CHAPTER XXVII. A DEAD CALM.

I was up and about a great deal during the night. It was not only that the heat murdered sleep; there was something so ominous in the profound stillness which fell upon our little ship that the mind found itself weighed down as with a sense of misgiving, a dull incommunicable dread of approaching calamity. Of the dead calm at sea I was by no means ignorant; in African and West Indian waters I had tasted of the delights of this species of stagnation over and over again. One calm, I remember, came very close to realising Coleridge’s description, or rather the description that the poet borrowed from the narrative of old Sir Richard Hawkins preserved in the foxed and faded pages of the Rev. Samuel Purchas. The water looked to be full of wriggling fiery creatures burning in a multitude of colours till the surface of the sea resembled a vast, ghastly prism reflecting the lights of some hellish principality, deep sunk in the dark brine. But I never recollect the ocean until this night as without some faint heave or swell; yet after the weak draught of air had utterly died out, somewhere about midnight, the yacht slept upon a bosom as stirless as the surface of a summer lake. There was not the slightest movement to awaken an echo in her frame, to run a tremor through her canvas, to nudge the rudder into the dimmest clanking of its tiller chains. The effect of such a hush as this at sea is indescribable. On shore, deep in the country, far distant from all hum of life, the stillness of night is a desired and familiar condition of darkness; it soothes to rest; whatever vexes it is a violence; the sweeping of a gale through hissing and roaring trees, the thunder of wind in the chimney, the lashing of the windows with hail and rain, the red belt of lightning to whose view the bedroom glances in blood to the eye of its disturbed occupant; all this brings with it an element of fear, of something unusual, out of keeping, out of nature almost. But at sea it is the other way about. ’Tis the dead calm that is unnatural. It is as though the mighty forces of heaven and ocean had portentously sucked in their breath in anticipation of the shock of conflict, as a warrior fills his lungs to the full and then holds his wind whilst he waits the cry of charge.

I tried to sleep, but could not, and hearing one o’clock struck on the forecastle, dropped out of my bunk for ten minutes of fresh air on deck. Cutbill sat with his back against the table; the small flame of the lamp that hung without the least vibration from the cabin ceiling gleamed in the sweat-drops that coated his face as though oil had been thrown upon him. I said softly, pausing a moment to address him: ‘A wonderfully still night, Cutbill.’

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‘Never remember the like of it, sir,’ he answered in a whisper that had a note of strangling in it, with his effort to subdue his natural tempestuous utterance.

‘All quiet aft?’

‘As a graveyard, sir.’

‘In case Sir Wilfrid Monson should look out and see you, what excuse for being here has Captain Finn provided you with?’

‘I’m supposed to be watching the bayrometer, sir. If Sir Wilfrid steps out I’m to seem to be peering hard at that there mercury, then to go on deck as if I’d got something to report.’

‘Oh, that’ll do, I dare say,’ I exclaimed. ‘He may wonder but that must not signify. Heaven grant, Cutbill, that I am unnecessarily nervous; but we’re a middling full ship; it is the right sort of night, too, to make one feel the hugeness of the ocean and the helplessness of sailors when deprived of their little machinery for fighting it; and what I say is, a misgiving under such circumstances ought to serve us as a conviction—so keep a bright look-out, Cutbill. Nothing is going to happen, I dare say; but our business is to contrive that nothing shall happen.’

The huge fellow lifted his enormous hand very respectfully to his glistening forehead, and I passed on to the deck.

The moon shone brightly and her reflection lay upon the sea like a league-long fallen column of silver, with the ocean going black as liquid pitch to the sides of the resplendent shaft. Not a wrinkle tarnished that prostrate pillar of light; not the most fairy-like undulation of water put an instant’s warping, for the space of a foot, into it. I set the mainmast head by a star and watched it, and the trembling, greenish, lovely point of radiance hung poised as steadfastly on a line with the truck as though it were some little crystal lamp fixed to an iron spike up there.

