Captain Marmaduke rushed up to the watch and caught him by the shoulder. ‘What have you done?’ he said; ‘you have lost the ship!’
The man shook himself away from the Captain’s hand.
‘It was no fault of mine,’ he said between his teeth. ‘I took all the care I could. I saw all this froth at a distance, and I asked the steersman what it was, and he told me that it was but the sea showing white under the light of the moon.’
Captain Marmaduke gave a little groan of despair.
‘What is to be done?’ he asked. ‘Where are we?’
‘God only knows where we are,’ the man answered, still in that sullen, shamefaced way. ‘But for sure we are fast upon a bank that I never heard tell of ere this night.’
As they were thus talking, and all around were full of consternation, I saw that Marjorie had come up from below and was standing very still by the companion head. She had flung a great cloak on over her night-rail, and though her face was pale in the moonlight she was as calm as if she were in church. When I came nigh her she asked me, in a low, firm voice, what had happened.
I told her all that I knew—how the ship had by mischance run on some bank through the whiteness of the moonlight misleading the steersman. With another woman, maybe, I should have striven to make as light as possible of the matter, but with Marjorie I knew that there was no such need. I told her all that had chanced and of the peril we were in, as I should have done to a man.
“She Had Flung a Great Cloak on.”