But as often as I thought it proper to speak to him, so often did I shrink from what was, perhaps, an obligation. No; I could not find it in me to tell him that he was a dying man.
The weather grew colder, and we met with some hard gales out of the southeast, which knocked us away fifty leagues to the westward out of our course. It was Cape Horn weather, though we were not up with that headland yet. The dark green seas rolled fierce and high; the sky hung low and sallow and fled in scud. We stormed our way along under reefed canvas, showing all that we durst, and making good average way, seeing that the gale was off the bow and the seas like cliffs for the little brig to burst through.
Anxiety lay very heavy upon me all this time. I had confidence in Yan Bol’s seamanship, but I had more faith in myself; and I was up and down in my watch below to look after the brig, till, when the twenty-four hours had come round, I would find I had not passed two of them in sleep.
The cold found the lady Aurora without warm apparel. The dress she had been shipwrecked in was of some gay, glossy stuff, plentiful in skirt, and as warm as a cobweb. What was to be done? It was not to be borne that she should sit shivering in the cabin for the want of apparel that would enable her to look abroad whenever she had a mind to pass through the hatch; so, after turning the matter over in my mind, one morning, soon after our meeting with the whaler, I ordered Jimmy and another to bring the slop chest into the cabin. It was a great box, and one of two. Both were of Tulp’s providing. The old chap guessed he saw his way to making money out of the sailors by putting cheap clothes aboard for sale, and it was likely enough he would find his little venture in this way answerable to his expectations when we got home, for already one of the chests was emptied of two-thirds of its contents, the sailors (I being one of them) having purchased at an advance of about eighty per cent. upon what would be rated ashore as a very high selling price.
Well, one of the slop chests was brought up and put in the cabin. I had tried to make Miss Aurora understand what I meant—to no purpose. Now, lifting the lid of the chest, she standing by me and looking down upon the queer collection of sailors’ clothing, I pulled out a monkey coat, big enough for the sheathing of even Yan Bol’s bolster-like figure, and, holding it up, went to work to make myself intelligible. I put the coat on her. I then touched it here and there to signify that, by shaping a waist, and cutting in at the dip of the back, by shortening the sleeves and fixing the velvet collar to suit her throat, she might make a very good figure of a jacket for herself out of the coat. I then took a cap from the chest, and I placed it upon her head, advising, as best I could by signs and words, that she should stitch flaps to it to shelter her ears, with strings to keep the thing on her head in wind. I went further still, being resolved that the lady should go warmly clad round the Horn, and, calling to Jimmy, bade him bring me up a bale of spare blankets. I heartily longed for a Spanish dictionary, that I might give her the word petticoat out of it. However, she caught my drift after a little, on my selecting one of the finest of the blankets and putting it about her and holding it to her waist. She nodded and laughed.
I witnessed no embarrassment, and, in honest truth, there was no cause for embarrassment. Yet I do not suppose that an English girl—at least, that many English girls—would have made this little business of suggesting apparel, and hinting at clothing which a man is not supposed to know anything at all about until he is married, so pleasant and easy as did this Spanish maiden.
Well, her ladyship was now supplied with materials for warm clothing, and that same afternoon she went to work on the coat. Hard work it was. She wanted shears for such cloth as that, and managed with difficulty with a sailor’s knife fresh from the grindstone; yet, by next afternoon, having worked all that day and all next morning, she had given something of the shape of her own figure to the coat. She put it on for me to look at. It wrapped her bravely; and when, with white teeth showing, she placed the cap on her head, her beauty—and beauty dark, speaking, impressive I must call it—took a quality of brightness, a piquancy that comes to beauty from male attire; in her case wanting when ordinarily dressed, of such gravity and dignity was her bearing, of such a natural, womanly loftiness were the whole figure and looks of her.
CHAPTER XXIV.
A SAILOR’S WILL.
After a troublesome spell of stormy weather there happened a fine afternoon, and when the evening drew around the shadow was richer in stars than any tropic night I ever beheld. The wind was light; the ocean breathed in a long swell from the north; the atmosphere was frosty, but sweet and comfortably endurable.
We had sent down our royal yards, yet to-night was a night for royals and studding sails—a night to be made the most of. The ocean was off guard, asleep, and easily might we have stolen past the slumbering sentinel, clothed from truck to waterway in the tall, wide wings we had expanded in the north.