Old Keeling seemed as bewildered as a person newly awakened from a dream; and, indeed, it was an extraordinary and an incredible thing. Mr. Saunders and Mynheer Hemskirk, with one or two others who were on the deck at the time, swore that no man had come aft from the direction of the forecastle. They were conversing in a group a little forward of the mizzen mast, and could take their oaths that there was no living creature abaft that point at the time of the occurrence saving the man who had been so mysteriously felled to the deck.
‘He most hov done it himself,’ said Hemskirk.
‘What! Dealt himself a blow that sheared through his hat into his skull?’ cried old Keeling.
‘I’ve been making inquiries, sir,’ said the second-mate, approaching us, ‘and find that Simpson, instead of being disliked, was a general favourite. No man has been aft, sir.’
‘Something must have fallen from the rigging,’ said Mr. Saunders.
‘Sir,’ cried the captain in a voice of mingled wrath and astonishment, ‘when anything falls from aloft, it drops plumb, sir—up and down, sir. The law of gravitation, Mr. Saunders, is the same at sea as it is on shore. What could fall from those heights up there’—and here he turned up his head like a hen in the act of drinking,—‘to strike a man standing at the wheel all that distance away?’
The news had got wind below, and the passengers came up in twos and threes from the cuddy, asking questions as they arrived, the loudest and most importunate amongst them, needless to say, being Colonel Bannister. There was real consternation amongst the ladies at the sight of the bloodstain. I shall not easily forget the picture of that poop-full of people: the staring of the women at the dark blotch against the wheel, whilst they held themselves in a sort of posture of recoil, holding their dresses back, as if something were crawling at them; the subdued wondering air of the men, restlessly looking about them, one going to the rail to gaze over, the dusky form of another stooping to peer under the gratings, a third with his head lying back straining his sight at the airy empearled spire of the cloths rising from the cross-jack to the royal yard, the mizzen-top showing clear and firm as a drawing in Indian ink against the delicate shimmering concavity of the topsail. The half-moon rode in brilliance over the main topgallant yard-arm, and the dark swell rolled in soundless heavings to the quarter, with the wake of the planet lying in the shape of a silver fan to half way across the ocean, and not a cloud in the whole wide velvet-black depths to obscure so much as a thumbnail of stardust.
‘What has happened, Dugdale?’ exclaimed Colledge, accosting me at once as he rose through the companion with Miss Temple at his side.
‘A man that was at the helm has been struck down,’ said I.
‘By whom?’ said he.