‘She looks to have been born to something higher than she is likely to attain,’ said I, watching her with eyes I found it impossible to withdraw. ‘A pity there did not go a little more womanhood to her composition. She might make a fine actress, and do very well in the unrealities of life; but I should say there is but small heart there, Mr. Saunders, with just the same amount of pride that sent Lucifer flaming headlong to——’
Some one coughed immediately behind me. I looked round and met Mrs. Radcliffe’s gaze full. She was seated on a hencoop; but whether she was there when I came to a stand to view Miss Temple, or had arrived unobserved by me, I could not tell. I felt the blood rise in scarlet to my brow, and walked right away forward on the forecastle, greatly, I doubt not, to the astonishment of little Saunders, who, I believe, was in the act of addressing me when I bolted.
I went into the head of the ship and leaned against the slope of the giant bowsprit as it came in the towering steeve of those days, to the topgallant-forecastle deck, through which it vanished like the lopped trunk of a titan oak whose roots go deep. The ping of a pistol report caught my ear. There was a sound of the splintering of glass at the yard-arm, along with some hand-clapping on the poop, as though the passengers regarded this shooting at a mark as an entertainment designed for their amusement. Far out ahead of me, jockeying the jib-boom, sat a sailor at work on the stay there; his figure stooped and soared with the lift of the long spar that pointed like the ship’s outstretched finger to the shining azure distance into which she was sailing, and he sang a song to himself in hoarse low notes, that to my mind put a better music to the flowing satin-like heavings of the darkly blue water under him than any mortal musician that I can think of could have married the picture to. There were a few seamen occupied on various jobs about the forecastle. The square of the hatch called the scuttle, lay dark in the deck, and rising up through it, I could hear the grumbling notes of a sailor apparently reading aloud to one of his mates.
Presently the bewhiskered face of the boatswain showed at the head of the forecastle ladder. On spying me, he approached with the rough sea-salute of a drag at a lock of hair under his round hat. He had served as able seaman aboard the ship that I had been midshipman in, though before my time; this had come out in a chat, and now he had always a friendly greeting when I met him on deck. He was a sailor of a school that is almost extinct; a round-backed man of the merchantman’s slowness in his movements, yet probably as fine a sample of a boatswain as was ever afloat; with an eye that seemed to compass the whole ship in a breath, of a singular capacity of seeing into a man and knowing what he was fit for, most exquisitely and intimately acquainted with the machinery of a vessel; a delightful performer upon his silver pipe, out of which he coaxed such clear and penetrating strains that you would have imagined when he blew upon it a flight of canary birds had settled in the rigging round about him. The voice of the tempest was in his gruff cry of ‘All hands!’ and his face might have stood as a symbol for hard ocean weather, as the bursting cheeks of Boreas express the north wind. He carried a little length of tough but pliant cane in his hand, with which he would flog whatever stood next him when excited and finding fault with some fellow for ‘sogering,’ as it is called; and I once saw him catch a man of his own size by the scruff of the neck, and with his cane dust the hinder part of him as prettily as ever a schoolmaster laid it on to a boy.
‘At the wrong end of the ship, ain’t you, sir?’ he called to me as he approached in his strong hearty voice.
‘It’s all one to me,’ said I, laughing, ‘now that there’s no music in the like of that pipe of yours to set me dancing.’
‘Ha!’ he exclaimed, fetching a deep breath. ‘I wonder if ever it’ll be my luck to knock off the sea and settle down ashore? I allow there’s more going to the life of a human being than the turning in of dead-eyes and the staying of masts plumb. By the way,’ added he, lowering his voice, ‘I’m afeerd there’s going to be a death aboard.’
‘I hope not,’ said I; ‘it will be the first, and a little early, too. Who’s the sick man, bo’sun?’
‘Why, a chap named Crabb,’ he answered. ‘I think you know him. I once took notice of a smile on your countenance as you stood watching him at the pumps.’
‘What! do you mean that bow-legged carroty creature with no top to his nose and one eye trying to look astern?’