“That’s an excellent idea,” said the bishop. “You haven’t asked me, Davoren, but I think I’ll join Captain Welfare in a glass of sherry.”
I had always admired Parminter’s tact, and now Captain Welfare was manifestly gratified with the sense of having done the right thing under difficult circumstances.
Captain Welfare was kind enough to praise my sherry.
“I hadn’t ought to have put any bitters in it,” he said. “It puts me in mind of the Green Man at Southampton, a little place near the docks. Naturally you wouldn’t know it. But they give you a glass of sherry there——”
He went on with this topic in a kind of meditative way, as if he had forgotten to stop talking.
As there was evidently no necessity to attend to his story, I took the opportunity of examining him more closely.
His short powerful figure was curiously like what I had expected. But his face was quite a surprise to me. Most strange faces are somehow familiar. I suppose they fall into one or other of certain categories of faces we have unconsciously formed in our minds.
This face was extraordinarily large, forming, as it were, the front wall of a massive head which was scarcely raised above his wide shoulders by a thick and very strong neck. I had noticed that while he was standing up. Now as he lay back in his chair the edge of his low collar made a groove in the flesh under his jaw, and his large indented chin almost filled up the opening of his waistcoat.
His complexion was quite colourless. I thought at first it was scarred by small-pox, but the reticulations in his tough skin were finer than those left by that disease. I don’t know if I am right about this, but it looked as if no hair grew on this sterile surface. I doubt if any razor could have shaved it. His vertical forehead, short straight nose, wide but well closed mouth and powerful chin were all rather admirable in a slightly grotesque way. He had undoubtedly the look of a man of considerable force and determination. But his large, well-shaped, greenish-brown eyes had a curious dreaminess in them, and something of the wistfulness of those of a small monkey.
I thought as he sat there how impossible it would be from his appearance to determine either his age or his occupation. I could conceive of him as an ecclesiastic, a lawyer, a tailor, or an actor. But nothing about him suggested the mariner. It is a curious fact that in whatever line of life my fancy placed him, I pictured him at the head of it as a cardinal, a Lord Chancellor, or a Scotch comedian. Yet he had been apparently an indifferent success as an adventurer. I thought of the bishop’s dictum—“Want of opportunity,” and wondered if the Astarte was destined to give this man his belated chance?