He sat down in a chair just opposite his father’s friend. He put down his hat upon the table with a slight, hard rap; looked Mr Abbott steadily and strongly in the eyes (an effort so unusual as to cause him positive pain), and said:
“I think you know why I have come.”
To such gross simplicity as the shipmaster’s, all this was as yet nothing but an annoyance. He took the young man’s hat off the table, reached out so as to hang it on the gas bracket behind him (whence it fell to the floor) and said “No.” And, as he said it, a very unpleasing expression passed across his face.
Cosmo jumped up, picked his hat off the floor, brushed it with his arm, rapped it down upon the table again and said, with admirable self-restraint: “You know as well as I do why I have come.”
“Let me put it up safely for you,” said Mr Abbott, and he reached forward again for the hat. Cosmo withdrew it and held it in his right hand, and, even at that most incongruous moment, Mr Abbott could not refrain from laughter.
“You will have it,” he said; and his amusement so far got the better of his temper, that Cosmo thought for one moment inwardly whether it would not be better to approach this coarse mind by another channel. But his training wisely persuaded him that the most direct of methods was the best. The method whereby men tame beasts; the masterly method of fear.
“I have come,” he said, still keeping himself well in hand, “because matters cannot go on much longer as they are doing now.” He paused a moment to let the impression form. “It can’t go on, Mr Abbott, and I have come to tell you so quite frankly.... Before I leave this room I mean the business to be settled.... It can’t go on.”
Mr Abbott rang a bell.
A young and rather nervous clerk came in, and gazed anxiously from one to the other, for Cosmo’s face was unfamiliar to him, and there had been quarrels of late.
“Arthur,” said Mr Abbott, “is it Friday or Monday that the Patagonia sails?”