I spied Jacob Crimp near the wheel, but I had come up to breathe and not to talk. I desired to coax a sleepy humour into me and guessed that that end would be defeated by a chat with the surly little sailor, with whom I rarely exchanged a few sentences without finding myself drifting into an argument. So I lay over the rail striving to cool my hot face with the breath off the surface of the black profound that lay like a sheet of dark, ungleaming mirror beneath. On a sudden I heard a great sigh out in the gloom. It was as though some slumbering giant had fetched a long, deep, tremulous breath in a dream. I started, for it had sounded close, and I looked along the obscure deck forward as if, forsooth, there was any sailor on board whose respiration could rise to such a note as that! In a moment I spied a block of blackness slowly melting out like a dye of ink upon the indigo of the water with the faint flash of moonlight off the wet round of it. A grampus! thought I; and stared about me for others, but no more showed, and the prodigious midnight hush seemed to float down again from the stars like a sensible weight with one wide ripple from where the great[265] fish had sunk, creeping like a line of oil to the yacht’s side and melting soundlessly in her shadow.

This grave-like repose lasted the night through, and when early in the morning, awakened by the light of the newly risen sun, I mounted to the deck, I found the ocean stretched flat as the top of a table, the sky, of a dirty bluish haze, thickening down and merged into the ocean line so that you couldn’t see where the horizon was, save just under the sun where the head of the misty white sparkle in the water defined the junction. It baffled and bothered the sight to look into the distance, so vaporous and heavy it all was, with a dull blue gleam here and there upon the water striking into the faintness like a sunbeam into mist, and all close to, as it seemed, though by hard peering you might catch the glimmer of the calm past the mixture of hazy light and hues where sea and sky seemed to end.

Jacob Crimp had charge. I asked him if all had been quiet below in the cabin.

‘Ay,’ he answered, ‘I’ve heard of nothen to the contrairy. Her ledship came on deck during the middle watch and had a bit of a yarn with me.’

‘Indeed!’ said I.

‘Yes, she scared me into a reg’lar clam. I was standing at the rail thinking I see a darkness out under the moon as if a breath of wind were coming along, and a woice just behind me says, “What’s your name?” Nigh hand tarned my hair white to see her, so quiet she came and her eyes like corposants.’

‘What did she talk about?’ said I in a careless way.

‘Asked what the sailor was a-sitting in the cabin for. “To prevent murder being done,” says I. “Murder?” says she. “Yes,” says I, “and to prewent this wessel from being set on fire and blown to yellow blazes,” says I, “for God knows,” says I, “what weight of gunpowder ain’t stowed away forrard.” “Who’s a-going to do all this?” says she; so I jist told her that Sir Wilfrid had been took worse, and that the order had come forward that the cabin was to be watched.’

‘What did she say to that?’ I exclaimed.

‘Why, walked to t’other side of the deck and sot down and remained an hour, till I reckoned that when she went below she must ha’ been pretty nigh streaming with dew.’

‘What do you think of the weather, Mr. Crimp?’

‘It’s agin nature,’ he answered. ‘Like lying off Blackwall for smoothness. ’Taint going to last, though. Nothing that’s agin nature ever do, whether it’s weather, or a dawg with two tails, or a cat with eight legs.’

‘I wish you were a magician,’ said I, ‘I’d tassel your handkerchief for a strong breeze. A roasting day with a vengeance, and the first of a long succession, I fear.’

At breakfast I told Miss Laura of Lady Monson’s visit on deck in the middle watch, and the mate’s blunt statement to her. ‘It[266] was a mighty dose of truth to administer,’ said I. ‘She will pass some bad quarters of an hour, I fear. Think of old Jacob talking to her of murder and fire, and explosions unto yellow blazes, whatever that may mean, with her husband sleeping right abreast of her cabin and armed, as she must know.’

‘Has he those pistols?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I answered; ‘I gave the case to one of the stewards to return to him, and now I am sorry I did so.’

‘Of course Henrietta will be frightened,’ she exclaimed. ‘I do not envy her in her loneliness. Why should she refuse to see me? I easily understand her objection to showing herself on deck by daylight; but I am her sister; I could sit with her; I could be company for her, win her, perhaps,’ she said with a wistful look, ‘to something like a gentle mood.’ She sighed deeply and continued: ‘Wilfrid scared me yesterday. There was that in his face which shocked me, but I could not explain what it was. Yet I am not the least bit afraid he will commit any deed of violence. Let him be twenty times madder than he now is, his heart is so tender, his spirit so boylike, pure, honourable, there is so much of sweetness and affection in his nature that I am certain his cruellest delirium would be tempered by his qualities.’

