“Good,” he echoed, staring, unconvinced and without hope; “that’s very good.”
And now, a miserable determination returning, I fixed my eyes again on the square, black bottle of rum. ’Twas a thing that fairly fascinated my attention. The cure of despair was legendary, the palatable quality a thing of mere surmise: I had never experienced either; but in my childhood I had watched my uncle’s fearsome moods vanish, as he downed his drams, one by 293 one, giving way to a grateful geniality, which sent my own bogies scurrying off, and I had fancied, from the smack of his lips, and from the eager lifting of the glasses at the Anchor and Chain, the St. John’s tap-room we frequented, that a drop o’ rum was a thing to delight the dry tongue and gullet of every son of man. My uncle sat under the lamp: I remember his countenance, aside from the monstrous scars and disfigurements which the sea had dealt him––its anxious regard of me, its intense concern, its gathering purpose, the last of which I did not read at that moment, but now recall and understand. ’Twas quiet and orderly in the room: the geometrical gentlemen were there riding the geometrically tempestuous sea in a frame beyond my uncle’s gargoylish head, and the tidied rocking-chair, which I was used to addressing as a belted knight o’ the realm, austerely abode in a shadow. I was in some saving way, as often happens in our lives, conscious of these familiar things, to which we return and cling in the accidents befalling us and in the emergencies of feeling we must all survive. The room was as our maid-servant had left it, bright and warm and orderly: there was as yet no disarrangement by the conviviality we were used to. ’Tis not at all my wish to trouble you with the despair I suffered that night, with Judith gone from me: I would not utter it––’twas too deep and unusual and tragical to disturb a world with. But still I stared at that square, black bottle of rum, believing, as faith may be, in the surcease it contained.
I watched that bottle.
“Dannie,” says my uncle, with a wish, no doubt, for a diversion, “is the moon up?”
I walked to the window. “’Tis up,” I reported; “but ’tis hid by clouds, an’ the wind’s rising.”
“The wind rising?” says he. “’Twill do us no harm.”
Of course, my uncle did not know which of us was at sea.
“The wind,” he repeated, “will do no harm.”
I sat down again: and presently got my glass before me, and reached for the square, black bottle of rum. I could stand it no longer: I could really stand it no longer––the pain of this denial of my love was too much for any man to bear.