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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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55 Vere advanced to meet him, thus unconsciously intercepting his view of Claggart, and interrupting the other’s wonted ceremonious salutation, said, “Nay, tell me how it is with yonder man,” directing his attention to the prostrate one. The Surgeon looked, and for all his self-command, somewhat started at the abrupt revelation. On Claggart’s always pallid complexion, thick black blood was now oozing from nostril and ear. To the gazer’s professional eye it was unmistakably no living man that he saw. “Is it so then?” said Captain Vere intently watching him. “I thought it. But verify it.” Whereupon the customary tests confirmed the Surgeon’s first glance, who now looking up in unfeigned concern, cast a look of intense inquisitiveness upon his superior. But Captain Vere, with one hand to his brow, was standing motionless. Suddenly, catching the Surgeon’s arm convulsively, he exclaimed, pointing down to the body-“It is the divine judgement on Ananias! Look!” Disturbed by the excited manner he had never before observed in the Indomitable’s Captain, and as yet wholly ignorant of the affair, the prudent Surgeon nevertheless held his peace, only again looking an earnest interrogation as to what it was that had resulted in such a tragedy. But Captain Vere was now again motionless standing absorbed in thought. But again starting, he vehemently exclaimed-“Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!” At these passionate interjections, mere incoherences to the listener as yet unapprised of the antecedents, the Surgeon was profoundly discomposed. But now as recollecting himself, Captain Vere in less passionate tone briefly related the circumstances leading up to the event. “But come; we must despatch,” he added. “me to remove him” (meaning the body) “to yonder compartment,” designating one opposite that where the Foretopman remained immured. Anew disturbed by a request that as implying a desire for secrecy, seemed unaccountably strange to him, there was nothing for the subordinate to do but comply. “Go now,” said Captain Vere with something of his wonted manner-“Go now. I shall presently call a drum-head court. Tell the lieutenants what has happened, and tell Mr. Mordant,” meaning the Captain of Marines, “and charge them to keep the matter to themselves.” |
