with admiration before the progress of the work.
You could almost smell these roses, he declared, sniffing
the faint flavor of turpentine which at that time pervaded
the saloon, and (as he confessed afterwards) made
him somewhat less hearty than usual in tackling his
food. But there was nothing of the sort to interfere
with his enjoyment of her singing. “Mrs.
Whalley is a regular out-and-out nightingale, sir,”
he would pronounce with a judicial air after listening
profoundly over the skylight to the very end of the
piece. In fine weather, in the second dog-watch,
the two men could hear her trills and roulades going
on to the accompaniment of the piano in the cabin.
On the very day they got engaged he had written to
London for the instrument; but they had been married
for over a year before it reached them, coming out
round the Cape. The big case made part of the
first direct general cargo landed in Hong-kong harbor—an
event that to the men who walked the busy quays of
to-day seemed as hazily remote as the dark ages of
history. But Captain Whalley could in a half hour
of solitude live again all his life, with its romance,
its idyl, and its sorrow. He had to close her
eyes himself. She went away from under the ensign
like a sailor’s wife, a sailor herself at heart.
He had read the service over her, out of her own prayer-book,
without a break in his voice. When he raised
his eyes he could see old Swinburne facing him with
his cap pressed to his breast, and his rugged, weather-beaten,
impassive face streaming with drops of water like a
lump of chipped red granite in a shower. It was
all very well for that old sea-dog to cry. He
had to read on to the end; but after the splash he
did not remember much of what happened for the next
few days. An elderly sailor of the crew, deft
at needlework, put together a mourning frock for the
child out of one of her black skirts.
He was not likely to forget; but you cannot dam up
life like a sluggish stream. It will break out
and flow over a man’s troubles, it will close
upon a sorrow like the sea upon a dead body, no matter
how much love has gone to the bottom. And the
world is not bad. People had been very kind to
him; especially Mrs. Gardner, the wife of the senior
partner in Gardner, Patteson, & Co., the owners of
the Condor. It was she who volunteered to look
after the little one, and in due course took her to
England (something of a journey in those days, even
by the overland mail route) with her own girls to
finish her education. It was ten years before
he saw her again.
As a little child she had never been frightened of
bad weather; she would beg to be taken up on deck
in the bosom of his oilskin coat to watch the big
seas hurling themselves upon the Condor. The swirl
and crash of the waves seemed to fill her small soul
with a breathless delight. “A good boy
spoiled,” he used to say of her in joke.
He had named her Ivy because of the sound of the word,
and obscurely fascinated by a vague association of
ideas. She had twined herself tightly round his
heart, and he intended her to cling close to her father
as to a tower of strength; forgetting, while she was
little, that in the nature of things she would probably
elect to cling to someone else. But he loved
life well enough for even that event to give him a
certain satisfaction, apart from his more intimate
feeling of loss.