III
Captain Vanton looked much less like a ghost than a man who had seen a ghost when Mermaid confronted him in the mahogany and teakwood parlour. She had with her a black bag, as if she were about to take a journey. She seated herself easily and her manner was composed, though her heart was beating rapidly. The short, thick figure of the retired seaman moved back and forth across the polished and whitened floor of the room as it had moved across the whitened and polished afterdeck of tall ships. His spreading sidewhiskers with their misleading air of benevolence could not contradict the disturbance in his reddened eyes. He had not looked at his caller since her arrival, and he did not now. Stranger still, he had not spoken to her. A few gestures and she was in the parlour, seated; the door was closed and they were alone.
“Captain Vanton,” began Mermaid. She paused an instant, then went on: “I am grown up and it is time that you told me my story.”
She saw the hands of the mariner, clasped behind him as he paced away from her, tighten. She knew she must say more to make him address her.
“Captain King——” she began.
The heavy tread was cut short. He was standing in front of her. He was speaking in a throaty voice as if his words had to carry against the force of a powerful gale to reach her.
“Don’t speak that man’s name,” he was saying.
“You must tell me my story,” Mermaid repeated.
He stood there irresolutely, an abject figure of shame, a sea captain unready with an instant decision, an order, a command, a shouted epithet. He hesitated; and when he would have put his helm hard over it was too late.
“My aunt and I are going to San Francisco,” the girl was saying. “In San Francisco they will remember Captain King.”