Later on in the night, when the moon had risen, Nils, who had not been able to sleep in his hammock, came up to Salvé again, and drew him aside behind the round-house, as if for a private conversation.
"What would I have done? you asked. I'll tell you," he said, after a short pause, and his honest face seemed to express a vivid realisation of the whole misery of the situation. "I would have died upon the doorstep!"
Salvé stood and looked at him for a moment. There came a strange pallor over his face in the moonlight.
"Look you," he said, ironically, laying his hand upon the other's shoulder, "I have never a wife; but all the same, I am dead upon the doorstep—" Then, in the next breath, and with a sudden change of tone, he said, "Of course I am only joking, you know," and left him, with a hard, forced laugh.
Nils remained where he was, and pondered, not knowing exactly how to take it. It was possible Salvé had only been making fun of him. But another feeling eventually predominated. It told him that he had had a glimpse into a despairing soul; and he was profoundly moved.
CHAPTER XIII.
They stood slowly away to the north-east along the coast of Brazil. Every morning, towards the end of the dog-watch, when the sun rose in its gorgeous majesty from the sea, there came a refreshing breeze off the land, bringing with it the perfume of a thousand aromatic herbs; albatrosses and sea-gulls circled round the ship; flying-fish were to be seen in shoals; and all nature, animate and inanimate, seemed to be freshened for the time into activity and life. But gradually the breeze would become warmer and lighter, and then die away altogether, so that before noon the sails would hang flapping against the mast. They scarcely made five knots in the watch, and the heat during the greater part of the day was unbearable—as unbearable almost as the captain's temper, which showed no signs of improvement, and which vented itself in a systematic grinding of the crew, who, Captain Beck declared, were getting into intolerable habits of idleness.
Strange things occurred on board just at this time, which, taken in connection with the captain's mood, produced an uncomfortable feeling that there was some evil influence at work by which both the ship and the captain were possessed. Groans had been distinctly heard down in the hold among the coals; and the sailmaker affirmed that on several nights in succession he had seen a man go from amidships aft along the bulwark railings, stand still and point with his hand to the compass, and then disappear in the wake of the ship. Another declared that he had seen the ship's genius proceed in the same direction and jump overboard—cap and all he was no higher than a half sea-boot; and when the genius deserts a ship, it betokens in the sailors' superstitious creed that she is about to founder.
The unaccountable sounds in the hold continued, and changed one day when the hatch was battened down to a kind of wail, which ceased, however, when, for fear of an explosion of coal-gas, it was taken off again. On the following day the cook, who had gone down for water, came hurrying back with a scared face, and declared that he had seen a man sitting there in a red jacket.
"It is the ship's genius lamenting the ship," was hesitatingly suggested by some. But when the cook objected that the creature was at least as large as Big Anders the boatswain, and proceeded besides to endow him with sable colouring and claws, the terror reached its height.