Some little while later, Stryker again approached him, perhaps swayed by an unaccustomed impulse of compassion; which, however, he artfully concealed. Blandly ironic, returning to his impersonation of the shopkeeper, "Nothink else we can show you, sir?" he inquired.
"I presume you couldn't put me ashore?" Kirkwood replied ingenuously.
In supreme disgust the captain showed him his back. "'Ere, you!" he called to one of the crew. "Tyke this awye--tyke 'im below and put 'im to bed; give 'im a drink and dry 'is clo's. Mebbe 'e'll be better when 'e wykes up. 'E don't talk sense now, that's sure. If you arsk me, I sye 'e's balmy and no 'ope for 'im."
Contradictory to the hopeful prognosis of Captain Stryker, his unaccredited passenger was not "better" when, after a period of oblivious rest indefinite in duration, he awoke. His subsequent assumption of listless resignation, of pacific acquiescence in the dictates of his destiny, was purely deceptive--thin ice of despair over profound depths of exasperated rebellion.
Blank darkness enveloped him when first he opened eyes to wonder. Then gradually as he stared, piecing together unassorted memories and striving to quicken drowsy wits, he became aware of a glimmer that waxed and waned, a bar of pale bluish light striking across the gloom above his couch; and by dint of puzzling divined that this had access by a port. Turning his head upon a stiff and unyielding pillow, he could discern a streak of saffron light lining the sill of a doorway, near by his side. The one phenomenon taken with the other confirmed a theretofore somewhat hazy impression that his dreams were dignified by a foundation of fact; that, in brief, he was occupying a cabin-bunk aboard the good ship _Alethea_.
Overhead, on the deck, a heavy thumping of hurrying feet awoke him to keener perceptiveness.
Judging from the incessant rolling and pitching of the brigantine, the crashing thunder of seas upon her sides, the eldrich shrieking of the gale, as well as from the chorused groans and plaints of each individual bolt and timber in the frail fabric that housed his fortunes, the wind had strengthened materially during his hours of forgetfulness--however many the latter might have been.