“Bad news, Cap’n?” came the clerk’s inquiring voice.
Broughton pulled himself together with an effort.
“No, no, thanks!” Mechanically he made his adieux and passed out into the street. He didn’t know where he was going. He never remembered how he found his way to the Outer Wharf where his boat was waiting.
But he must have got there somehow, for now he was sitting in the stern-sheets and looking out across the water to the ship lying at anchor, with eyes to which sorrow and the shadow of parting seemed to have given a strange new apprehension of beauty. How lovely she looked, he thought, with the little pink clouds seeming to be caught in her rigging, and the gulls flying and calling all about her! It was queer that he should notice things like that so much, now that he was going to lose her. He had known the time when he would have taken it all for granted. Now, he kept seeing all kinds of little things in a kind of new, clear light, as if he saw them for the first time——
Let young Kennedy tell the rest of the tale—in his cabin in a Blue Funnel liner, years afterwards; the unforgettable, indefinable smell of China drifting up from the Chinese emigrants’ quarters, the gabble of the stokers at their interminable fan-tan on the forecastle mingling with the piping of the gulls along the wharf sheds.
“I could see at once” (thus young Kennedy) “that something had gone wrong with the Old Man. He looked ten years older since I had seen him a couple of hours before. He came up the ladder very slowly and heavily, passed me by without speaking—I might have been a stanchion standing there for all the notice he took of me—and went down into the cabin almost as if he were walking in his sleep.
“Something—I don’t exactly know what—intuition, perhaps, you’d call it—made me trump up an excuse to follow him. I didn’t like the looks of him, somehow.
“I found him sitting in his chair by the table, staring straight before him with that same fixed look as if he didn’t really see anything.
“He didn’t so much as turn his head when I went in, and at first when I spoke he didn’t seem to hear me. I spoke again, a little louder, and he gave a sort of start, as if he had been suddenly roused out of a sleep.
“‘Yes—no!’ he said in a dazed kind of way. ‘Yes—no’ (like that); and then suddenly, in a very loud, harsh voice, quite different from his ordinary way of speaking: ‘A hulk! A hulk! They are going to make a coal hulk of her!’