CHAPTER III.
IMOGENE AND I ARE MUCH TOGETHER.
So far I have been minute, accounting for every hour and all things which happened therein since I was picked up by the mate of the Death Ship and put aboard her. My first impressions were keen and strong, and I have sought to lay them before you in the order in which they occurred. But to pursue this particularity of narrative, to relate every conversation, to regularly notice the striking of the clock, the movements of the skeleton, and the hoarse comminatory croak of the parrot, would be to speedily render this tale tedious. Therefore let me speak briefly for a little space.
The storm blew with steady fury for six days, driving the tall fabric to leeward to a distance of many leagues every twenty-four hours, the course of the drift being as I should suppose—for it was impossible to put much faith in the compasses—about south-east by east, the larboard tacks aboard and the ship "ratching" nothing. It was so continuous and heavy, this gale, that it began to breed a feeling of despair in me, for I felt that if such weather lasted many weeks it would end in setting us so far south that we should be greatly out of the road taken by ships rounding the Cape, and so remote from the land, that should Vanderdecken desire to careen or water his vessel it would occupy us months to fetch the coast, so that the prospect of escaping with Miss Imogene grew small and gloomy. Added to which was the melancholy of the cell-like cabin in which it was my lot to sleep, the fiery crawlings, the savage squeakings of great rats, the grinding, groaning and straining noises of the labouring structure, likewise the sickening, sweeping, soaring, falling motions of the high light vessel, movements which, as we drove further south, where the seas were swollen into mountains by the persistent hardness of the gale and the vastness of the liquid plain along which they coursed, furious with the fiendish lashing of the thongs of the storm, grew at times so insupportable that, sailor as I was and used to the sea in all its moods, I would often feel faint and reel to a sensation of nausea.
But Imogene was never in the least degree discomposed. She was so used to the ship that its movements were to her what the steadiness of dry land is to other women. She seldom came on deck however. Indeed, the gusts and guns were often so fierce—coming along like thunderbolts through the gale itself—that any one of them catching her gown might have carried her light figure overboard. Moreover, twenty-four hours after the gale set in, it drew up thick as mud; the horizon was brought within reach of a musket-shot; and out of this thickness blew the rain, in straight lines, mixed with the showering off the heads of the seas; the sky hung steady, of the colour of slate—no part lighter or darker than another, but so low that it appeared as if a man could whip his hand into it from our masthead whenever those reeling spars came plumb.
As it gave me no pleasure to linger on deck in such weather, you may suppose that Miss Imogene and I were much together below. Often a whole morning or afternoon would pass without a soul entering the cabin where we sate. Whether Vanderdecken was pleased to think that Imogene had a companion—a fellow-countryman, with whom she could converse, and so kill the time which he would suspect from her recent fit of weeping hung heavy on her spirits; or that, having himself long passed those marks which time sets up as the boundaries of human passions, he was as incapable of suspecting that Imogene and I should fall in love, as he clearly was of perceiving the passage of years; 'tis certain he never exhibited the smallest displeasure when, perchance, he found us together, albeit once or twice on entering the cabin when we were there he would ask Imogene abruptly, but never with the sternness his manner gathered when he addressed others, what our talk was about, as if he suspected I was inquiring about his ship and cargo; though if, indeed, this was so, I don't doubt the suspicion was put into his head by Van Vogelaar, who, I am sure, hated me as much because I was an Englishman as because our panic-stricken men had fired upon him.
It takes a man but a very short time to fall in love, though the relation of the thing, if the time be very short, is often questioned as a possibility, sometimes heartily laughed at as an absurdity, when deliberately set down in writing. Why this should be I do not know. I could point to a good many men married to women with whom they fell in love at a dance, or by seeing them in the street, or by catching sight of them in church and the like. I have known a man to become passionately enamoured of a girl by beholding her picture. And what says Marlowe?
"Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?"
Depend upon it, when passion is of slow growth and cultivated painfully, you may suspect a deficiency somewhere. Either the girl is not delightful of face and shape and her virtues and good qualities are hard to come at, or she is a tease and a coquette, and, in a manner of speaking, puts her foot down upon a man's heart and prevents the emotion there from shooting. There will be something wanting, something wrong, I say. Association may indeed lengthily induct one into a habit of affection, but the sort of love I have in my mind springs like a young god into a man's intelligence from a maiden's eyes.