joy; and the two names can count more flukes than all the rest in the island together; though the Worths, and the Gar'ners, and the Swaines, dart better harpoons, and set truer lances, than any men who come from the weather-side of the Atlantic.”
Katherine listened to this digression in honor of the whalers of Nantucket, with marked complacency; and, when he concluded, she repeated slowly:
“Coffin! this, then, is long Tom!”
“Ay, ay, long Tom, and no sham in the name either,” returned the cockswain, suffering the stern indignation that had lowered around his hard visage to relax into a low laugh as he gazed on her animated features; “the Lord bless your smiling face and bright black eyes, young madam! you have heard of old long Tom, then? Most likely, 'twas something about the blow he strikes at the fish—ah! I'm old and I'm stiff, now, young madam, but afore I was nineteen, I stood at the head of the dance, at a ball on the cape, and that with a partner almost as handsome as yourself—ay! and this was after I had three broad flukes logg'd against my name.”
“No,” said Katherine, advancing in her eagerness a step or two nigher to the old tar, her cheeks flushing while she spoke, “I had heard of you as an instructor in a seaman's duty, as the faithful cockswain, nay, I may say, as the devoted companion and friend, of Mr. Richard Barnstable—but, perhaps, you come now as the bearer of some message or letter from that gentleman.”