“And a fat lot of good it did me,” retorted the sailor. “But,” he added, with the sudden recollection that it is never wise of a master mariner to irritate any shipowner, “but, sir, I wasn’t talking to you. I fancied it was Mr. Onslow here who was wanting to deal with me.”
“Then your fancy carried you astray, captain,” said Shelf. “Come, come, don’t let’s get angry with one another. As I repeatedly impress on all who come in contact with me, there is never any good born out of words voiced in anger. Mr. Onslow has seen fit to mention a few of your—shall I say—eccentricities, just to show—er—that we understand one another.”
“To show he’s got his knife in me, Mr. Shelf, and can wraggle it if he chooses.”
“What a fractious pepper-box it is!” said Onslow, with a laugh. “Man, dear, if I’ve got to be shipmate with you for a solid month, d’ye think I’d put your back up more than’s necessary? If you remember me at all, you must know I’m the deuce of a stickler for my own personal comfort and convenience. You can bet I haven’t been talking at you through gratuitous cruelty. But Mr. Shelf and I have got a yarn to bring out directly, which is a bit of a coarse, tough-fibered yarn, and we didn’t want you to give it a top-dressing of varnish. So, by way of safeguard, I pointed out to you that if we show ourselves to be sinners, you needn’t sing out that you find yourself in evil company for the first time.”
Mr. Theodore Shelf had been shuffling his feet uneasily for some time. Onslow’s method of speech jarred him to the verge of profanity. His own saintliness was a garb which he never threw entirely away at any moment. His voice had always the oily drone of the conventicle. His smug hypocrisy was a perennial source of pride and comfort to him, without which he would have felt very lonely and abandoned.
At this point he drew the conversation into his own hands. It had been said of him that he always addressed the House of Commons as though he were addressing a congregation from the pulpit of his own tin tabernacle, and he preached out his scheme of plunder, violence, and other moral uncleanness with similar fervent unction. Onslow was openly amused, and once broke out into a mocking laugh. He was never at any pains to conceal his contempt for Mr. Theodore Shelf; which was more honest than judicious on his part.
Kettle, on the other hand, wore the puckered face of a puzzled man. The combination of cant and criminality was not altogether new to him. Men of his profession are frequently apt to behave like fiends unbooted at sea, and then grovel in clamorous piety amongst the pews of some obscure meeting-house during all their stay ashore. It is a peculiar trait; but many a sea-scoundrel believes that he can lay up a stock of fire insurance of this sort, which will comfortably see him through future efforts. In Kettle’s mind, however, shipowners were a vastly different class of beings, and so it never occurred to him that the same might apply to them.
In this attitude Captain Kettle listened to the sermon which was reeled out to him, and rather gathered that the project he was exhorted to take part in was in some obscure manner a missionary enterprise promoted solely in the honor and glory of Mr. Theodore Shelf’s own particular narrow little sect; and had Mr. Shelf made any appreciable pause between his sonorous periods, Kettle would have felt it his respectful duty to slip in a humble “Amen.” But the dictator of the great shipping firm was too fearful of interruptions from his partner to give any opening for a syllable of comment.
But if Captain Owen Kettle was unversed in the finer niceties of the art of hypocrisy, he was a man of angular common-sense; and by degrees it dawned upon him that Mr. Shelf’s project, when removed of its top-dressing of religion, was in its naked self something very different from what he had at first been drawn to believe.