GREAVES SICKENS.
This time gives a date to a change that came over Greaves. It was the
change of sickness. He grew feverish, irritable, fanciful; his appetite
fell away; the light in his eyes dimmed; sometimes he would put on a
staring look, as though he beheld something beyond that at which he
gazed.
I had been struck by his manner, and more by his manner than by his
speech, when he lectured Wirtz and flung at Antonio, the Spaniard, as
you have read in the last chapter. Yet of itself this would not have
been a matter to rest very weightily upon my mind, seeing that all along
I had considered Greaves as a little, just a little, mad at the root.
But soon the incident took significance as being a first lifting of the
curtain, so to speak, upon a new and somewhat crazy behavior in my
friend. I hoped at first it was the heat that unsettled his nerves and
that the Horn would give me back my old, odd, hearty, generous shipmate
and messmate. Then I feared that the blow he had dealt himself when he
stumbled in the hold of the _Casada_ had been silently and painlessly
working bitter mischief in the organ of the liver, or in parts adjacent
thereto. If the liver was hurt the strangeness of the man might be
accounted for. I have suffered from the liver in my time, and know what
it is to have felt mad; I say I have known moments--O God, avert the
like of them from me and those I love--when I could scarce restrain
myself from breaking windows, kicking at the shins of all who approached
me, knocking my head against the wall, yelling with the yell of one who
drops in a fit; and all the while my brain was as healthy as the
healthiest that ever filled a human skull, and nothing was wanted but a
musketry of calomel pills to dislodge the fiend that was jockeying my
liver and galloping the whole fabric of my being down the easy descent.
It will not be supposed that the change in Greaves was sudden. It
uttered itself at capricious intervals, and at the beginning was more
visible in the mood than in the man.
For example, it was, I think, about four days after the little incident
which brings the last chapter to a close. I had charge of the deck from
eight to midnight. Miss Aurora had passed half an hour with me,
sometimes asking questions by gestures distinguishable by the light of
the moon, sometimes attempting strange sentences in English, all the
words correctly pronounced, but so misplaced that with true British
politeness I was forever breaking into a laugh at her. A moment there
had been when she was in earnest. She came to a stand, her face fronting
the moon so that I witnessed the working of it, her eyes with a little
silver flame in each liquid depth dark as the sea over the side. She
spoke in Spanish, with here and there a word of English. It seemed to me
she referred to the voyage. I fancied that I worked out of her words the
meaning that she desired to continue in the brig, and was content. How
did I gather this, when I tell you in the next breath that I could not
understand her? Well, it was my _fancy_ of her meaning that I give you,
but whether I understood her or not she motioned with an air of tragic
distress, clasped her hands, looked up at the stars, and cried in
English, “Sad--sad--not understand--sad.” We then resumed our walk, and
presently she left me.
Now it was that Greaves arrived. He smoked a long curled pipe of Turkish
workmanship and moved noiseless in slippers. The moonlight whitened his
face and silvered his hair and blackened his eyes till, elsewhere, I
might have looked twice without knowing him. We were to the southward of
the Lima parallel, our course south by west. The Bolivian coast trends
inward. Our course gave us to larboard a wide sweep of open ocean and
this we should hold down to the latitude of 50°. After which the chance
was small of our falling in with anything armed under Spanish colors.
We had made noble progress taking the days all round, and this night we
were courtesying onward with a pretty breeze off the larboard beam--a
wind that ran the waters gushing white to the bends, and overhead were
all the stars and the moon in their midst dimming a circle of them, and
under the moon the play of the sea was like a torrent of boiling silver.
“This is a desolate ocean,” said Greaves.
“So much the better for us,” said I.
“Oh, yes, so much the better for us. But the solitude of the sea is a
burden that the heart don’t always beat lightly under. Is solitude a
material thing? It has the weight of substance when it settles upon the
spirits.”
I let him talk on. He was fond of big, fine words, and the stranger he
became the more heroic grew his vein.
“Any more rows forward among the men?”
“I have heard of none.”
“I had two men who fought through a voyage. They had sailed together
before and fought throughout. ‘They will fight while they meet on
earth,’ said the boatswain of the ship to me, ‘and they will fight if
they catch sight of each other at the Resurrection.’” He puffed a cloud
of smoke upon the wind and looked round the sea. “I am unsettled in my
faith,” said he, “I am troubled by doubts. I believe I am almost Roman
Catholic, but lack sufficient credulity to enable me to bring up in that
faith. I will tell you what I mean to believe in,” continued he, halting
in his walk, compelling me to stand, and looking me full in the face;
“I am going to believe in the transmigration of souls.”
