He paused awhile, and all the men looked gravely into one another's face, but no one spoke.
The boom, with the great mainsail, lay over at the starboard side of the schooner. The Duke, the Marquis, and the captain were standing by the starboard main shrouds. The two noblemen were leaning up against the bulwark, and the captain was standing five or six planks to windward, amid-ship from the bulwark, and in a line with a line drawn from a point about halfway between the mainmast and the companion. Thus he could not see anything of what was going on at the wheel, and the flapping of the sails prevented his hearing the words spoken further aft beyond the cry of "Mr. Mate!" to which he had attached no importance.
The lower portion of the bodies of the four men now at the wheel had been all along visible to the Marquis of Southwold. Such a gathering of the crew on the quarter-deck was, under the circumstances, exceedingly unusual, and it attracted the heir's attention. At last he spoke:
"I say, Captain Drew, what can all these men want aft in a calm at this time of night?"
The captain turned quickly round, stooped so as to be able to see under the boom, recognised by the bulk and stature of the four men who they were, and guessing something was wrong from the fact that the first mate, whose watch it was below, was on deck and in consultation with Pritchard at the wheel, the second mate, and the carpenter, said: "I'll go see, my lord," and dived under the boom and disappeared, all but the lower part of his body.
"What is it, Mr. Mate?" asked the captain.
"Well, sir, it looks bad enough."
"The weather? I know it does. We're going to have it, and I think, Mr. Mate, a good deal too, of it, out of the north. But we are able for all we can get. Eh?" The final interrogative was spoken, evidently not with a view to an answer to the question it put, but with the intention of encouraging the mate to speak out and explain why a council should be held on the quarter-deck without him, at such an hour, and in a calm.
There was a perceptible pause.
"We think," said Yarmould, in a whisper, "that there's going to be a gale----"