“No,” said I.
She motioned to let me know she could tell as much by my ignorance of the use of that ring; and then, taking the thing from me, she went through a pretty and dramatic pantomime, reciting “Aves” while she touched the ring, and winding up with a sentence out of the “Paternoster.” She put on the ring after she had made an end of her pretty pantomime, and, looking again at me earnestly, repeated, with the same dramatic sigh:
“You are not Catolique.”
“No,” said I.
“You will be Catolique?” she exclaimed, in very fairly pronounced English, still wearing a wistful and impassioned expression.
I slowly shook my head. She sighed again and looked very downcast; but I was wanted on deck and could sit at table no longer, and so I left her.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE WHALER.
All this while the crew went on quietly with the work of the ship, giving me no trouble nor occasioning me further anxiety than such as arose from my fear of how it might prove with us should the captain die. This will I say of Bol: a better boatswain never trod the decks of a vessel. I carried by nature a critical eye, and while Greaves lay ill my vigilance was redoubled; but not once had I cause to find fault with Yan Bol’s part in the duties of the brig.
We wanted, indeed, the freshening of the paint pot, but in all other respects we were as smart a little ship, as we blew toward the Horn, as though we had quitted the Thames but a week before. Our brass guns sparkled, our decks were yacht-like with holy-stoning, our rigging might have been newly set up by riggers of the king. Every detail of the furniture aloft was carefully seen to, from the eyes of the royal rigging to the lanyards of the channel dead-eyes.
The men feared Bol; his vast bulk of beef and the granite lumps which swelled in muscle to the movement of his arms made him the match for any two of them. The delivery of his lungs was the cannon’s roar. I have seen a stout fellow stagger as though to a blow—sway in the recoil of a man who is hit hard, on Yan Bol thrusting his huge mouth into the fellow’s face and exploding in passion an order betwixt his eyes. But though the crew feared him they also liked him; he acted as second mate, indeed, but throughout with reluctance; was their shipmate and forecastle associate first of all, the man who ate out of their kids and drank out of their scuttle butt, who slung his hammock in their bedroom, showed them what to do and often how to do it, occasionally went aloft with them, yarned and smoked with them. So much for Yan Bol.