ive character of a religious
function--was deemed superfluous. Nor were the crew any more careful as
to their own condition or that of their clothing. It is a fact that
during the whole period of my sojourn on board _La belle Jeannette_ I
never saw one of her people attempt to wash himself or any article of
clothing; and, as a natural result of this steadfast disregard of the
most elementary principles of cleanliness, the little hooker simply
swarmed with vermin.

But, bad as it was, this was not the worst. The crew, from Lemaitre
downward, were a low, brutal, quarrelsome gang, always wrangling
together, and frequently fighting; while, as I have already mentioned,
the one predominating idea of Francois, the chief mate, was that they
could only be kept in order by constantly and impartially rope's-ending
them all round. Possibly he may have been right; at all events, I found
it far easier to excuse his behaviour after I had seen the crew than I
had before.

All this time Lemaitre had been behaving toward me with a rough, clumsy,
off-hand kindness that his personal appearance would have led no one to
expect, and which, try as I would, I could not bring myself to regard as
genuine, because, through it all, there seemed now and then to rise to
the surface an underflow of repressed malignity, not pronounced enough
to be certain about, yet sufficiently distinct to provoke in me a vague
sensation of uneasiness and distrust. To put the matter concisely,
although Lemaitre was by no means effusive in his expressions of good-
will toward me, and although there was a certain perfunctory quality in
such attentions as he showed me, there was with it all a curious subtle
something, so intangible that I found it utterly impossible to define or
describe it, which yet impressed me with the feeling that it was all
unreal, assumed, a mockery and a pretence; though _why_ it should be so,
I could not for the life of me divine.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

A DOUBLE TRAGEDY.

I had been up and about for a full week, and had during that period
observed in Lemaitre's manner toward me not only a steadily decreasing
solicitude for my welfare--which was perhaps only natural, now that my
health was rapidly improving--but also a growing disposition to sneer
and gibe at me, covert at first but more pronounced and unmistakable
with every recurring day, that strongly tended to confirm the singular
suspicion I have endeavoured to bring home to the