‘Ay, sir.’
‘Do you mean all hands?’
‘Well, your honour knows what sailors are. When they’re housed together under one deck they’re like a box of them patent lucifer lights—if one catches, the whole mass is aflame.’
‘It’s a passing fit of superstition,’ said I. ‘Give it time. Best say nothing about it to Sir Wilfrid.’
‘Bless us, no, sir. Sorry it’s raised so much satisfaction in that there old Jacob, though. A laugh in Jacob don’t sound natural. Any sort o’ joyfulness in such a constitution is agin nature.’
At this point Miss Jennings arrived on deck, and Finn, with a shadowy fist mowing at his brow, stepped to the opposite rail, where his figure was easily distinguished by the stars he blotted out.
‘I hope your spirits are better,’ said Miss Laura.
‘I should be glad to turn the silent sailor of that wreck out of my memory; but my spirits are very well.’
‘Wilfrid noticed your depression at table, but he attributed it entirely to the dreadful sight you witnessed on the wreck.’ She passed her hand through my arm with a soft impulse that started me into a walk, but there was so much real unconsciousness in her way of doing this—a childlike intimation of her wish to walk without proposing it, and so breaking the flow of our speech at the moment—that for some little while I was scarce sensible that I held her arm, and that I was pacing with her. ‘But I think there is more the matter with you, Mr. Monson,’ she continued, with her face glimmering like pearl in the dusk, as she looked up at me, ‘than meets the ear—I will not say the eye.’
‘The fact is, Miss Jennings,’ said I abruptly, ‘I am bothered.’