rver 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.

Two men on board the craft were absorbed in thought--the old man, and
the skipper of the hooker, who must not be mistaken for the chief of the
band. The captain was occupied by the sea, the old man by the sky. The
former did not lift his eyes from the waters; the latter kept watch on
the firmament. The skipper's anxiety was the state of the sea; the old
man seemed to suspect the heavens. He scanned the stars through every
break in the clouds.

It was the time