The breeze had freshened—had drawn apparently more yet to the northward; and the yacht, having hauled it a bit now that we were out of the Solent, was leaning over a trifle with a sputtering and frisky snapping of froth along her bends and a quiet moaning sounding down into her heart out of the hollows of her canvas, whilst an occasional creak, breaking from one knew not what part of the structure, hinted at a taut drag of tacks and sheets, though there was no motion in the water, over whose surface our keel slided as steadily as a sleigh over a snow-covered plain.
It was one thing on top of another, I suppose; the fancies put into me by the oddness of this adventure; the memory of the long gun forward; Wilfrid’s tragic intentions, the darker to my mind because it was so easy for me to see how grief, wrath, a sense of dishonour, bitter injury, with impulses not imaginable by me which every recurrence to the motherless little baby at home would visit him with, had quickened in him of late the deadly seminal principle that circulated in his blood. Then again, there was Miss Laura’s beauty, if beauty be the proper term to express a combination of physical charms which a brief felicitous sentence like a single line from some old poet would better convey than fifty pages of description; her conversation; her sympathy with the motive of this trip; her apparent heedlessness as to the time to be occupied by it; her indifference as to the magnitude of the programme that Wilfrid’s resolution to recover his wife might end in framing, if Table Bay should prove but a starting-point—I say it was one thing on top of another; and all reflections and considerations being rendered acute by the spirit of life one now felt in the yacht, and that awakened the most dormant or puzzled faculty to the perception that it was all grim, downright earnest, small wonder that I should have lain awake until half-past eleven. Indeed that I should have snatched a wink of sleep that first blessed night is a mystery only to be partially resolved by reflecting that I was young, heedless, ‘unencumbered’ as they say, a lover of adventure, and in no sense dissatisfied by the company I found myself among.
CHAPTER V.
LONG TOM.
When I awoke the morning was streaming a windy light through the port-hole over my bunk. I lay a few minutes watching my coat and other suspended garments swinging against the bulkhead, and listening to the creaking and groanings of partitions and strong fastenings, and to a muffled humming sound that was like the distant continuous roll of a drum mixed with a faint seething that sent one’s fancy to the shingle of the English shore, and to the panting respiration of the recoiling breaker upon it; and then I guessed that there was a fresh breeze blowing.
I tumbled out of bed and stood awhile, partly with the notion of making sure of my sea-legs, and partly to discover if I was likely to be sea-sick. Finding myself happily sound in all ways, I drew on some clothing and looked out. Wilfrid’s melancholy man sat at the cabin table, leaning his head upon his elbow, with his fingers penetrating the black plaister of hair over his brow, so that he presented a very dejected and disordered appearance. I called to him; he looked in my direction with a wandering eye, struggled to get up, put his hand upon his stomach with an odd smile and sat again. I entered the cabin to see what ailed the fellow.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ said I. ‘Sick?’
He turned his hollow yellow face upon me, and I saw that he was in liquor.
‘It’s here, sir,’ he exclaimed, pointing with an inebriated forefinger to the lower button of his waistcoat; ‘it’s a feelin’, sir, as if I was a globe, sir, with gold and silver fishes a-swimming round and round, and poking of their noses against me to get out.’
He spoke respectfully, but thickly, with sundry little feints at rising, as though very sensible that he should not be sitting whilst I stood.