"My dear, do not fret,", said I, again calling her my dear, for I still lacked the courage to call her my love; "this experience makes me clear on one point: we shall escape, but not by a ship."
"How, if not by a ship?" she cried, tremulously.
Before I could reply, Vanderdecken looked round upon us, and came our way, at the same time telling Van Vogelaar to swing the topsail-yard and board his main tack.
"'Tis in this fashion," he exclaimed, "that most of the ships I meet serve me. It would be enough to make me deem your countrymen a lily-livered lot if the people of other nations, my own included, did not sheer off before I could explain my needs or learn their motives in desiring to board us. What alarmed the people of that ship, think you, mynheer?"
"Who can tell, sir?" I responded, in as collected a manner as I could contrive. "They might suspect us hardly worth the trouble of capturing——"
He motioned an angry dissent.
"Or," I continued, abashed and speaking hurriedly, "they might have seen something in the appearance of your crew to promise a bloody resistance."
"By the Holy Trinity!" he cried, with the most vehement scorn, "if such a thing were conceivable I should have been glad to confirm it with a broadside!" and his eye came from the frigate that was fast lessening in the distance to his poor show of rust-eaten sakers and green-coated swivels.
It was sure that he had no suspicion of the truth. Not knowing that he and his ship were accurst, how was it possible for him to guess the cause of the behaviour of the ships which fled from him? You would suppose that he and the rest of the crew discovered many signs of satisfaction and delight at this escape from a ship to whose commands they had hauled down their flag; instead, they hung upon the rail watching the frigate shifting her helm for a hasty flight without a murmur, a note of speech; nothing appeared in them but a dull, leaden, Dutch phlegmatic curiosity, if indeed this quality at all possessed them, and when Van Vogelaar sang out to them to brace round the yards on the main, they fell to the job of trimming sail and getting way on the ship with an incredible ghastly indifference in their countenances and in their movements, as they went about their silent labour. Indeed, whatever passions they had seemed to pertain to what was to come; I mean, the heaving in sight of a ship would make them eager for tobacco or for whatever else they needed and she might have; but when the incident, the adventure, the experience—call it what you will—was passed, they turned a black and passionless mind upon it, without the capacity of grief or gladness.
It was an hour after our usual dinner-time, and Prins arrived to tell the captain the meal was on the table. He put Imogene's hand under his arm caressingly, and I followed them with one wistful look at the frigate that was already a toy and far off, melting like a cloud into the junction of sapphire ether and violet ocean. I saw Vanderdecken level a glance at her too, and as we entered the cabin he said, addressing me, but without turning his head, and leading Imogene to the table. "It will be a disappointment to you, mynheer, that your countrymen would not stay to receive you?"