“Yes, sir, I’d have him pitched to the sharks. There is no occasion for excitement. Certainly no guest of mine would be guilty of anything like that. I should not like to be under the necessity of sending a guest of mine forward. But as sure as my name is Amos Widmer, if it comes to action I’ll act with the best of them—or the worst.”
Then Hastings smiled. “It would indeed be a singular circumstance that would force a gentleman—” the stress on the word was ever so slight—“to take such measures with a guest.”
So deep the silence, as they finished the meal, that each heard twice the faint ripple of a woman’s laugh.
With all her canvas set, the Winnemere swept on down the long line dotted on the charts, to Singapore and Malacca Strait; and off among the islands, with the stumps of her broken masts rising from the seas that washed her decks, lay the hull of the Helen of Troy.
Evening came, and again the two sat opposite each other at the cabin table. But this time Hastings was the more taciturn. After the manner of many an outspoken man who becomes all at once aware that he has been made game of, he withdrew into a silence that, half unwittingly, met Widmer at his own game. And Widmer, with that unpleasant light in his eyes, again masked himself with exaggerated courtesy.
“Who would have thought—” his voice was unnaturally smooth as he repeated the sentence for the twentieth time, lingering over the irony of each phrase, “—who would have thought that I should have the honor of bringing home Captain Hastings, of the Helen of Troy!” Then he laughed shortly.
Hastings raised his glass, as if unaware that he had been addressed.
“Such an honor!” Widmer continued. “Think of it. More than once I’ve raced the Helen of Troy and been beaten. And a good many times more than once I’ve seen Donald Hastings sitting in the garden by the white house, and have gone away and left him there. But there was a time when Donald Hastings found the gate open and the garden empty. And now the time is come when all that is left of the crew of the Helen of Troy is right glad of passage on the Winnemere.”
If there was any indication that Hastings was listening to the other’s words, it was only in the tension of his fingers as they pressed the table top, and in the whiteness of his knuckles.
But Widmer, speaking at intervals as if to probe for some most sensitive nerve center, went on, his eyes fixed on Hastings’ forehead: “An empty garden—and now the Helen of Troy is gone—it would be an honor indeed to bring him home, but an empty honor, after all—what if he never came home—if—!” Suddenly he lowered his eves until they looked into Hastings’ own. “My wife, sir,” he said with fierce intensity, “cried the day I married her, cried at her wedding, shed a bucket of tears. Tears are no wedding flummery, sir. I didn’t know then why it was. But I know now. Do you hear? I know, damn it, know.”