I was grateful to her for thus speaking of my poor cousin, but I could not agree with her. The qualities she pinned her faith to had suffered him at all events to shoot Colonel Hope-Kennedy and to make nothing of the man’s death. Yet, thought I, looking at her, seeing how this sweet little creature values, and to a large extent understands him, what devil’s influence was upon the loving, large-hearted, childlike man when he chose the other one for his wife? But, fond of him and sorry for him as I was, I could not have wished it otherwise—for my sake at all events; though on her part it would have made her ‘her ladyship’ and found her a husband whose brain I don’t doubt might year by year have grown stronger in the cheerful and fructifying light of her cordial, sympathetic, radiant character.

I looked in upon him after breakfast. Miss Laura wished to accompany me, but I advised her to delay her visit until I had ascertained for myself how he did. He was lying in his bunk, a large pipe in his mouth, at which he pulled so heartily that his cabin was dim with tobacco smoke. His cheek was supported by his elbow and his eyes fixed upon his watch, a superb gold time-keeper that dangled at the extremity of a heavy chain hitched to a little hook screwed into the deck over his head. On the back of this watch were his initials set in brilliants, and these gems made the golden circle show like a little body of light as it hung motionless before his intent gaze. He did not turn his head when I opened the door, then looked at me in an absent-minded way when I was fairly entered.

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed languidly, ‘it is you, Charles. You promised to sit with me awhile last night.’

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‘I did, but the heat below was unendurable. It is no better now. The temperature of this cabin must be prodigious. What calculations are you making?’ said I.

‘None,’ he answered. ‘I have slung the watch to observe if there is any movement in the yacht. She is motionless. Mark it. There is not a hairbreadth of vibration. We are afloat, of course?’ he said, suddenly looking at me.

‘I hope so,’ said I. ‘Afloat? Why, what do you suppose, Wilf? That we’ve gone to the bottom?’

‘It would be all one for me,’ he answered with a deep sigh, and then applying himself to his pipe again with a sort of avidity that made one think of a hungry baby sucking at a feeding bottle. He clouded the air with tobacco smoke and said: ‘I am heartily weary of life.’

‘And why?’ cried I: ‘because we are in a dead calm with the equator close aboard. The very deep is rotting. A calm of this kind penetrates through the pores of the skin, enters the soul and creates a thirsty yearning for extinction. Being younger than you. Wilf, I give myself another twelve hours, and then, if no breeze blows, I shall, like you, be weary of life and desire to die.’

‘It is easily managed,’ said he.

‘Yes,’ cried I, startled, ‘no doubt; but the weather may change, you know.’ And not at all relishing his remark nor the looks that accompanied it, I seized my hat and fell to fanning the atmosphere with the notion of expelling some of the tobacco smoke through the open porthole.

‘I am of opinion,’ said he, puffing and dropping his words alternately with the clouds he expelled whilst he kept his eyes fixed upon his watch, ‘that, spite of the arguments of the divines, life is a free gift to us to be disposed of as we may decide. Nature is invariably compensative. We are brought into this world without our knowledge, and therefore, of course, without our consent, d’ye see, Charles,’ and here he rolled his eyes upon me, ‘and by way of balancing this distracting obligation of compulsory being, nature says you may do what you like with existence: keep it or part with it.’

‘I say, Wilfrid,’ said I, ‘there are surely more cheerful topics for an equinoctial dog-day than this you have lighted on. Don’t speculate, my dear fellow; leave poor old nature alone. Take short views, and let the puzzling distance unfold and determine itself to your approach. It is the wayfarers who decline to look ahead, who whistle as they trudge along the road of life. The melancholy faces are those whose eyes are endeavouring to see beyond the horizon towards which they are advancing. Tell me now—about this cabin door of yours. My dear fellow, it must be big enough this morning to enable you to pass through; so come along on deck, will you, Wilfrid?’

