He seemed to reflect a moment, and suddenly cried, with a passionate sparkle in his eyes, "But 'twas cowardly in your captain to order his men to fire upon our boat. What did we seek? Such tobacco as you could have spared, which we were willing to purchase. By the vengeance of Heaven, 'twas a deed unworthy of Englishmen."
I did not dare explain the true cause, and said, gently, "Sir, our captain lay dead in his cabin. The men, missing the chief, fell into a panic at the sight of this ship, for she showed large in the dusk, and we feared you meant to lay us aboard."
"Enough!" he exclaimed, imperiously. "Follow me to your cabin."
He led the way on to the deck and we descended the quarter-deck ladder.
CHAPTER XIV.
MY FIRST NIGHT IN THE DEATH SHIP.
I had been in too great a confusion of mind to heed the movements of the ship whilst I was under cover, but on emerging I now noticed that it had come on to blow very fresh. The vessel under larboard tacks—I could not see what canvas she carried—lay along very much, being light and tall, and rolled with peculiar clumsiness in the hollows. I caught sight of the water over the weather-rail, and judged with the eye of a seaman that what progress she was making was wholly leeway; so that we were being blown dead to the eastward, without probably "reaching," as it is termed, by so much as half-a-knot an hour. The moon was now deep in the west and showing a very wan and stormy disk. North-west, where the land lay, the sea looked to rise into a fluid blackness of thunder-clouds, wherefrom even as I glanced that way there fell a red gash of lightning. There was a heavy sound of seething and bombarding billows all about us, and the whole picture had a wildness past language, what with the scarlet glare of the northern levin-brands and the ghastly tempestuous paleness of the westering moon and a dingy faintness owing its existence to I know not what, if it were not the light of the foaming multitudinous surge reflected upon the sooty bosoms of the lowering clouds over our stern.
Captain Vanderdecken stood for a moment looking round upon this warring scene, and flung up his arms towards the moon with a passionate savage gesture, and then strode to a narrow hatch betwixt the limits of the quarter-deck and the mainmast, down which he went, first turning to see if I followed. I now found myself in a kind of 'tween-decks, with two cabins on either hand, in the doorway of the fore one, on the starboard side, stood the man Prins, holding a small lantern.