I answered: "What he does in his sleep he may do awake. This action is like the whispers of a dreamer, babbling out his conscience. It is in his soul to kill me, and long thinking upon it has moved him to the deed in his sleep."
"Oh, Geoffrey, did I not beg you to secure your door?"
"Ay—that shall be looked to in future, I warrant you. But why should this man, of all the others, especially thirst for my life? How have I wronged him?"
She replied by pointing out that the crew of my ship had fired upon him; also that in the days of his natural life he was no doubt a villain at heart and that all the features of his devilish nature attended him through his doom; that being more jealous, rapacious and avaricious than the others, he might regard my presence as a menace to his share of the treasure, and hunger after my destruction; so that, come what might, I should never be able to report the wealth that lay in the ship's hold.
There was no doubt my darling was right, impossible as I found it to reconcile these earthly and human passions and motives with his supernatural being; and particularly the indifference he exhibited on the previous evening when the Frenchman came running us aboard, with his concern for his share in the gold, jewels and plate below. But I had long abandoned all speculation concerning what I must term the intellectual aspect of these miserable creatures. You will suppose that we found a fruitful text in this mate's somnambulistic attack upon me, and that we talked at great length about our chances of escape and the necessity Van Vogelaar's malignant hate put me under of inventing some method to deliver ourselves by, be the risks of it what they might. Yet it was but talk.
Indeed, never did prisoners' outlook appear more hopeless. Compared to this floating jail, compassed about by the mighty sea, the walls of a citadel were as paper, the bars of a dungeon's window as packthread. But the most bitter and invincible barrier of all was Captain Vanderdecken's resolution to carry Imogene with him in this ship to Amsterdam.
CHAPTER V.
A TEMPEST BURSTS UPON US.
I did not, as I had told Imogene, need a second hint to secure my life by night, however it might fall out with me in the day. By looking about I met with a piece of ratline stuff which I hid in my cabin, and when the night came I secured one end to the hook of the door, passing the other end through the staple and then making it fast to my wrist; so that, the door being shut, no one could enter without tweaking or straining my arm with such violence as was sure to awake me.