I reckon Mr. Barney put the refusal more briefly. But the Gullwing continued to hang in the wind while another line of flags was run up to her fore. The book told me that the signal read: “I’ll send boat aboard.”
“No he won’t, by jinks!” crowed Cap’n Si. “Nor he wouldn’t wanter do it if he warn’t so blamed short-handed. Stow your flags, Mr. Barney. Stand by. Ready! haul sheet!” and he went ahead and gave swift orders to put the Seamew about on the other tack.
But I was glad that those aboard the Gullwing knew that I was alive. I could imagine Thank’s relief, and how surprised and—I hoped—glad, the others would be to know that I had not found my grave in the ocean. I even thought kindly of Bob Promise, the bully, and believed that he was likewise thinking kindly of me at that moment.
“And to serve Cap’n Si out for not being willing to meet Cap’n Joe half way, and let them take me aboard,” I muttered to myself, “I hope the Gullwing beats the Seamew all to flinders!”
The Seamew, however, gained slowly upon her sister ship. On every tack that day she made a better showing. Sometimes the Gullwing was below the horizon; but whenever we sighted her she was dropping back a bit. The wind remained steady and from a favorable quarter and by and by the night dropped down and divided the two ships more effectually than the sea itself.
As the light faded upon sea and sky we sailed under a vast, black-velvet canopy embroidered upon which were the countless stars and planets. Constellations that I knew nothing about glowed from the depths of the firmament; and brighter than all was the Southern Cross. The moon had dipped below the horizon and therefore the Cross and the stars were the more brilliant. I paced the deck alone and thought of my mother, and wondered what she was doing just then, and if Chester Downes was still trying to circumvent me, and Mr. Hounsditch, and gain control of the fortune, possession of which he so much begrudged my mother and myself.
And a thought came to me from out the stillness and immensity of that night—a thought that forever after seemed to haunt me; was there not some curse upon my grandfather’s huge property, which had been willed my mother and I under such wicked conditions? For that Grandfather Darringford’s will had been inspired by hatred of Dr. Webb, my father, one could not doubt.
Had my father not been drowned as he was off White Rock, that will of grandfather’s would have been the source of heartburnings in the family. Human nature is human nature; the time would have come when the fact that Dr. Webb was a stumbling-block to his son’s advancement, or his wife’s ease, would have been advanced. That is, if my father had remained all these years a poor man. And what else could he have been with his practice in Bolderhead?
Men get stunted in small towns—especially professional men. Dr. Webb could never have made much more than a miserably poor living for mother and I had he lived; and all that time the thought of the great Darringford Estate would have been the skeleton in our closet!
It was better as it was, I suppose. It had been a dream that my father was still alive. I believe I would have gladly given up my share of my grandfather’s money to have found that the mysterious man aboard the frozen ship was my father! I had been strangely drawn toward that man.