‘Damn it, how blind you are!’ he exclaimed.

‘No, I’m not,’ said I.

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‘D’ye mean to say that you can’t see what’s happened to me since we last met?’

‘What now, Wilfrid?’

‘What now?’ he shouted. ‘Why, man, I can’t stand upright.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Because I’m too tall for this cabin,’ he answered in a voice of passion and grief.

‘Pray when did you find that out?’ said I.

‘On rising to dress myself this morning,’ he answered, ‘I was obliged to clothe myself in my bunk. What a dreadful blow to befall a man! I can’t even quit my bed now, and everything I want must be handed to me.’

Well, well! thought I; God mend him soon. Hot as it was, a chill ran through me to the crazy, wistful, despairful look he directed at me, and I was oppressed for a moment with the same sickness of heart that had visited me during my interview with him on the preceding day.

‘I had resolved to sell the “Bride,”’ said he mournfully, putting his pipe into a shelf at the back of him and folding his hands, which seemed to me to have grown thin and white during the past few days, upon his breast, ‘but I shan’t be able to do so now.’ I was silent. ‘She will have to be broken up,’ he added.

‘Nonsense!’ I exclaimed.

‘But I say yes!’ he suddenly roared; ‘how the devil else am I to get out of her?’

‘Oh, I see!’ I answered soothingly, ‘I forgot that. But, Wilf, since you’re too big to use this cabin, for the present only, for I am certain you will dwindle to your old proportions before long, don’t you think you ought to have an attendant constantly with you, some one at hand sitting here to wait upon you?’

‘Why, yes,’ said he, ‘no doubt of it. I am almost helpless now. But I’ll not have that rascal Muffin.’

‘No, no,’ said I. ‘Nor would the stewards make the sort of servants you want. If I were in your place I should like to be waited on by a couple of jolly hearty sailors, fellows to take turn and turn about in looking after me, chaps with their memories full of long yarns, unconventional, sympathetic, no matter how rough their manners, agile, strong as horses, with lively limbs, used to springing about. One or two such men are to be met forward amongst your crew.’

‘A good idea,’ he cried. ‘Gad! after my experiences of Muffin I’d rather be waited upon by the tarriest of tarry tarpaulins than one of your sleek, soft-stepping, trained rogues who come and ask you for a situation with an excellent character in one pocket from their late master, and in the other the contents of his dressing-case. Ha, ha, ha!’ and here he delivered one of his short roars of laughter.

I remained conversing with him until an hour was gone. Now that he had put his pipe down the atmosphere of the cabin grew[269] somewhat endurable, yet the heat was extraordinarily great, and due, so far as one’s sensations went, not more to the temperature than to the incredible motionlessness of the yacht, so that there was not the faintest stir of air in the porthole. I spoke of Lady Monson, fancying that the thought of her might help to steady his mind and bring him away from his crazy notions of growth and expansion; but he would not talk of her; as regularly as I worked round to the subject of her ladyship, as regularly was he sliding off into some other topic. Sometimes I’d think that feeling had utterly changed in him; that there had grown up in him for the woman whom he had again and again vowed to me he adored, a loathing to which his innate good taste forbade him to give expression. How it would be if they should meet I could not tell. Her black tragic eyes might not have lost their fascination, nor her shape of beauty and dignity its power of delighting and enamouring him. But certainly, as we sat conversing, the sort of cowering air that accompanied his abrupt changing of the subject every time I mentioned his wife’s name was strongly suggestive of disgust and aversion. He talked very sensibly save about his dimensions, but I took notice in him of a hankering after the topic of suicide. Several times he tried to bring me into an argument upon it.

‘Am I to be told,’ he said, ‘that a man’s life is not his own? If not, to whom does it belong, pray?’

‘To heaven,’ I responded sullenly.

‘Prove it,’ he sneered.

‘Oh, ’tis too plain and established a fact to need proving,’ said I.

‘If a man’s life is his own,’ he cried, ‘who the deuce in this world has the right to hinder him from doing what he will with it?’

