He looked up at me quietly. “No,” he said. “No—that is not the whole of it.”
Still he did not continue, so I prompted him. “You said the whale was seen four times,” I suggested.
He nodded; and so drifted into his story again. “Aye, four times,” he agreed. “The old bull with the cross upon his skull. Four times. I’ve but told the first.”
He puffed silently for a little, shifted his great bulk in the chair, rose and crossed to the window to look down toward the harbor, and returned at last to me.
“Joan kept to her cabin much, from that day,” he said. “She kept to her cabin; and Eric Scarf did his tasks and held aloof from her. We came smoothly northward, and presently were at our pier, unloading the casks that filled our holds. Eric had slowly recovered something of the old strength and power that moved him; and though he avoided the girl, and though I could see how he suffered and what agony he was enduring, he kept a steady face to the men, and drove them as he always drove.
“Cap’n Tobbey was a quiet, stern man; but he was just. He blamed Eric for taking out the boat, but he knew the other for what it was, an accident of Fate; and when time came for the next cruise, Eric was too good a man to stay ashore. He shipped as mate, and I was second mate again.
“This time, Joan stayed behind. She had had enough of the sea for a lifetime, she told me; and from a girl, she was become a woman. Lovely as ever, her laughter as sweet and crisp as a spring wind, yet there was a depth in her that had not been there before, and at times her eyes shrank as though they gazed upon awful, tragic happenings.
“She was on the pier the day we sailed; and I saw Eric Scarf watching her with the hopeless longing in his eyes that tears at the vitals of a man.
“There was a shadow over the mate from the beginning of that cruise. Any man could see it; and the fo’mast hands used to watch him, and whisper among themselves. Outwardly he was the same; strong and quick and proud, alive, alert, his body uplifted with the energy it housed. He trod the decks lightly, he moved with the quick precision of an animal; and he plunged into his work in a fashion that would have worn another man to threads.
“A sprinkling of our old crew was aboard; so Eric’s story was no secret. But it was never mentioned by him or in his presence. He seemed to find a joy in his toil that allowed him to forget; and the man’s eyes brightened and his cheeks set in their old firm, fine lines as we drove southward. There is no better index to a man than the cheeks of him. Flabbiness of body or soul shows quickest there, and there all other vices and all virtues first appear. Eric’s face was neither gaunt nor round, but it had a chiseled perfection of contour that was like a song.