“I wonder,” Bellair mused. “He talks always of death. He’s been in at the deaths of many men. He’ll die hard himself—if he doesn’t tame down.”
Fleury added: “When a man is so much an animal, all his consciousness is in that. They see death as the end—that’s why they are afraid——”
“I wonder if he is a coward?” Bellair questioned.
“The stuff animals are made of cannot last,” the preacher concluded.
Bellair pondered as he sat with Stackhouse that night. Brandy was the choice of the evening. The Japanese woman brought it from the deeps of the hold, where it had come in stone from Bruges. Bellair joined him a second and a third time for the instant stinging zest of the fire.... Fleury and the woman had long stood together aft by the clicking log. The moon came late and bulbous. Stackhouse talked of his fortune, and the chaos in many island affairs his death would cause.... Once he had loved a chap named Belding, and would have left him great riches, but Belding was dead....
3
They had crossed the Line. The night was windless hot—almost suffocating below. Bellair gave it up, a little after midnight, and went on deck, moving forward out of the smell of paint, for the heat had bubbled the lead on the cabin planking. A few first magnitude stars glinted in the fumy sky. The anchor chains and the big hook itself made a radiator not to be endured—better the smell of paint than that. Captain McArliss moved past with a cigar and suggested jerkily that a hammock was swung aft by the binnacle. Bellair thanked him and went there, but did not lie down. Close to the rail he could smell the deep and it refreshed him. Left alone in this hard-won ease, his thoughts turned back to New York.
... It was like a ghost at the companionway—a faint grey luminosity. She came toward him without a sound, the child in her arms. Something of the strangeness prevented him speaking until she was near, and then he spoke softly in fear lest she be frightened:
“It is I, Bellair——”
If she were startled, she did not let him know. He offered the deckchair he had occupied, or the hammock, as she chose.