‘Wilf, if this goes on,’ said I, ‘we shall be landed in a religious controversy; a thing unendurable even under the sign of the frozen serpent, but down here with a thermometer at about 112° in the cabin, no ice nearer than 56° north?—see here, my dear cousin, get you small again as soon as you can, back to your old size, join Laura and myself at the table afresh, walk the decks with us, taste the fragrance of a cigar upon the cool night air; realise that your little one is at home waiting for you, and that on your return you will have plenty of homely occupation in looking after those excellent improvements in your property which you were telling me the other day you had in your mind. This sudoriferous speculation as to whether people have a right to hinder a man from taking his life will then exhale.’

And so I would go on chatting, talking him away, so to speak, from this gloomy subject which his condition rendered depressing and most uncomfortably significant in his mouth.

However, my visit to him had led to one stroke of good, for on quitting him I at once went to Finn, who was on deck, and told him how Sir Wilfrid had fallen into my scheme and was for having a couple of sailors to wait upon him, one of whom should be constantly in his cabin.

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‘You must be plain with the fellows, captain,’ said I; ‘tell them that Sir Wilfrid’s craze grows upon him and that he must be narrowly watched, but with tact.’

‘I’ll see to it, sir,’ said he; ‘can’t do better than Cutbill and Furlong, I think. They’re both hearty chaps, chock-a-block with lively yarns, and they’ve both got good tempers. But dorn’t his honour get no better then, sir?’

‘No,’ said I.

‘Dorn’t he feel as if he was a-coming back to his old shape, sir?’

‘On the contrary,’ I answered, ‘yesterday he had only broadened, but this morning he feels so tall that he can’t stand upright.’

‘Well to be sure!’ cried the worthy fellow, with his long face working all over with concern and anxiety. ‘It’s all her ladyship’s doing. It’s all her caper-cutting that’s brought him to this. Such a gentle heart as he has, too, and a true gentleman through and through him when his mind sits square in his head? But lor’ bless me, sir, what did he want to go and get married for? ’Taint as if he wanted a home, or a gal with money enough to keep him. Not that it’s for me to say a word agin marriage, for my missus has always kept a straight helm steady in my wake ever since I took her in tow. But all the same, I’m of opinion that matrimony is an institootion that don’t fit this here earth. It’s a sort of lock-up; a man’s put into a cell along with a gal. If she’s a proper kind of gal, why well and good. The window dorn’t seem barred and ye don’t take much notice of your liberty being gone; but if she tarns out to be of her ladyship’s sort, why there’s nothen to do but to sing out through the keyhole for a rope to hang yourself with, or, if ye ain’t got sperret enough for that remedy, to hang her with.’

The delivery of this harangue seemed to ease his mind, and he went forward with a face tolerably composed to give instructions to the two men who were to serve as companions or, to put it bluntly, as keepers to Wilfrid.

The weather held phenomenally silent and breathless. Just before lunch I went right aft, where I commanded the length of the vessel, and steadfastly watched her, and though I had my eye upon the line of her jibboom I did not see that the end of the spar lifted or fell to the extent of the breadth of a finger-nail. The sole satisfaction that was to be got out of this unparalleled condition of stagnation was the feeling that it could not possibly last. The dim and dirty blue of the sea went rounding not above a mile distant into a like hue of atmosphere, with a confused half-blinded vagueness of sky overhead that did not seem to be higher up than twice the height of our masts, and the appearance made you think of sitting in a glass globe sunk a fathom or two under water with the light sifting through to you in a tarnished, misty, ugly azure. A strange part of it was that though the sky was cloudless the atmosphere was so thick you could watch the sun, which hovered[271] shapeless as a jelly-fish almost overhead, for a whole minute at a time, without inconvenience; yet his heat bit fiercely for all that; there was a wake, too, under him, flakes of muddy yellow-like sheets of a ship’s sheathing scaling one under another, as though they were going to the bottom in a procession. If you put your hand upon the rail clear of the awning you brought it away with a stamp of pain. I touched the brass binnacle hood by accident and bawled aloud to the burn which raised me a blister on the side of my hand that lasted for three days. A sort of impalpable steam rose from the very decks, so that if a man stood still a moment you saw his figure trembling in it like the quivering of an object beheld in clear running water. And how am I to express that deeper quality of heat which seemed to come into the atmosphere with the smell of the blistering of paint along the yacht’s sides?

