Sard left the deck in charge of Pompey and went below to make ready for breakfast. He had been too busy ever since dawn to think of his own affairs, but down in his cabin the words of the warnings rang again in his brain: “You will meet her again in that house: it will be . . . very, very important.” And deep within his mind a voice seemed speaking: “You, who did not believe, see what has been done for you. The way has been cleared for you to go ashore.”
“Yes,” he thought, “I shall be ashore by two bells. I could go to the house before the boxing. I shall be free here for five hours, when I expected to be out at sea. All the same, I am not ashore yet. Captain Cary may change his mind.”
For the last two years he had noticed old age, “with crawling clutch,” laying hold of Captain Cary. One of its results was an old-maidish inquisitiveness about his officers’ doings ashore; a desire to screen them from “temptation.” This was easily to be understood, since he had himself trained all his officers from their first coming to sea, but it was trying to grown men. Sard knew that Captain Cary looked upon him partly as a favourite chick, a prize hatching from a clutch who had become “my mate,” or “my chief officer,” or “my Mr. Harker,” but that mainly Captain Cary still thought of him as a boy in the half deck, whose morals must be watched in port. “I know,” he muttered, “the old man will say something at breakfast that will check my movements ashore. He won’t give me absolute liberty on the day of sailing.”
He went into the long narrow cabin, that was painted white fore and aft; little shields painted with blue and white stripes were on all the doors opening into this cabin. A clock and a tell-tale compass were under the skylight, set into the coamings. All round the after bulkhead were stands of arms, old Snider rifles, bayonets, boarding pikes, tomahawks and cutlasses, all shining like stars. On the table were six red geraniums in pots. The table shone with electro-plated ware, for Captain Cary kept a style. He was at the head of the table in clean white drills. The old steward stood at attention beside him. Sard took his seat.
At breakfast, Captain Cary, after feeding his canaries, talked of the pleasure of getting away to sea with a full crew. “When my brother was here in the Lolita in ’79, in the beginning of the gold-rush, everybody left her, except his boatswain, and none of them came back, except one of the boys, a lad of the name of Jenkins, who had a lump of gold as big as one hand, done up in a handkerchief.”
“I hope, sir, that your brother charged Jenkins bullion-rates for freightage.”
“No, Mr. Harker; he gave him the end of a brace for going out of the ship. And Jenkins went ashore in the ship’s dinghy that night and never went aboard again. He started one of these low dance-and-cigar divans; there used to be too many of them. He married one of these greaser women after, but I never heard that he did much good.”
“Did your brother get a crew, sir?”
“Yes; when some of the gold-diggers had had enough of it; or too much, as often happened, for there were Indians, then, in the foothill country, seventy miles from here. When I was here myself, in ’74 or ’75, you could see the Indian bucks riding their ponies. You could get your hair cut for nothing outside the walls after nightfall in those days. You can get your throat cut for nothing inside the walls in these days, for the matter of that.”
“Yes, sir. I hear, sir, that that is because the rum-smugglers have been landing their cargoes along the coast here.”