Miss Jennings clasped her fingers upon her forehead and sat motionless, looking down. For a little I was both startled and bewildered; one moment he talked as though his wish was that his wife should not be harmed, and the next, in some concealed convulsion of wrath, he betrayed a far blacker resolution than ever I could have imagined him capable of. Yet in the brief silence that followed I had time to rid myself of my little fit of consternation by considering, first of all, that he was now talking just as, according to my notion, he was acting—insanely; next, that it was a thousand to one against our falling in with the yacht; and again, supposing we came up with her, it was not very probable that the crew of the ‘Bride’ could be tempted, even by heavy bribes, into a measure that might put them in jeopardy of their necks or their liberty.
It was new dark, and the cabin lamps had been for some time lighted. The evening looked black against the portholes and the skylight, but the cheerfulness and beauty of the cabin were greatly heightened by the sparkling of the oil-flames in the mirrors, the swing-trays, the glass-like surface of the bulkheads, and so on. Miss Laura’s golden loveliness—do not laugh at my poor nautical attempts to put this amber-coloured, violet-eyed woman before you—showed, as one may well suppose of such a complexion and tints, incomparably perfect, I thought, in the soft though rich radiance diffused by the burning sperm. I wondered that she should listen so passively to Wilfrid’s confession of his intentions should we overhaul the ‘Shark.’ My gaze went to her as he concluded that little speech I have just set down; but I witnessed no alteration in as much of her face as was visible, nor any stir as of one startled or shocked in her posture. Possibly she did not master all the significance of his words; for how should a girl realise the full meaning of plumping round shot out of an eighteen-pounder into a vessel till she was made a sieve of? Or it might be that she was of my mind in regarding the expedition as a lunatic undertaking, and in suspecting that a few weeks of this ocean hunt would sicken Wilfrid of his determination to chase the ‘Shark’ round the world. Or mingled with these fancies, besides, there might be enough of violent resentment against her sister, of grief, pain, shame, to enable her to listen with an unmoved countenance to fiercer and wilder menaces than Wilfrid had as yet delivered himself of.
These thoughts occupied my mind during the short spell of silence that followed my cousin’s speech. He suddenly rang a little handbell, and his melancholy servant came sliding up to him out of the after cabin.
‘Tell Captain Finn I wish to see him—that is, if he can leave the deck.’
The fellow mounted the steps.
‘What is the name of that gloomy-looking man of yours, Wilfrid?’
‘Muffin,’ he answered.
‘Have I not seen somebody wonderfully like him,’ said I, ‘holding on with drunken gravity to the top of a hearse trotting home from the last public-house along the road from the graveyard?’
Miss Laura laughed; and there was a girlish freshness and arch cordiality in her laughter that must have put me into a good humour, I think, had it been my wife instead of Wilfrid’s that Colonel Hope-Kennedy was sailing away with.