your honour!« sighed Claggart, mildly shaking his shapely head as in
sad deprecation of such unmerited severity of tone. Then bridling - erecting
himself as in virtuous self-assertion, he circumstantially alleged certain words
and acts which collectively, if credited, led to presumptions mortally
inculpating Budd, and for some of these averments, he added, substantiating
proof was not far.
    With gray eyes impatient and distrustful, essaying to fathom to the bottom
Claggart's calm violet ones, Captain Vere again heard him out; then for the
moment stood ruminating. The mood he evinced, Claggart - himself for the time
liberated from the other's scrutiny - steadily regarded with a look difficult to
render - a look curious of the operation of his tactics, a look such as might
have been that of the spokesman of the envious children of Jacob deceptively
imposing upon the troubled patriarch the blood-dyed coat of young Joseph.
    Though something exceptional in the moral quality of Captain Vere made him,
in earnest encounter with a fellow-man, a veritable touchstone of that man's
essential nature, yet now as to Claggart and what was really going on in him,
his feeling partook less of intuitional conviction than of strong suspicion
clogged by strange dubieties. The perplexity he evinced proceeded less from
aught touching the man informed against - as Claggart doubtless opined - than
from considerations how best to act in regard to the informer. At first, indeed,
he was naturally for summoning that substantiation of his allegations which
Claggart said was at hand. But such a proceeding would result in the matter at
once getting abroad, which in the present stage of it, he thought, might
undesirably affect the ship's company. If Claggart was a false witness - that
closed the affair. And therefore, before trying the accusation, he would first
practically test the accuser; and he thought this could be done in a quiet
undemonstrative way.
    The measure he determined upon involved a shifting of the scene, a transfer
to a place less exposed to observation than the broad quarter-deck. For although
the few gun-room officers there at the time had, in due observance of naval
etiquette, withdrawn to leeward the moment Captain Vere had begun his promenade
on the deck's weather-side; and though during the colloquy with Claggart they of
course ventured not to diminish the distance; and though throughout the
interview Captain Vere's voice was far from high, and Claggart's silvery and
low; and the wind in the cordage and the wash of the sea helped the more to put
them beyond ear-shot; nevertheless