The ancient port of Sunwich was basking in the sunshine of a July
afternoon. A rattle of cranes and winches sounded from the shipping in
the harbour, but the town itself was half asleep. Somnolent shopkeepers
in dim back parlours coyly veiled their faces in red handkerchiefs from
the too ardent flies, while small boys left in charge noticed listlessly
the slow passing of time as recorded by the church clock.
It is a fine church, and Sunwich is proud of it. The tall grey tower is
a landmark at sea, but from the narrow streets of the little town itself
it has a disquieting appearance of rising suddenly above the roofs
huddled beneath it for the purpose of displaying a black-faced clock with
gilt numerals whose mellow chimes have recorded the passing hours for
many generations of Sunwich men.
Regardless of the heat, which indeed was mild compared with that which
raged in his own bosom, Captain Nugent, fresh from the inquiry of the
collision of his ship _Conqueror_ with the German barque _Hans Muller_,
strode rapidly up the High Street in the direction of home. An honest
seafaring smell, compounded of tar, rope, and fish, known to the educated
of Sunwich as ozone, set his thoughts upon the sea. He longed to be
aboard ship again, with the Court of Inquiry to form part of his crew.
In all his fifty years of life he had never met such a collection of
fools. His hard blue eyes blazed as he thought of them, and the mouth
hidden by his well-kept beard was set with anger.
Mr. Samson Wilks, his steward, who had been with him to London to give
evidence, had had a time upon which he looked back in later years with
much satisfaction at his powers of endurance. He was with the captain,
and yet not with him. When they got out of the train at Sunwich he
hesitated as to whether he should follow the captain or leave him. His
excuse for following was the bag, his reason for leaving the volcanic
condition of its owner's temper, coupled with the fact that he appeared
to be sublimely ignorant that the most devoted steward in the world was
tagging faithfully along a yard or two in the rear.
The few passers-by glanced at the couple with interest. Mr. Wilks had
what is called an expressive face, and he had worked his sandy eyebrows,
his weak blue eyes, and large, tremulous mouth into such an expression of
surprise at the finding of the Court, that he had all the appearance of a
beholder of visions. He changed the bag to his other hand as they left
the town behind them, and regarded with gratitude the approaching end of
his labours.
At the garden-gate of a fair-sized house some half-mile along the road
the captain stopped, and after an impatient fumbling at the latch strode
up the path, followed by Mr. Wilks, and knocked at the door. As he
paused on the step he half turned, and for the first time noticed the
facial expression of his faithful follower.
"What the dickens are you looking like that for?" he demanded.
"I've been surprised, sir," conceded Mr. Wilks; "surprised and
astonished."
Wrath blazed again in the captain's eyes and set lines in his forehead.
He was being pitied by a steward!
"You've been drinking," he said, crisply; "put that bag down."
"Arsking your pardon, sir," said the steward, twisting his unusually dry
lips into a smile, "but I've 'ad no opportunity, sir--I've been follerin'
you all day, sir."
A servant opened the door. "You've been soaking in it for a month,"
declared the captain as he entered the hall. "Why the blazes don't you
bring that bag in? Are you so drunk you don't know what you are doing?"
Mr. Wilks picked the bag up and followed humbly into the house. Then he
lost his head altogether, and gave some colour to his superior officer's
charges by first cannoning into the servant and then wedging the captain
firmly in the doorway of the sitting-room with the bag.
"Steward!" rasped the captain.
"Yessir," said the unhappy Mr. Wilks.
"Go and sit down in the kitchen, and don't leave this house till you're
sober."
Mr. Wilks disappeared. He was not in his first lustre, but he was an
ardent admirer of the sex, and in an absent-minded way he passed his arm
round the handmaiden's waist, and sustained a buffet which made his head
ring.
"A man o' your age, and drunk, too," explained the damsel.
Mr. Wilks denied both charges. It appeared that he was much younger than
he looked, while, as for drink, he had forgotten the taste of it. A
question as to the reception Ann would have accorded a boyish teetotaler
remained unanswered.
In the sitting-room Mrs. Kingdom, the captain's widowed sister, put down
her crochet-work as her brother entered, and turned to him expectantly.
There was an expression of loving sympathy on her mild and rather foolish
face, and the captain stiffened at once.
"I was in the wrong," he said, harshly, as he dropped into a chair; "my
certificate has been suspended for six months, and my first officer has
been commended."
"Suspended?" gasped Mrs. Kingdom, pushing back the white streamer to the
cap which she wore in memory of the late Mr. Kingdom, and sitting
upright. You?"
"I think that's what I said," replied her brother.
Mrs. Kingdom gazed at him mournfully, and, putting her hand behind her,
began a wriggling search in her pocket for a handkerchief, with the idea
of paying a wholesome tribute of tears. She was a past-master in the art
of grief, and, pending its extraction, a docile tear hung on her eyelid
and waited. The captain eyed her preparations with silent anger.
"I am not surprised," said Mrs. Kingdom, dabbing her eyes; "I expected it
somehow. I seemed to have a warning of it. Something seemed to tell me;
I couldn't explain, but I seemed to know."
She sniffed gently, and, wiping one eye at a time, kept the disengaged
one charged with sisterly solicitude upon her brother. The captain, with
steadily rising anger, endured this game of one-eyed bo-peep for five
minutes; then he rose and, muttering strange things in his beard, stalked
upstairs to his room.
