Broughton put the suggestion aside with a laugh. Pellatt, who was one of those people who, as the phrase goes, “talk as they warm,” and simply said it out of a desire to say something complimentary and pleasing to his host—Broughton’s absorption in his ship being something of a standing joke among his fellow-captains when his back was turned—probably forgot he had ever said it before he got back to his own ship. But the words had sown their seed.
At first Broughton only played with the idea at odd moments: he would do this, he would do that, if the ship were his—treating it as a pleasant kind of game of make-believe wherewith to beguile an idle minute; but always with the mental proviso that, of course, no one but a silly gabbling ass like Pellatt would ever have thought of such a thing.
Then, gradually, he began to wonder if it really was such a ridiculous notion, after all. Old Featherstone’s business would die with him, that was very certain. Hadn’t he said as much himself, the last time Broughton dined at Blackheath, about the time young Daly, whose father Featherstone had worked for in his clerking days, came such a holy mucker in the Bankruptcy Court?
“I don’t intend to leave my house-flag to be trailed through the mire!” he had said.
And hadn’t he said, too, not once but many times:
“I shall never sell the ‘Maid of Athens’!”
Presently, from being a desirable but remote possibility, he began to consider it in the light of a probability; and from that it was but a short step to take to begin to look upon it as a right. Who, he asked himself, had a stronger claim to the ship than he—if, indeed, half so strong?
He began by degrees to make his plans more definitely. It was no longer “if the ship were mine,” but “when she is mine.” He hugged the thought to him, fed upon it, lived with it night and day. He hoped he could honestly say he had never wished Old Featherstone’s death; but when the news of his death had come he had not been able to repress a thrill of exultation as the thought rose to the surface of his mind, “Now, at last, she will surely be mine!”
It had been the old man himself who had finally turned what had until then been no more than a vague hope into a virtual certainty.
It was on the occasion of that last dinner at Blackheath, a matter of six weeks ago, just before the attack of bronchitis that had finished the old fellow off. There he had sat in his big easy-chair by the fire, looking incredibly frail and shrunken, his eyes, for all that, as keen as ever in their sunken caves as they wandered from Broughton’s face to the counterfeit presentment of the “Maid of Athens” riding proudly on her painted sea.