“Stoke—first mate,” was the reply.
The rest of the story of the wreck has been told by abler pens in the daily newspapers. How forty-seven people were saved; how the lifeboat from Cadgwith picked up some, floating insensible on the ebbing tide with lifebuoys tied securely round them; how some men proved themselves great, and some women greater; how a few proved themselves very contemptible indeed; how the quiet chief officer, Stoke, obeyed his captain's orders to take charge of the passengers;—are not these things told by the newspapers? Some of them, especially the halfpenny ones, went further, and explained to a waiting world how it had all come about, and how easily it might have been avoided. They, moreover, dealt out blame and praise with a liberal hand, and condemned the owners or exonerated the captain with the sublime wisdom which illumines Fleet Street. One and all agreed that because the captain was drowned he was not to blame, a very common and washy sentiment which appealed powerfully to the majority of their readers. Some of the newspapers, while agreeing that the first officer, having saved many lives by his great exertions during the night, and perfect organization for relief and help the next day, had made for himself an immortal name, hinted darkly that the captain's was the better part, and that they preferred to hear in such cases that all the officers had perished.
Stoke despatched the surviving passengers by train from Helston back to London. They were not enthusiastic about him, neither did they subscribe to present him with a service of plate. They thought him stern and unsympathetic. But before they had realized quite what had happened they were back at their homes or with their friends. Many of the dead were recovered, and went to swell the heavy crop of God's seed sown in St. Keverne churchyard. It was Stoke who organized these quiet burials, and took a careful note of each name. It was he to whom the friends of the dead made their complaint or took their tearful reminiscences, to both of which alike he gave an attentive hearing emphasized by the steady gaze of a pair of grey-blue eyes which many remembered afterwards without knowing why.
“It is all right,” said the director of the great steamship company in London. “Stoke is there.”
And they sent him money, and left him in charge at St. Keverne. The newspaper correspondents hurried thither, and several of them described the wrong man as Stoke, while others, having identified him, weighed him, and found him wanting in a proper sense of their importance. There was no “copy” in him, they said. He had no conception of the majesty of the Press.
At length the survivors were all sent home and the dead thrown up by the sea were buried. Martin, the second officer, was among these. They found the captain's pilot-jacket on the beach. He must have made a fight for his life, and thrown aside his jacket for greater ease in swimming. Twenty-nine of the crew, eleven passengers, and a stewardess were never found. The sea would never give them up now until that day when she shall relinquish her hostages—mostly Spaniards and English—to come from the deep at the trumpet call.
Stoke finished his business in St. Keverne and took the train to London. Never an expansive man, he was shut up now as the strong are shut up by a sorrow. The loss of the Grandhaven left a scar on his heart which time could not heal. She had come to his care from the builder's yard. She had never known another husband.
He was free now—free to turn to the hardest portion of his task. He had always sailed with Dixon, his life-long friend. They had been boys together, had forced their way up the ladder together, had understood each other all through. His friend's wife, by virtue of her office perhaps, had come nearer to this man's grim and lonely heart than any other woman. He had never defined this feeling; he had not even gone back to its source as a woman would have done, or he might have discovered that the gentle air of question or of waiting in her eyes which was not always there, but only when he looked for it, had been there long ago on a summer voyage before she was Captain Dixon's wife at all.
All through his long swim to shore, all through the horrors of that November night and the long-drawn pain of the succeeding days, he had done his duty with a steady impassiveness which was in keeping with the square jaw, the resolute eyes, the firm and merciful lips of the man; but he had only thought of Mary Dixon. His one thought was that this must break her heart.
It was this thought that made him hard and impassive. In the great office in London he was received gravely. With a dull surprise he noted a quiver in the lips of the managing director when he shook hands. The great business man looked older and smaller and thinner in this short time, for it is a terrible thing to have to deal in human lives, even if you are paid heavily for so doing.