me of Lord Frederick Bury himself; especially when he looked all
of a sudden to the horizon in that wide, vacant kind of fashion,
as if he expected it farther off than it was: only Jones's face
was twice the age, like a man's that had had double the passions
in it at the outset, and given them full swing since then; with a
sleeping devil in his eye yet, besides, as I thought, which only
wanted somewhat to rouse it. Only for that, I had a sort of leaning
to Jones myself; but, as it was, I caught myself wishing, over and
over, for something to make us fall regularly foul of each other,
and get rid of this confounded doubtful state. One hitch of a word
to take hold of, and, by Jove! I felt all the blood in my body would
boil out in me to find how we stood, and show it; but nothing of the
kind did Jones let pass--and as close as the sea itself he was in
regard to his past life. As for the men from the frigate, at least,
they seemingly looked on him with no great fondness, and a good deal
of respect, in spite of themselves, for his seamanship; whereas,
if he had been left in the forepeak in place of the cabin, I've no
doubt in a short time it would have been no man but Jones. You light
now and then upon a man afloat, indeed, that his shipmates hold off
from, as healthy dogs do from a mad one; and you saw they had some
sort of an inkling of the gloomy close nature Jones had in him, by
the way they obeyed his orders. Webb's three Cape Dutchmen seemed
to have a notion he was some being with mysterious powers, while
the Lascars ran crouching at his very word--some of them being, as
I found, Malays, and the rest Mussulmen from Chittagong; but Jones
could send them about in their own language, Dutchmen and all--a
part of the matter which did not tend to keep me less careful over
him. Still I observed, since his coming aboard, that Jones never
once touched liquor, which had plainly enough been his ruin ashore;
whether on account of meaning to pull up once for all and mend, or
only to have a wilder bout at next port, or else to keep himself
steady for aught that might turn up, I couldn't settle in my own
mind. Though deucedly doubtful of its being the first, the very idea
of it made one feel for the man; and, in case of his doing well, I
had no small hopes of something in the upshot to save a real sailor
like him from going to the devil altogether, as he seemed doing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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