"If you young fellows knew," he remarked dryly, "all that you surely learn later, you'd let the stuff alone. I'm part owner here, and when you went on that drunk and quit me I had made up my mind to put you in command. 'Tend to business, now, and you can take her out next voyage."
"I'll make good, sir," I answered, pleased with the prospect, and willing to be thought an ex-drunkard rather than an ex-convict.
"But keep still about it," he said. "The principal owner is on board for the trip home. Your job is to impress him before the proposition is put up to him. He's somewhat crotchety and queer."
I joined the ship—a big, black, skysail yarder, filled to the hatches with sugar and jute—as she was lifting her anchor. We went to sea in a gale, and for two days and two nights I had not time to unpack my chest, much less to take note of my surroundings and the impression I was creating as a first mate fitted to command. I saw the owner occasionally in the brief lulls of shortening down—a tall, spare figure, muffled to the nose in a hooded mackintosh—but I did not meet him until the morning of the third day out, when, after an hour or two of sleep, I turned out for a look around before going to breakfast, and there, in the forward companion, ran plump into him. The next moment I had him by the throat, position, prospects, honor, love, and liberty going down before the uprush of rage and hatred.
There flashed into my mind at that moment a memory from boyhood, forgotten through the years, of his father being largely interested in shipping, but it was futile, irrelevant, and left me as it came; then, while he sagged under my grip, there came to me the picture of Grace Morton's frightened face as she had turned it up to me in the lamplight. But I forced it from me. That love is dead, I thought, and I hissed the thought through my teeth with my curses. Then, thinking of the long, bitter years in prison, the suffering and the shame, the thwarted hopes and plans, the struggle to maintain my integrity for the sake of a girl that had forgotten me, and knowing only that the cause of it all was right here, in my hands, I felt what I had not felt before—the impulse, the desire, and the self-justification to kill.
But I did not kill him. I relaxed my hold and looked into the same frightened face that had appealed to me once before. Older now, with lines of care and trouble in it, but more womanly and commanding. She stood in the dining-room door, and had commanded me to stop; and I obeyed her. Her brother slunk past her into the dining-room. The second mate was on deck, the steward had not come aft with the breakfast. The captain had not come through from the after cabin. None but the girl had seen the assault.
"Go to your room, George," she called to him through the door. "Wait for me, and say nothing to the captain."
Then she turned, and calmly regarded me. On my part, I stood before her like a culprit, trembling, and with my tongue dry against the roof of my mouth.
"Jack," she said, "I have watched you through this window since we sailed, watched you in your strength and mastery of your calling. And I have listened to your voice, that roused me from sleep on the first night, and which I recognized as yours. And I said to myself that you were a man, that you must be a man, and that I may have misjudged you. But here, you assault an invalid for a quarrel over five years old, that began in my behalf, I admit, but which ended in your own."
"An invalid," I managed to say. "A quarrel—in my behalf? Go on, please, Miss Morton."