'Never mind about that there stun'-sail! Ye can lay down, moy lads!' and he bawled to me (who had returned aft), by way, no doubt, of excusing himself to Nakier, who was on the forecastle, and who appeared to be keeping a keen look-out upon the ship on his own account, 'There's no use, Oi think, Mr. Tregarthen, aworriting about stun'-sails ontil this here breeze hardens. It'll only be keeping the men agoing for no good.'
'Unless we are speedy,' I whispered to Helga, as we stood within earshot of the helmsman, 'that man Abraham will ruin us. Think of the fellow piling canvas at such a time! What a curse is consequentiality when out of season! Here is a poor, miserable Deal boatman with the privilege of ordering a few black men about, and he doesn't know how to make enough of his rights.'
From time to time I would gaze mechanically round the sea in search of a ship, but with no notion of finding encouragement in the gleam of a sail or in the shadowing of a steamer's smoke. My hope lay in a very different direction. But custom is strangely strong on shipboard, and I continued to look, though I was without the wish to see.
Shortly before noon I fetched the two sextants, one of which I gave to Abraham and the other to Helga. The boatman seemed hardly to know what to do with the instrument; it was a new, very handsome sextant, sparkling with brass and details of telescope, coloured glass, and the like, and bore as little resemblance to the aged, time-eaten quadrant that had gone down with the Early Morn as to the cross-staff of the ancient mariner. I marked him putting it to his eye, and then fumbling with it, and, noticing several fellows forward, Nakier among them, attentively watching us, I called to him softly:
'Keep it at your eye, man! Let them believe that you thoroughly understand it!'
'Roight ye are,' he answered, putting the instrument to his face; 'but who the blazes is agoing to bring the sun into the middle o' such a muddle o' hornamentation as this here?'
The attention of the men, however, was in reality fixed upon Helga. She stood at the rail within full view of them, and there was, indeed, novelty enough in the sight to account for their staring, apart from the hope they had of her as the one that was to navigate their ship to the coast on which, as I took it, they meant to wreck her. Her well-fitting dress of dark serge showed no signs of wear as yet. No posture that she might have artfully adopted could so happily express the charms of her figure as this, when she turned her face sunwards, with the shining sextant raised to her eye. The delicate pale gold of her short hair was the right sort of tint to fascinate the dusky gaze that was fastened upon her. In her conversations with me she had made little or nothing of her knowledge of navigation, but it was easy to see in an instant's glance that she was a practised hand in the art of coaxing the sun's limb to the sip of the sea-line.
I spied Nakier forward watching her with an air of breathless interest. He and the rest of them might have doubted her capacity, knowing of it only from such off-hand talk as Punmeamootty had been able to collect and repeat from the cabin table. But now she was justifying their expectations, and by this time the whole of the crew—ten of them, with Jacob in the waist and a Malay at the wheel—were staring as one man; the cook from the door of his galley, Nakier on the forecastle swinging off from a rope, the rest of them in groups here and there.
'It is eight bells,' cried Helga in her clear voice, accentuated, as it always was, with a faint harshness of Scandinavian articulation.
'Height bells!' roared Abraham, though it might have been midnight to him, so far as the indications of his sextant went.