"I have known them only ashore," said Drew, "and I certainly never knew a more joyous, open-hearted people—hardly the sort to make tyrants of." He turned to Medbury: "But you were going to say—?"
Medbury sharply drew the strands of his rope through the outer walling of the knot as he replied:
"Oh, nothing."
"I fancy," began Drew, "that sailors are too practical a class, too constantly surrounded by danger, not to know the value of self-restraint. It is wise to keep far from one the passion that fires the mind beyond the point where the every-day work of living is accomplished with the least friction."
Medbury glanced up as he spoke, and caught the look that Hetty fastened upon the speaker. There was nothing in the quiet gaze beyond interest and the sympathy of kindred convictions, but it gave Medbury the curious sensation of standing apart from them, of being irrevocably alone. He turned away with a new pain about his heart. He was still thinking of Hetty's look when Drew, busily erecting his card-house of the sailor's life upon a foundation of calm philosophy, asked him if he had ever seen cruelty on shipboard. His tone was the confident one of the philosopher who, having formulated a theory, calmly awaits the facts that will establish it.
"You two might call it that," Medbury answered, not without a touch of resentment in his voice; "I shouldn't. It's easy enough to talk about self-restraint, but when it means letting things go to the dogs, and maybe putting your vessel in danger—" He thrust his fid between the strands of his rope with an energy that seemed to him adequately to complete his meaning.
Drew was dimly aware that the situation had somehow become charged with feeling, and remained silent; but Hetty, with clearer instinct, recognized the cause of Medbury's heat, and resented it, while she recognized its potential force, feeling that she had unwittingly been drawn from the calm current of broad discussion into an inner vortex of personal emotion. That she had become unduly interested in Drew—she clearly saw that the thought was in Medbury's mind—she indignantly denied to herself. She turned toward the sailor with resentment shining in her eyes; but at the sight of his head bowed above his work, there flashed over her a strange revulsion of feeling. It was not tenderness, though compounded of tenderness, pity, and the memory of many things. His loyalty to her, which had lived on through long years in spite of varying encouragement, had sometimes provoked her vexation, sometimes her complacency; at this moment it suddenly appeared to her to be a beautiful thing. His hair waved a little about his brows; his face, though sad, showed the old fine courage. She saw his close-shut lips held nothing of harshness. His hands, brown and sinewy, revealed strength and skill, and were as yet uncoarsened by hard contact with hemp and canvas in cold and wet and sun. "After all, he's a man," she thought, with tears welling in her eyes.
She turned and looked out across the shining sea, feeling its immensity, its power in the moving waves, to be somehow strangely like the life that inclosed her and swept her on without the power of volition. She did not turn as Drew spoke.
"Shall we finish our book?" he had asked her.
From time to time in the last few days he had read aloud from the "Idylls of the King" while she worked at some trifle, or sat with hands clasped in her lap and watched the waves in a pleasurable emotion to which his fine, unaffected voice had contributed quite as largely as the words of the poet. At this moment his question, in its abrupt withdrawal from the general interest, seemed tactless. For an instant she made no answer.