"Come on deck," said he, "the air will refresh you."
And they went up the companion-steps, whilst the Newfoundland continued to sentinel the captain's door.
A glorious evening sky, in the west like a city on fire, clouds with brows glowing into scarlet as they sailed into the splendour abeam, the ship leaning with the breeze, and the white spume twinkling on the eastern blue in a trembling heaven-full of the lights of foam. Two sail were in sight, fairy gleams upon the lens-like edge on the port bow.
"Oh," cried the girl, with a swift look along the deck, "after an open boat! and one man groaning and then lying dead in her!"
They walked slowly to and fro to leeward, leaving Mr. Candy, who ogled them betwixt his white eyelashes, to pace the weather quarter-deck in the loneliness of command. The sailors had immediately seen how things stood. Nothing that happens at sea astonishes a sailor, unless it is the expected, which is often a real surprise, so full of disappointments, of leeway, head winds, misreckoning is the life. Here was the chief mate who had fallen in with a girl whom he knew.
"They might have kept company ashore," says Bill to Jim. "She was bound one way and he another. Ain't that sailor fashion?"
"Ain't she got a figure?" says Jim to Bill. "Wouldn't I like to put my arm round her waist if Dick and the little 'un was playing. It's damned hard on us sailor men that no female society's allowed aboard a ship."
"There's the figurehead if it's female," says Bill. "I've known a man so 'ard up that of a dog-watch, when there was plenty o' light, he'd slide down the dolphin-striker just to talk to the woman on the stem-head. He'd say it was the next best thing."
Perhaps it was, for some figureheads in those days were a little gorgeous. I have seen ladies under the bowsprit with long black hair and swelling bosoms, bright with golden stars. Their blush was deep, their lips scarlet, their smile alluring, they were always curtseying, and the sea in its loving humours flung snow-white nosegays at them.