‘I can only repeat,’ she continued, preserving her expression of dismay, ‘that any sum of money you may choose to ask’——
‘I know all about that, mem,’ he interrupted, but not offensively, and with a gesture that was almost bland. He then leisurely turned to me. ‘You gave me to believe this morning, sir, that you was acquainted with navigation?’
‘And what then?’ I exclaimed impatiently.
‘I hope that you didn’t deceive me,’ he said with a dark look.
‘You shall have the full truth when I know your motive in examining me in this fashion,’ said I hotly, ‘and not before.’
But immediately after I had spoken I was sensible of my folly in losing my temper. Talk as we might, vapour as we would, we were in this man’s power: in the power of a man who was absolutely unintelligible as a character whether sane or mad, and the girl’s and my own safety might wholly depend upon our judgment and tact. He gazed at me with eyes whose expression seemed to grow more and more malignant, though, God knows, this might have been my fancy, since I was in the humour at the moment to figure all things very blackly.
‘Understand me,’ I exclaimed, wholly changing my manner, and speaking in a softened tone; ‘if I can be of service to you in any direction, you have but to command me. I owe you my own and this lady’s life; and though it is an obligation beyond my power of discharging in full, yet it must be my duty and happiness to diminish it in any direction I am equal to.’
‘We will before long talk together, sir,’ said he, and then fell silent, nor did he again open his lips during the seven or eight minutes in which we continued sitting together at that table.
I was exceedingly puzzled and troubled by what had passed. What did this captain mean by his dark mysterious nods, by his saying that he would talk to me presently, by his insistence in ascertaining the extent of my nautical knowledge? It was possible, indeed, that being the only navigator aboard his vessel, he might consider himself in serious need of some one to take his place if he should fall sick. But his behaviour was scarcely reconcilable with this plain clear want, and it seemed certain that there was more going to his speech and manner than the desire that I should fill the part of mate to him.
It was a fair, warm, delightful night, rich with stars, and soothing with the dew-sweetened wind that blew with steady freshness over the quarter, running the pale shape of the barque over the dark waters, as though she were some wreath of mist that must presently dissolve. Miss Temple and I, sometimes walking, sometimes sitting on the skylight, held to the deck till a late hour. She abhorred the thought of withdrawing to the cabin allotted to her; and short as my sleep had been since the hour of my quitting the Indiaman’s side, I was as little willing as she to quit the silence and coolness and beauty of the open night for the confinement of a small hot berth.