This old man, who looked more German than anything else, although he had one of those unfathomable faces in which nationality is lost, was bald, and so grave that his baldness might have been a tonsure.  Every time he passed before the Virgin on the prow, he raised his felt hat, so that you could see the swollen and senile veins of his skull.  A sort of full gown, torn and threadbare, of brown Dorchester serge, but half hid his closely fitting coat, tight, compact, and hooked up to the neck like a cassock.  His hands inclined to cross each other, and had the mechanical junction of habitual prayer.  He had what might be called a wan countenance; for the countenance is above all things a reflection, and it is an error to believe that idea is colourless.  That countenance was evidently the surface of a strange inner state, the result of a composition of contradictions, some tending to drift away in good, others in evil, and to an observer it was the revelation of one who was less and more than human—­capable of falling below the scale of the tiger, or of rising above that of man.  Such chaotic souls exist.  There was something inscrutable in that face.  Its secret reached the abstract.  You felt that the man had known the foretaste of evil which is the calculation, and the after-taste which is the zero.  In his impassibility, which was perhaps only on the surface, were imprinted two petrifactions—­the petrifaction of the heart proper to the hangman, and the petrifaction of the mind proper to the mandarin.  One might have said (for the monstrous has its mode of being complete) that all things were possible to him, even emotion.  In every savant there is something of the corpse, and this man was a savant.  Only to see him you caught science imprinted in the gestures of his body and in the folds of his dress.  His was a fossil face, the serious cast of which was counteracted by that wrinkled mobility of the polyglot which verges on grimace.  But a severe man withal; nothing of the hypocrite, nothing of the cynic.  A tragic dreamer.  He was one of those whom crime leaves pensive; he had the brow of an incendiary tempered by the eyes of an archbishop.  His sparse gray locks turned to white over his temples.  The Christian was evident in him, complicated with the fatalism of the Turk.  Chalkstones deformed his fingers, dissected by leanness.  The stiffness of his tall frame was grotesque.  He had his sea-legs, he walked slowly about the deck, not looking at any one, with an air decided and sinister.  His eyeballs were vaguely filled with the fixed light of a soul studious of the darkness and afflicted by reapparitions of conscience.

From time to time the chief of the band, abrupt and alert, and making sudden turns about the vessel, came to him and whispered in his ear.  The old man answered by a nod.  It might have been the lightning consulting the night.

CHAPTER III.

TROUBLED MEN ON THE TROUBLED SEA.