To resume. Neither the captain, nor the second mate, nor the seaman at the tiller, taking the least notice of me, I determined to keep myself to myself till it should please Vanderdecken to address me; so I got under the lee of the house where I had conversed with the captain before breakfast, and gazed about. It was as dirty a day as ever I remember—the heavens of the colour of drenched granite, the sea-line swallowed up in spray and haze, out of which there came rolling to the ship endless processions of olive-coloured, prodigious combers. The storming aloft was a perpetual thunder. Upon every rope the gale split with a shriek, and there was a dreary clattering of the cordage, and as the vessel swang her spars to windward, an edge of peculiar and hurricane-like fierceness would be put into the wind, as though it were driven outrageously mad by the stubborn swing of the masts against its howling face. Nothing was in sight save over against our weather-quarter a Cape hen, poised on such easy wings that the appearance of the bird made a wonder of the weight of the blast; its solitariness gave a heavy desolation to the aspect of the pouring, warring scene of frothing summits and roaring hollows. The reefed courses under which the vessel lay were dark with wet from the showering of the sea, of which great, green, glittering masses striking the weather-bow, raised such a smoke of crystals all about the forecastle that the vessel looked to be on fire with the steam-like, voluminous whiteness soaring there.
There were a few men on the decks that way, muffled up to their noses; but I did not see them speak to one another nor go about any kind of work. They had the same self-engrossed, nay, entranced air that was visible in those, such as the two mates and Vanderdecken, whom I had already observed. The ship offered an amazing picture as she soared and sank upon the billows, half-hidden by storms of froth swept by the wind betwixt the masts with wilder screamings than a hundred mad-houses could make. The great barricaded tops, her spritsail topmast standing up out of another top at the end of the bowsprit—she had no jibboom—and the long yard, after the lateen-style, on her mizzen-mast, gave her so true a look of the age in which she had been built that it would be impossible for any sailor to see her and not know what ship she was. None other resembling her has been afloat since the age of William III., nor is it conceivable that the like of her will ever be seen again.
CHAPTER XIX.
I WITNESS THE CAPTAIN'S ENTRANCEMENT.
I had been on deck about a quarter of an hour when Vanderdecken, who all this time was standing motionless at the rail looking—as who shall tell with what fancies in him and what visions—at the windward sea, came down to the lee of the house as though he all along knew I was there, though I can swear he never once turned nor appeared to see me, and said—
"Is the lady in the cabin?"
"She went to her room, sir," I replied.
"Did she tell you her story?" he said, bringing his beard to its place with both hands, and viewing me with a severity that I began to think might be as much owing to the cast of his features as to his nature.
I replied that she had told me how he had met with her in an open boat, how her parents had perished, and how he had felt a father's pity and love for her and was taking her home.