There was no lack of talk this morning when the passengers had taken their places. The anxieties of the preceding day and night seemed only to have deepened the purple hue of old Keeling’s countenance, and his face showed like the north-west moon in a mist betwixt the tall points of his shirt collars, as he turned his skewered form from side to side answering questions, smirking to congratulations, and bowing to the ‘Good-morning, captain,’ showered upon him by the ladies. Mr. Johnson came to the table with a black eye, and Dr. Hemmeridge’s forehead was neatly inlaid with an immense strip of his own sticking-plaster, the effect in both cases of the gentlemen having fallen out of their bunks in the night. Colonel Bannister had sprained a wrist, and the pain made him unusually vindictive and aggressive in his remarks. The weather had not apparently served the ladies very kindly. Mrs. Hudson presented herself with her wig slightly awry, and her daughter looked as if she had not been to bed for a week. It was hard to realise, in fact, that the pale spiritless young lady with heavy violet eyes looking languidly through their long lashes, which deepened yet the dark shadow in the hollows under them, was the golden, flashful, laughing, coquettish young creature of the preceding morning.
I had made sure of a bow at least from Miss Temple; but I never once caught so much as a glance from her. Yet she was very easy and smiling in her occasional conversation with Colledge across the table. She alone of the women seemed to have suffered nothing from the violent usage of the night that was gone. In faultlessness of appearance, so far as her hair and attire and the like went, she might have stepped from her bedroom ashore after a couple of hours spent with her maid before a looking-glass. Not even a look for me, thought I! not even one of those cold swiftly fading smiles with which she would receive the greeting of a neighbour or a sentence from the captain!
I was stupid enough to feel piqued—to suffer from a fit of bad temper, in short, which came very near to landing me in an ugly quarrel with Mr. Johnson.
‘D’ye know, I rather wish now,’ said this journalist, addressing us generally at one end of the table, but with an air of caution, as though he did not desire the colonel to hear him, ‘that that brig yesterday had attacked us. It would have furnished me with an opportunity for a very remarkable sea-description.’
‘Tut!’ said I, with a sneer; ‘before a man can describe he must see; and what would you have seen?’
‘Seen, sir?’ he cried; ‘why, everything that might have happened, sir.’
‘Amongst the rats perhaps down in the hold. Nothing more to be seen there, unless it’s bilgewater.’
‘Goot!’ cried Mynheer Hemskirk. ‘It vould hov been vonny to combare Meester Shonson’s description mit der reeality.’
‘I will ask you not to question my courage,’ said Mr. Johnson, looking at me with a face whose paleness was not a little accentuated by his black eye. ‘I believe when it came to the scratch I should be found as good as another. You would have fought, of course,’ he added, with a sarcastic sneer at me.
‘Yes; I would have fought then, just as I am ready to fight now,’ said I, looking at him.