Old Featherstone came on board, as his custom was, as soon as she was fairly berthed, and Broughton—tongue-tied and stammering as he always was on important occasions of the kind—gave an account of his stewardship. The old man listened with never a word, only just a grunt or a brusque nod now and again; and when the tale was told made no comment whatever beyond a curt “Humph! Well, you can’t have command of this ship. She’s promised to Allinson. Can’t go back on him. Besides, he’s senior to you.”
Then, with one foot on the gangway, he turned back and barked out:
“I’ve bought a new ship. ‘Philopena’ or some such outlandish name. She’s at Griffin’s Wharf, Millwall. Better go and look at her. You can have her if you fancy her.”
Half-way down the gangway he turned again.
“Come and dine with me at Blackheath on Thursday. Seven o’clock. And don’t keep me waiting, mind! I’m a punctual man, or I shouldn’t be where I am.”
That invitation—invitation? it was more like a Royal command—as Broughton well knew, set the seal on his promotion.
The ship was the “Maid of Athens.”
IV
Broughton went in search of her as soon as he had finished up on board the “Haidée” and turned her over to the care of the old lame shipkeeper.
He didn’t feel particularly excited; his feeling, naturally enough, was one of pleasurable anticipation of an improvement in his material circumstances—no more than that, as he realized with that wistful sense of flatness and disappointment which inevitably accompanies the discovery that some long-desired consummation has lost through the lapse of time its power to excite and to intoxicate the mind. “If this had happened ten years ago,” he thought rather sadly, “Lord, how full of myself I should have been!” forgetting that middle age, when it does make acquaintance with passion, seldom does it by halves.