“I think the weather is moderating, Captain Horst,” he said, pleasantly, as he sat down.
“_Ja_,” responded Captain Horst, gruffly, throwing a perfunctory glance through the unshuttered forward windows of the charthouse.
“We ought to reach the neighbourhood of our wreck some time to-night?” pursued Jensen in affable enquiry.
Lyngstrand had addressed himself in silence to the food the steward set before him, but he glanced up as though some undertone of significance in his friend’s voice had caught his ear.
“Thereabouts,” conceded Captain Horst in a tone which sufficiently indicated that he was disinclined for conversation.
“I wonder whether we shall hit on some other wreck instead?” he surmised. “These seas must be strewn with them.”
“If I were a German U-boat commander,” he said, with a quiet deliberation, his eyes straight on Captain Horst’s face, “I should not dare to sail over these seas again. I should see drowning faces sinking through every wave.”
His last sentence seemed to ring through the silence which followed it. Captain Horst sat impassive, but his brutal jaw looked hard and his cruel mouth thinned during the moment in which he returned Lyngstrand’s glance.
“Bah!” he said. “The dead don’t come back!” There was something of defiance in his harshly contemptuous tone. “They are finished with--for ever!”
The blood went out of Lyngstrand’s face as he bent down again to his plate.
There was no further conversation during the meal.
The afternoon was spent by the two young men, in company with the half-dozen divers under their orders, in overhauling the diving-dresses, air-pumps, etc., which might be required on the morrow.
The gale had obviously blown itself out. The western sky had cleared, the rain had ceased, the wave-tops were no longer torn in flying spume, there was less violence in the rolling surges in whose trough they wallowed. When, a little after four bells, they were summoned to tea, the sun was setting in a golden splendour that promised a peaceful dawn.
Excited by the prospect of the next day’s work, the two young men forgot their suspicions of Captain Horst, could talk of nothing but their plans for diving despite the after-swell of the gale which would surely still be running. The captain listened to their impatience with the ghost of a grim smile, but volunteered no part in the conversation.