“Don’t you think,” I said, “that the heavy sea which, you told me, came
aboard just then might have killed the man? I have seen the sheer weight
of a sea kill a man very neatly, by simply breaking his neck.”
“Good God!” he uttered, impressively, fixing his smeary blue eyes on
me. “The sea! No man killed by the sea ever looked like that.” He seemed
positively scandalized at my suggestion. And as I gazed at him certainly
not prepared for anything original on his part, he advanced his head
close to mine and thrust his tongue out at me so suddenly that I
couldn’t help starting back.
After scoring over my calmness in this graphic way he nodded wisely. If
I had seen the sight, he assured me, I would never forget it as long as
I lived. The weather was too bad to give the corpse a proper sea burial.
So next day at dawn they took it up on the poop, covering its face with
a bit of bunting; he read a short prayer, and then, just as it was, in
its oilskins and long boots, they launched it amongst those mountainous
seas that seemed ready every moment to swallow up the ship herself and
the terrified lives on board of her.
“That reefed foresail saved you,” I threw in.
“Under God--it did,” he exclaimed fervently. “It was by a special mercy,
I firmly believe, that it stood some of those hurricane squalls.”
“It was the setting of that sail which--” I began.
“God’s own hand in it,” he interrupted me. “Nothing less could have
done it. I don’t mind telling you that I hardly dared give the order.
It seemed impossible that we could touch anything without losing it, and
then our last hope would have been gone.”
The terror of that gale was on him yet. I let him go on for a bit, then
said, casually--as if returning to a minor subject:
“You were very anxious to give up your mate to the shore people, I
believe?”
He was. To the law. His obscure tenacity on that point had in it
something incomprehensible and a little awful; something, as it were,
mystical, quite apart from his anxiety that he should not be suspected
of “countenancing any doings of that sort.” Seven-and-thirty virtuous
years at sea, of which over twenty of immaculate command, and the last
fifteen in the Sephora, seemed to have laid him under some pitiless
obligation.
“And you know,” he went on, groping shame-facedly amongst his feelings,
“I did not engage that young fellow. His people had some interest with
my owners. I was in a way forced to take him on. He looked very smart,
very gentlemanly, and all that. But do you know--I never liked him,
somehow. I am a plain man. You see, he wasn’t exactly the sort for the
chief mate of a ship like the Sephora.”
I had become so connected in thoughts and impressions with the secret
sharer of my cabin that I felt as if I, personally, were being given to
understand that I, too, was not the sort that would have done for the
chief mate of a ship like the Sephora. I had no doubt of it in my mind.
“Not at all the style of man. You understand,” he insisted,
superfluously, looking hard at me.