Old Mike’s bit o’ fire smouldered a little and went out, leaving nothing but an acrid stink to mark its passing. The well-stewed tea in the enamel cup at his elbow, with the two ragged slices of margarine-plastered bread beside it in the slopped saucer, grew cold unheeded. Outside, the rain dripped down like slow tears. And there he sat, with his clenched hands before him on the table, staring into the Past.
There wasn’t a plank of her, not a rivet, not a rope-yarn that didn’t mean something to him. True, Old Featherstone had given his money for her: and if he knew that old man aright he hadn’t given a brass farthing more than he could help. But he—what had he given to her? Money—well, he had given that, too, since Old Featherstone had turned mean, though his twenty pounds a month hadn’t run to a great deal. But that was neither here nor there. Things money could never buy he was thinking of, sitting there in the cold, fog-dimmed cabin.
The years of his life had gone into her—affection, understanding, ungrudging service, sleepless nights and anxious days. What wonder that she seemed almost like a part of himself? What wonder that to a man of his rigid, slow-moving type of mind a future in which she had no part was a thing unthinkable?
His memory passed on to all the mates and second mates who had faced him at meals over that very cabin. A regular procession of them—Marston—Reid—what was the name of that chap with the light eyelashes?—Barnes, was it?—Digby—he was a decent chap, now—went into steam years ago and was chief officer in one of the B. I. ships last time Broughton heard of him. That was what he ought to have done. He had known it at the back of his mind all along. But he couldn’t leave her—he couldn’t leave her!
Well, well, there was no use meeting trouble half-way! What was it old Waterhouse, his first skipper in his brassbound days, used to say? “If you’re jammed on a lee shore and can’t stay, why, then try wearing. If that don’t work, try boxing her off. But whatever you do, do something! Don’t sit down and howl!”
They used to laugh at him and mimic him behind his back, cheeky young devils; but it was damned good advice for all that. He was on a lee shore now right enough; but there was bound to be a way out somewhere if he kept his head.
An intense drowsiness and weariness had begun to creep over him—just such a leaden desire for sleep as he had experienced in that same cabin many a time after days of incessant and anxious battling with gales and seas. His unmade bed looked singularly unenticing, so, dragging a blanket from the pile upon it, he kicked off his sodden boots and lay down on the cabin settee.
A rising wind had begun to moan and sigh in the rigging, driving the rain in sheets against the skylight ... there was a way out, a way out ... if he could only think of it ... somewhere....
VI
He awoke to a flood of bright sunshine streaming in through the skylight. The wind had driven fog and rain before it, leaving a virginal and new-washed world under a sky of pale, remote blue.