Almost as he uttered the words, Mr Fosset came up the engine-room hatchway and made his way hurriedly towards us.
“By jingo, Fosset, here you are at last!” exclaimed the skipper on seeing him. “I thought you were never coming up again, finding it so jolly warm and comfortable below! Are things all right there now, and are the bilge-pumps working?”
Captain Applegarth spoke jocosely enough, everything being pretty easy on deck and the ship breasting the gale like a duck, but Mr Fosset’s face, I noticed, looked grave and he answered the other in a more serious fashion than his general wont, his mouth working nervously in the pale moonlight that lent him a more pallid air as the words dropped from his lips, making his countenance, indeed, almost like that of a corpse.
“But what, man!” exclaimed the skipper impatiently, interrupting his slow speech before Mr Fosset could get any further. “Anything wrong, eh?”
“Yes, sir, I’m sorry to say something is very wrong, I fear—very wrong below,” replied the other sadly. “There has been a sad accident in the stoke-hole!”
Old Masters, whose ears had been wide open to the conversation, here nudged me with his elbow as I stood beside him, and at the same time giving forth a grunt of deep and heartfelt significance.
“I knowed summet ’ud happen,” he whispered in a sepulchral voice that sounded all the more gruesome from the attendant circumstances, the shrieking wind tearing through the riggings, the melancholy wash of the waves alongside, the moaning and groaning of the poor old barquey’s timbers as if she were in grievous pain, while at that very moment the bell under the break of the fo’c’s’le struck eight bells slowly, as if tolling for a passing soul. “You seed the ghost-ship, Mr Haldane, the same as me, for I saw it, that I did!”