‘Try a dose of brandy,’ said I, satirically.
‘Do you think it will help me, sir?’ he inquired, pulling his fingers out of his hair and clasping his hands upon his waistcoat, whilst his lips went twisting into an intoxicated grin on one side of his nose, as it looked. ‘I will try it, Mr. Monson, sir. There’s a something here as wants settling, sir. I never was partial to the hocean, sir.’
He was proceeding, but just then the second steward came below, on which I quitted the melancholy man, ordered a cold salt-water bath and a hot cup of coffee, and was presently on deck. It was a windy-looking morning, the sky high, grey, compacted; with here and there a dark curl of scud in chase of some bald lump of sulphur-coloured cloud blowing away to leeward like the first ball of powder smoke from a cannon’s mouth ere the wind has had time to shred it. The water was green, a true Channel sea with the foam of the curled ridges dazzling out in times to the touch of a wet, pale beam of sunshine dropping in a lance of light in some breathless moment through one of the dim blue lines that here and there veined the dulness aloft. There was no land to be seen; the haze of the sea-line ran the water into the sky, and the green of the horizon went blending into the soft greyness of the heavens till it looked all one with a difference of colour only.
The yacht was bowling through it at a noble pace; the wind sat as it should for such a craft as the ‘Bride’; the sea had quartered her and swept in hillocks of foam along her lustrous bends, sending an impulse to her floating rushes with every pale boiling of it to her frame, and the sputter and creaming all about her bows, and the swirl of the snow over the lee rail, and the milk-white race of wake rising and falling fan-shaped astern prismatic with the glint of chips and bubbles and feathers of spume swept out of the giddiness by the rush of the wind, might have made you think yourself aboard a ship of a thousand tons. Upon my word it was as though the ‘Bride’ had got the scent and knew that the ‘Shark’ was not far distant. Finn was not sparing her. He was to windward, close beside the wheel, as I emerged, and I knew he watched me whilst I stood a moment in the hatch looking from the huge thunderous hollow of the mainsail to the yawn of the big square-sail they had clapped upon her with the whole square topsail atop of it, topgallant sail stowed, but the jibs yearning from their sheets taut as fiddle-strings, as though they would bodily uproot the timber and iron to which they were belayed.
Something of the exhilaration of a real chase came into one with the glad roaring aloft and the saw-like spitting at the cutwater, and the sullen crash of the arching billow repulsed by the cleaving bow; and it was the instinct in me, I suppose, due to my early training and recollection of the long pursuit of more than one polacre and nimble-heeled schooner flush to the hatches with a living ebony cargo that made me send a look sheer over the bows in search of some shining quarry there.
There were three or four coasters in a huddle on the weather beam, their outlines sharp, but their substance of a dingy black against the yellowish glare of light over the water that way as though the East were finding reflection in it; and to leeward, a mile off, a full-rigged sailing ship on a bowline bound up Channel, and plunging her round bows with clumsy viciousness into the green hollows with a frequent lift of white water to above the cathead, where it blew in a storm of crystals into the head canvas.
‘Good morning, captain.’
‘Good morning, sir,’ answered Finn, knuckling his forehead in the old-fashioned style. ‘Nice little breeze of wind, sir.’
‘Ay, one could pray for nothing better,’ said I, crossing over to him. ‘You’ve got a fine craft here certainly, captain; no stint of beam, and bulwarks stout and tall enough to serve the purpose of a pirate. And how finely she rounds forward to the eyes! Hillo! getting ready with your gun so soon?’
‘No, sir, only a cleaning of him,’ he answered with a grin.