The captain's wife, with her usual foresight, had anticipated the possibility of a storm. The news of her husband's rumoured delinquency had filled her with distress, but it served to bring out some of her fine qualities of head and heart. She felt assured the report was untrue; though, from the time that Stauncy went over the bar, her dream had troubled her, and she was unable to refrain from depressing forebodings, so that she contrived a plan by which the captain was absent from Northam at the time of the funeral.
The crowd became more and more uneasy and vehement, and a series of altercations as to what ought to be done by no means improved their temper. Whilst some pressed forward and gazed rudely into Stauncy's windows, others vociferated, 'Who scuttled the brig? who murdered the crew?' The voices of flushed females prevailed even more than the clamour of wordy contention and indignation amongst the men, and something serious seemed impending, when Mary Stauncy appeared at the door, and, drawing herself up to the extent of her dignity, proceeded at once, like a clever tactician, to charge right home.
'You're a disgrace to Northam,' she said; 'you're a disgrace to human nature. Instead of uniting to shelter a townsman from suspicion, and guard a character you have always held blameless, you first listen to the scandal of a tap-room, believing a worthless toper who wants money as a price for silence, and then you take the law into your own hands without judge or jury. Be ashamed of yourselves, and go home, as you ought to do after such a burying, serious and charitable.'
The crowd listened; the crowd relented; the crowd was on the point of taking a new view of things, when a way was rapidly made in it by the pushing form of the captain, who had returned sooner than his wife expected, and imagined that some disaster had befallen his family. But when his presence evoked again the cry, 'Who scuttled the brig? who murdered the crew?' the truth flashed on him in a moment, and, rushing towards the most noisy of the calumniators, he threatened to fell him with a blow, and, confronting the astonished mob, exclaimed, 'If any of you have anything to say, say it, or else be off every one of you!'