I had to risk it.  His dilated eyes looked ready to seize on me for an illustration.  I spoke peremptorily, and he bowed his head low, saying, ‘My son, gentlemen,’ and submitted himself to my hands.  The feasters showed immediately that they felt released by rising and chatting in groups.  Alderman Saddlebank expressed much gratitude to me for the service I had performed.  ’That first half of your father’s speech was the most pathetic thing I ever heard!’ I had not shared his privilege, and could not say.  The remark was current that a great deal was true of what had been said of the Fitzs.  My father leaned heavily on my arm with the step and bent head of an ancient pensioner of the Honourable City Company.  He was Julia Bulsted’s charge, and I was on board the foreign vessel weighing anchor from England before dawn of Janet’s marriage-day.

CHAPTER LVI

CONCLUSION

The wind was high that morning.  The rain came in gray rings, through which we worked on the fretted surface of crumbling seas, heaving up and plunging, without an outlook.

I remember having thought of the barque Priscilla as I watched our lithe Dalmatians slide along the drenched decks of the Verona frigate.  At night it blew a gale.  I could imagine it to have been sent providentially to brush the torture of the land from my mind, and make me feel that men are trifles.

What are their passions, then?  The storm in the clouds—­even more short-lived than the clouds.

I philosophized, but my anguish was great.

Janet’s ‘Good-bye, Harry,’ ended everything I lived for, and seemed to strike the day, and bring out of it the remorseless rain.  A featureless day, like those before the earth was built; like night under an angry moon; and each day the same until we touched the edge of a southern circle and saw light, and I could use my brain.

The matter most present to me was my injustice regarding my poor father’s speech in the City hall.  He had caused me to suffer so much that I generally felt for myself when he appealed for sympathy, or provoked some pity:  but I was past suffering, and letting kindly recollection divest the speech of its verbiage, I took it to my heart.  It was true that he had in his blind way struck the keynote of his position, much as I myself had conceived it before.  Harsh trials had made me think of my own fortunes more than of his.  This I felt, and I thought there never had been so moving a speech.  It seemed to make the world in debt to us.  What else is so consolatory to a ruined man?