“ ‘Why,’ he said, still beating the bush about me, ‘there is some difference between the sultan’s palace, plain as its outside is, and the emir’s porphyry walls which the little Irish nightingale sang about—not so much though, to my mind, as between a merchant dreaming of a full cargo to-night, and waking to hear of a wrecked ship and no insurance in the morning—ay, or a captain making two good voyages and finding himself still in debt—ay, deep as the fathomless sea in debt—to his owners.’
“ ‘That, I suppose, you would call a species of blank-verse, Captain Catherton,’ said I.
“ ‘Ay,’ he answered, with a fierce, tiger-like gleam of his dark eyes, ‘but the beauty of the thing is, this cargo will balance accounts, and it’s a long back stretch from ‘Oman’s green water’ to the sandy shores of Bedford Bay.’
“This was starting the devil with a vengeance, so I determined that he should show his purpose clearly before I gave any reply to the hints he had thrown out.
“ ‘Captain Catherton,’ said I, fixing my eyes firmly upon him, ‘I am no greenhorn to rush into any man’s schemes blindfolded. If you wish my services in any thing that is to my taste, you must speak out.’
“He emptied his glass again, in a way which showed that he was hardly sensible of the action, and, ‘Mr. Miller,’ said he, ‘there is that about you which reminds me of old days, and that, perhaps, is one reason I’ve taken a fancy to you. It doesn’t matter a rope-yarn whether you join me or not; my mind is fixed to its course. You shall hear the whole, however, and judge for yourself before you decide—which is more than I would care to reveal to any other man that breathes.’ He flung his sheroot on the deck as he spoke, and mechanically setting his foot upon it, bared his sinewy arm to the elbow, in the lamp-light. ‘Do you see those initials?’ he said, in a tone of unnatural calmness. Sure enough there they were—his wife’s, I had no doubt—E. S. B., dotted in India ink, and two hearts, worked one within the other, under them. As I looked in his face for the explanation which was to follow, I saw that it was fearfully changed; and although his eyes met mine, at first steadily enough, a strange sort of a spasm contorted the muscles of his jaw, as if he looked, as it were, through me at some horrible sight, with his teeth set, and his thin nether lip drawn tightly in. The truth, or at least an inkling of it, I had had already from the second mate, and in spite of the terrible doubts in my mind, and the rascally scheme he had hinted at, I confess I could not help feeling somewhat softened toward the man. Perhaps he noticed this in my looks, for, with a shivering sigh, he placed his elbows on the table, and covering his eyes with his hands, although not a groan or a moan escaped from his lips, I knew by the tears which forced their way through his fingers, and the quiver of his strong frame, that some hard struggle was going on. I sat still in pure wonder at this sudden outbreak of feeling—the initials, as it were, staring me full in the face, and the man’s damp forehead, with its mass of dark curls within reach of my hand—until a strange thought that I had seen him before in some old, familiar place, came slowly thrilling into mind. Where this might have been I could not, at the moment, conjecture; but as he removed his hands and I looked anxiously at his features, I felt almost sure that it had been years before, in some scene of summer-revelry, with trees and horses in front, and woman’s soft eyes on the background. Perhaps it was the altered look of Catherton himself, which brought the last into my mind in the cabin of the old Tartar, to be associated in some unaccountable way with that tall, muscular frame, and that dark, gloomy face, frowning as if ashamed of his emotion, though it might be, the tears had done him good. At any rate, the idea oppressed me so forcibly that, before he composed himself to speak again, I glanced nervously round the cabin, taking in every object as well as I could by the smoky light—from the state-rooms, on the larboard side, with their musty, sickening smell, to the rack in the recess between the cabin doors, and thence from the starboard ones up to the chart-rack and the broad transom, where the two models, one of a whale-ship, the other of a first-rate, both made of a sperm whale’s jaw—guns, boats, spars, and even the miniature brail-blocks, all fashioned out of glistening white bone, were resting on their mimic ways. Of course I saw nothing there to account for the impression, faint as it grew again while I gazed, and half deeming it the delusive trace of some forgotten likeness, or of something which I had read of or dreamed, I turned my eyes again upon Captain Catherton.
“ ‘Mr. Miller,’ said the man, as calmly as if he were sitting at home, it might be, in his nursery, his wife within reach of a whisper, and something in the subdued, moist look of his eyes in devilish accordance with the drowsy quiet of a domestic scene, ‘we are not all as philosophic as Cato—nor as vile as the man made immortal in infamy by Horace—non omnibus dormis—you remember the satires.’
“As I stared again at this, a forlorn ghost of a smile flitted over his face, and with his next breath the mystery of the thing vanished. I have often wondered since what it was that kept me fixed to my seat like stone; perhaps it was the reflection that my own accursed folly had been the wreck of us three—him, the wretch—myself, and her—perhaps it was the awful suddenness of the shock which stunned me like a heavy blow; I cannot say; but stifling the groan which rose to my lips as the horrible truth flashed upon me, while the very air seemed to thicken before my gaze, and his words to come with terrible distinctness through the gloom, I sat still on my seat and heard him out.
“ ‘I was born,’ he said, ‘at the village of ——, a few miles from Philadelphia, and abandoned my home, like a fledged petrel, as soon as I could comprehend the map of the world with its thousand ports and its endless stretch of sea. It is a strange thing, Mr. Miller, this young fancy of ours for being blown about by the wild winds, and rocked out of a life of ease by the cunning waves of the deep. To my mind there was once nothing so joyous in life as the roar of the gale at its height, when you slid from the top of a sea to the trough—the dripping dash of a head sea on the prow—or the rush of cleft waters astern, as you sat conning the chart.’ Little did that careful old pedagogue dream, as, day after day he chuckled over my progress in this department of knowledge, what restless longings disturbed the breast of his pupil, like the instinct of the unfledged albatross when it hears the sound of the sea from its nest on some sheltering cliff.
“ ‘It was but last night,’ he continued, in a tone of melancholy widely at variance with the usual sound of his voice, ‘that I dreamed of the old man—his thin, white hairs brushed back from his brow—his spectacles set straight on his nose, as he traced out on the revolving globe the voyages of Columbus and Vasco de Gama, pausing, with his rod stayed at some particular point, to enlarge on the daring spirit of each. It was little wonder that I early yearned for the sea; and yet, as I afterward learned, great was his astonishment, not unmixed with chagrin akin to remorse, when he found that I had cut and run. However,’ he said, putting his hand to his forehead, ‘we met again, and the matter was thoroughly cleared up between us.’