CHAPTER VII

A RACE AND A ROLLER

Mrs. Burke talked with me in my cabin for some time. She wondered that her husband could be so credulous as to believe in ghosts, and said she had never before suspected he was superstitious. She kissed me and said good-night, and went away thinking, I dare say, she had left me fairly cheerful; and so indeed I was while she was with me, but when she was gone, and I lay alone in the darkness, I felt very uneasy. The cabin porthole was high above the low bunk in which I rested; I could not see the stars in it, but the noise of waters fretted by a gentle catspaw of wind came through very clearly, along with a dim sifting of moonshine that ruled the gloom in a spectral spoke of light which was like dreaming to see; it was a dismal, sobbing, moaning noise of waters whilst it lasted, and made me think of the dead men deep down in the sea, and of the apparition that had moved upon the forecastle, and vanished seemingly as smoke goes out, till I was too afraid to sleep.

The last bells I heard stealing faintly through the calm were eight--four o'clock in the morning.

However, I was at the breakfast table at the usual hour; Captain Burke and his wife and the doctor came below from the deck and seated themselves. Presently I said:

'Are we making good way, Captain Burke?'

'Noble way. We've taken a fine royal breeze right abeam. It's hit our heels to a hair.'

I looked at him as he spoke, and observed a certain dulness in his countenance. The arch expression was gone out of his eyes, and if they seemed merry it was through their blue glitter, not their spirit. It may have been his face which made me ask:

'Was anything more seen of the ghost during the night?'

'No, miss,' he answered abruptly.

'It was no ghost, Miss Marie,' exclaimed my old nurse. 'Why, as Mr. Owen justly says, you can't have no better ingredients for a spectre than moonshine and the moving shadows of rigging.'

'For such a noodle as the fellow that saw the thing,' said the doctor, with a half-glance of interest and speculation at the captain.

'You're not going to get correct likenesses of living people out of moonshine and shadow,' said the captain.

'Why, yes, out of light and shade merely, captain,' said Mr. Owen. 'What else would you do work with in pencil or crayon?'

'I wonder you can be so silly, Edward,' said Mrs. Burke.

I looked at her inquiringly, perceiving that something lay behind this: on which she said, 'The man who saw the ghost has frightened Edward by saying he thought it was the captain at first, the face was so like.'

The captain sipped at a big breakfast cup to conceal his expression, and subdue, as I thought, some temper excited by his wife's remark. He then said, quietly smiling, but with no light of merriment upon him, 'I went forward last night after you were turned in, Miss Otway, to take a look round. I called to the fellow the ghost appeared to, and asked him to describe the thing to me; he did so, and said it had my face. My wife thinks I am frightened. You don't believe that, I hope? You'd not feel safe in a ship commanded by a skipper who's to be scared by a seaman's yarn.'

'Just a little bit of forecastle malice, depend upon it,' said the doctor. 'We'll have the truth of it yet. Perhaps they hope to justify their charges against your beef by dreaming terrific waking nightmares, and seeing precisely the sort of thing that an unsavoury harness cask would be fruitful of.'

'You'll have the other man saying now that the thing he saw _was_ like you,' said Mrs. Burke.

'He's said it,' exclaimed the captain, with an emphatic nod at her.

Mr. Owen lay back in his chair with a loud laugh; an ill-timed explosion and forced withal, for you easily saw that the mood of the captain was then a distemper, which needed the medicine of a little skilful sympathy. But the subject was dropped after the doctor's laugh, and Captain Burke, turning to me, talked in a gentle voice of the