‘Tell him to go forward, Finn; tell him to go forward,’ cried Wilfrid, ‘and see that he never has any more to do with that gun on any account whatever, d’ye understand?’
The seaman knuckled his forehead and wheeled round, but methought I could just catch a glimpse past his whisker of a sudden protrusion of the cheek as though he was signalling with his tongue to a brother Jack who was flemish-coiling a rope not very far from where he was standing.
The luncheon bell rang and we went below. At table we could talk of nothing but the unhappy Portuguese whom our round-shot had sent to the bottom. Muffin’s face of respectful horror was a feature of the time which I recall more vividly than even the disaster itself. This man, though he was in attendance on Wilfrid as a valet, regularly stood behind his master’s chair at meals. It was Wilfrid’s whim to have him at hand. He did not offer to wait unless it was to procure anything my cousin might require when the stewards were busy with Miss Jennings and myself, or one or both of them absent. His air of deferential consternation was exceedingly fine as he listened to our talk about the annihilated boat and the foundered foreigner—‘Who,’ said I, with a glance at his yellow visage, the shocked expression of which he tried to smother by twisting his lips into a sort of shape that might pass as a faint obsequious simper and by keeping his eyelids lowered, ‘let us trust was cut in halves, for then his extinction would be painless; for after all, drowning, though it is reckoned an agreeable death after consciousness has fled, is mortal agony, I take it, whilst the sensation of suffocation remains.’
Muffin’s left leg fell away with an exceedingly nervous crooking of it in the trouser, and he turned up his eyes an instant to the upper deck with so sickly a roll, that spite of myself I burst into a laugh, though I swiftly recovered myself.
‘It is strange, Charles,’ exclaimed my cousin in a raven-like note, ‘that a ghastly incident of this kind should sit so lightly on your mind, considering that you have quitted the sea for years and have led a far more effeminate life ashore than I who have been roughing it on the ocean when very likely you were lounging with a bored face in an opera stall or dozing over a cigar in some capacious club arm-chair. Had you been chasing slavers or pitching cannon shot into African villages down to the present moment, I could almost understand your indifference to a business that’s going to haunt me for the rest of my days.’
‘Nonsense!’ I exclaimed, ‘it was a bad job I admit, but a pure accident, not more tragical than had the boat capsized and drowned the man. There would be nothing in a twenty-fold uglier mishap to haunt you. But I’ll tell you what, though,’ I continued, talking on to avert the sentimental argument which I saw strong in Wilfrid’s face, ‘the incident of this morning points a very useful moral.’
‘What moral?’ he demanded.
‘Why, that we must not be in too great a hurry to speak every sail we sight.’
‘Finn knows my wishes; we must hear all we can about the “Shark,”’ cried Wilfrid warmly.