Mrs. Kingdom, thus forsaken, dried her eyes and resumed her work. The
remainder of the family were in the kitchen ministering to the wants of a
misunderstood steward, and, in return, extracting information which
should render them independent of the captain's version.
"Was it very solemn, Sam?" inquired Miss Nugent, aged nine, who was
sitting on the kitchen table.
Mr. Wilks used his hands and eyebrows to indicate the solemnity of the
occasion.
"They even made the cap'n leave off speaking," he said, in an awed voice.
"I should have liked to have been there," said Master Nugent, dutifully.
"Ann," said Miss Nugent, "go and draw Sam a jug of beer."
"Beer, Miss?" said Ann.
"A jug of beer," repeated Miss Nugent, peremptorily.
Ann took a jug from the dresser, and Mr. Wilks, who was watching her,
coughed helplessly. His perturbation attracted the attention of his
hostess, and, looking round for the cause, she was just in time to see
Ann disappearing into the larder with a cream jug.
[Illustration: "His perturbation attracted the attention of his
hostess."]
"The big jug, Ann," she said, impatiently; "you ought to know Sam would
like a big one."
Ann changed the jugs, and, ignoring a mild triumph in Mr. Wilks's eye,
returned to the larder, whence ensued a musical trickling. Then Miss
Nugent, raising the jug with some difficulty, poured out a tumbler for
the steward with her own fair hands.
"Sam likes beer," she said, speaking generally.
"I knew that the first time I see him, Miss," re-marked the vindictive
Ann.
Mr. Wilks drained his glass and set it down on the table again, making a
feeble gesture of repulse as Miss Nugent refilled it.
"Go on, Sam," she said, with kindly encouragement; "how much does this
jug hold, Jack?"
"Quart," replied her brother.
"How many quarts are there in a gallon?"
"Four."
Miss Nugent looked troubled. "I heard father say he drinks gallons a
day," she remarked; "you'd better fill all the jugs, Ann."
"It was only 'is way o' speaking," said Mr. Wilks, hurriedly; "the cap'n
is like that sometimes."
"I knew a man once, Miss," said Ann, "as used to prefer to 'ave it in a
wash-hand basin. Odd, ugly-looking man 'e was; like Mr. Wilks in the
face, only better-looking."
Mr. Wilks sat upright and, in the mental struggle involved in taking in
this insult in all its ramifications, did not notice until too late that
Miss Nugent had filled his glass again.
"It must ha' been nice for the captain to 'ave you with 'im to-day,"
remarked Ann, carelessly.
"It was," said Mr. Wilks, pausing with the glass at his lips and eyeing
her sternly. "Eighteen years I've bin with 'im--ever since 'e 'ad a
ship. 'E took a fancy to me the fust time 'e set eyes on me."
"Were you better-looking then, Sam?" inquired Miss Nugent, shuffling
closer to him on the table and regarding him affectionately.
"Much as I am now, Miss," replied Mr. Wilks, setting down his glass and
regarding Ann's giggles with a cold eye.
Miss Nugent sighed. "I love you, Sam," she said, simply. "Will you have
some more beer?"
Mr. Wilks declined gracefully. "Eighteen years I've bin with the cap'n,"
he remarked, softly; "through calms and storms, fair weather and foul,
Samson Wilks 'as been by 'is side, always ready in a quiet and 'umble way
to do 'is best for 'im, and now--now that 'e is on his beam-ends and lost
'is ship, Samson Wilks'll sit down and starve ashore till he gets
another."
At these touching words Miss Nugent was undisguisedly affected, and
wiping her bright eyes with her pinafore, gave her small, well-shaped
nose a slight touch _en passant_ with the same useful garment, and
squeezed his arm affectionately.
"It's a lively look-out for me if father is going to be at home for
long," remarked Master Nugent. Who'll get his ship, Sam?"
"Shouldn't wonder if the fust officer, Mr. Hardy, got it," replied the
steward. "He was going dead-slow in the fog afore he sent down to rouse
your father, and as soon as your father came on deck 'e went at
'arfspeed. Mr. Hardy was commended, and your father's certifikit was
suspended for six months."
Master Nugent whistled thoughtfully, and quitting the kitchen proceeded
upstairs to his room, and first washing himself with unusual care for a
boy of thirteen, put on a clean collar and brushed his hair. He was not
going to provide a suspended master-mariner with any obvious reasons for
fault-finding. While he was thus occupied the sitting-room bell rang,
and Ann, answering it, left Mr. Wilks in the kitchen listening with some
trepidation to the conversation.
"Is that steward of mine still in the kitchen?" demanded the captain,
gruffly.
"Yessir," said Ann.
"What's he doing?"
Mr. Wilks's ears quivered anxiously, and he eyed with unwonted disfavour
the evidences of his late debauch.
"Sitting down, sir," replied Ann.
"Give him a glass of ale and send him off," commanded the captain; "and
if that was Miss Kate I heard talking, send her in to me."
Ann took the message back to the kitchen and, with the air of a martyr
engaged upon an unpleasant task, drew Mr. Wilks another glass of ale and
stood over him with well-affected wonder while he drank it. Miss Nugent
walked into the sitting-room, and listening in a perfunctory fashion to a
shipmaster's platitude on kitchen-company, took a seat on his knee and
kissed his ear.