Part 8 (2/2)

Nils's sympathetic eyes had perceived from his behaviour and whole appearance that day that there was something unusual the matter with him; and when he saw that Salve remained behind, he remained too, observing that it would be pleasant to cool for a while before going to their hammocks in the close air between decks.

The sky above them blazed like a cupola ”inlaid with patines of bright gold;” obliquely from the horizon the Southern Cross was rising, and the evening star shone in the warm night, before the moon had yet risen, with a silver gleam that threw clear light and shadow upon the deck below; while the vessel seemed to plough through a sea of phosph.o.r.escence, leaving in her wake a long trail of bluish glittering light.

From the forecastle below came wafted up a sentimental sailor's song, the burden of which was pretty well summed up in the two concluding lines:--

”But never more her name I'll utter till I die, For rosy though her lips were, her heart it was a lie.”

It sounded melancholy at that hour, and Nils, to judge from the occasional sighs with which he had accompanied it, was moved. When it came to an end, Salve turned suddenly to him.

”You are distressing yourself for another's sweetheart now, Nils. What would you have done if it had been your own?”

”My wife!” He had evidently not for the moment taken in the idea, and looked with all his heavy countenance at Salve.

”Yes. Wouldn't you have liked to see her sunk to the bottom of the sea?”

”My Karen to the bottom of the sea! I'd go there myself first.”

”Yes; but if she had been unfaithful to you?” persisted Salve, seeming to take a fiendish delight in bringing home the idea to the poor fellow.

”But she is not,” was the rejoinder.

Nils had no genius for the abstract, and no more satisfaction was to be got out of him. But at the same time he had been shocked, and went down shortly after without saying a word.

Salve still remained aloft, the dull consciousness of Elizabeth's engagement with the captain's son alternating with a more active desire for revenge upon the captain himself for the manner in which he had conveyed the information; and the result of his brooding up there upon the yard was a determination to desert as soon as the Juno arrived at Rio. He would never go back to Arendal; and he would no longer tread the same deck with the father of Carl Beck.

Later on in the night, when the moon had risen, Nils, who had not been able to sleep in his hammock, came up to Salve again, and drew him aside behind the round-house, as if for a private conversation.

”What would I have done? you asked. I'll tell you,” he said, after a short pause, and his honest face seemed to express a vivid realisation of the whole misery of the situation. ”I would have died upon the doorstep!”

Salve stood and looked at him for a moment. There came a strange pallor over his face in the moonlight.

”Look you,” he said, ironically, laying his hand upon the other's shoulder, ”I have never a wife; but all the same, I am dead upon the doorstep--” Then, in the next breath, and with a sudden change of tone, he said, ”Of course I am only joking, you know,” and left him, with a hard, forced laugh.

Nils remained where he was, and pondered, not knowing exactly how to take it. It was possible Salve had only been making fun of him. But another feeling eventually predominated. It told him that he had had a glimpse into a despairing soul; and he was profoundly moved.

CHAPTER XIII.

They stood slowly away to the north-east along the coast of Brazil.

Every morning, towards the end of the dog-watch, when the sun rose in its gorgeous majesty from the sea, there came a refres.h.i.+ng breeze off the land, bringing with it the perfume of a thousand aromatic herbs; albatrosses and sea-gulls circled round the s.h.i.+p; flying-fish were to be seen in shoals; and all nature, animate and inanimate, seemed to be freshened for the time into activity and life. But gradually the breeze would become warmer and lighter, and then die away altogether, so that before noon the sails would hang flapping against the mast. They scarcely made five knots in the watch, and the heat during the greater part of the day was unbearable--as unbearable almost as the captain's temper, which showed no signs of improvement, and which vented itself in a systematic grinding of the crew, who, Captain Beck declared, were getting into intolerable habits of idleness.

Strange things occurred on board just at this time, which, taken in connection with the captain's mood, produced an uncomfortable feeling that there was some evil influence at work by which both the s.h.i.+p and the captain were possessed. Groans had been distinctly heard down in the hold among the coals; and the sailmaker affirmed that on several nights in succession he had seen a man go from amids.h.i.+ps aft along the bulwark railings, stand still and point with his hand to the compa.s.s, and then disappear in the wake of the s.h.i.+p. Another declared that he had seen the s.h.i.+p's genius proceed in the same direction and jump overboard--cap and all he was no higher than a half sea-boot; and when the genius deserts a s.h.i.+p, it betokens in the sailors' superst.i.tious creed that she is about to founder.

The unaccountable sounds in the hold continued, and changed one day when the hatch was battened down to a kind of wail, which ceased, however, when, for fear of an explosion of coal-gas, it was taken off again. On the following day the cook, who had gone down for water, came hurrying back with a scared face, and declared that he had seen a man sitting there in a red jacket.

”It is the s.h.i.+p's genius lamenting the s.h.i.+p,” was hesitatingly suggested by some. But when the cook objected that the creature was at least as large as Big Anders the boatswain, and proceeded besides to endow him with sable colouring and claws, the terror reached its height.

<script>