He did not answer. I was angry with him, and stood one foot uncomfortably over the other for a little while, and then went back to the men.
“He will answer only ‘Yes,’” I said angrily. The men grunted, and I sat down, angry, yet not quite understanding, leaving him still smiling.
All day I sat, angry, and when evening came and we had eaten, grumbling, and cursing—all save my lord, who had eaten nothing—I got up and clambered again on to the hind-deck.
When I came to him I stood, all the words having left me. I seized my courage hard and spoke.
“When we get back, if we ever do, the men will leave you.”
I waited; he gave no answer. I started to speak again, but no words would come. I tried again. Then, with a sudden movement I leaned round on the bulwark and saw his face. For a moment yet I stood impatient; then with a cry of rage and pity I seized his hand and held it a moment, then dropped it and rushed back among the men, and hid my face in a dark corner, and sat there cursing weakly in a childish feeling of impotency—oh, the shame; and the great woe he carried in his smiling face!
Toward evening the wind fell, and as the sun went down the water shone smooth, and the light blazed in our faces. The cool of the dusk was a relief, and long after the great red moon had risen, we lay, restlessly, surely a strange ship-load, lost on the limitless seas.
When morning came we pushed out our oars and toiled regularly, creakingly, over the level water. The sun blistered the wood of the bulwarks and burned our faces, and we longed for evening. So for twelve days; till the yard was crooked, and our faces the colour of tanned skin. The men used to groan at the oars. On the twelfth day, midway between sunset and dark, came a little breeze over the water, that made the men shout. And for two days we went unsteadily eastward and northward with the little puffs of wind.
All this time we saw no land and no streak of foam upon the sea, that was the colour of wood-ashes; only brown seaweed drifting northwards. My lord had become very brown, and had a way of always turning toward the light, looking east when the sun rose and west when it set.
Now, for some days we went northward; then for more days we went east, till one morning, just after sunrise, we saw land, black hills which we had come near to during the night. And for two days we coasted along the great cliffs where the water beat white at their black bases. Then we came to some houses, then to a curve and dying down of the cliffs. Then a great wind took us and we were blown in, and all the rest was storm. Once we drove past a sandy desolate point of land that was gone in an instant; and once the ship grew almost full of water which we baled out in the darkness.