‘Ah!’ exclaimed Captain Braine, heaving a deep sigh and shaking his head: ‘Lush’s loss would have been my gain. One Chicken was worth all the Lushes that were ever afloat.—But hush, mem, if you please.’
‘I shall certainly say nothing more about your crew,’ exclaimed Miss Temple quickly and a little haughtily, while she slightly recoiled from the face he turned upon her.
‘Have you any books aboard, Captain Braine?’ said I, glancing at the volume he held in his hand. ‘Any sort of amusement in the shape of chess or cards to help Miss Temple and myself to kill an hour or two from time to time?’
‘There are some vollums in Chicken’s cabin that belonged to him,’ answered Captain Braine. ‘I’ve read two or three of them. His cargo that way was usually edifying. There’s Baxter’s “Shove:” a good yarn; there’s the “Pilgrim’s Progress;” and there’s the “Whole Dooty o’ Man”—a bit leewardly; I couldn’t fetch to windward in it myself. For my part, one book’s enough for me; and excepting some vollums on navigation, it is the only work I goes to sea with.’
‘The Bible!’ I exclaimed, taking it from him. I was astonished and pleased. There seemed little for one to apprehend in the character of a man who could dedicate his leisure to the study of that Book, and I was sensible of an emotion of respect for the strange-looking, staring figure as I returned the little volume to him.
He dropped it into a side-pocket, and then most abruptly walked to the rail, took a long look at the weather and a long look aloft, trudged over to Mr. Lush, with whom he exchanged a sentence or two, and immediately afterwards disappeared down the companion.
For some time after this Miss Temple and I paced the deck together. There was much to talk about, and my companion found a deal to say about Captain Braine, whilst, as we walked, I would catch her taking furtive peeps at Mr. Lush, who, it was easy to see, had inspired her with aversion and fear, though the man had not offered to address a word to us, nor had he once looked our way, thirstily inquisitive as his stare had been whilst in the boat. I could not help contrasting her behaviour now with what I recollected of it aboard the Countess Ida. She had put her hand into my arm, and the intimacy of our association in this way might well have suggested an affianced pair. She talked eagerly and with all the passion of the many emotions which rose in her with her references, to our situation, to her aunt, to the chance of our sighting the Indiaman, and the like; and I don’t doubt that the men who watched us from the forepart of the vessel put us down either as husband and wife or a betrothed couple.
And all this in three days! Three days ago she could hardly bring herself to speak or even to look at me; and now fortune had contrived that she should have no other companion, that she should be locked up with me alone in a dismasted hull, and then be brought, always with me at her side, into a vessel where, as she believed, there was much more to fill us with alarm than in the worst of the conditions which entered into our existence aboard the wreck! Again and again she would ask, with her dark and glowing eyes bent with an expression of despair upon my face, when it was to end and how it was to end; and these questions my heart would echo as I gazed at the cold and alarmed beauty of her face, but with a very different meaning from what she attached to the inquiries.
At last she grew weary of walking, and I took her below and sat with her awhile on a cushioned locker. It was now drawing on to four o’clock in the afternoon; the breeze quiet, the sky in shadow, the sea very smooth save for the soft undulation of the swell, which pleasantly and soothingly cradled the little fabric as she slipped through it, of a milky white from water-line to truck, to the impulse of her wide overhanging pinions. After a bit, I observed a heaviness in the lids of my companion, and urged her to lie down and take some rest. She consented; and I lingered at her side until sleep overcame her, and then I stood for awhile surveying with deep admiration the calm sweetness of her face, into which had stolen the tenderness of the unconscious woman, softening down the haughty arching of eyebrow, unbending the imperious set of the mouth. It was as though her spirit clad in her own beauty was revealed to me disrobed of all the trappings of the waking humours. I could have knelt by her side, and in that posture have watched her for an hour. Can it be, thought I, as I crept softly to the cuddy door, that I am in love with her?
I leisurely filled my pipe from the hunk of tobacco I had met with in the wreck, taking, whilst I did so, as I stood on the quarter-deck, a good steady look at such of the sailors as were about, though I contrived an idly curious manner, and directed my eyes as often at the barque’s furniture as at the seamen. After I had been on the poop a few minutes, Mr. Lush left it to go forward; and with my pipe betwixt my teeth, I lounged over to the binnacle to see how the ship headed. The man who grasped the spokes was the honest-faced fellow I had before noticed at the wheel; he, I mean, of the minute eyes and whiskers joined at his throat, who had addressed me in the boat whilst we lay alongside the hull. I noticed that he seemed to stir a little uneasily as I approached, as though nervously meditating a speech, and I had scarcely glanced into the compass bowl when he exclaimed: ‘I beg your pardon, sir.’