I looked at her inquiringly, perceiving that something lay behind this: on which she said, 'The man who saw the ghost has frightened Edward by saying he thought it was the captain at first, the face was so like.'
The captain sipped at a big breakfast cup to conceal his expression, and subdue, as I thought, some temper excited by his wife's remark. He then said, quietly smiling, but with no light of merriment upon him, 'I went forward last night after you were turned in, Miss Otway, to take a look round. I called to the fellow the ghost appeared to, and asked him to describe the thing to me; he did so, and said it had my face. My wife thinks I am frightened. You don't believe that, I hope? You'd not feel safe in a ship commanded by a skipper who's to be scared by a seaman's yarn.'
'Just a little bit of forecastle malice, depend upon it,' said the doctor. 'We'll have the truth of it yet. Perhaps they hope to justify their charges against your beef by dreaming terrific waking nightmares, and seeing precisely the sort of thing that an unsavoury harness cask would be fruitful of.'
'You'll have the other man saying now that the thing he saw was like you,' said Mrs. Burke.
'He's said it,' exclaimed the captain, with an emphatic nod at her.
Mr. Owen lay back in his chair with a loud laugh; an ill-timed explosion and forced withal, for you easily saw that the mood of the captain was then a distemper, which needed the medicine of a little skilful sympathy. But the subject was dropped after the doctor's laugh, and Captain Burke, turning to me, talked in a gentle voice of the letter I had sent home, and calculated the distance the brig had sailed since we spoke her, and chatted to entertain me and perhaps to brisken up his own spirits.
When I went on deck I beheld one of the most spacious splendid scenes of morning our ship had ever sprang through. It was blowing fresh, but the seas ran steadily in defined hard blue ridges, smoking as they came at us right abeam. The rolling of the ship was so regular as to be scarcely noticeable. It was all cream and yeast to leeward; I had never seen before alongside such a bubbling, throbbing spread of white spume, winking, seething, crackling like burning brushwood, sweeping off in steam whenever the heel of the ship hurled the blast under the foot of the mainsail sheer into it over the rail. The clouds hung in vast terraces to windward, with bodies of vapour blowing up to the zenith out of the silk-white heaps, then scudding westward to mass themselves low down in a coast of cloud, that looked, with its breaks and tints, like a rich land dimly seen in mist.
It was this cloud scenery, with its steady whirl of vapour between, that made the morning show as wide again as it was. Mr. Owen, seeing me alone looking at the water, joined me.
'It is difficult to feel superstitious on such a morning as this,' said he.
'If the stranger comes again I hope it will be in daylight,' I answered. 'The thing seems to have affected the captain's spirits.'