Several hours passed like this. We were again out at sea, and my longing to know what had happened was consuming me, but I dared not ask from fear of a bad answer.
Before the night was out, however, I had gone to work in a roundabout way. Taking O'Sullivan into my confidence, I told him it had not been my parents that I had been anxious about (God forgive me!), but somebody else whom he had seen and spoken to.
"Do you mean Mal . . . I should say Lady . . ."
"Yes."
"By the holy saints, the way I was thinking that when I brought you the letter at Port Said, and saw the clouds of heaven still hanging on you."
I found that the good fellow had a similar trouble of his own (not yet having heard from his mother), so he fell readily into my plan, which was that of cross-questioning the chairman about my dear one, and I about his, and then meeting secretly and imparting what we had learned.
Anybody may laugh who likes at the thought of two big lumbering fellows afraid to face the truth (scouting round and round it), but it grips me by the throat to this day to see myself taking our chairman into a quiet corner of the smoke-room and saying:
"Poor old O'Sullivan! He hasn't heard from his old mother yet. She was sick when he sailed, and wouldn't have parted with him to go with anybody except myself. You haven't heard of her, have you?"
And then to think of O'Sullivan doing the same for me, with:
"The poor Commanther! Look at him there. Faith, he's keeping a good heart, isn't he? But it's just destroyed he is for want of news of a great friend that was in trouble. It was a girl . . . a lady, I mane. You haven't heard the whisper of a word, sir . . . eh?"