The Pilot had stood still to deliver this harangue, and he now sat down, and buried his face in his hands. When he again raised his head, the skipper without a ship was helping himself sorrowfully to more of the whisky that was four over proof.
Slowly the rugged Pilot rose, and passed out of the French window into the garden of roses and the sunlight.
“I think,” said Sartoris, passing the decanter to Scarlett, “that another drop o’ this will p’raps straighten us up a bit, and help us to see what we’ve gone an’ done. For myself, I own I’ve lost my bearings and run into a fog-bank. I’d be glad if some one would help me out.”
“The old man’s a powder-magazine, to which you managed to put a match. That’s how it is, Captain. These many years he’s been a sleeping volcano, which has broken suddenly into violent eruption.”
Both men, figures comical enough for a pantomime, looked seriously at each other; but not so Amiria, whose face appeared in the doorway.
“It’s a mystery, a blessed puzzle; but I’d give half-a-crown for a smoke,” said Sartoris, looking wistfully at the Pilot’s tobacco-pipes on the mantelpiece. “I wonder if the young lady would object if I had a draw.”
There was an audible titter in the passage.
“A man doesn’t realise how poor he can be till he gets shipwrecked,” said Scarlett: “then he knows what the loss of his pipe and ’baccy means.”
There was a scuffling outside the door, and the young lady with the brown eyes was forcibly pushed into the room.
“Oh, Rose, I’m ashamed,” exclaimed the Maori girl, as the Pilot’s daughter pushed her forward. “But you two men are so funny and miserable, that I can’t help myself,”—she laughed good-naturedly—“and there’s Captain Summerhayes, fretting and fuming in the garden, as if he’d lost a thousand pounds.”