“Oh, you’ll wish to choose your next body before deciding, won’t you?”
said I. “You wouldn’t be a flea or a cockroach?”
“The flea and perhaps the cockroach have short lives,” said he gravely,
“and the next entry might be into something noble. But stop till I tell
you why I am going to believe in the transmigration of souls. I had a
dream a few nights since. I dreamt that I was a Jewess. I beheld my face
in a glass and admired it vastly. My eyes flashed and were full of fire;
my lips were scarlet. I wore something white about my head. I knew that
I was a Jewess. Shadowy faces of many races of people approached, looked
me close in the eye, felt my face with their hands, accosted me, and I
could not speak. I was suffocated with the want of speech. But on a
sudden I obtained relief. I opened my mouth and spoke, and the words I
spoke were Hebrew.”
“D’ye know Hebrew?” said I.
“A stupid question to ask a sailor.”
“How do you know you spoke in Hebrew?”
“Because it wasn’t Greek; because it wasn’t Welsh;
because--because--man, it was just Hebrew.”
“And how does transmigration offer here?” said I.
“I was my own soul, informing the body of a Jewess. My soul, of course,
couldn’t utter itself, as it was fresh from the body of an Englishman,
until it had filled up, as smoke might, every cranny and brain cell of
the shape it possessed; until it had penetrated to the crypts and dark
foundations of the woman’s heart. Then, seeking vent, my soul broke
through the lips of the Jewess. In what tongue, d’ye ask? In what but
the tongue of her nation?”
“This,” thought I, “is the lady Aurora’s doing. She it is who’s the
Jewess of my poor friend’s dream. The fiery eyes, if not the scarlet
lips, are hers, and hers the arrest and suffocation of speech.”
But I guessed it would anger him to put this; yet it grieved me to hear
this nonsense in his mouth, and the more because his looks by the moon,
that shone upon us while he discoursed, gave a gloomy accentuation
of--what shall I call it? not yet madness; not yet craziness; let me
rather speak of it as wildness--to his words.
He walked with me for above an hour, talking on this absurdity of
transmigration, and reasoning illogically, and often with irreverence,
on points relating to the salvation of man. It is a bad sign when
religion gets into a man’s head and acidly turns into windiness and
nightmare imaginations, as a sweet milk hardens into curdy flatulence in
the belly of the suckling.
I sought to shift the helm of his mind by talking about the dollars
below; by speaking about the crew and my secret distrust of Yan Bol; by
calling his attention to the look of his brig as she floated, with
aslant spars, through the moonlight, flowing lengths of the sails
curving in alabaster beyond the shadow in their hollows, the water,
black as ink under her bowsprit, pouring aft in fire and snow. But all
to no purpose. He looked and seemed not to see; he repeated, in a
mouthing, absent way, my sentences about Bol and other matters, and
immediately struck back again into his talk about heaven, his soul, the
Jewess he had dreamt of, and the like.
But, even without seeing him, even without hearing him, I should have
known that there was something wrong with the man by the behavior of his
dog. I do not say that all dogs have souls; but I am as sure that
Galloon had a soul of his own, after its kind, as that my eyes are
mates. As a change slowly came over Greaves, so slowly changed Galloon.
I would notice the dog watching his master’s face at table, and found a
score of human emotions in the creature’s expression. I’d see him lying
at Greaves’ door if the captain was within, when formerly he would be on
deck cruising about among the men or skylarking aft with me. If I called
him, he’d come slowly. There was no more capering up to me, no more
buoyant greetings, no leapings and lickings and short, eager yelps of
salutation in response to the many things I’d say to him. We make much
of human love, I would think while caressing the dog or looking at him,
and the love of man we call a passion; but the love of the dog we call
an instinct. Yet is not the instinct nobler than the passion? Purity it
has that is faultless. Is human passion pure to faultlessness? There is
selfishness in human passion, but the love of yonder dog for its master
is without selfishness. Many qualities enter into the passion of love;
but the love of yonder dog is a primary quality in him. It is as gold
among metals. Supposing analysis possible, then analyze the brute’s
affection, and you find not a hair’s weight, not a dust-grain’s bulk, of
vitiating element.
