‘What is the hour, Mr. Monson?’
‘I say, Charles, are you on deck?’ shouted Wilfrid from the companion hatch.
‘Ay; here I am with Miss Jennings. What’s the time, Wilfrid, d’ye know?’
As I spoke two silver chimes, and then a third, came floating and ringing from the forecastle—three bells, half-past nine.
‘See that corposant?’ bawled Wilfrid. And he came groping up to us. ‘An omen, by George!’ he cried with an odd hilarious note in his voice. ‘Laura, mark me, that flame isn’t shining for nothing. ’Tis a signal light fired by fortune to advise us of some great event at hand.’
‘Quarterdeck there!’ came down the voice of the lookout man, falling from sail to sail, as it seemed, in an echo that made the mysterious flame a wild thing to the imagination for a moment by its coming direct from it.
‘Hallo?’ roared Finn.
‘Can I lay down till this here blasted light’s burnt out? ’Tain’t right to be all alone with it up here.’
‘It is burnt out,’ cried Finn, in a way which showed he sympathised with the fellow. In fact, as the sailor called, the light vanished, and, though we stood looking awhile waiting for its reappearance, we saw no more of it.
That ocean corpse candle had shone at the right moment. Likely enough I should have made myself a bit merry over my tender and beautiful companion’s fears in revenge for her pouting, pettish wonderment at the uneasiness which the mysterious voices had raised in me. But Wilfrid remained with us for the rest of the evening, and, as I was anxious that he should know nothing about the strange sound, I forbore all raillery. It was midnight when we went to bed. Our talk had been very sober, indeed somewhat philosophical in its way, with references to electrical phenomena. Wilfrid chatted with excitement, which he increased by two or three fuming glasses of seltzer and spirits. He told us a wild story of a ship that he was on board of somewhere down off the New Zealand coast, ploughing through an ocean of fire on a pitch-black night with a gale of wind blowing and a school of whales keeping pace with the rushing fabric, spouting vast feather-like fountains of burning water as they stormed through it. He talked like a man reciting a dream or delivering an imagination, and there was a passion in his speech due to excitement and old Cognac, along with a glow in his large peering eyes and a play of flushed features that persuaded me of a very defined mood of craziness passing over his mind. His fancy seemed to riot in the roaring, fiery scene he figured; the ship, plunging into hollows, which flashed about her bows like volcanic vomitings of flame, the heavens above black as soot, the ocean waving like sheet lightning to its confines, and the huge body of the whales crushing the towering surges as they rolled headlong through them into a moonlike brilliance, flinging on high their delicate emerald-green sparkling spouts of water, which floated comet-like over them against the midnight of the heavens.