Freya haunted them both like an ubiquitous spirit, and as if she were the only woman in the world.  Jasper remembered her earnest recommendation to be guarded and cautious in all his acts and words while he was away from her.  In this quite unforeseen encounter he felt on his ear the very breath of these hurried admonitions customary to the last moment of their partings, heard the half-jesting final whisper of the “Mind, kid, I’d never forgive you!” with a quick pressure on his arm, which he answered by a quiet, confident smile.  Heemskirk was haunted in another fashion.  There were no whispers in it; it was more like visions.  He saw that girl hanging round the neck of a low vagabond—­that vagabond, the vagabond who had just answered his hail.  He saw her stealing bare-footed across a verandah with great, clear, wide-open, eager eyes to look at a brig—­that brig.  If she had shrieked, scolded, called names! . . .  But she had simply triumphed over him.  That was all.  Led on (he firmly believed it), fooled, deceived, outraged, struck, mocked at. . . .  Beak and claws!  The two men, so differently haunted by Freya of the Seven Isles, were not equally matched.

In the intense stillness, as of sleep, which had fallen upon the two vessels, in a world that itself seemed but a delicate dream, a boat pulled by Javanese sailors crossing the dark lane of water came alongside the brig.  The white warrant officer in her, perhaps the gunner, climbed aboard.  He was a short man, with a rotund stomach and a wheezy voice.  His immovable fat face looked lifeless in the moonlight, and he walked with his thick arms hanging away from his body as though he had been stuffed.  His cunning little eyes glittered like bits of mica.  He conveyed to Jasper, in broken English, a request to come on board the Neptun.

Jasper had not expected anything so unusual.  But after a short reflection he decided to show neither annoyance, nor even surprise.  The river from which he had come had been politically disturbed for a couple of years, and he was aware that his visits there were looked upon with some suspicion.  But he did not mind much the displeasure of the authorities, so terrifying to old Nelson.  He prepared to leave the brig, and Schultz followed him to the rail as if to say something, but in the end stood by in silence.  Jasper getting over the side, noticed his ghastly face.  The eyes of the man who had found salvation in the brig from the effects of his peculiar psychology looked at him with a dumb, beseeching expression.

“What’s the matter?” Jasper asked.

“I wonder how this will end?” said he of the beautiful voice, which had even fascinated the steady Freya herself.  But where was its charming timbre now?  These words had sounded like a raven’s croak.

“You are ill,” said Jasper positively.

“I wish I were dead!” was the startling statement uttered by Schultz talking to himself in the extremity of some mysterious trouble.  Jasper gave him a keen glance, but this was not the time to investigate the morbid outbreak of a feverish man.  He did not look as though he were actually delirious, and that for the moment must suffice.  Schultz made a dart forward.