The lady Aurora was quick to notice the change in Greaves. Her lids
moved swiftly upon her eyes, and their lashes were a veil, and she had
an art of glancing without seeming to glance. She did not like him, and
would not appear to see him more often than courtesy obliged. Her rapid
glances, therefore, on occasions when she would have found other
occupation for her eyes, told me that she was struck by the man’s looks,
that she wondered at them and guessed their significance. I was no
doctor. For all I could tell she might have some knowledge under that
head. I fancied this from her manner of looking at Greaves.
So one day, when she and I were alone in the cabin, Bol on the lookout
above, and the captain in his berth, I endeavored to converse with her
about my friend; but to no purpose. Intelligibility vanished in signs,
shakes of the head, dumb pointings to the brow and ribs. She had,
indeed, picked up a little English. She was able to pronounce the names
of various articles of food, also had several English nautical terms at
her tongue’s end; but when it came to trying to talk about Greaves’
state of health, there was nothing for it but to crook our brows, hunch
our backs, and work meaning into nonsense with postures.
Yet I managed to discover that the lady and I were agreed in this; that
Greaves had received some internal injury from his fall, that it was
slowly sickening him, and affecting his mind.
Nevertheless, he went about as usual, punctually took sights, attended
at meals, was up and down during the day and night. He was very rational
in all the orders he gave to the men, in all direct instructions to me
respecting shipboard discipline and routine. It was by fits and starts
that his growing wildness showed, and always when he had me alone; and
then the matter of his discourse was dreams and religion and death. Not
that he talked as though he supposed his end was approaching; upon his
words lay no shadow of the melancholy that is cast by the dread event
when the heart knows, dimly and mysteriously, that it is coming. He
chattered as if for argument’s sake; postulated to disprove his own
assertions, but he was seldom logical, often devout, filled to the very
twang of his nose with fervor, and at other times, and on a sudden, as
impious as young John Bunyan.
What think you of this character of a seaman, of a plain north-country
merchant seaman; _you_ whose ideas of the nautical man are gotten from
Smollett’s studies, from the delightful portraits of dear Captain
Marryatt? But, Jack, bless ye! _you_, who have been to sea, _you_ who
have sailed ten times round the world, who have swung your hammock in a
score of forecastles, and who have outweathered Satan himself in a dozen
different aspects of ship’s captains, _you_, mate, will approve this
sketch, will recognize its truth, will tell the landlubbers that at sea
are many varieties of men--men who swear not, who are gentle, faithful
in their duty below; men who are a little crazy, who drink deeply and
are devils in their thoughts and madmen in their behavior, but trucklers
and slaverers to those who hire them; men who are hearty, pimpled, broad
of beam, verdant with the grog blossom and green in naught else, moist
in the weather eye, and bow-legged by great seas.
One Sunday morning, when we had left the island a little more or less
than three weeks behind us, Greaves said to me at the breakfast table:
“I shall hold divine service this morning on deck.”
I stared, but said nothing.
“I’ll read a portion of the Church of England liturgy to the men,” said
he, “and a chapter out of the Bible. What chapter do you recommend?”
I was at a loss.
“Give them something interesting,” said I, “something that will carry
them along with you.”
“Right,” he exclaimed, with a little light of vivacity in his somewhat
sunken and somewhat leaden eye, “what d’ye say to a fight out of
Joshua?”
“I do not think,” I answered, “that a good fight out of Joshua could be
bettered.”
“I’ll give ’em that chapter,” said he, “in which the son of Nun corks
the five kings up in a cave and then hangs them. Not that there’s any
moral that I can see in that sort of narrative. It is an Ebrew Gazette
extraordinary--a pitiful, bloody business from beginning to end. But if
the reading of a chapter of it causes even one of the sailors to take an
interest in the Bible I shall have done some good.”
“So you will.”
“Do you know the men’s persuasions?”
“Not I, captain.”
“The Spaniards are Roman Catholics, of course. The Dutchmen and the
others will be of us if they’re of anything. When you go on deck tell
Bol to see that the crew clean themselves, and let him muster and bring
them aft for divine service at half-past ten.”
“Ay, ay, sir.”
Miss Aurora sat over against me at this meal as at most others; she
stared at me as though something was wrong. I did not wonder; I had been
unable to conceal my astonishment at Greaves’ orders for divine service.
Down to this moment he had never read a prayer to the men, never
exhibited the least disposition to do so, never imported the faintest
shadow of anything religious into the dull and swinish routine of the
brig. It was somewhat late in the day to lay up on _that_ tack,
methought. But it was for me to obey, and I went on deck, leaving
Greaves sitting. Miss Aurora followed, and touched my elbow as I passed
through the companion hatch.
