Chapter 35 - Page 2

saying her
vespers most energetically.

It has somewhere been hinted, that Annatoo occasionally cast sheep's
eyes at Jarl. So I was not a little surprised when her manner toward
him decidedly changed. Pulling at the ropes with us, she would give
him sly pinches, and then look another way, innocent as a lamb. Then
again, she would refuse to handle the same piece of rigging with him;
with wry faces, rinsed out the wooden can at the water cask, if it so
chanced that my Viking had previously been drinking therefrom. At
other times, when the honest Skyeman came up from below, she would
set up a shout of derision, and loll out her tongue; accompanying all
this by certain indecorous and exceedingly unladylike gestures,
significant of the profound contempt in which she held him.

Yet, never did Jarl heed her ill-breeding; but patiently overlooked
and forgave it. Inquiring the reason of the dame's singular conduct,
I learned, that with eye averted, she had very lately crept close to
my Viking, and met with no tender reception.

Doubtless, Jarl, who was much of a philosopher, innocently imagined
that ere long the lady would forgive and forget him. But what knows a
philosopher about women?

Ere long, so outrageous became Annatoo's detestation of him, that the
honest old tar could stand it no longer, and like most good-natured
men when once fairly roused, he was swept through and through with a
terrible typhoon of passion. He proposed, that forthwith the woman
should be sacked and committed to the deep; he could stand it no
longer.

Murder is catching. At first I almost jumped at the proposition; but
as quickly rejected it. Ah! Annatoo: Woman unendurable: deliver me,
ye gods, from being shut up in a ship with such a hornet again.

But are we yet through with her? Not yet. Hitherto she had continued
to perform the duties of the office assigned her since the
commencement of the voyage: namely, those of the culinary department.
From this she was now deposed. Her skewer was broken. My Viking
solemnly averring, that he would eat nothing more of her concocting,
for fear of being poisoned. For myself, I almost believed, that there
was malice enough in the minx to give us our henbane broth.

But what said Samoa to all this? Passing over the matter of the
cookery, will it be credited, that living right among us as he did,
he was yet blind to the premeditated though unachieved peccadilloes
of his spouse? Yet so it was. And thus blind was Belisarius himself,
concerning the intrigues of Antonina.

Witness that noble dame's affair with the youth Theodosius; when her
deluded lord charged upon the scandal-mongers with the very horns she
had bestowed upon him.

Upon one