'There's the Captain!' exclaimed Helga, instantly halting, and then recoiling in a way that dragged me a pace back with her.
He rose through the companion-hatch, his outline vaguely visible in the dim radiance sifting through the cabin skylight. Abraham addressed him.
'Quite right, Wise, very wise of you, Wise!' he exclaimed. 'There is a marked fall in the barometer, and I perceive lightning in the north-east, with a deal of rugged cloud down there.' His shadowy form stepped to the binnacle, into which he peered a moment. 'I think, Wise,' said he—and, to use a Paddyism, I could see the man's fixed and singular smile in the oiliness of his accents—'that you cannot do better than go forward and rouse up all hands. I can rely best upon my crew when the weather is quiet.'
Abraham trudged forward, and a minute later I heard him thumping heavily on the fore hatch, topping the blows with a boatswain's hoarse roar of 'All hands shorten sail!'
'The Captain's politeness,' I said, 'will end in making that Deal boatman sit at his feet.'
'He is afraid of his crew, perhaps,' answered Helga, 'and is behaving so as to make sure that the two men will stand by him should difficulties come.'
'It was a bad blow that sunk the fellows' lugger. We might have sighted that steamer of to-day and be now homeward bound at the rate of fourteen knots an hour.'
'And it is all my fault!' she cried, in tones impassioned by regret and temper. 'But for me, Hugh——'
I silenced her by taking her hand as it lay in my arm and pressing it. She drew closer to me, with a movement caressing but wistful too, though finely and tenderly simple.
I did not doubt that the Captain perceived us; nevertheless, he hung near the wheel, never coming farther forward than the companion-hatch, while we kept at the other end of the little poop, where the shadow of the port-wing of mainsail lay heavy.