“What is it?” said she, in English.
“Nothing, nothing,” I answered, smiling and shaking my head, for it
would have given me a deal too much to act, with Yan Bol and the fellow
at the wheel as spectators, to gesticulate Greaves’ intention to collect
all hands to prayers.
“No danger?” said she, speaking again in English.
“No, no,” I responded heartily.
She touched her forehead, clasped her hands, and turned up her eyes to
heaven with one of her incomparable expressions of tragic melancholy,
sighed heavily, and returned to the cabin.
“Bol,” said I, stepping up to the great Dutchman where he stood near the
wheel, “you will see that the men clean themselves and muster aft by
half-past ten for divine service.”
“What’s dot?” said he.
“Prayers.”
He looked at Teach, who was at the helm, and a smile crawled over his
face, as wind creeps over a surface of sea. His smile wrinkled his
massive visage to the line of his hair.
“Brayers, Mr. Fielding! Dot vhas strange after all dese months. For vhat
vhas ve to pray now dot der dollars vhas on boardt?”
“Reason the matter with the captain, if you choose. You have your
instructions.”
“Ay, ay, sir. Mr. Fielding, may I hov a verdt mit you?”
He spoke respectfully, and moved from the wheel. He was a man I had been
careful to give a wide berth to throughout the voyage; but also was he a
man whom, for my own peace sake, I had been at some pains not to give
offense to. The familiarity of the fellow was Dutch. I never could make
sure that it was more than a characteristic of his countrymen with him,
and that he meant insolence when he spoke insolently. I bore in mind,
moreover, that secretly he, and no doubt the rest of the crew, viewed me
as an interloper--as one who would, probably, share far more handsomely
than they in the treasure without having entered at Amsterdam or having
formed a part of the original scheme of the expedition. This
consideration, then, made me wary in my relations with Yan Bol.
He moved from the wheel out of earshot of the fellow there, and said, in
a rumbling voice of subdued thunder:
“I oxbects dot der captain vhas not fery vell, Mr. Fielding?”
“He is not very well.”
“She vhas a bad shob if he vhas to took und die.”
“Yaw; but what is it you wish to say to me?”
“I hov nothing to say, Mr. Fielding, oxcept vhat I hov said. Der men
likes to know how her captain vhas. Vhen I goes forwardt und tells dem
dot dey most lay aft und bray, dey vhas for vanting to know if der
captain vhas all right mit his headt. Oxcuse me, Mr. Fielding, but vhas
it all right mit der captain’s headt?”
“We are talking of the captain,” said I.
“Ay, ay, sir; and I shpeaks mit all respect. You vhas first mate; I oct
second. It vhas right ve shpeaks together, vhen der capt’n’s health vhas
in trouble.”
“You are able to judge of his state as well as I, Bol.”
“No; you live close mit him. My end of der ship vhas yonder.”
His voice seemed to deepen yet as he spoke these words, while he pointed
with his vast square hand to the forecastle. I held my peace, sending a
look to windward and at the wheel, as a hint to him to go. He stood a
while viewing me and appearing to consider, all with a heavy Dutch
leisureliness of manner and expression, as though his thoughts rose
slow, like whales, to the surface of his intelligence, spouted, and sunk
before he could harpoon them; then, saying, “Vell, brayers at half-past
ten. Dot vhas a strange idea now der money vhas on boardt,” he walked
forward.
This being Sunday morning, the men had nothing to do, and lounged about
the galley, smoking and conversing. I watched Bol approach them. He
stood abreast of a knot and delivered his orders. _That_ I gathered from
the stares, the starts, the hoarse laugh, the rude forecastle joke sent
in a growling shout across to a mate at a distance. A little later,
however, the fellows came together in a body, somewhat forward of the
caboose, some of them out of my sight until my steps carried me to the
gangway. Yan Bol stood among them. It was clear to me that they were
talking over this new scheme of a prayer meeting aft. I kept well away,
and heard nothing but the rumbling of their voices; but it was easy to
guess that the most of their talk ran on the captain’s health and
intellect, and I reckoned that, if they had already noticed any
strangeness in him, this call to prayers would go further to prove him
mad in their eyes than the insanest shipboard order he could have
delivered.
Some while, however, before there was need for Bol to send the men to
clean themselves, Jimmy came out of the cabin and said that the captain
wished to speak to me. The morning was fine, the breeze steady, and the
sea smooth. The deck was to be safely left for a short interval. I
called an order to the helmsman and went below.
