He silently surveyed her, and then directed his eyes at me.
‘You’ll be wanting to get home too, sir, I suppose?’ said he.
‘Oh yes,’ I replied. ‘Miss Temple is under my care, and I must see her safe.’
He turned to her again, and stood staring; then said: ‘That’ll be all right, mem; we’re bound to be falling in with something coming along presently; and if England’s her destination and she’ll receive ye, the boat that brought you from the hull shall take you to her, weather permitting. That’ll do, I think?’
She bowed, looking as pleased as agitation and anxiety would allow her.
‘Come now and take a look at the hull,’ continued Captain Braine; ‘and then’——
‘You quite understand, I hope,’ she interrupted, ‘that any sum’——
He broke in with an odd flourish of his hand. ‘No need to mention that matter, mem,’ he exclaimed;—‘we are Christian men in that part of the country where I come from, and there’s never no talk of pay amongst us for doing what the Lord directs—succouring distressed fellow-creatures.’
With which he spun upon his heels and walked out of the cabin, leaving us to follow him.
I had no eyes nor thoughts for anything else than the hull the moment I saw her. I remember recoiling as to a blow, and panting for a few breaths with my hand to my side. She had slipped to something more than two miles away down on the starboard quarter, and although only a portion of her was as yet on fire, she was showing as a body of flame brilliant and forked, soaring and drooping against the leaden-hued background of sky. Shudder after shudder went like ice through me as my sight swept the mighty girdle of the deep, coming back to the little body of flame that most horribly to every trembling instinct in me accentuated the lonely immensity of the surface on which it glowed.