“Jasper dear, what is the matter with you?  Why are you so strange?”

I tried to look astonished, but broke down miserably.  Do what I would, my eyes seemed to be beyond my control; they would not meet her steady gaze.

“Uncle Loveday is coming up later on.  He’s looking after the Cap—­I mean the sailor, and said he would run in afterwards.”

“What is this sailor like?”

This question fairly broke me down.  Between my dread of the Captain and her pained astonishment, I could only sit stammering and longing for the earth to gape and swallow me up.  Suddenly a dreadful suspicion struck my mother.

“Jasper!  Jasper! it cannot be—­you cannot mean—­that it was his ship?”

“No, mother, no!  Father is all right.  He said—­I mean—­it was not his ship.”

“Oh! thank God!  But you are hiding something from me!  What is it?  Jasper dear, what are you hiding?”

“Mother, I think it was the Mary Jane.  But it was not father’s ship.  Father’s all right.  And, mother, don’t ask me any more; Uncle Loveday will tell all about it.  And—­I’m not very well, mother.  I think—­”

Want of sleep, indeed, and the excitement of the morning, had broken me down.  My mother stifled her desire to hear more, and tenderly saw me to bed, guessing my fatigue, but only dimly apprehensive of anything beyond.  In bed I lay all that morning, but could get no sleep.  The vengeance of that dreadful man seemed to fill the little room and charge the atmosphere with horror.  “I come on them in bed sometimes, and sometimes from behind when they’re not looking”—­the words rang in my ears, and could not be muffled by the bed-clothes; whilst, if I began to doze, the dreadful burthen of his song—­

    “And the devil has got his due, my lads—­
        Sing ho! but he waits for you!”—­

With the peculiar catch of its lilt, would suddenly make me start up, wide awake, with every nerve in my body dancing to its grisly measure.

At last, towards noon, I dozed off into a restless slumber, but only to see each sight and hear each sound repeated with every grotesque and fantastic variation.  Dead Man’s Rock rose out of a sea of blood, peopled with hundreds of ghastly faces, each face the distorted likeness of John or the Captain.  Blood was everywhere—­on their shirts, their hands, their faces, in splashes across the rock itself, in vivid streaks across the spume of the sea.  The very sun peered through a blood-red fog, and the waves, the mournful gulls, the echoes from the cliff, took up the everlasting chorus, led by one silvery demoniac voice—­

    “Sing ho! but he waits for you!”

Finally, as I lay tossing and tormented with this phantom horror in my eyes and ears, the sound died imperceptibly away into the soft hush of two well-known voices, and I opened my eyes to see mother with Uncle Loveday standing at my bedside.