“The following morning I happened to be talking with Deshay, for at sea dislike of a shipmate is no reason for not getting what entertainment there is in him, and while we were talking Claud came up and requested a few words with him.
“‘Anything personal?’ I asked. Claud hesitated for a moment, apparently embarrassed.
“‘Oh, no,’ said he, and went on, stammering like a school-boy who had forgotten his recitation. ‘You see, Doctor Leyden,’ said he, ‘when I engaged my passage I was afraid that I might be seasick, so I made an arrangement with Captain Deshay by which he was to drop me at Honolulu if I wished it. He—he—told me that there were to be no other passengers.’”
“‘But you are not seasick, are you?’ said I.
“‘No,’ he answered, ‘but I am—I am—I am homesick.’ Upon my word, he gulped like a little girl the first day in school and his blue eyes filled with tears; he could not have been under twenty years of age.
“‘I do not think that you have dealt quite fairly with me, Captain,’ said he, in a voice which he tried to make cold and assertive, but would have been only contemptible if one had not been sorry for him—and then as he looked at our faces and saw scant sympathy in either, he crumbled.
“‘To tell the truth, Captain,’ he continued, with a rather nervous laugh, ‘I’m afraid that I’ve lost my nerve; I’m sick of the voyage already and want to get back home. Of course, I’ll defray any additional expense due to taking you out of your course,’ he concluded, with a sort of shy eagerness.
“‘Oh, come, old fellow,’ said Deshay, coaxingly, and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘The first twenty-four hours——’
“‘Look out for your dog!’ I cried suddenly, for as Deshay’s hand fell upon Claud’s shoulder I had happened to glance at Dixie. The dog was standing quietly enough at his master’s heel, and at Deshay’s action had made none of the usual canine expressions of displeasure, and it was this absence which made him so alarming, for as I glanced at his great, dark, intelligent eye it seemed filled with such a smouldering, slumbering intensity of hate that it gave me a positive start. The fine, silky hair was not even ruffled, there was not the slightest twitch to the velvet lips, but I could see that every muscle of the beautifully moulded body was tense as our weather shrouds and there was a fine quiver to the strong flanks. Have you ever, Doctor, closely watched a woman who is married to a man she hates, loathes, despises, as her husband enters the room? Perhaps he is a plausible brute who only shows the cloven hoof after he has shot the bolt of her bedroom door; no one else may guess it unless one watches the wife. The dilatation of the pupil, the faintest quiver of the nostrils, the little shiver—Dixie had all of these, but, as Claud had said, he was too self-contained, too much of a gentleman, to further reveal his emotions.
“I could see Claud shrivel at Deshay’s familiarity. One guessed that he longed to throw off the man’s hand, which still clutched his shoulder good-humoredly, but he was too sensitive, too fearful of giving offense, not through any liking for the man, but because it seemed gauche, boorish, and would fill the air with a sort of rough impulse, shocking to his fine sensitiveness. No doubt he had suffered at times from rebuffs to his own timid advances, and had not enough knowledge of the world and men to keep from putting a coarse, thick-skinned brute like Deshay in his own class of emotions.