‘Certainly. What! On a fine night like this? What do you want? That I should call hands to the relieving tackles?’ cried the second-mate.
The man sent a look up at the stars before answering, with a sort of cowering air in the posture of his head.
‘One of them blooming boomerangs,’ said he, ‘might come along again, sir. What’s a man to do if time ain’t allowed him to get out of the road?’
‘Your having a companion won’t help you,’ said the second-mate.
‘I dunno,’ answered the fellow. ‘Whatever it be that chucks the like of them things, might hold off at the sight of two of us.’
The second-mate stood looking at him a little, and then burst into a laugh.
‘Well, well!’ said he; ‘if there’s ever a lead-line to sound the depths of forecastle ignorance, I allow there must be fathoms enough of it to belay an end to the moon’s horns.’
Nevertheless he called to one of the watch to come aft and hold the wheel with the other man, making some allowance, I daresay, for the superstitious feelings which possessed the sailor, and which were certainly not to be softened down by the sight of the great bloodstain close to his feet.
I went below for a glass of brandy, and found the passengers listening to Mr. Saunders, who, with the meteorolite before him, was delivering a discourse on that kind of stone, pointing to it with his finger, speaking very slowly and emphatically, and looking in his wistful way up into the faces of his audience. Even Miss Temple seemed interested, and stood listening with her back against the mizzen-mast, the embellished trunk of which formed a very noble fanciful background for her fine figure. However, I was more in the temper for a pipe of tobacco than for a lecture, and was presently on deck again, for after half-past nine o’clock in the evening we were privileged to smoke upon the poop. Colledge presently joined me; but in twenty minutes he gave a prodigious yawn and then went to bed; and I paced the deck alone, with deep enjoyment of the hush coming to the ship out of the dark scintillant distance—a silence of ocean-night that seemed to be deepened to the senses by the marble stillness of the wide white pinions stealing and floating up in a sort of glimmer of spaces to the faint mist-like square of the main royal. There was a faint noise of trembling and rippling waters over the side, and the line of the taffrail with the two fellows at the wheel rose and fell very softly to the black secret heave of the long deep-sea undulation. The cuddy lamps were dimmed, the interior deserted; there was a small group of smokers on the quarter-deck in the shadow of the bulwark conversing quietly; abaft the mizzen rigging flitted the dusky form of old Keeling, who had come up to take a turn or two and a final squint at the weather before turning in.
Some one emerged through the companion hatch, and, after looking about him a little, crossed to the lee rail, where I was standing.