‘Well,’ he answered. ‘But I say, Charles, what do you think?’ said he with a sudden boyish air that startled me with its suggestion of stupidity in him. ‘Muffin is drunk.’
‘Drunk!’ cried I; ‘but who the deuce is Muffin?’ forgetting the name.
‘Why, my man,’ he answered; ‘my valet. It’s very odd. I thought at first it was sea-sickness. He’s been crying. The tears, I give you my word, streamed down his cheeks. He begs to be set ashore, and swears that if he should choke with one of the fish that are swimming about in him, his mother and two sisters would have to go to the Union. Do you think he’s mad?’
‘Drunk, and sea-sick, too,’ said I. ‘Has he not been away with you on a yachting trip before?’
‘No. This is a handsome vessel, don’t you think, Charles?’ he exclaimed, breaking from the subject as though it had never been in his mind, and following on his question with a curious fluttering smile and that trembling of the lids I have before described; though his gaze steadied miraculously as they rested upon the gun the fellows were at work upon, and a shadow came into his face which was as good as telling me that I need not respond to his inquiry, as his thoughts were already elsewhere.
‘Let’s go and have a look at my cannon,’ said he with the same odd boyish manner he had discovered a minute or two earlier.
We walked forward; the decks had been some time before washed down and were sand dry, white as a tree newly stripped of its bark, with a glitter all about them of the crystals of salt. The rigging was everywhere neatly coiled down; whatever was of brass shone as though it reflected a sunbeam; no detail but must have satisfied the most exacting nautical eye with an indication of frigate-like neatness, cleanliness, finish, and fore and aft discipline. The ‘Bride,’ after the manner of many yachts of those days, carried a galley on deck abaft her foremast. I peeped in as I passed and took notice of a snug little interior, brilliant with polished cooking vessels, and as clean and sweet as a dairy. A few of the sailors were standing about it waiting (as I took it) for the cook to furnish the messes with their breakfast. They had the air of a rough resolute set of men, with something of the inspiration of the yachting business, perhaps, in their manner of saluting Sir Wilfrid and myself, but with little of the aspect of the seafarer of the pleasure-vessel of these times. They were bushy-whiskered hard-a-weather fellows for the most part, with one odd face amongst them as yellow and wrinkled as the skin of a decayed lemon.
I asked Wilfrid carelessly if any of his crew had sailed with him before. He answered that a few of them had; but that the others had declined to start on a voyage to the end of which Finn was unable to furnish a date, so that the captain had made up the complement in a hurry out of the best hands he could find cruising about ashore. So this, thought I, accounts for the absence of that uniformity of apparel one looks for amongst the crews of yachts; yet all the sailors I had taken notice of were dressed warmly in very good clean nautical clothes, though I protest it made one think of the old picaroon and yarns of the Spanish Main to glance at one or two of the dry, tough, burnt, seawardly chaps who concealed their pipes and dragged a curl upon their foreheads to us as we passed them.
Wilfrid stared at his eighteen-pounder as though he were some lad viewing a toy cannon he had just purchased. He bent close to it in his near-sighted way, and looked it all over whilst he asked me what I thought of it. I saw the two fellows who were still at work upon it chew hard on the junks in their cheek-bones in their struggle to keep their faces.
‘Why,’ said I, ‘it seems to me a very good sort of gun, Wilfrid, and a thing, when fired, I’d rather stand behind than in front of.’