"The doctors say you cannot live in wet, gloomy England, and here it is not much better. You will get well where we are going. We can be together as much as when I was chief officer in the old Deepdale, running out of Antwerp. The deeds of the home are ready to sign. I pay the ten thousand dollars when I come to New York this voyage. Then you come out the voyage after with me, for the company makes for us exception to the rule that a wife cannot sail on her husband's vessel."
She wistfully smiled as if led by a beautiful dream, thinking in her heart that to be sure of seeing her husband so often would be more than ever she dare hope for. Even beckoning health must yield first place to such a gift as this, but not yet satisfied she asked with tremulous insistence:
"But the bank will send the money over without risk, and it is all we have in the world, dear Max. Do you remember how the nest-egg was put away so long ago, when we hoped for children, and this was to be the beginning of their fortune? Why carry the money on your ship? Why take it with you?"
"Mein Gott, sweetheart mine, is not the old Wasdale safe as the dry land? Is not the old vessel safer than the banks, which, as they say in New York, bust higher as a kite every little while? Perhaps they give me a piece of paper worth ten thousand dollars in Antwerp. When I dock in New York, perhaps the bank has gebust while I am in mid-ocean, then my paper is worth nothing; the money is a total loss. In the Wasdale, in my room, in my safe, it is mine, and I have never lost a life, much less ten thousand good dollars. You do not worry when I go to sea. Am I not worth as much as our stocking full of gold? Answer me that, my Flora."
He did not know through how many nights, when she heard the winter gales from the North Sea cry over the roof, a quivering agony of fear had gripped her wide-eyed lest the Wasdale might have met disaster. But experience had taught the wife that no argument could prevail in which the safety and strength of the ship were questioned. Helpless to make reply, she accepted defeat, for the parting hour was far gone and the separation always taxed her fitful energy near to breaking.
Always as he raised her for the last kiss, and then halted reluctant in the doorway, he was to her as her bright youth had first seen him, a red viking, born to master steel and steam instead of the galleys of his forebears. This night he smote his chest resoundingly before he vanished into the hallway, and said in comforting farewell:
"It is here, in the old brown wallet, next my heart, where thou dwellest, my Flora. Our money is soon on the old Wasdale. God keep you!"
The biting wind of early March fairly whipped the captain up the side of the liner lying, with shortened cable, mid-stream in the Mersey. Clutching a stiff hat with one hand, baggy trousers fluttering, the tails of his frieze ulster tripping him, it was an odd and ungainly figure of a man that gained the deck and lumbered forward. A quartermaster near the gangway grinned when the pot-hat bounced from the bristling red head and carromed merrily off the deck-house, but a glance from the tail of Captain Arendt's eye froze the mahogany countenance of the offender into instant solemnity. It was a hint that the master of the ship was coming into his own. A few moments later he emerged from his quarters transformed. The smartly setting uniform of blue and the flat cap jammed down hard were so evidently what he belonged in, that the shore-going clothes had been like a clumsy disguise. A small boy flattened himself against the rail and saluted with immense dignity. The captain pinched him with a hairy paw and chuckled:
"Hello, Moses, or vas it Josephs I calls you last woyage? Holy Schmokes! If you keep my room no better dis woyage, I bites your head off close to your neck. You hear? Scoo-o-t."