The closed door

By John Fleming Wilson
“I left the wreck in the last boat,” Gorham told me. “It was a very dark and stormy morning and the sea ran before the gale in great splashes of a kind of vivid, intense white. To the east of us the California coast rose like a shadow out of the spume and spindrift. And that woman sat beside me on the thwart and clutched my arm with a steady, relentless strength which affected me more than if she had screamed.”
“I never could understand that affair,” I said. “Harry Owen was not only a seaman of ability and experience, but the last man in the world to——”
Gorham sighed and lifted his tired eyes to mine.
“I have never appeared in the affair, of course,” he remarked. “I was only a passenger on the Shearwater . The underwriters didn’t go into the matter.” My companion sighed again, staring at me owlishly. He rubbed his great forearm thoughtfully. “That woman’s fingers were set in my flesh, I tell you, right through my jacket. And it was precisely as if she were screaming. And any minute I expected a sea to tumble us all into Davy Jones’ locker.”
“His wife?” I commented.
“Of course,” Gorham replied. “So she was—Captain Harry Owen’s wife. And although she had been married to him six years she had never so much as suspected, I think.”
“Suspected what?”
Gorham made a slight gesture of disdain for my dullness.
“Who the other woman was.”
It was my turn to stare. Hadn’t I known Owen for years, been shipmate with him, been his friend? And didn’t everybody know that after he married pretty Sheila McTodd he never so much as glanced at another woman?
“You mean to tell me that there was another woman?” I demanded of Gorham. Then something in the extraordinary expression of his usually calm face stopped me. “Then that explains——”