A furious squall twisted the two words into a shriek.
A sea slopped over the weather quarter and ran hissing across the deck to leeward. It sucked hungrily at the gold woman's feet and ankles. At its touch her rage grew, but passed from the man at the wheel to the sea. It was the sea that he hated, not her. It was the sea that she hated. It was the sea that had spoken through him. The sea was his enemy. It became in that moment personal to her—her enemy.
Thus the spirit of Lavelle reacted upon Emily Granville's. Could she have seen her face at that instant she would have discovered in it the same elemental, the same primitive passion, which had shocked her in his.
The girl ran from the deck and below.
Lavelle saw her when she returned and lit the lamp in the lounge. She wore a long oilskin. A sou'wester covered her head. Out of the tail of his eye he caught her staring at the barometer. He noted it with a thought that she had "some sense."
She came out to him and had to press her lips against his ear to make him hear her message.
"Everything—closed—be—low! Barom—28:00!"
That was a fall of three-hundredths of an inch in less than ten minutes!
The Daphne was in a trap. Somewhere near her—somewhere in the southern quadrants of the compass between the east and the west—the center of a storm was bearing down upon her. Whether the barometer was lying or telling the truth was of little moment now. Lavelle knew he could not be mistaken in the signs of a revolving storm. He knew the meaning of the wolf-like noises and the wing creakings in the air; the oily, sooty, sight-killing blackness. But one sign was absent and, even as he noted this, it appeared—a sickening, brick-red coloring which cuts the eyes acridly like hay smoke. It diffused itself through the blackness without lessening the night's impenetrability. With its coming the wind veered quickly from the S.S.E. into the south. By the law of storms this change told the lone man arrayed against the sea that the center was bearing upon the Daphne eight points to the right, or out of the S.S.W. The bark was trapped in the storm's advancing or dangerous semicircle. He could not heave her to now. There was but one thing to do: Run. Let the storm overtake the bark and catch her in its vortex and—the sea must win. It depended alone on the Daphne's worthiness and the hands and brain of the man at her helm to beat it.
With a full-manned ship the thing to do now was heave to. The enraged man laughed to himself at the thought of his trying to do this alone.