End of the Tether | Page 6

turpentine which at
that time pervaded the saloon, and (as he con- fessed 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 listen- ing 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 Hongkong
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 Whal-
ley 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 to- gether 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 de-
light. "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 associa- tion 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.
After he had purchased the Fair Maid to occupy his loneliness, he
hastened to accept a rather unprofitable freight to Australia simply for
the opportunity of seeing his daughter in her own home. What made
him dis- satisfied there was not to see that she clung now to some- body
else, but that the prop she had selected seemed on closer examination
"a rather poor stick"--even in the matter of health. He disliked his
son-in-law's studied civility perhaps more than his method of handling
the sum of money he had given Ivy at her marriage. But of his
apprehensions he said nothing. Only on the day of his departure, with
the hall-door open already, hold- ing her hands and looking steadily
into her eyes, he had said, "You know, my dear, all I have is for you
and the chicks. Mind you write to me openly." She had answered him
by an almost imperceptible movement of her head. She resembled her
mother in the color of her eyes, and in character--and also in this, that
she under- stood him without