There was now some grumbling. Crimp had enabled the men to guess that Wilfrid was afraid to enter the forecastle, and sundry sarcasms, with a mutinous touch in them, passed from bunk to bunk.
‘Avast!’ roared Finn; ‘listen if he’ll speak now.’
But no sound resembling a human syllable entered the stillness.
‘It’s rats, I tell ’ee,’ shouted the skipper, making to go on deck. ‘Come along, Mr. Monson. Blamed now if I believe that Jacob is the only grandmother as has signed articles for this here woyage.’
But as I followed him the exclamations I caught determined me on advising Wilfrid to come forward. He had left Miss Jennings standing alone at the rail, and was walking swiftly here and there with an irritability of gesture that was a sure symptom in him of a troubled and active imagination. On catching sight of me as I emerged out of the blind shadow on the forward part of the yacht, he cried out eagerly, ‘Well, what have you heard? Is it a voice, Charles?’
‘There is nothing to hear,’ I answered. ‘Finn disrespectfully calls it rats.’
‘What else, your honour?’ exclaimed Finn, ‘the squeaking of rats ain’t unlike a sort o’ language. Put the noise they make along with the straining of bulkheads and the like of such sounds and let the boiling be listened to by a parcel of ignorant sailors, and I allow ye’ll get what might be tarmed a supernatural woice.’
Wilfrid burst into one of his great laughs, but immediately after said in a grave and hollow tone, ‘But you, Charles, have before heard something preternatural in the shape of a hail off yonder quarter, and from the dead man you found on the wreck.’
‘Fancy, mere fancy,’ I said. ‘Gracious mercy! am I making this voyage to carry home with me a belief in ghosts? But I wish you’d go into the forecastle with Finn, Wilfrid, and listen for yourself. Make your mind easy: there’s nothing to be heard. A visit from you will pacify the men. They hold that you admit the truth of what they allege by declining to satisfy yourself by listening. Their temper is not of the sweetest. They should be soothed, I think, when it is to be so easily done.’
He hung in the wind and said in a hesitating way, ‘What do you think, Finn?’