Part 3

“What’s this I hear, Whalley? Is it true you’re selling the Fair Maid?”

Captain Whalley, looking away, said the thing was done--money had been paid that morning; and the other expressed at once his approbation of such an extremely sensible proceeding. He had got out of his trap to stretch his legs, he explained, on his way home to dinner. Sir Frederick looked well at the end of his time. Didn’t he?

Captain Whalley could not say; had only noticed the carriage going past.

The Master-Attendant, plunging his hands into the pockets of an alpaca jacket inappropriately short and tight for a man of his age and appearance, strutted with a slight limp, and with his head reaching only to the shoulder of Captain Whalley, who walked easily, staring straight before him. They had been good comrades years ago, almost intimates. At the time when Whalley commanded the renowned Condor, Eliott had charge of the nearly as famous Ringdove for the same owners; and when the appointment of Master-Attendant was created, Whalley would have been the only other serious candidate. But Captain Whalley, then in the prime of life, was resolved to serve no one but his own auspicious Fortune. Far away, tending his hot irons, he was glad to hear the other had been successful. There was a worldly suppleness in bluff Ned Eliott that would serve him well in that sort of official appointment. And they were so dissimilar at bottom that as they came slowly to the end of the avenue before the Cathedral, it had never come into Whalley’s head that he might have been in that man’s place--provided for to the end of his days.

The sacred edifice, standing in solemn isolation amongst the converging avenues of enormous trees, as if to put grave thoughts of heaven into the hours of ease, presented a closed Gothic portal to the light and glory of the west. The glass of the rosace above the ogive glowed like fiery coal in the deep carvings of a wheel of stone. The two men faced about.

“I’ll tell you what they ought to do next, Whalley,” growled Captain Eliott suddenly.

“Well?”

“They ought to send a real live lord out here when Sir Frederick’s time is up. Eh?”

Captain Whalley perfunctorily did not see why a lord of the right sort should not do as well as anyone else. But this was not the other’s point of view.

“No, no. Place runs itself. Nothing can stop it now. Good enough for a lord,” he growled in short sentences. “Look at the changes in our time. We need a lord here now. They have got a lord in Bombay.”

He dined once or twice every year at the Government House--a many-windowed, arcaded palace upon a hill laid out in roads and gardens. And lately he had been taking about a duke in his Master-Attendant’s steam-launch to visit the harbor improvements. Before that he had “most obligingly” gone out in person to pick out a good berth for the ducal yacht. Afterwards he had an invitation to lunch on board. The duchess herself lunched with them. A big woman with a red face. Complexion quite sunburnt. He should think ruined. Very gracious manners. They were going on to Japan. . . .

He ejaculated these details for Captain Whalley’s edification, pausing to blow out his cheeks as if with a pent-up sense of importance, and repeatedly protruding his thick lips till the blunt crimson end of his nose seemed to dip into the milk of his mustache. The place ran itself; it was fit for any lord; it gave no trouble except in its Marine department--in its Marine department he repeated twice, and after a heavy snort began to relate how the other day her Majesty’s Consul-General in French Cochin-China had cabled to him--in his official capacity--asking for a qualified man to be sent over to take charge of a Glasgow ship whose master had died in Saigon.

“I sent word of it to the officers’ quarters in the Sailors’ Home,” he continued, while the limp in his gait seemed to grow more accentuated with the increasing irritation of his voice. “Place’s full of them. Twice as many men as there are berths going in the local trade. All hungry for an easy job. Twice as many--and--What d’you think, Whalley? . . .”

He stopped short; his hands clenched and thrust deeply downwards, seemed ready to burst the pockets of his jacket. A slight sigh escaped Captain Whalley.

“Hey? You would think they would be falling over each other. Not a bit of it. Frightened to go home. Nice and warm out here to lie about a veranda waiting for a job. I sit and wait in my office. Nobody. What did they suppose? That I was going to sit there like a dummy with the Consul-General’s cable before me? Not likely. So I looked up a list of them I keep by me and sent word for Hamilton--the worst loafer of them all--and just made him go. Threatened to instruct the steward of the Sailors’ Home to have him turned out neck and crop. He did not think the berth was good enough--if--you--please. ‘I’ve your little records by me,’ said I. ‘You came ashore here eighteen months ago, and you haven’t done six months’ work since. You are in debt for your board now at the Home, and I suppose you reckon the Marine Office will pay in the end. Eh? So it shall; but if you don’t take this chance, away you go to England, assisted passage, by the first homeward steamer that comes along. You are no better than a pauper. We don’t want any white paupers here.’ I scared him. But look at the trouble all this gave me.”

“You would not have had any trouble,” Captain Whalley said almost involuntarily, “if you had sent for me.”

Captain Eliott was immensely amused; he shook with laughter as he walked. But suddenly he stopped laughing. A vague recollection had crossed his mind. Hadn’t he heard it said at the time of the Travancore and Deccan smash that poor Whalley had been cleaned out completely. “Fellow’s hard up, by heavens!” he thought; and at once he cast a sidelong upward glance at his companion. But Captain Whalley was smiling austerely straight before him, with a carriage of the head inconceivable in a penniless man--and he became reassured. Impossible. Could not have lost everything. That ship had been only a hobby of his. And the reflection that a man who had confessed to receiving that very morning a presumably large sum of money was not likely to spring upon him a demand for a small loan put him entirely at his ease again. There had come a long pause in their talk, however, and not knowing how to begin again, he growled out soberly, “We old fellows ought to take a rest now.”

“The best thing for some of us would be to die at the oar,” Captain Whalley said negligently.

“Come, now. Aren’t you a bit tired by this time of the whole show?” muttered the other sullenly.

“Are you?”

Captain Eliott was. Infernally tired. He only hung on to his berth so long in order to get his pension on the highest scale before he went home. It would be no better than poverty, anyhow; still, it was the only thing between him and the workhouse. And he had a family. Three girls, as Whalley knew. He gave “Harry, old boy,” to understand that these three girls were a source of the greatest anxiety and worry to him. Enough to drive a man distracted.

“Why? What have they been doing now?” asked Captain Whalley with a sort of amused absent-mindedness.

“Doing! Doing nothing. That’s just it. Lawn-tennis and silly novels from morning to night. . . .”

If one of them at least had been a boy. But all three! And, as ill-luck would have it, there did not seem to be any decent young fellows left in the world. When he looked around in the club he saw only a lot of conceited popinjays too selfish to think of making a good woman happy. Extreme indigence stared him in the face with all that crowd to keep at home. He had cherished the idea of building himself a little house in the country--in Surrey--to end his days in, but he was afraid it was out of the question, . . . and his staring eyes rolled upwards with such a pathetic anxiety that Captain Whalley charitably nodded down at him, restraining a sort of sickening desire to laugh.

“You must know what it is yourself, Harry. Girls are the very devil for worry and anxiety.”

“Ay! But mine is doing well,” Captain Whalley pronounced slowly, staring to the end of the avenue.

The Master-Attendant was glad to hear this. Uncommonly glad. He remembered her well. A pretty girl she was.

Captain Whalley, stepping out carelessly, assented as if in a dream.