‘Just the afternoon for a game of draughts,’ said I, in playful allusion to the want of air.
She waved away the suggestion with a weak movement. In fact she was so oppressed that when I told her about Wilfrid’s new phase of growth she could only look at me dully as though all capacity of emotion lay swooning in her heart. I sat by her side fanning her, whilst the perspiration hopped from my forehead like parched peas.
‘Oh,’ cried the little creature, ‘how long is this calm going to last? What would I give for an English Christmas day to tumble down out of the sky upon us, with its snow and hail.’
‘Let us go on deck,’ said I; ‘I am certain it is cooler up there.’
We mounted the steps, but she was scarcely out of the companion hatch when she declared it was a great deal hotter above than below, and down she went again. After all, thought I, Sir Wilfrid and his wife are as well off in their cabins as though they had permitted themselves to wander at large about the yacht. Yet it seemed a roasting existence to my fancy for the self-made prisoners when I glanced aft and thought of the size of their cabins, with not air enough to stir a feather in the open ports, and Cutbill’s huge form in Wilfrid’s berth to give as distinct a rise to the thermometer there as though a stove had been introduced and a fire kindled in it.
All day long it was the same smoky, confused blending of misty blue water and heaven shrouding down overhead and closing upon us, with the sea like a dish of polished steel set in the midst of it, bright as glass where we lay, then dimming into a bluish faintness in the atmospheric thickness at its confines, and the sun a distorted face of weak yellow brightness staring down as he slided westwards with an aspect that made him look as though he were some newly-created luminary. At about six o’clock he hung over the sea line glowing like a huge live cinder, and the air was filled with his smoky crimson glare that went sifting and tingling into the distance till one was able to see twice as far again, a red gleam of sea opening past the dimness and a delicate liquid dye of violet melting down, as one might have thought, from the highest reaches of the heavens into the eastern atmosphere.
‘Hillo!’ cried I to Jacob Crimp, who was leaning over the side with his face purple with heat and full of loathing of the weather; ‘direct your eyes into the south, will ye, and tell me what you see there?’
He turned with the leisurely action peculiar to merchant-sailors, lifted the sharp of his hand to his brow and peered sulkily in the direction which I had indicated.
‘Clouds,’ said he. ‘Is that what ye mean?’
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘and a very noble and promising coast of them, too, as I believe we shall be finding out presently when the change which I hope their brows are charged with shall have clarified the air.’