‘Is the fire out?’ I asked.
‘Black out,’ he answered. ‘It was no fire, to speak truly of it, Mr. Dugdale. A top bale of blankets or some such stuff was smouldering in about the circle of a five-shilling piece—a little ring eating slowly inwards, but throwing out smoke enough to furnish forth a volcano for a stage-scene. A beastly smell! not to speak of some of the stuff down there being as blackening as a shoe-polisher’s brushes.’ Here he looked at the palms of his hands, which were only a little more grimy than his face.—‘But what’s this I hear about Crabb? Has the dead sailor come to life again?’
‘He’s yonder,’ said I, nodding towards the boatswain’s berth, which the captain and mate had entered, closing the door after them: ‘you’ll need to see to believe. Time was that when a man was dropped over a ship’s side with a cannon-ball at his feet he was as dead as if his brains were out. D’ye remember, Mr. Cocker, how that hammock went floating astern, as if there were less than a dead sailor in it, though something more than nothing? There’s been some devilish stealthy scheme here depend upon it. We may yet find out that the ship wasn’t scuttled because the ugly rogue hadn’t time to pierce through the lower hatch before he set the vessel on fire.’
‘But he was a dead man, sir; Hemmeridge saw him dead,’ cried Cocker, eyeing me with an inimitable air of astonishment.
‘Ay,’ said I, ‘dead as the bones of a mummy. But he’s there all the same,’ I added pointing to the forecastle cabin, ‘as alive as you or I, and capable, I daresay, of kicking after a little.’
At this moment the mate put his head out of the boatswain’s berth and called to Mr. Cocker, on which I walked leisurely aft, with amazement in me growing, and scarcely capable of realising the truth of what I had seen.
The passengers were still crowding the fore-part of the poop, peering and eagerly talking, but in subdued voices, with Colonel Bannister moving angrily amongst them, and the boatswain’s mate sentinelling the foot of the ladder.
‘Oh, Mr. Dugdale,’ cried Mrs. Radcliffe, leaning over the rail and crying down her question with a pecking motion of her head; ‘is the fire out, do you know? Are we safe?’
‘The fire is out, madam,’ I replied, lifting my hat; ‘and the ship is as safe this minute as ever she was in the Thames. Captain Keeling will, I have no doubt, be here very shortly to reassure you.’
Miss Temple, towering half a head above her aunt, looked down at me with an air of imperious questioning in her face. There was a hot scarlet blush all along the west, yet with power enough in its illumination to render each face of the crowd above quite distinguishable against the tender shadow stealing from the east into the air, and I could see an eagerness in the girl’s full, dark, glowing, and steadfast gaze to warrant me the honour of a conversation with her if I chose to ascend the ladder. But just then Hemmeridge came out of the cuddy on to the quarter-deck with the hint of a stagger in his walk. His eyes showed that he was only just awake, and his hair that he had run out of his cabin in a hurry.