It was seven o’clock when I awoke. I at once rose, bathed, and went on deck, thinking, as I passed through the cabin and observed the brilliant effect of the sunshine streaming through porthole and skylight in rippling silver upon the shining bulkheads, the radiant lamps, the mirrors, rich carpet and elegant draperies of the cabin, what a very insignificant figure a night-fear cuts by daylight. The wind was north-east, a merry shining morning with a wide blue heaven full of liquid lustre softened by many small white clouds blowing into the south-west, and rich as prisms with the rainbow lights that kindled in their skirts as they sailed past the sun. The firm line of the ocean went round the sky tenantless. The yacht was making good way, running smoothly over the crisping and crackling waters under an airy spread of studdingsail which trembled a light into the water far beyond her side. Finn was on deck standing aft with his back upon the companion. I walked leisurely over to him with vitality in the very last recesses of my being stirred by the exquisite sweetness and freshness of the long, pure sunlit gushing of the wind.
‘Good morning, Captain Finn.’ He turned and touched his cap. ‘How long is this delicious weather going to last, I wonder? Nothing in sight, eh? Bless us, captain, when are we going to run the “Shark” into view?’
He looked at me with a curious expression which his smile, that was always in the middle of his face, rendered exceedingly odd, and said, ‘Did ye hear anything like a mysterious woice, sir, last night after you’d turned in?’
‘I was for fancying,’ I answered, ‘that the atmosphere crawled with indistinguishable whispers. But I suppose without imagination there would be no lunatic asylums.’
He said, still preserving his odd look, ‘The sperrit’s discovered, sir.’
‘Gammon!’ I exclaimed.
‘Ay! we’ve got hold of the woice!’ he cried gleefully. ‘Did ye ever see a ghost, Mr. Monson, sir? Look! There’s the corpse as belonged to the wreck, and there’s the happarition as was a cursing of this yacht last night in the forepeak, and your honour may take it that there is the invisible shape whose hail from off yon quarter has given old Jacob the blues;’ and all the time that he spoke he was pointing to the fore-rigging just under the cross-trees.
I had before lightly glanced at a man up there, but had given him no heed whatever, as I supposed him to be a sailor at work. But now I looked again, shading my eyes.
‘Muffin!’ I cried with a gasp of astonishment. ‘Do you mean to say——?’ and I veritably staggered as the full truth and absurdity of the thing rushed upon me.
He hung in the rigging facing seawards, and there was turn upon turn of rope round his arms and legs; indeed, he was as snugly secured to the shrouds as if he had been a sample of chafing gear. The sailors had compassionately jammed his hat down on his head, and in the shadow of the brim of it his face looked of the sickly yellow hue of tallow. But he was too high to enable me to witness the expression he wore. He had nothing on but his shirt and a pair of grimy duck trousers rolled to above his knees.