"Ay," said I, "she shows twice her number of cloths. Is it not astonishing," I continued, softening my voice, "that Vanderdecken, and his mates and men, should not guess that there is something very wrong with them, from the mere contrast of such beautifully cut and towering canvas as that yonder with the scanty, storm-darkened rags of sails under which this groaning old hull is driven along?"
"Yes, at least to you and me, who have the faculty of appreciating contrasts. But think of them as deficient in all qualities but those which are necessary for the execution of the Sentence. Then their heedlessness is that of a blind man, who remains insensible to the pointing of your finger to the object you speak to him about."
"Would to God you and I were quit of it all," said I.
"We must pray for help, and hope for it too!" she answered, with a swift glance at me, that for a breathless moment carried the violet beauty and shining depths of her eyes fair to mine. An instant's meeting of our gaze only! Yet I could see her heart in that rapid, fearless, trustful look, as the depth of the Heavens is revealed by a flash of summer lightning.
Suddenly Vanderdecken gave orders for the ensign to be hoisted. The boatswain entered the little house, and returned with the flag which he bent on to the halliards rove at the mizzen topmast-head. The colours mounted slowly to his mechanical pulling, and they were worthy indeed of the dead-and-alive hand that hoisted them, being as ragged and attenuated with age as any banner hung high in the dusty gloom of a cathedral. But the flag was distinguishable as the Hollander's ensign, as you saw when it crazily streamed out its fabric, that was so thin in places, you thought you spied the sky through it. One should say it was a flag seldom flown on board the Dutchman, to judge from the manner in which the crew cast their eyes up at it, never a one of them smiling, indeed, though here and there under the death-pallor there lay a sort of crumpling of the flesh, as of a grin. 'Twas a flag to drive thoughts of home deep into them, and now and again I would catch one muttering to another behind his hand, whilst the most of them continued to steadfastly regard the ensign for many minutes after Jans had mastheaded it, as though they fancied home could not be far distant with that flag telling of it.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE CENTAUR FLIES FROM US.
Now the Dutch flag had not been flying twenty minutes when, my sight being keen, I thought I could perceive something resembling a colour at the fore-royal masthead of the ship. I asked Imogene if she saw it. She answered "No." I said nothing, not being sure myself, and was unwilling to intrude upon the four men standing to windward by asking for the telescope. On board our ship they had set the sprit-topsail, and the forward part of the dull, time-eaten, rugged old vessel resembled a Chinese kite. She was doing her best; but let her splutter as she would 'twas for all the world like the sailing of a beer-barrel with a mast steeped in the bunghole. And this, thought I, was the vessel that gave the slip to the frigate belonging to Sir George Ascue's squadron! The wake she made was short, broad and oily—a square, fat, glistening surface of about her own length—not greatly exceeding the smoothness she would leave aweather if drifting dead to leeward under bare poles; different indeed from that suggestion of comet-like speed which you find in the fleecy swirl of a line of foaming waters boiling out from the metalled run of a fleet cruiser, and rising and falling and fading into dim distance like a path of snow along a hilly land.
On board yonder ship they would have perspective glasses of a power very different from the flat lenses in Vanderdecken's tubes; and since by this time it was certain they had us large in their telescopes, what would they be thinking of our huge, old-fashioned tops, fitter for the bowmen and musqueteers of Ferdinand Magellan and Drake than for the small-armsmen of even the days of the Commonwealth, of the antique cut of our canvas and the wild and disordered appearance its patches and colour submitted, of the grisly aspect of the wave-worn, storm-swept hull, of the peaked shape and narrowness of our stern, telling of times long vanished, as do the covers of an old book or the arches in an ancient church?