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But the sensation was that the air was being sucked up to the sky, leaving a vacuum on the face of the waters. Suddenly the captain's voice startled the night, rising trumpet-like above the hiss of the steam. "Stand BY!" he cried. Luke looked down to the lower bridge. "You had better hold on to something," he called, and as he spoke the hurricane struck the Croonah.
All the world seemed to be asleep except these two men one motionless on the bridge, the other alert in the dimly lighted wheelhouse. The Croonah herself seemed to slumber with the regular beating of a great restless heart far down in her iron being. The dawn was now creeping up into the eastern sky, touching the face of the waters with a soft, pearly light.
Luke, who knew himself to be a pessimist a man who persistently looked for ill-fortune felt that her meaning could not well be other than that she preferred remaining on board because he could not go ashore. The dinner bell rang out over the quiet decks, and, with a familiar little nod, Agatha turned away from her companion. The next morning saw the Croonah speeding past Trafalgar's heights.
He knew that this wise old sailor was in the habit of accumulating as much sleep in his brain as possible before passing Ushant light, because he lived on the bridge when the Croonah had once turned eastward up the Channel. Whenever the captain took a night's rest, he broke it at four o'clock, at the change of the watch.
The deck was at an angle of thirty. The port boats on their davits were invisible; they were under water. If the Croonah righted quickly those boats would break up like old baskets. The two men on the lower bridge stood on the uprights of the rail, leaning against the deck as against a wall. The crackling sound like breaking matchwood seemed to come from above.
Luke himself in uniform looked sternly in earnest. They had been talking of Gibraltar, where the Croonah was to touch the next morning, and Luke had just told Agatha that he could not go ashore with her and Mrs. Ingham-Baker. "Don't I?" the girl reiterated with a little sigh. "Well, it does not sound like it."
The Croonah sailed by time-table, subjecting the winds and seas, as the great steamships do nowadays. Luke FitzHenry had calculated this to a minute before he telegraphed the single word "Milksop" to Willie Carr in London. He was on the bridge a few minutes before eight bells rang, and found the captain. He knew his chief's customs.
He could not think of life without Agatha, and he did not see why he should be called upon to do so. Ill fortune had dogged him from his childhood. He had borne it all, morosely but without a murmur. He was going to turn at last. The Croonah must go. She was well insured, he knew that. That the cargo was fully covered against loss he could safely suppose.
"The truth is," said Agatha, "that I have an inward conviction that it would only be more trouble than it is worth." "What would be more trouble than it is worth?" "Going ashore." "Then you will not go?" he asked eagerly. "I think not," she answered, with demure downcast eyes. And Luke FitzHenry was the happiest man on board the Croonah. There was no mistaking her meaning.
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