'My God!' exclaimed Pooley, while the faces of all around him took on a blanched, terrified look, and Bella, with the beautiful carnation of her lips almost white now, grasped her lover's arm. 'My God!' Then he turned to Fagg and muttered, repeating the other's words: '"Not much to fear until one of us gets affected." Heavens! we haven't had long to wait!'
While, following Charke who had already gone forward, and followed by Fagg, he went towards the forecastle.
His mates were bringing Wilks down the ladder now, since Charke sang out that he should be taken into the comparative darkness of their quarters at once, thereby to escape the glare of the sun; and not one of those who were eagerly watching his descent but observed how like his actions were to the actions of the blind negroes when they were brought off from the dhow, and the actions of the others to the behaviour of the men who had assisted them to come on board. For his companions directed his hands to the ladder's ropes even as the blacks, hands had been directed; while in each of his motions was the same hesitation, followed by the same careful grasping of the rail, as there had been in the motions of the slaves.
'Oh, Gilbert,' Bella exclaimed piteously, as she clung to him, 'what is going to happen? What is hanging over us? Supposing--supposing----'
'What, darling?'
'That--oh, I don't dare to say what I dread. But if this terrible thing should spread all through the ship. If uncle, if you, if all the sailors were attacked. And you--you--dearest; you, my darling.'
'Let us hope it will not come to that. Besides I, personally, matter the least of any----'
'Bertie!' she almost shrieked, alarmed, 'when you know that those others--some of them at least--that those poor black creatures have died after it. And you say that you matter the least of any; you, whom I love so.'
'I meant as regards the ship. I am not one of her officers, nor concerned in the working of her; and Bella, dearest Bella, don't get those dreadful ideas into your pretty head. Never give way to panic in an emergency. Doubtless some more will find their eyesight leave them--temporarily--but it can scarcely be that all will be attacked. And as regards death following, why, those other niggers are all right, and they are just as blind as those who have died!'
It happened--as so often such things happen in this world--that he spoke a little too soon. He hit upon the denial of the likelihood of a possibility occurring which, by a strange decree of fate or chance, was, at the very moment of that denial, to occur; since, just as the repudiation of such probability was uttered by him, and before the men helping Wilks had had time to get him comfortably into his berth in the forecastle, there arose once more that strange, weird, moaning kind of incantation from the deck-cabin in which the remaining negroes were, that had been heard before by all. And, added to it, was something more than any had heretofore heard, namely, a series of wild turbulent shouts in the unknown barbaric tongue used by the Africans--shouts that seemed to issue alone from one of their throats. A noise, a bellowing, in which, though on board the Emperor of the Moon there was not one person who could understand the words that voice uttered, all recognised the tones that denote fear, terror, and misery extreme.