The thick weather lay heavily upon the captain’s mind, held him in fits of abstraction whilst at table, dismissed him after a brief sitting to the deck, and kept him heedful and taciturn whilst there. He had had one collision, and wanted no more; and you would notice how that tragedy had served him, by observing him when in the cuddy to prick up his ears to the least unusual noise on deck, to glance at the tell-tale compass over his head, as though it were the sun which he had been patiently waiting for a chance to ‘shoot,’ to swallow his food with impatient motions to the steward to bear a hand, and to bolt up the cabin steps without a smile or syllable of apology to us for quitting the table.
CHAPTER IV
LOUISE TEMPLE
But there came a change at last. Ushant was then many long leagues astern, and the night had been dark but quiet, with a long Biscayan swell brimming to our starboard quarter, and a play of sheet-lightning off the lee bow, and wind enough to send the Indiaman through it at some six knots with her royals and cross-jack furled and the weather clew of her mainsail up. This was as the picture showed when I went to bed at five bells—half-past ten—and on opening my eyes next morning I found the berth brilliant with sunshine, bulkhead and ceiling trembling to the glory rippling off the sea through the large round scuttle or porthole, and the action of the ship a stately gliding, with a slow long floating heave that raised no sound whatever of creak or straining, and that, after the long spell of tumblefication, was as grateful to every sense and to all wearied bones as the firm unrocking surface of dry land.
Mr. Colledge was shaving himself. I lay eyeing him for a few minutes, admiring the handsome high-born looks of the youth, and thinking it was a pity that such manly beauty as his should lack the consecrating touch of an intellectual expression to parallel his physical graces. He saw me in the glass in which he was scraping himself.
‘Good-morning, Dugdale. I feel all right again, d’ye know. I am going to eat my breakfast in the cuddy and then go on deck.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ said I, putting my legs over the side of the bunk.
‘I suppose there’ll be some girls about this morning,’ said he. ‘Who the dooce are the passengers, I wonder? Anybody very nice aboard, not counting that ripping young lady with the black eyes?’
‘Nearly everybody’s been as sea-sick as you,’ said I; ‘and the few who have put in an appearance are males—your friend Emmett, the fat Dutchman, and two or three others.’