It is true that in further interviews Bunter showed himself very mild and deferential.  He seemed to cling to his captain for spiritual protection.  He used to send for him, and say, “I feel so nervous,” and Captain Johns would stay patiently for hours in the hot little cabin, and feel proud of the call.

For Mr. Bunter was ill, and could not leave his berth for a good many days.  He became a convinced spiritualist, not enthusiastically—­that could hardly have been expected from him—­but in a grim, unshakable way.  He could not be called exactly friendly to the disembodied inhabitants of our globe, as Captain Johns was.  But he was now a firm, if gloomy, recruit of spiritualism.

One afternoon, as the ship was already well to the north in the Gulf of Bengal, the steward knocked at the door of the captain’s cabin, and said, without opening it: 

“The mate asks if you could spare him a moment, sir.  He seems to be in a state in there.”

Captain Johns jumped up from the couch at once.

“Yes.  Tell him I am coming.”

He thought:  Could it be possible there had been another spiritual manifestation—­in the daytime, too!

He revelled in the hope.  It was not exactly that, however.  Still, Bunter, whom he saw sitting collapsed in a chair—­he had been up for several days, but not on deck as yet—­poor Bunter had something startling enough to communicate.  His hands covered his face.  His legs were stretched straight out, dismally.

“What’s the news now?” croaked Captain Johns, not unkindly, because in truth it always pleased him to see Bunter—­as he expressed it—­tamed.

“News!” exclaimed the crushed sceptic through his iands.  “Ay, news enough, Captain Johns.  Who will be able to deny the awfulness, the genuineness?  Another man would have dropped dead.  You want to know what I had seen.  All I can tell you is that since I’ve seen it my hair is turning white.”

Bunter detached his hands from his face, and they hung on each side of his chair as if dead.  He looked broken in the dusky cabin.

“You don’t say!” stammered out Captain Johns.  “Turned white!  Hold on a bit!  I’ll light the lamp!”

When the lamp was lit, the startling phenomenon could be seen plainly enough.  As if the dread, the horror, the anguish of the supernatural were being exhaled through the pores of his skin, a sort of silvery mist seemed to cling to the cheeks and the head of the mate.  His short beard, his cropped hair, were growing, not black, but gray—­almost white.

When Mr. Bunter, thin-faced and shaky, came on deck for duty, he was clean-shaven, and his head was white.  The hands were awe-struck.  “Another man,” they whispered to each other.  It was generally and mysteriously agreed that the mate had “seen something,” with the exception of the man at the wheel at the time, who maintained that the mate was “struck by something.”

This distinction hardly amounted to a difference.  On the other hand, everybody admitted that, after he picked up his strength a bit, he seemed even smarter in his movements than before.