“That’s number one!” said old Masters, the boatswain, meeting me at the door of the saloon as I came out on deck, Weston having already told him the sad news. “Master Stokes’ll foller next, and then you or hi, Master Haldane, for we be all doomed men, I know, arter seein’ that there ghost-ship!”
I made no reply to the superstitious old seaman’s ominous prediction, but as I made my way forward to the bridge to inform Captain Applegarth and the others of what had happened, I could not help thinking how strange it was that poor Jackson should have recalled, at the very moment the spirit was quitting his crippled body, the fact of my sighting the ship in distress and the account I had given the skipper of what I had seen on board that mysterious craft!
Mr Fosset, or some of the hands who accompanied him, must have taken down the yarn to the stoke-hold, only just before the unfortunate man met with his terrible accident, though I had no doubt that he must have seen the man-of-war through the port hole of the cabin, which was right opposite his bunk, as she brought up under our stern to speak to us earlier in the afternoon, and the sight of HMS Aurora had, somehow or other, amid the wanderings of his unconscious brain, got mixed up with the remembrance of what he had previously heard concerning the vessel I had seen at sunset the two days prior.
It was now getting dark, the evening closing in quickly, and, what with the dying man’s queer talk and the boatswain harping on the same theme immediately afterwards, I confess I felt far from comfortable, my nerves being in a state of constant tension from the painful scene in the cabin that I had just witnessed, while the gloomy shades of the night that were fast enwrapping us, the dull roar of the ever-breaking sea and the groaning of the ship as she rolled, like a living creature in pain, all worked on my overtried fancy and made me almost afraid of my own shadow as I slipped and stumbled along the sloppy deck, my mind being in a complete whirl till I reached my goal—the bridge.
“What’s the matther, me bhoy?” asked Garry O’Neil, who was speaking to the skipper, the two examining a chart in the wheel-house, the light from the doorway of which fell on my face. “Faith, ye look quite skeared, Haldane, jist as if ye’d sane a ghoast, sure!”
I mentioned what had happened, however, and he at once dropped his chaffing manner, looking as grave as a judge.
“Begorrah, it’s moighty sorry I am to hear that, now!” said he in a more serious tone. “Sure, and he was a foine, h’ilthy man entirely, barrin’ that accident, bad cess to it! He moight have lived till a hundred, an’ then aunly died of auld age; for he’d the constitution of an illiphent. Faith, I never saw such a chist and thorax on a chap in me loife before!”
“Poor fellow!” observed the skipper. “He seems to have gone off awfully sudden at the last. I thought you said he was getting on well when you went down to see him awhile ago?”
“Bedad, I did that, sir; father’s no denyin’ it,” answered the Irishman, off-hand. “But I niver s’id he’d git over it, cap’en. I tuld ye from the first he couldn’t reciver, for he was paralysed, poor craytur’, from the waist downwards, and had a lot of internal injury besides. It was aunly bekase he was sich a shtrang man that he’s lasted so long, sir. Any one else would have died directly outright afther the accident, for he was pretty well smashed to pieces!”
“Strange!” muttered Captain Applegarth, who, although hasty of temper sometimes, was a man of deep feeling. “Sunday night again and that man dead! Only a week ago, this very evening, he came up to me here as I was standing by the binnacle to ask about some carpenter’s stores that were wanted in the engine-room. He and I then got talking, I recollect, it being Sunday, I suppose, of religious matters. He imagined himself—poor chap—a ‘materialist,’ as they call themselves, but his arguments on the point were very weak. He argued that there was no hereafter, no future state; the heaven and hell spoken of in Scripture, he suggested, being the happiness or punishment we meet with below here, while living, in accordance with our own lives.”