“Well, give me a chance, Dan,” Varney pleaded. “This business is getting on my nerves. I want to be quit of it. You’ve had four thousand; that’s a hundred per cent. You haven’t done so badly.”
“I didn’t expect to do badly. I took a big risk. I gambled two thousand for ten.”
“Yes, and you got me out of the way while you put the screw on to poor old Haygarth to make his daughter marry you.” It was an indiscreet thing to say, but Purcell’s stolid indifference to his danger and distress had ruffled Varney’s temper somewhat.
Purcell however was unmoved. “I don’t know,” he said, “what you mean by getting you out of the way. You were never in the way. You were always hankering after Maggie, but I could never see that she wanted you.”
“Well, she certainly didn’t want you,” Varney retorted; “and, for that matter, I don’t think she wants you now.”
For the first time Purcell withdrew his eye from the horizon to turn it on his companion. And an evil eye it was, set in the great, sensual face, now purple with anger.
“What the devil do you mean?” he exclaimed furiously; “you infernal, sallow-faced little whipper-snapper! If you mention my wife’s name again I’ll knock you on the head and pitch you overboard.”
Varney’s face flushed darkly and for a moment he was inclined to try the wager of battle. But the odds were impossible, and if Varney was not a coward, neither was he a fool. But the discussion was at an end. Nothing was to be hoped for now. Those indiscreet words of provocation had rendered further pleading impossible; and as Varney relapsed into sullen silence, it was with the knowledge that for weary years to come, he was doomed, at best, to tread the perilous path of crime, or, more probably to waste the brightest years of his life in a convict prison. For it is a strange fact, and a curious commentary on our current ethical notions, that neither of these rascals even contemplated as a possibility the breach of a merely verbal covenant. A promise had been given. That was enough. Without a specific release, the terms of that promise must be fulfilled to the letter. How many righteous men—prim lawyers or strait-laced, church-going men of business—would have looked at the matter in the same way?
The silence that settled down on the yacht and the aloofness that encompassed the two men were conducive to reflection. Each of the men ignored the presence of the other. When the course was altered southerly Purcell slacked out the sheets with his own hand as he put up the helm. He might have been sailing single-handed. And Varney watched him askance but made no move, sitting hunched up on the locker, nursing a slowly-matured hatred and thinking his thoughts.
Very queer thoughts they were; rambling, but yet connected and very vivid. He was following out the train of events that might have happened, pursuing them to their possible consequences. Supposing Purcell had carried out his threat? Well, there would have been a pretty tough struggle, for Varney was no weakling. But a struggle with that solid fifteen stone of flesh could end only in one way. He glanced at the great, purple, shiny hand that grasped the knob of the tiller. Not the sort of hand that you would want at your throat! No, there was no doubt; he would have gone overboard.