‘Asleep, sir,’ he replied in a blandly confidential way.
‘Glad to hear it,’ I exclaimed, ‘don’t disturb him. He passed a bad night down to two or three o’clock this morning.’ I was going; suddenly I stopped. ‘By the way,’ said I, rounding upon the fellow, ‘how long have you been in Sir Wilfrid’s service?’
My question appeared to penetrate him with a consuming desire to be exact. He partially closed one eye, cocked the other aloft like a hen in the act of drinking, and then said with the air of one happy in the power of speaking with accuracy, ‘It’ll be five months to the hour, sir, come height o’clock, Friday evening next.’
‘During the time that you have been in his service,’ said I carelessly, ‘have you ever heard him speak of hearing voices or seeing visions?’
‘Woices, no, sir,’ he answered; ‘but wisions,’ he added with a sigh and lengthening his yellow face into an expression of deep concern, ‘has, I fear, sir, more’n once presented theirselves to him.’
‘Of what nature, do you know?’
‘Sir Wilfrid’s a little mysterious, sir,’ he responded in a greasy tone of voice, and looking down as if he would have me understand that with all due respect he was my cousin’s valet and knew his place.
I said no more, but made my way on deck with a suspicion in me that the fellow had lied, though I hardly knew why I should think so. I trudged forward, and finding three or four of the men hanging about the galley I pulled out five shillings and gave the money to one of them, saying that I was going aloft and wished to pay my footing, for I was in no temper to be chased and worried. This made me free of the rigging, into which I sprang and had soon shinned as high as the topgallant-yard, upon which I perched myself so noiselessly that the man who overhung it on the other side of the mast and who was drowsily chewing upon a quid of tobacco with his eye screwed into Wilfrid’s lovely telescope, had no notion I was alongside of him. I coughed softly, for I had known seamen to lose their lives when up aloft by being suddenly startled. He put a whiskered face past the mast and stared at me as if I was Old Nick, out of the minutest pair of eyes I ever saw in the human head, mere gimlet-holes they seemed for the admission of light.
‘Thinking of your sweetheart, Jack?’ said I with a laugh, ignorant of his name but counting Jack to be a sure word.
‘Can’t rightly say what I was a-thinking of, sir,’ he answered hoarsely; ‘’warn’t my sweetheart anyways, seeing that the only gell I was ever really partial to sarved me as her ledship sarved Sir Wilfrid yonder,’ indicating the quarterdeck with a sideways motion of his head.