Yet there was no fall in the mercury, no hint above or below to indicate a change at hand. Close alongside the burnished water lay clear as crystal and gave back every image with almost startling brilliance. I remember looking over and seeing my face in the clear profound as distinctly as ever I had viewed it in a mirror. It lay like a daguerreotype there. It was of course as deep down as I was high above the surface, and I protest it was like looking at one’s self as though one floated a drowned man.

It was the right kind of day for a plunge, and I pined for a swim, for the delight of the cool embrace of the glass-clear brine. But the skipper would not hear of it.

‘To the first splash, sir,’ he exclaimed, ‘there’d sprout up a regular crop of black fins. It isn’t because there’s nothing showing now that there ain’t a deal more than I for one ’ud care to see close at hand. No sir; be advised by me; don’t you go overboard.’

‘Oh, captain,’ said I, ‘I’ve been a sailor in my day and of course know how to obey orders. But I’ve cruised a good deal in my time in John Sharkee’s waters, and with all due deference to you I must say that whenever there are sharks about one or more will be showing.’

‘Sorry to contradict ye, sir, but my answer’s no to that,’ he replied. ‘Tell ’ee what I’ll do, sir—there’s nothen resembling a shark hanging round now, is there?’

We both stared carefully over the water, and I said no.

‘Well, now, sir,’ he exclaimed, ‘I’ll bet ’ee a farden’s worth of silver spoons that I’ll call up a shark to anything I may choose to chuck overboard.’

‘Make it a pennyworth of silver spoons,’ said I, ‘and I’ll bet.’

‘Done,’ said he with a grin, and straightway walked forward. After a little he returned with a canvas-bag stuffed full of rubbish, potato-parings, yarns, shavings enough to make it floatable, and the like. He hitched the end of a leadline to it, jumped on to the taffrail clear of the awning, and whirling it three or four times, sent it speeding some distance away on the quarter. It fell with a splash,[272] and the blur it made upon the flawless surface was for all the world like the impress of a damp finger upon a sheet of looking-glass. He towed it gently, and scarce had he drawn in three fathoms of the line when a little distance past the bag up shot the fin of a shark with a gleam off its black wetness as though it were a beer-bottle. He hauled the bag aboard and the fin disappeared.

‘Are they to be egg-spoons or dessert-spoons, Finn?’ said I, laughing. ‘By George, I shouldn’t have believed it, though. But it’s always so. Let a man fancy that he knows anything to the very top of it, and he’s sure to fall in with somebody who has a trick above him.’

But it was too hot for shark-fishing, let alone the mess of a capture on our ivory-white planks. At first I was for decoying the beasts to the surface and letting fly at them with one of the muskets below, but Finn suggested that the firing might irritate Sir Wilfrid. What was to be done but lie down and pant? Miss Laura was so overcome by the heat that for once she proved bad company. At lunch she could not eat; she was too languid to talk.

‘Just the afternoon for a game of draughts,’ said I, in playful allusion to the want of air.

She waved away the suggestion with a weak movement. In fact she was so oppressed that when I told her about Wilfrid’s new phase of growth she could only look at me dully as though all capacity of emotion lay swooning in her heart. I sat by her side fanning her, whilst the perspiration hopped from my forehead like parched peas.

‘Oh,’ cried the little creature, ‘how long is this calm going to last? What would I give for an English Christmas day to tumble down out of the sky upon us, with its snow and hail.’

‘Let us go on deck,’ said I; ‘I am certain it is cooler up there.’

We mounted the steps, but she was scarcely out of the companion hatch when she declared it was a great deal hotter above than below, and down she went again. After all, thought I, Sir Wilfrid and his wife are as well off in their cabins as though they had permitted themselves to wander at large about the yacht. Yet it seemed a roasting existence to my fancy for the self-made prisoners when I glanced aft and thought of the size of their cabins, with not air enough to stir a feather in the open ports, and Cutbill’s huge form in Wilfrid’s berth to give as distinct a rise to the thermometer there as though a stove had been introduced and a fire kindled in it.

