‘My advice to you is—at once, mem,’ said the captain.
‘We must believe that Captain Braine is fully sensible of the meaning of his requests,’ said I, answering the glance she shot at me.
She removed the earrings and gave them to me. The captain stood running his eyes over her figure; then, with a melodramatic gesture, pointed to her watch. This, too, with the handsome chain belonging to it, I pocketed. He now addressed himself to contemplating me.
‘You don’t need to show any watch-chain,’ said he, speaking with his head drooping towards his left shoulder; ‘there’s no good in that signet ring either. As to the breast-pin’—he half-closed one eye—‘well, perhaps that’s a thing that won’t hurt where it is.’
He waited until I had taken off my ring and dropped my chain into my waistcoat pocket, and then, looking first of all aft and then forward, then up at the little skylight, whilst he seemed to hold his breath as though intently listening, he approached us, as we stood together, by a stride, and said in a low deep voice, tremulous with intensity of utterance: ‘My men are not to be trusted. Hush! If they imagined I suspected them, they would cut my throat and heave me overboard.’
Miss Temple took my arm.
‘Let me understand you?’ said I, wrestling with my amazement. ‘In what sense are they untrustworthy?’
He stared eagerly and nervously about him again, and then, extending the fingers of his left hand, he touched one of them after another, as though counting, whilst he said: ‘First, I have reason to believe that Lush, the carpenter, who acts as my second mate, committed a murder four years ago.’
‘Good God!’ I ejaculated.
‘Hold!’ he cried. ‘Next, there ain’t no shadow of a doubt that two at least of my able seamen are escaped convicts. Next, there is a man forward who was concerned in a mutiny that ended in the ringleaders being hung. Next’—he paused, and then exclaimed: ‘but no need to go on alarming the lady.’