‘We needn’t sleep, my dearest, we can keep wide awake. But will it not be madness to expose one’s self to a violent storm merely because——’
‘Oh, horror!’ interrupted Lady Monson; ‘I shall remain here though the clouds rain burning sulphur.’
‘Finn,’ said I, ‘when you have smoked your pipe out fall to with the others, will you, to get this sail into the cabin, and turn the two silent figures there out of it?’
‘Where are they to go, sir?’
‘Oh, lower them into the hold for to-night. Lady Monson, is your mattress to be left here?’
‘Certainly,’ she answered indignantly; ‘how am I to rest without a mattress?’
‘Only one mattress, then, is to be carried aft, Finn,’ said I. ‘Now bear a hand like good sailor-men whilst there’s daylight. We shall have that blackness yonder bursting down upon us in a squall, then it will be thick as pitch, with decks like a surface of trawlers’ nets to wade through, and yonder main hatch at hand grinning like a man-trap.’
‘Come, lads!’ cried Finn.
The four of them sprang to their feet, rolled up the sail and hauled it aft, singing out a shipboard chorus as they dragged. When they had got it into the cabin, they cut off a big stretch of it which they spread over the open skylight, and secured by weighting the corners heavily with the masses of shell which had been chipped away to come at the aperture. Then Head arrived for Laura’s mattress, flung it over his back and staggered with it, grinning, along to the quarter-deck. Lady Monson looked on, cold, white, but with anger brilliant in her great black eyes.
‘I believed that these men were still my servants to command,’ she exclaimed.