‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ exclaimed Mr. Prance, in a subdued reprimanding voice, ‘the ladies will be hearing you in a minute.’
‘You have been a sailor, Dugdale, you know,’ remarked Mr. Emmett in a satirical tone, ‘and might, therefore, have guessed yesterday that either the brig was a harmless trader, or that, supposing her to have been of a piratical nature, she would not attack us.’
‘And what then?’ cried I, eyeing him hotly.
‘Well,’ said he, with a foolish grin, ‘of course, under those circumstances, a large character for heroism might be earned very cheaply indeed.’
Johnson lay back in his chair to deliver himself of a noisy laugh. His seat was a fixed revolving contrivance, and its one socketed leg might have been injured during the night. Be this as it may, on the journalist flinging himself back with a loud applauding ‘Ha! ha!’ of his friend Emmett’s satiric hit at me, the chair broke, and backward he went with it with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other. Old Keeling started to his feet; the stewards came in a rush to the prostrate man. Those ladies who were near gathered their gowns about them as they watched him plunging in his efforts to extricate himself from the chair, in which his hips were in some manner jammed. For my part, having breakfasted, and being half suffocated with laughter, I was glad enough to run away out on deck. Indeed, the disaster had cooled my temper, and this occurrence was something to be thankful for, since one thing was leading to another, and, for all one could tell, the journalist and I might have come to blows as we sat side by side.
He and Emmett cut me for the rest of the day. My own temper was sulky for the most part. I spent the whole of the morning on the forecastle, smoking pipe after pipe in the ‘eyes’ of the ship, yarning in a fragmentary way with the boatswain, who invented excuses to come into the ‘head’ to indulge in a brief chat with me, whilst by his postures and motions he contrived to wear an air of business to the gaze that might be watching from the poop.
I would not own to myself that the sullen cast of my temper that day was due to Miss Temple; but secretly I was quite conscious that my mood was owing to her, and the mere perception of this was a new vexation to me. For what was this young lady to me? What could signify her coolness, her insolence, her cold and cutting disregard of me? We had barely exchanged a dozen words since we left the Thames. Though my admiration of her fine figure, her haughty face, her dark, tragic, passionate eyes was extravagantly great, it was hidden; she had not divined it; and she was therefore without the influence over my moods and emotions which she might have possessed had I known that she was conscious how deeply she fascinated me. She would not even give me a chance to thoroughly dislike her. The heart cannot steer a middle course with such a woman as she. Had her behaviour enabled me to hate her, I should have felt easy; but her conduct was of the marble-like quality of her features, hard and polished, and too slippery for the passions to set a footing upon. ‘Pshaw!’ thought I again and again, as I viciously hammered the ashes out of the bowl of my pipe on the forecastle rail, ‘am not I an idiot to be thinking of yonder woman in this fashion, musing upon her, speculating about her—a person who is absolutely as much a stranger to me as any fine lady driving past me in a London Park!’ Yet would I repeatedly catch myself stealing peeps at her from under the arch of the courses, hidden as I was right forward in the ship’s bows, while she was pacing the length of the poop with Mr. Colledge, or standing awhile to hold a conversation with her aunt and Captain Keeling, the nobility of her figure and the chilling lofty dignity of her bearing distinctly visible to me all that way off, and strongly defining her amongst the rest of the people who wavered and straggled about the deck.
The wind lightened towards noon; the fine sailing breeze failed us, and sank into a small air off the larboard beam; the swell of the sea went down, but the colour of the brine was still the same rich sparkling blue of the early morning. I had never seen so deeply pure and beautiful a tint in the ocean in these parallels. It made one think of the Cape Horn latitudes, with the white sun wheeling low, and a gleam of ice in the distant sapphire south. The great masses of cream-soft rainbow-tinctured cloud melted out, and at two o’clock in the afternoon it was a true equinoctial day, and the Indiaman a hot tropic picture, awnings spread, the pitch softening betwixt the seams, a sort of bluish steamy haze lazily floating off the line of her bulwark rail, through which the dim sea-limit showed in a sultry sinuous horizon. The ship rippled through it, clothed to her trucks with cloths that shone with the silver whiteness of stars to the hot noontide effulgence. The ayahs lolled about the quarter-deck, and John Chinaman sat upon a carronade fretting the baby he held into squeals of laughter and temper by tossing to. The old sow grunted with a grave grubbing noise under the long-boat, and fore and aft every cock in the ship was swelling his throat with defiant fine-weather crowings.
It was somewhere about three bells that evening—half-past seven o’clock—that I was standing with Mr. Prance at the brass rail that protected the break of the poop, the pair of us leaning upon it, watching a grinning hairy fellow capering in a hornpipe a little abaft the stowed anchor on the forecastle. The one-eyed ape which we had rescued, and which by this time was grown a favourite amongst the seamen, sat low in the foreshrouds, watching the dancing sailor—an odd bit of colour for the picture of the fore-part of the ship, clothed as he was in a red jacket and a cap like an inverted flower-pot, the tassel of it drooping to his empty socket. It was a most perfect ocean evening, the west glowing gloriously with a scarlet sunset, the sea tenderly heaving, a soft warm breathing of air holding the lighter sails aloft quiet. All the passengers were on deck saving Miss Temple, who was playing the piano to herself in the cuddy. In the recess just under me were three or four smokers; and the voice of Mr. Hodder waxing warm in some argument with Mynheer Peter Hemskirk, entered with unpleasant disturbing emphasis into the tender concert of sounds produced by the fiddlers forward, the occasional laughter of the seamen, the tinkling in the saloon, the voices of the ladies aft, the gentle rippling of water alongside, combining, and softened by distance and the vastness amid which the ship floated, into a sort of music.
I was in the midst of a pleasant yarn with Mr. Prance, whilst we hung over the rail, half watching the jigging chap forward, and half listening to each other. He was recounting some of his early experiences at sea, with a hint in his manner of lapsing anon into a sentimental mood on his lighting upon the name of a girl whom he had been betrothed to.