I knew all about the Merry Chanter. This was a ship. It was her ship which was to come in. Years ago this ship had been freighted with the ventures of her family, and had sailed for far-off seas. The results of those ventures, together with the ship itself, now belonged to Doris. They were her expectations.
“But why does this grieve you?” I asked. “Why do you say that the coming of the ship, to which you have been looking forward with so much ardor, is not the worst of it?”
“Because it isn’t,” she answered. “The rest is a great deal worse. The whole affair is a doleful failure. I had a letter to-day from Mooseley, a little town on the sea-coast. The Merry Chanter came back there three years ago with nothing in it. What has become of what it carried out, or what it ought to have brought back, nobody seems to know. The captain and the crew left it the day after its arrival at Mooseley. Why they went away, or what they took with them, I have not heard, but a man named Asa Cantling writes me that the Merry Chanter has been lying at his wharf for three years; that he wants to be paid the wharfage that is due him; and that for a long time he has been trying to find out to whom the ship belongs. At last he has discovered that I am the sole owner, and he sends to me his bill for wharfage, stating that he believes it now amounts to more than the vessel is worth.”
“Absurd!” I cried. “Any vessel must be worth more than its wharfage rates for three years. This man must be imposing upon you.”
Doris did not answer. She was looking drearily out of the window at the moonlighted landscape. Her heart and her fate had come together, and they did not appear to suit each other.
I sat silent, also, reflecting. I looked at the bill which she had handed to me, and then I reflected again, gazing out of the window at the moonlighted landscape.
It so happened that I then had on hand a sum of money equal to the amount of this bill, which amount was made up not only of wharfage rates, but of other expenses connected with the long stay of the vessel at Asa Cantling’s wharf.
My little store of money was the result of months of savings and a good deal of personal self-denial. Every cent of it had its mission in one part of the world or another. It was intended solely to carry on the work of my life, my battle for fortune. It was to show me, in a wider and more thorough manner than had ever been possible before, what chance there was for my finding the key which should unlock for me the treasures in the storehouse of the earth.
I thought for a few minutes longer, and then I said, “Doris, if you should pay this bill and redeem the vessel, what good would you gain?”
She turned quickly towards me. “I should gain a great deal of good,” she said. “In the first place I should be relieved of a soul-chilling debt. Isn’t that a good? And of a debt, too, which grows heavier every day. Mr. Cantling writes that it will be difficult to sell the ship, for it is not the sort that the people thereabout want. And if he breaks it up he will not get half the amount of his bill. And so there it must stay, piling wharfage on wharfage, and all sorts of other expenses on those that have gone before, until I become the leading woman bankrupt of the world.”