‘It was a sort of mood,’ she answered, speaking low, ‘that I have noticed in him, but never before saw so defined.’
‘It was madness,’ said I, with a shake of the head.
‘The shadow of a passing mood of madness,’ said she. ‘Was he on deck with you before breakfast?’
I answered yes.
‘Were his spirits good?’
‘Irrationally good, I thought. It was the sight of the flying schooner, no doubt, the picture of the running seas, the sense of headlong speed, with the black grin of the forecastle gun to quicken his wild craving into a very delirium of expectation and hope. But that kind of glee is quite as alarming as his melancholy.’
‘Yes, but you will find his melancholy strong as his spirits seem high. Do I make myself understood, Mr. Monson?’
‘Quite. One moment, you mean, he is looking down upon this extraordinary plan of his—this goose-chase, I must call it—with a bounding heart from the edge of a chasm; the next he is at the very bottom of the pit gazing upwards in an anguish of dejection. The deeper the precipice the gloomier the depth where he brings up. Certainly I understood you, Miss Jennings. But here is now a consideration that is bothering me,’ I continued, sending a look aft, and up at the open skylight and around, to make sure that we were unheard. ‘I am his cousin. As his associate in this voyage I have a right to regard myself as his best friend, for the time being anyway. Now what is my duty in the face of a condition of mind whose capriciousness fills it with menace? He brings me here as his right-hand man to help him, but to help him in or to what? I seem to understand his programme, yet I protest I cannot render it intelligible to my own common sense. Many might think me “wanting” myself to be here at all; but I will not go into that; what I mean is, is it not my duty to hinder him if possible from prosecuting a chase which, in my humble judgment, by continuing to irritate him with the disappointment of hope, may end in rendering organic what is now, let us pray, merely functional and fugitive?’
‘You may try, but I do not think you will succeed,’ she exclaimed. ‘Indeed,’ she cried, raising her voice, but immediately and nervously subduing it, ‘I hope you will not try, for it is not hard to foresee what must follow. You will merely make his resolution more stubborn by rendering it angrier than it is, and then there might come a coolness between you—indeed, something worse than coolness on his side; for in such minds as your cousin’s it is impossible to imagine what dangerous ideas opposition may provoke.’
I bowed in recognition of the truth of this, admiring in her a quality of sagacity that, to the fancy at all events of a young man, as I then was, would gather a new excellence from her graces. She looked at me with a tremble of light in her gaze that vexed its serenity.