Again he paused, then pronounced stoically the words, “She has a hard struggle.”

And his head fell on his breast, his eyebrows remained knitted, as by an effort of meditation.  But generally his mind seemed steeped in the serenity of boundless trust in a higher power.  Mr. Van Wyk wondered sometimes how much of it was due to the splendid vitality of the man, to the bodily vigor which seems to impart something of its force to the soul.  But he had learned to like him very much.

XIII

This was the reason why Mr. Sterne’s confidential communication, delivered hurriedly on the shore alongside the dark silent ship, had disturbed his equanimity.  It was the most incomprehensible and unexpected thing that could happen; and the perturbation of his spirit was so great that, forgetting all about his letters, he ran rapidly up the bridge ladder.

The portable table was being put together for dinner to the left of the wheel by two pig-tailed “boys,” who as usual snarled at each other over the job, while another, a doleful, burly, very yellow Chinaman, resembling Mr. Massy, waited apathetically with the cloth over his arm and a pile of thick dinner-plates against his chest.  A common cabin lamp with its globe missing, brought up from below, had been hooked to the wooden framework of the awning; the side-screens had been lowered all round; Captain Whalley filling the depths of the wicker-chair seemed to sit benumbed in a canvas tent crudely lighted, and used for the storing of nautical objects; a shabby steering-wheel, a battered brass binnacle on a stout mahogany stand, two dingy life-buoys, an old cork fender lying in a corner, dilapidated deck-lockers with loops of thin rope instead of door-handles.

He shook off the appearance of numbness to return Mr. Van Wyk’s unusually brisk greeting, but relapsed directly afterwards.  To accept a pressing invitation to dinner “up at the house” cost him another very visible physical effort.  Mr. Van Wyk, perplexed, folded his arms, and leaning back against the rail, with his little, black, shiny feet well out, examined him covertly.

“I’ve noticed of late that you are not quite yourself, old friend.”

He put an affectionate gentleness into the last two words.  The real intimacy of their intercourse had never been so vividly expressed before.

“Tut, tut, tut!”

The wicker-chair creaked heavily.

“Irritable,” commented Mr. Van Wyk to himself; and aloud, “I’ll expect to see you in half an hour, then,” he said negligently, moving off.

“In half an hour,” Captain Whalley’s rigid silvery head repeated behind him as if out of a trance.

Amidships, below, two voices, close against the engineroom, could be heard answering each other—­one angry and slow, the other alert.

“I tell you the beast has locked himself in to get drunk.”