Page:Stevenson and Quiller-Couch - St Ives .djvu/421

 others sobbed, exhorted, even leaped in the air. "Stronger, brother!!! 'Tis working, 'tis working!!! O deliverance!!! streams of redemption!" For ten minutes or a quarter of an hour maybe, the ship was a Babel, a Bedlam. And then the tumult would die down as suddenly as it had arisen, and, dismissed by the old man, the crew, with faces once more inscrutable but twitching with spent emotion, scattered to their usual tasks.

Five minutes after these singular outbreaks it was difficult to believe in them. Captain Colenso paced the quarter-deck once more with his customary shuffle, his hands beneath his coat-tails, his eyes conning the ship with their usual air of mild abstraction. Now and again he paused to instruct one of his incapables in the trimming of a brace, or to correct the tie of a knot. He never scolded; seldom lifted his voice. By his manner of speech and the ease of his authority he and his family might have belonged to separate ranks of life. Yet I seemed to detect method in their obedience. The veriest fumbler went about his work with a concentrated gravity of bearing as if he fulfilled a remoter purpose, and understood it while he tied his knots into grannies and generally mismanaged the job in hand.

Towards the middle of our second week, we fell in with a storm—a rotatory affair, and soon over by reason that we struck the outer fringe of it—but to a landsman sufficiently daunting while it lasted. Late in the afternoon I thrust my head up for a look around. We were weltering along in horrible forty-foot seas, over which our bulwarks tilted at times until from the companion hatchway, I stared plumb into the grey sliding chasms, and felt like a fly on the wall. The Lady Nepean hurled her old timbers along under close-reefed main topsail and a rag of a foresail only. The captain had housed top-gallant masts and