“Come,” said Stoke. “Be a man and face it.”
There was no answer, and the speaker sat staring across the lashed waters to the west, his square chin thrust forward, his resolute lips pressed, his eyes impassive. There was obviously only one course through life for this seaman—the straight one.
“If it is only for Mary's sake,” he added at length.
“Keeping the Gull Lightship east-south-east, and having the South Foreland west by north, you should find six fathoms of water at a neap tide,” muttered Captain Dixon, in a low monotone. His eyes were fixed and far away. He was unconscious of his companion's presence, and spoke like one talking in his dreams.
Stoke sat motionless by him while he took his steamer in imagination through the Downs and round the North Foreland. But what he said was mostly nonsense, and he mixed up the bearings of the inner and outer channels into a hopeless jumble. Then he sat huddled up on the wall and lapsed again into a silent dream, with eyes fixed on the western sea. Stoke took him by the arm and led him back to the town, this harmless, soft-speaking creature who had once been a brilliant man, and had made but one mistake at sea.
Stoke wrote a long letter to Mary Dixon that afternoon. He took lodgings in a cottage outside St. Just, on the tableland that overlooks the sea. He told the captain of the coastguards that he had been able to identify this man, and had written to his people in London.
Dixon recognized her when she came, but he soon lapsed again into his dreamy state of incoherence, and that which made him lose his grip on his reason was again the terror of having to face the world as the captain of the lost Grandhaven. To humour him they left St. Just and went to London. They changed their name to that which Mary had borne before her marriage, a French Canadian name, Baillere. A great London specialist held out a dim hope of ultimate recovery.
“It was brought on by some great shock,” he suggested.
“Yes,” said Stoke. “By a great shock.”
“A bereavement?”