"Then," said Meldon, "we'll discuss her. I expect we'll come to an end of her soon, but we can at all events decide where we'll go to-morrow."
The yacht turned out to be a more fruitful subject than Meldon expected. The Major had made some alterations in her trim, which led to an animated discussion. He also had a plan for changing her from a cutter into a yawl, and Meldon was quite ready to argue out the points of advantage and disadvantage in each rig. It was half-past eleven o'clock before they parted for the night, and even then they had not decided where to go next day.
CHAPTER IX.
It was the evening of the second day of the Spindrift's cruise. The wind, which had come fresh from the east in the morning, followed the sun round in its course, blowing gently from the south at mid-day, and breathing very faintly from the west in the evening. After sunset it died away completely. The whole surface of the bay lay calm, save here and there where some chance movement of the air ruffled a tiny patch of water; or where, at the corners of the islands and in very narrow channels, the inward drawing of the tide marked long, curved lines and illusive circles on the oily sea. The Spindrift was poised motionless on the surface of the water, borne slowly, almost imperceptibly, forward by the sweep of the tide. Her mainsail, boomed out, hung in loose folds. The sheet, freed from all strain, was borne down by its own weight, until the slack of it dipped in the water. Terns and gulls, at lazy rest, floated close to the yacht's side. Long rows of dark cormorants, perched on rocky points, strained their necks and peered at her. Innumerable jelly-fish spread and sucked together again their transparent bodies, reaching down and round about them with purple feelers. Now and then some almost imperceptible breath of wind swayed the yacht's boom slowly forward against the loose runner and the stay, lifted the dripping sheet from the water, and half bellied the sail. Then the Spindrift would press forward, her spars creaking slightly, tiny ripples playing round her bows, a double line of oily bubbles in her wake. Again the impulse would fail her, and she would lie still among the palpitating jellyfish, perfectly reflected in the water beneath her; but carried steadily on by the silent shoreward swelling of the tide.
Major Kent sat at the tiller smoking. He was in that mood of vacant obliviousness of the ordinary affairs of life which long drifting on calm seas induces. The helplessness of man in a sailing-ship, when the wind fails him, begets a kind of fatalistic acceptance of the inevitable, which is the nearest thing to peace that any of us ever attain. Indeed to drift along the tide is peace, and no conviction of the inevitableness of the worries which lurk in ambush for us on the land has any power to break the spell.
Meldon lay stretched on the deck outside the combing of the cockpit. Nirvana had no attraction for him. He resented forced inactivity as an unendurable wrong. Instead of smoking with half-closed eyes, he peered eagerly forward under the sail. He noted everything—the floating gulls and puffins, the stiff, wild-eyed cormorants, the jelly-fish, the whirling eddies of the tide. As the yacht drifted on, or was driven forward by the occasional faint puffs of air, he hissed through his teeth in the way known to sailors as whistling for a breeze. He gazed long and steadily at the beach beyond the Spindrift's moorings.
"I think," he said at last, "that there is a man on the shore, and he looks to me very much as if he was waiting for us."
Major Kent made no answer. His feeling was that the man who waited might be left to wait without speculation about his purpose. Guessing at the possible business of an unknown and distant man is a form of mental exertion very distasteful to any one who has entered into the calm joy of drifting home after sunset. But Meldon was a man of incurably active mind. He was deeply interested in the solitary figure on the beach. The yacht was borne very slowly on, and it became possible at last to distinguish the figure of the waiter more clearly.
"He looks to me," said Meldon a few minutes later, "very like that fellow Callaghan, the Ballymoy House gardener."