‘Ay, sir,’ he answered; and then under his breath, ‘but what voice was it that hailed us then!’
‘Come, give way!’ I cried, ‘they’ll be growing impatient aboard the yacht.’
The oars dipped, feathered, flashed, and in an instant the blue sides of the smart and sparkling little craft were buzzing and spinning through it in foam. It was like coming from a graveyard to the sight of some glittering, cheerful, tender poetic pageant to carry the eye from the hull to the yacht. She seemed clad by the contrast with new qualities of beauty. You found the completest expression of girlish archness in the curtseying of her shapely bows, with a light at her forefoot like a smile on the lip when she lifted her yellow sheathing there, pouting, as one might say, from the caressing kiss of the blue brine, to gleam like gold for a moment to the sunlight. We swept alongside and I sprang on board.
‘The poor creature is dead, I suppose?’ exclaimed Wilfrid, inspecting the wreck through a binocular glass.
‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘dead as the dead can be; too dead to handle, faith. I might have sought in his pockets for some hints to found a report upon, but his face had the menace of a fierce whisper.’
‘It seems cruel to leave him unburied,’ said Miss Laura, with her soft eyes full of pity, and the emotions begotten of the presence of death.
‘That hulk must soon go to pieces,’ said I, ‘and then she will give him a sailor’s funeral.’
‘When nature acts the part of high priestess, if there be such a part,’ exclaimed Wilfrid in a low, tremulous voice, not without a kind of sweetness in its way, thanks, perhaps, to the mood of tender sentiment that was upon him, ‘how grandly she celebrates the humblest sailor’s obsequies! how noble is her cathedral! Observe the altitude of that stupendous roof of blue. How sublime are the symphonies of the wind; how magnificent the organ notes which they send pealing through this great echoing fabric! Nature will give yonder poor fellow a nobler funeral than it is in our power to honour him with. But Charles,’ he cried, with a sudden change of voice, and indeed with a new manner in him, ‘have you ever remarked the exquisite felicity with which nature invents and fits and works her puppet shows? Take yonder scene at which we have been suffered to steal a peep. What could be more choicely imagined than that a dead man should have charge of such a dead ship as that, and that the look-out he is keeping upon her deck should be as black as the future of the vessel he still seems to command?’
‘Well, well,’ said I, ‘all this may be as you put it, Wilf. But all the same, I am glad to see that topsail-yard swung and that spectre there veering astern. I protest my visit has made me feel as though I must lie down for a bit;’ and, in a sober truth, the body I had inspected, coupled with the thrill of amazement that had shot through me to the voice we had heard, had proved a trifle too much for my nerves, topped, as it all was, with certain superstitious stirrings, the crawling, as it might be, upon the memory of that ghostly, insoluble hail, along with the workings of an imagination that was too active for happiness when anything approaching to a downright horror fell in its way. So I went below and lay upon a sofa, but had scarcely hoisted my legs when Wilfrid arrived, bawling to the steward for a bottle of champagne, and immediately after came Miss Jennings, who must needs fetch me a pillow, and then, as though she had a mind to make me feel ridiculous, saturate a pocket handkerchief with eau de Cologne, all which attentions I hardly knew whether to like or not till, having swallowed a bumper of champagne, I hopped off the couch with a laugh.
‘A pretty sailor I am, eh, Wilfrid?’ cried I; ‘a likely sort of figure to take command of the Channel Fleet. Miss Jennings, your eau de Cologne has entirely cured me.’