“Very.”
“How he talks—mine Cott, how he talks! I would gif half mine dollars to talk like dot shentleman.”
“He is an educated man, and speaks well.”
“Yaw, vell indeedt. I like der sheck of Antonio in oxbecting a share. But he oxbects no longer, ha?”
I turned from the Dutchman and looked through the skylight, and saw Greaves sitting at table, leaning his head upon his hand. The lady Aurora continued to write, but once or twice while I watched, she lifted her eyes to look at the captain. I was weary and passed below to go to my cabin. Greaves had left the table and was entering his own berth, as I descended the companion steps. The materials for a glass of grog were on a swing tray. While I mixed myself a tumbler the girl rose and handed me the paper she had been writing upon. The sheets had been torn by Greaves from an old log book, and they were filled by her with Spanish names with their English meanings. I ran my eye over the writing, which was a very neat, clean Spanish hand, and nodded and smiled, and returned the pages to her, saying Bueno. Then emptying my glass I gave her a bow, bade her good-night in Spanish, received her answer of “Good-night, sir,” well expressed in English, and passed into my berth.
CHAPTER XXII.
GREAVES SICKENS.
This time gives a date to a change that came over Greaves. It was the change of sickness. He grew feverish, irritable, fanciful; his appetite fell away; the light in his eyes dimmed; sometimes he would put on a staring look, as though he beheld something beyond that at which he gazed.
I had been struck by his manner, and more by his manner than by his speech, when he lectured Wirtz and flung at Antonio, the Spaniard, as you have read in the last chapter. Yet of itself this would not have been a matter to rest very weightily upon my mind, seeing that all along I had considered Greaves as a little, just a little, mad at the root. But soon the incident took significance as being a first lifting of the curtain, so to speak, upon a new and somewhat crazy behavior in my friend. I hoped at first it was the heat that unsettled his nerves and that the Horn would give me back my old, odd, hearty, generous shipmate and messmate. Then I feared that the blow he had dealt himself when he stumbled in the hold of the Casada had been silently and painlessly working bitter mischief in the organ of the liver, or in parts adjacent thereto. If the liver was hurt the strangeness of the man might be accounted for. I have suffered from the liver in my time, and know what it is to have felt mad; I say I have known moments—O God, avert the like of them from me and those I love—when I could scarce restrain myself from breaking windows, kicking at the shins of all who approached me, knocking my head against the wall, yelling with the yell of one who drops in a fit; and all the while my brain was as healthy as the healthiest that ever filled a human skull, and nothing was wanted but a musketry of calomel pills to dislodge the fiend that was jockeying my liver and galloping the whole fabric of my being down the easy descent.
It will not be supposed that the change in Greaves was sudden. It uttered itself at capricious intervals, and at the beginning was more visible in the mood than in the man.
For example, it was, I think, about four days after the little incident which brings the last chapter to a close. I had charge of the deck from eight to midnight. Miss Aurora had passed half an hour with me, sometimes asking questions by gestures distinguishable by the light of the moon, sometimes attempting strange sentences in English, all the words correctly pronounced, but so misplaced that with true British politeness I was forever breaking into a laugh at her. A moment there had been when she was in earnest. She came to a stand, her face fronting the moon so that I witnessed the working of it, her eyes with a little silver flame in each liquid depth dark as the sea over the side. She spoke in Spanish, with here and there a word of English. It seemed to me she referred to the voyage. I fancied that I worked out of her words the meaning that she desired to continue in the brig, and was content. How did I gather this, when I tell you in the next breath that I could not understand her? Well, it was my fancy of her meaning that I give you, but whether I understood her or not she motioned with an air of tragic distress, clasped her hands, looked up at the stars, and cried in English, “Sad—sad—not understand—sad.” We then resumed our walk, and presently she left me.