A minute, old man and young looked steadily at each other. Then Hal came up the white-sanded walk, between the two rows of polished conches. He stopped at the old man’s window.
“Grandfather,” said he in a low tone. “Will you listen to me, please?”
“What have you got to say, sir?” demanded Briggs, and stiffened his resolution. “Well, sir?”
“Listen, grandfather,” answered Hal, in a very manly way, that harmonized with his blue-eyed look, and with his whole air of ingenuous and boyish contrition. He crossed his bare arms, looked down a moment at the sand, dug at it a little with a toe, and then once more raised his head. “Listen, please. I’ve got just one thing to ask. Please don’t lecture me, and don’t be harsh. I stand here absolutely penitent, grandfather, begging to be forgiven. I’ve already apologized to Dr. Filhiol and Ezra—”
“So I understand,” put in Briggs, still striving hard to make his voice sound uncompromising. “Well?”
“Well, grandfather—as for apologizing to you, that’s kind of a hard proposition. It isn’t that I don’t want to, but the relations between us have been so close that it’s pretty hard to make up a regular apology. You and I aren’t on a basis where I really could apologize, as I could to anybody else. But I certainly did act the part of a ruffian on the Sylvia Fletcher, and I was certainly a rotter here last night. There’s only one other thing—”
“And what’s that, sir?” demanded Briggs. The captain still maintained judicial aloofness, despite all cravings of the heart. “What’s that?”
“I—you may not believe it, gramp, but it’s true. I really don’t remember hardly anything about what happened aboard the schooner or here. I suppose I can’t stand even a couple of drinks. It all seems hazy to me now, like a kind of nightmare. It’s all indistinct, as if it weren’t me at all, but somebody else. I feel just as if I’d been watching another man do the things that I really know I myself did do. The feeling is that somebody else took my body and used it, and made it do things that I myself didn’t want it to do. But I was powerless to stop it. Grampy, it’s true, true, true!”
He paused, looking at his grandfather with eyes of tragic seriousness. Old Briggs shivered slightly, and drew the bathrobe more tightly around his shoulders.
“Go on, Hal.”