'Ay, ay, but ye mun send it,' waved back the head and shoulders, with a flourish of arm.
Captain Burke flourished in response. Sailors talk more eloquently by gesture than the people of any nation in the world. The contortion of a hump-backed posture will in an instant reveal a voyage full of troubles, and more than half an hour of talk is contained in a peculiar toss of the hand.
A number of the crew came running aft to the call of the mate: a quarter-boat was cleared and lowered, four men entered her along with the mate, who put my letter into his pocket and away they went for the brig, miraculously vitalising and humanising the desert plain of ocean by the mere picture of their straining forms and flashing oars, and the gilt lines running astern from the white sides of the boat as she was swept through it with Mr. Green's square frame, stiff-backed in the stern, bobbing cask-like with the jump of the little craft, his hand on the tiller.
'One could almost think oneself at the seaside to see that boat,' said Mrs. Burke.
'Yes, I just now caught myself half looking round,' I answered, 'with a fancy of tall chalk cliffs, a little pier, a nest of houses in a split——'
I paused.
'And a fine house on the top of the cliff, and trees at the back, and a flight of rooks going up like smoke out of them,' said Mrs. Burke, smiling.
'It'll not be far off even, when we've gone all the way we've got to go,' said the captain, 'and by the time we've hove it into sight again, we shall have been as good as our word, Miss—good as the doctor's word anyhow. What now would I give for some portrait machine that takes colour and light instantaneously, that when they get your letter they might see you as we do!'
Mr. Green handed up the letter to the man who had hailed us, and returned. The boat was then hoisted, the topsail swung, and the ensign dipped as a farewell and thank you to the little homeward-bound brig. I stood straining my eyes at her as her topsail swept out of hollow shadow into a full breast of sunshine, and I watched her break the long, soft, glittering wave into a little leap of scaling and combing foam at her bow, leaning from the hot quiet wind with yard-arm sharply pointed to it, in a posture of something living that steadies itself aslant for a firmer grip. She was my ocean post-office. I cannot express my thoughts as I viewed her thinning down and growing blue in the atmosphere that was silver blue with water and blue sky, and brimming sunshine. Captain Burke said she would probably arrive in Liverpool before we were up with the Horn, for all that the catspaw and the calm and the hard head wind had dismally belated her down to this time.
And now it is that a dreadful thing happened, making this day, with what had gone before, the most remarkable of any to that hour.