He withdrew his head and waited a while by the skylight, but heard only the chirping of the indefatigable canary, a feeble twittering that seemed to ooze through the drooping red blossoms of geraniums growing in flower-pots under the glass panes.  He strolled away a step or two before the voice from down below called hurriedly: 

“Hey, Shaw?  Are you there?”

“Yes, Captain Lingard,” he answered, stepping back.  “Have we drifted anything this afternoon?”

“Not an inch, sir, not an inch.  We might as well have been at anchor.”

“It’s always so,” said the invisible Lingard.  His voice changed its tone as he moved in the cabin, and directly afterward burst out with a clear intonation while his head appeared above the slide of the cabin entrance: 

“Always so!  The currents don’t begin till it’s dark, when a man can’t see against what confounded thing he is being drifted, and then the breeze will come.  Dead on end, too, I don’t doubt.”

Shaw moved his shoulders slightly.  The Malay at the wheel, after making a dive to see the time by the cabin clock through the skylight, rang a double stroke on the small bell aft.  Directly forward, on the main deck, a shrill whistle arose long drawn, modulated, dying away softly.  The master of the brig stepped out of the companion upon the deck of his vessel, glanced aloft at the yards laid dead square; then, from the door-step, took a long, lingering look round the horizon.

He was about thirty-five, erect and supple.  He moved freely, more like a man accustomed to stride over plains and hills, than like one who from his earliest youth had been used to counteract by sudden swayings of his body the rise and roll of cramped decks of small craft, tossed by the caprice of angry or playful seas.

He wore a grey flannel shirt, and his white trousers were held by a blue silk scarf wound tightly round his narrow waist.  He had come up only for a moment, but finding the poop shaded by the main-topsail he remained on deck bareheaded.  The light chestnut hair curled close about his well-shaped head, and the clipped beard glinted vividly when he passed across a narrow strip of sunlight, as if every hair in it had been a wavy and attenuated gold wire.  His mouth was lost in the heavy moustache; his nose was straight, short, slightly blunted at the end; a broad band of deeper red stretched under the eyes, clung to the cheek bones.  The eyes gave the face its remarkable expression.  The eyebrows, darker than the hair, pencilled a straight line below the wide and unwrinkled brow much whiter than the sunburnt face.  The eyes, as if glowing with the light of a hidden fire, had a red glint in their greyness that gave a scrutinizing ardour to the steadiness of their gaze.

That man, once so well known, and now so completely forgotten amongst the charming and heartless shores of the shallow sea, had amongst his fellows the nickname of “Red-Eyed Tom.”  He was proud of his luck but not of his good sense.  He was proud of his brig, of the speed of his craft, which was reckoned the swiftest country vessel in those seas, and proud of what she represented.