When we first observe him watching the captain, and listening to his conversation with Mr. Torrens, his face is lighted up with joy, and his limbs are shaking with excitement.
“He cannot escape me,” he thinks. “I have run him to earth, and within ten days he will be denounced. Heaven grant me patience to keep my counsel until we reach Malta. Ha! now he returns with his ill-gotten gains, and that other scoundrel little imagines how he will be punished for his greed.”
For the next ten minutes Mr. Trace finds connected thought impossible, but, with his eye put close to the peephole, is taking a necessarily circumscribed view of the scene being enacted in the captain’s berth. There is a tempting display of very beautiful jewellery, and there is considerable haggling anent its distribution. But the latter is accomplished at last, and the captain places his share in his private desk, which he locks very carefully. Mr. Torrens, wearing a very savage look on his face, crosses the cabin to his own berth, and fastens the door after him. As it is still early in the afternoon, he is perhaps thinking of taking a nap.
The steward is apparently satisfied with his observations for the present, for he gets down from his post of vantage, and prepares himself for his afternoon duties. Tea has to be ready at five o’clock, and, from a purely stewardly point of view, much time has been wasted, so that it behoves him to hurry himself now. His beard, which is brown and bushy, requires some little readjustment, and Captain Cochrane would be considerably surprised if he could see how easily removable both beard and wig are.
But we, who already recognise in William Trace our friend Hilton Riddell, feel no surprise whatever, unless it be at his temerity in offering himself for a post concerning the duties of which he knew positively nothing. When, on attempting to engage a berth as passenger in the “Merry Maid,” he found his application rejected, he straightway resolved to change his disguise; and having found that the ship had not her full complement of men, and could not sail until morning, he resolved to apply to the mate to be taken on as steward. The mate, without much inquiry, gave him the post, and had already repented of his indiscretion, for a man may have a great deal of natural aptitude, and yet fail utterly at a post that is quite strange to him. It was so with William Trace, and he had already learnt the savour of a seaman’s invective.
It may have hurt his pride a little to hear himself called a fraud and a duffer, and to have a number of burning adjectives hurled at his head every day. But, in view of his recent discoveries, he is inclined to condone these offences against his self-respect.
Unfortunately for him, he has forgotten to lower the piece of cardboard with which he is wont to cover the peephole which overlooks the captain’s berth.
From such simple oversights do tragedies spring.