If Mr. Sterne could at no time have told him anything new about his partner, he could have told Mr. Sterne that another use could be made of a man’s affliction than just to kick him out, and thus defer the term of a difficult payment for a year.  To keep the secret of the affliction and induce him to stay was a better move.  If without means, he would be anxious to remain; and that settled the question of refunding him his share.  He did not know exactly how much Captain Whalley was disabled; but if it so happened that he put the ship ashore somewhere for good and all, it was not the owner’s fault—­was it?  He was not obliged to know that there was anything wrong.  But probably nobody would raise such a point, and the ship was fully insured.  He had had enough self-restraint to pay up the premiums.  But this was not all.  He could not believe Captain Whalley to be so confoundedly destitute as not to have some more money put away somewhere.  If he, Massy, could get hold of it, that would pay for the boilers, and everything went on as before.  And if she got lost in the end, so much the better.  He hated her:  he loathed the troubles that took his mind off the chances of fortune.  He wished her at the bottom of the sea, and the insurance money in his pocket.  And as, baffled, he left Captain Whalley’s cabin, he enveloped in the same hatred the ship with the worn-out boilers and the man with the dimmed eyes.

And our conduct after all is so much a matter of outside suggestion, that had it not been for his Jack’s drunken gabble he would have there and then had it out with this miserable man, who would neither help, nor stay, nor yet lose the ship.  The old fraud!  He longed to kick him out.  But he restrained himself.  Time enough for that—­when he liked.  There was a fearful new thought put into his head.  Wasn’t he up to it after all?  How that beast Jack had raved!  “Find a safe trick to get rid of her.”  Well, Jack was not so far wrong.  A very clever trick had occurred to him.  Aye!  But what of the risk?

A feeling of pride—­the pride of superiority to common prejudices—­crept into his breast, made his heart beat fast, his mouth turn dry.  Not everybody would dare; but he was Massy, and he was up to it!

Six bells were struck on deck.  Eleven!  He drank a glass of water, and sat down for ten minutes or so to calm himself.  Then he got out of his chest a small bull’s-eye lantern of his own and lit it.

Almost opposite his berth, across the narrow passage under the bridge, there was, in the iron deck-structure covering the stokehold fiddle and the boiler-space, a storeroom with iron sides, iron roof, iron-plated floor, too, on account of the heat below.  All sorts of rubbish was shot there:  it had a mound of scrap-iron in a corner; rows of empty oil-cans; sacks of cotton-waste, with a heap of charcoal, a deck-forge, fragments of an old hencoop, winch-covers all in rags, remnants of lamps, and a brown felt hat, discarded by a man dead now (of a fever on the Brazil coast), who had been once mate of the Sofala, had remained for years jammed forcibly behind a length of burst copper pipe, flung at some time or other out of the engine-room.  A complete and imperious blackness pervaded that Capharnaum of forgotten things.  A small shaft of light from Mr. Massy’s bull’s-eye fell slanting right through it.