All day long it was the same smoky, confused blending of misty blue water and heaven shrouding down overhead and closing upon us, with the sea like a dish of polished steel set in the midst of it, bright as glass where we lay, then dimming into a bluish faintness in the atmospheric thickness at its confines, and the sun a distorted face of weak yellow brightness staring down as he slided westwards with an aspect that made him look as though he were some newly-created luminary. At about six o’clock he hung over[273] the sea line glowing like a huge live cinder, and the air was filled with his smoky crimson glare that went sifting and tingling into the distance till one was able to see twice as far again, a red gleam of sea opening past the dimness and a delicate liquid dye of violet melting down, as one might have thought, from the highest reaches of the heavens into the eastern atmosphere.

‘Hillo!’ cried I to Jacob Crimp, who was leaning over the side with his face purple with heat and full of loathing of the weather; ‘direct your eyes into the south, will ye, and tell me what you see there?’

He turned with the leisurely action peculiar to merchant-sailors, lifted the sharp of his hand to his brow and peered sulkily in the direction which I had indicated.

‘Clouds,’ said he. ‘Is that what ye mean?’

‘Yes,’ said I, ‘and a very noble and promising coast of them, too, as I believe we shall be finding out presently when the change which I hope their brows are charged with shall have clarified the air.’

In fact I had just then caught sight, away down in the south amidst the haziness there, of some bronze streaks stretching from south-east to south-west, with here and there dashes of exceedingly faint shadow of the colour of flint. Much looking was not needful; it was quickly to be seen that right astern of our course, though as the yacht lay just then the appearance was off the starboard beam, there had gathered and was slowly mounting a long, heavy body of thunderous cloud scarce visible as yet save in its few bronze outlines.

‘It will mean a change I hope,’ said I to Crimp; ‘more than mere thunder and lightning, let us pray. Yet the drop in the glass is scarcely noticeable.’

‘Time something happened anyway,’ said he. ‘Dum me if it ain’t been too hot even for the sharks to show themselves. I allow the “’Liza Robbins” ain’t over sweet just now.’

‘No, I’d rather be you than your brother to-day, Crimp.’

‘Sorry to hear from the captain,’ said he, ‘that Sir Wilfrid’s got the notion in his head that he’s growed in the night till he’s too tall to stand upright.’

‘Yes,’ said I, ‘and I hope his craze may end at that.’

‘There’s but one cure for the likes of such tantrums,’ said he.

‘And pray what is that, Mr. Crimp?’

‘Fright. Git the hair of a chap that’s mad to stand on end, and see if his crazes don’t fly clean off out of it like cannon balls out of a broadside of guns.’

‘Ay, but fright, as you call it, might drive my poor cousin entirely mad, Mr. Crimp.’

‘No fear,’ he answered. ‘Tell ’ee what I’ll ondertake to do. What’s the hour now?’

‘Call it six o’clock,’ said I.

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‘Well, I’ll ondertake by half-past six to have Sir Wilfrid running about these ’ere decks.’

‘And what’s the prescription, pray?’

‘Why, there’s a scuttle to his cabin, ain’t there?’

‘Yes,’ I answered.

‘An’ it lies open, I allow, a day like this. Werry well. Give me ten minutes to go forrards and black my face and dress up my head according to the notion that’s in my mind; then let me be lowered by a bowline over the side. I pops my head into the scuttle and sings out in a terrible woice, “Hullo, there, I’m the devil,” I says, says I, “and I’ve come,” says I, “to see if ye’ve got any soul left that’s worth treating for.” And what d’ye think he’d do at sight of me? Why run out of his cabin as fast as his legs ’ud carry him.’

‘More likely let fly a pistol at you,’ I exclaimed, laughing at the look of self-complacency with which the sour little fellow eyed me. ‘However, Mr. Crimp, we’ll leave all remedies for Sir Wilfrid alone till we see what yonder shadow to the southward is going to do for us,’ and so saying I stepped below to change my coat for dinner.