Greaves was pacing the cabin floor. The lady Aurora was in her berth,
perhaps at her devotions. Galloon was upon a chair, wistfully watching
his master as he measured the cabin.
Greaves’ face worked with excitement and agitation; his walk was equally
suggestive of distress and disorder. Were there such a thing as news at
sea, I might have supposed that something heart-shaking had come to him.
“Fielding,” he cried, as I stood viewing him from the bottom of the
companion ladder, “I can’t read prayers to the men. The devil’s right.
He’s put it into my head that I’m too wicked, that I’ve been too great a
sinner in the past, and am still altogether too vile to read prayers.”
“Do not attempt to do so then,” said I.
“I might be struck dead for profanity,” said he. “There’s a feeling
here”--he laid his hand upon his heart--“that warns me I shall drop if I
open my lips in the recital of a prayer to the men. Look how nervous I
am!” he exclaimed, with a wild, hard smile; and approaching me close he
extended his hands, which trembled violently, and then, turning up the
palms, he disclosed the channels or lines in them wet with perspiration.
“Tell the men,” said he, “that I am too ill to read prayers. Next
Sunday, perhaps----”
He threw himself upon a locker, and hid his face upon the table. I
watched him for a few minutes, then, going on deck, beckoned to Bol and
told him there would be no prayers that morning. The Dutchman threw a
suspicious look at the skylight and walked forward.
After this incident anxiety increased upon me until it became
indescribably great. I had supposed that the hurt Greaves had done
himself, through the connection which exists between the liver and the
brain, affected his mind; but now, when he was growing worse, I reckoned
he had struck his head as well as his side. Be this as it will, his
intellect was giving way, his health every day decaying, and I say that
when I grew sensible of this, when I understood that unless he took a
turn and mended apace he must die, anxiety made my days bitter.
My old fear of the crew revived. That fear had been hushed somewhat by
the behavior of the men, but it grew clamorous when I thought of Greaves
as dead and buried in the sea, of the treasure of half a million of
dollars in the lazarette, of myself as standing alone in the brig, with
no man in authority to support me, without even the moral backing of
good-will I might have got from the men had I shipped at Amsterdam and
formed one of the Tulp party.
The dead days became dreams and visions to my memory when I thought
backward and recalled the _Royal Brunswicker_, Captain Spalding, my
arrival in the Downs, the gibbet on the sand hills, the press-gang, the
long outward passage to the island, and the hopes and fears which came
and went when Greaves talked rationally of the dollars, then
irrationally of dreams and the like, and so on, and so on. I did pray
very eagerly in my heart that he would be spared. Indeed, I loved the
man. He had saved my life, he had enriched me, he had proved a generous,
cordial, and cheery shipmate and messmate. I say I loved him, and on
several occasions, when I was on deck alone, walking out the weary hours
of the night watch, did I look up at the stars and ask of God to deliver
my friend from the death whose hand was closing upon him. These
petitions would I murmur till my eyes were wet. It was hard that he
should be called away in the prime of his time, after years of the stern
and barren servitude of the sea, at the moment when a noble prize,
gained, as I would think, with high adventurous skill, was his.
But I never could discover, at this time at all events, that he had the
smallest idea he was in a bad way. What was visible to me and the
sailors, to the Spanish lady, yes, and to his own dog, himself did not
see--at least, by never a word that fell from his lips did he give me to
guess he knew he was ill. Sometimes he’d complain of weakness and keep
his bed; he’d wonder what had become of his appetite, that was all; he
never went further. It was I, mainly, who took sights and kept the
ship’s reckoning, who, in fact, navigated the brig, and did the work of
her master. Miss Aurora’s sympathies with him were strong at the
start--that is, when she saw how ill he was and how his illness was
increasing upon him. She’d make efforts to anticipate his wants at
table; with her own hands she’d boil chocolate for him in the caboose
and bring it to the cabin; she let me understand she wished to nurse
him. But whether it was because of simple dislike, or because his poor
head, muddling the fine woman whom he had rescued with the speechless
Jewess of his dream, excited in him some inscrutable fear or aversion I
know not; he would have nothing to say to her, looked away when she
spoke, repelled whatever she offered, often shrank when she
approached--was so crazily discourteous, in a word, that I was obliged
to take the girl aside and, by signs and such words as were now current
between us, advise her to keep clear of him.
