‘He is not, sir.’
I went down the companion steps, knocked at the captain’s door, and entered. It was a roomy interior, a very noble ship’s berth, occupying hard upon the width of the deck right aft, saving, as I have before described, a sort of small chart-room alongside, bulkheaded off. There was a large stern window, after the olden fashion, with the blue line of the horizon gently sliding up and down it, and a shivering light lifting off the sea to the glass, sharp and of a sort of azure brilliancy, as though from diamonds set a-trembling. Keeling, in full fig, his face showing of a dark red against some maple-coloured ground of bulkhead or ship’s side, was seated at a table. He instantly rose on my entering, gave me one of his wire-drawn bows, and motioned me to a seat, thanking me in a few words for coming. On the starboard hand stood Crabb and the sailmaker, handcuffed, and on either side of them was a seaman with a cutlass dangling at his hip. On the port hand sat Dr. Hemmeridge, his legs crossed, his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, and his head drooped. He was deadly pale, and looked horribly ill and worried. Near him was one of the sailors, a young fellow of some seven or eight and twenty, with a quantity of hair falling over his brow, a straggling beard, and small black eyes, which roamed swiftly in glances charged methought with the spirit of mutiny and menace and defiance. Mr. Prance was at the captain’s elbow; and the third mate was seated at an end of the table with a pen in his hand and some paper in front of him.
I bowed to Hemmeridge, but he took no notice. Until the captain addressed me, I stared hard at Crabb; for even now, with the ugly ruffian standing before me, my mind found it difficult to realise that he was alive; that the creature I gazed at was the man whom all hands of us, with an exception or two, supposed overboard a thousand fathoms deep. There was, besides, the fascination of his ugliness. The hunch-like curve of his back, his little blood-stained eyes looking away from his nose, as though they sought to peer at something at the back of his head, the greasy trail of carroty hair upon his back, the fragment of nose over his hare-lip, these and the rest of him combined into the representation of the most extravagantly grotesque, ill-favoured figure ever witnessed outside the bars of a menagerie. The sailmaker’s face was as white as one of his bolts of canvas, but it wore a determined look, though I noticed a quivering in the nostrils of his high-perched nose, and a constant uneasy movement of the fingers, as of dying hands plucking at bedclothes.
‘Mr. Dugdale,’ exclaimed old Keeling with the dignity and gravity of a judge, ‘I’ve taken the liberty to send for you, as I am informed by Mr. Prance that when that man there’—inclining his head towards Crabb without looking at him—‘was lying, as it was supposed, dead in his bunk, you accompanied Mr. Hemmeridge, the ship’s surgeon’—here he indicated the doctor with a motion of his head but without looking at him either—‘into the forecastle, and stood for some considerable time surveying the so-called corpse.’
‘That is quite true,’ said I.
‘Did Mr. Hemmeridge expose the man’s face to you?’
‘He did.’
‘What impression was produced upon your mind by the sight of the—of the—body?’
Crabb gave a horrible grin.
‘That he was stone-dead, Captain Keeling; so stone-dead, sir, that I can scarcely credit the man himself is now before me.’