Chance

All this the goggle-eyed mate had said in a resentful and melancholy

voice, with pauses, to the gentle murmur of the sea. It was for him a

bitter sort of pleasure to have a fresh pair of ears, a newcomer, to whom

he could repeat all these matters of grief and suspicion talked over

endlessly by the band of Captain Anthony's faithful subordinates. It was

evidently so refreshing to his worried spirit that it made him forget the

advisability of a little caution with a complete stranger. But really

with Mr. Powell there was no danger. Amused, at first, at these plaints,

he provoked them for fun. Afterwards, turning them over in his mind, he

became impressed, and as the impression grew stronger with the days his

resolution to keep it to himself grew stronger too.

* * * * *

What made it all the easier to keep--I mean the resolution--was that

Powell's sentiment of amused surprise at what struck him at first as mere

absurdity was not unmingled with indignation. And his years were too

few, his position too novel, his reliance on his own opinion not yet firm

enough to allow him to express it with any effect. And then--what would

have been the use, anyhow--and where was the necessity?

But this thing, familiar and mysterious at the same time, occupied his

imagination. The solitude of the sea intensifies the thoughts and the

facts of one's experience which seems to lie at the very centre of the

world, as the ship which carries one always remains the centre figure of

the round horizon. He viewed the apoplectic, goggle-eyed mate and the

saturnine, heavy-eyed steward as the victims of a peculiar and secret

form of lunacy which poisoned their lives. But he did not give them his

sympathy on that account. No. That strange affliction awakened in him a

sort of suspicious wonder.

Once--and it was at night again; for the officers of the Ferndale

keeping watch and watch as was customary in those days, had but few

occasions for intercourse--once, I say, the thick Mr. Franklin, a

quaintly bulky figure under the stars, the usual witnesses of his

outpourings, asked him with an abruptness which was not callous, but in

his simple way: "I believe you have no parents living?"

Mr. Powell said that he had lost his father and mother at a very early

age.

"My mother is still alive," declared Mr. Franklin in a tone which

suggested that he was gratified by the fact. "The old lady is lasting

well. Of course she's got to be made comfortable. A woman must be

looked after, and, if it comes to that, I say, give me a mother. I dare

say if she had not lasted it out so well I might have gone and got

married. I don't know, though. We sailors haven't got much time to look

about us to any purpose. Anyhow, as the old lady was there I haven't, I

may say, looked at a girl in all my life. Not that I wasn't partial to

female society in my time," he added with a pathetic intonation, while

the whites of his goggle eyes gleamed amorously under the clear night

sky. "Very partial, I may say."