“He did,” cried Mr. Burns excitedly. “And it’s my belief he would have tried to take the ship down with him if it had been in human power. He never meant her to see home again. He wouldn’t write to his owners, he never wrote to his old wife, either—he wasn’t going to. He had made up his mind to cut adrift from everything. That’s what it was. He didn’t care for business, or freights, or for making a passage—or anything. He meant to have gone wandering about the world till he lost her with all hands.”
Mr. Burns looked like a man who had escaped great danger. For a little he would have exclaimed: “If it hadn’t been for me!” And the transparent innocence of his indignant eyes was underlined quaintly by the arrogant pair of moustaches which he proceeded to twist, and as if extend, horizontally.
I might have smiled if I had not been busy with my own sensations, which were not those of Mr. Burns. I was already the man in command. My sensations could not be like those of any other man on board. In that community I stood, like a king in his country, in a class all by myself. I mean an hereditary king, not a mere elected head of a state. I was brought there to rule by an agency as remote from the people and as inscrutable almost to them as the Grace of God.
And like a member of a dynasty, feeling a semimystical bond with the dead, I was profoundly shocked by my immediate predecessor.
That man had been in all essentials but his age just such another man as myself. Yet the end of his life was a complete act of treason, the betrayal of a tradition which seemed to me as imperative as any guide on earth could be. It appeared that even at sea a man could become the victim of evil spirits. I felt on my face the breath of unknown powers that shape our destinies.
Not to let the silence last too long I asked Mr. Burns if he had written to his captain’s wife. He shook his head. He had written to nobody.
In a moment he became sombre. He never thought of writing. It took him all his time to watch incessantly the loading of the ship by a rascally Chinese stevedore. In this Mr. Burns gave me the first glimpse of the real chief mate’s soul which dwelt uneasily in his body.
He mused, then hastened on with gloomy force.
“Yes! The captain died as near noon as possible. I looked through his papers in the afternoon. I read the service over him at sunset and then I stuck the ship’s head north and brought her in here. I—brought—her—in.”
He struck the table with his fist.