As to _her_, she spent much of her time in sewing and in attempting to
master the English tongue out of some books which I borrowed from
Greaves’s cabin, and with such help as I had time to give her. We had
plenty of needles and thread on board. Greaves, before his illness grew,
had given Miss Aurora a handsome roll of pure white duck, or drill--I
forget now which it was--to do what she pleased with. I had found some
remnants of bunting, of different colors, that she might amuse herself,
if she chose, with Greaves’s notion of trimming her dresses; then I had
borrowed a thimble from the forecastle. You will suppose that it was not
a _tight_ fit; but she managed with it. And so she went to work, sewing
in the cabin or in her own berth; and I see her now, with my mind’s eye,
as she sits under the skylight, stitching away like any seamstress
earning a living, the jewels upon her fingers flashing as her hand rises
and falls.
One morning she came out of her berth dressed in a gown of her own
manufacture. It was built on original lines, and it suited her. I
believe she had shaped it to enable her to get about with ease, to allow
her to step without inconvenience up the companion ladder and through
the hatch, to pass through the cabin betwixt the table and the lockers
without being dragged, and sometimes held, by the folds of her skirt,
and to freely move in her little bedroom. The dress she had been cast
away in had hardly permitted this liberty. It was voluminous enough to
have yielded her three clinging skirts; it caught the wind when she was
on deck, and blew out like a topsail in a squall when the yard is on the
cap. I admired her vastly in this costume of her own making. The cut
answered something to my own taste in female apparel; the waist rose
high, the sleeves were tight, the dip and swell of her shape were
defined. I had always suspected that a nobly proportioned woman lay
awkwardly hid in the dress that had heretofore clothed her, and I
guessed I had been right when I looked at her this morning and marked
the curve of the breast, the width of the shoulders, the fine, swinging,
lofty carriage.
The dress was snow white; it fell in with the color of her face. Her
cheeks seemed the whiter for the whiteness of her clothes. She had
trimmed her dress with triple lines of red bunting, and, for my part, I
should never want to see a prettier or more effective gown on a maiden
for sea use.
She stood in the door of her berth, looking archly at me. Galloon
growled, scarce knowing her for the moment. Greaves was in his berth,
for by this time he was ailing badly. She looked down her dress, colored
slightly, then walked up to me and said:
“How you like it? How you like it?” turning herself about a little
coquettishly.
Admiration will often make a man laugh; and I laughed to see her in that
dress and laughed to hear her address me in English; and laughed yet
again, but always admiringly, at her spirited, courting manner of
turning her figure about, that I might get a view of her clothes.
“It is very good, indeed,” said I.
“_Si_, it is very good,” she repeated after me.
She then sought to express herself further, and, failing, signed to let
me know that she had now two dresses, and that presently she would have
three. I pronounced some word of applause in Spanish, which she obliged
me to repeat, that I might catch the correct pronunciation, and we then
sat down to breakfast.
I have told you that she wore some very handsome rings, and on this
occasion it was that I took particular notice of a remarkable ring which
she carried on her left hand. She followed my gaze, and stretched out
her hand to my face. I imagined she intended that I should kiss her
hand, for I was a fool in the customs of nations, and honestly knew not
but that a man’s kissing a woman’s hand thus held out to him, almost to
his lips, as it were, was some Spanish fashion of significant civility
which she would expect me to attend to; so I bent my head and put my
mouth to her hand.
She colored, her eyes flashed, she looked confused; then smiled, shook
her head, and pointed to the ring. I was young and ingenuous, and the
blood rose to my face when I understood that I had blundered; but I held
my peace, and looked at the ring. A moment later she pulled it off and
put it into my hand. It was a very rich ring, formed of ten precious
stones of different sorts and a medallion of the crucifix. I turned it
about, admiring it. She watched me earnestly, and then, with a smile and
a sigh, said:
“You are not Catolique.”
“No,” said I.
She motioned to let me know she could tell as much by my ignorance of
the use of that ring; and then, taking the thing from me, she went
through a pretty and dramatic pantomime, reciting “Aves” while she
touched the ring, and winding up with a sentence out of the
“Paternoster.” She put on the ring after she had made an end of her
pretty pantomime, and, looking again at me earnestly, repeated, with the
same dramatic sigh:
“You are not Catolique.”
“No,” said I.
“You will be Catolique?” she exclaimed, in very fairly pronounced
English, still wearing a wistful and impassioned expression.
I slowly shook my head. She sighed again and looked very downcast; but I
was wanted on deck and could sit at table no longer, and so I left her.