“I don’t. I know only the child He has given me.”
And he began to walk. Mr. Van Wyk, jumping up, saw the full meaning
of the rigid head, the hesitating feet, the vaguely extended hand.
His heart was beating fast; he moved a chair aside, and instinctively
advanced as if to offer his arm. But Captain Whalley passed him by,
making for the stairs quite straight.
“He could not see me at all out of his line,” Van Wyk thought, with a
sort of awe. Then going to the head of the stairs, he asked a little
tremulously--
“What is it like--like a mist--like . . .”
Captain Whalley, half-way down, stopped, and turned round undismayed to
answer.
“It is as if the light were ebbing out of the world. Have you ever
watched the ebbing sea on an open stretch of sands withdrawing farther
and farther away from you? It is like this--only there will be no flood
to follow. Never. It is as if the sun were growing smaller, the stars
going out one by one. There can’t be many left that I can see by this.
But I haven’t had the courage to look of late . . .” He must have been
able to make out Mr. Van Wyk, because he checked him by an authoritative
gesture and a stoical--
“I can get about alone yet.”
It was as if he had taken his line, and would accept no help from men,
after having been cast out, like a presumptuous Titan, from his heaven.
Mr. Van Wyk, arrested, seemed to count the footsteps right out of
earshot. He walked between the tables, tapping smartly with his heels,
took up a paper-knife, dropped it after a vague glance along the blade;
then happening upon the piano, struck a few chords again and again,
vigorously, standing up before the keyboard with an attentive poise
of the head like a piano-tuner; closing it, he pivoted on his heels
brusquely, avoided the little terrier sleeping trustfully on crossed
forepaws, came upon the stairs next, and, as though he had lost his
balance on the top step, ran down headlong out of the house. His
servants, beginning to clear the table, heard him mutter to himself
(evil words no doubt) down there, and then after a pause go away with a
strolling gait in the direction of the wharf.
The bulwarks of the Sofala lying alongside the bank made a low, black
wall on the undulating contour of the shore. Two masts and a funnel
uprose from behind it with a great rake, as if about to fall: a solid,
square elevation in the middle bore the ghostly shapes of white boats,
the curves of davits, lines of rail and stanchions, all confused and
mingling darkly everywhere; but low down, amidships, a single lighted
port stared out on the night, perfectly round, like a small, full moon,
whose yellow beam caught a patch of wet mud, the edge of trodden grass,
two turns of heavy cable wound round the foot of a thick wooden post in
the ground.
Mr. Van Wyk, peering alongside, heard a muzzy boastful voice apparently
jeering at a person called Prendergast. It mouthed abuse thickly,
choked; then pronounced very distinctly the word “Murphy,” and chuckled.
Glass tinkled tremulously. All these sounds came from the lighted port.
Mr. Van Wyk hesitated, stooped; it was impossible to look through unless
he went down into the mud.
“Sterne,” he said, half aloud.