I was hardly listening to him.

“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 scandalised 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 shamefacedly 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.