He wiped his forehead perplexedly. “Phew, how you do talk!” he remonstrated. “What I mean is that my wife...” He stopped again, then went on. “She took it into her head to come with me this voyage. For the first time.... And you two coming alone in an open boat like this! It’s what she isn’t used to.”
I simply couldn’t get at what he meant; I couldn’t even hear him very well, because Manuel-del-Popolo was still calling out to Seraphina in the cabin. Williams and I looked at each other—he embarrassed, and I utterly confounded.
“Mrs. Williams thinks it’s irregular,” Sebright broke in, “you and your young lady being alone—in an open boat at night, and that sort of thing. It isn’t what they approve of at Bristol.”
Manuel suddenly bellowed out, “Señorita—save me from their barbarity. I am a victim. Behold their bloody knives ready—and their eyes which gloat.”
He shrank convulsively from the fellow with the bundle of cutlasses under his arm, who innocently pushed his way close to him; he threw himself forward, the two sailors hung back on his arms, nearly sitting on the deck, and he strained dog-like in his intense fear of immediate death. Williams, however, really seemed to want an answer to his absurdity that I could not take very seriously. I said:
“What do you expect us to do? Go back to our boat, or what?”
It seemed to affect him a good deal. “Wait till you are caught by a good woman yourself,” he mumbled wretchedly.
Was this the roystering Williams? The jolly good fellow? I wanted to laugh, a little hysterically, because of the worry after great fatigue. Was his wife such a terrifying virago? “A good woman,” Williams insisted. I turned my eyes to Sebright, who looked on amusedly.
“It’s all right,” he answered my questioning look. “She’s a good soul, but she doesn’t see fellows like us in the congregation she worships with at home.” Then he whispered in my ear, “Owner’s niece. Older than the skipper. Married him for love. Suspects every woman—every man, too, by George, except me, perhaps. She’s learned life in some back chapel in Bristol. What can you expect? You go straight into the cabin,” he added.
At that moment the cabin door opened again, and the figure of the woman I had seen before reappeared against the light.