“Captain,” said he, with timid hesitation. “I feel that my presence may add to your embarrassment. Therefore, I think I had best return to Salem this evening. If you will ask Ezra to harness up my horse, I’ll be much obliged.”
“I’ll do nothing of the kind, doctor! You’re my friend and my guest, and you’re not going to be driven out by any such exhibition of brutal bad manners! I ask you, sir, to stay. I haven’t seen you for fifty years, sir; and you do no more than lay ’longside, and then want to hoist canvas again and beat away? Never, sir! Here you stay, to-night, aboard me. There’s a cabin and as nice a berth as any seafaring man could ask. Go and leave me now, would you? Not much, sir!”
“If you really want me to stay, captain—”
Briggs took Filhiol by the hand and looked steadily into his anxious, withered face.
“Listen,” said he, in a deep, quiet tone. “I’m in trouble, doctor. Deep, black, bitter trouble. Nobody in this world but you can help me steer a straight course now, if there’s any way _to_ steer one, which God grant! Stand by me now, doctor. You did once before on the old _Silver Fleece_. I’ve got your stitches in me yet. Now, after fifty years, I need you again, though it’s worse this time than any knife-cut ever was. Stand by me, doctor, for a little while. That’s all I ask. _Stand by!_”
The miracle of a new day’s sunshine—golden over green earth, foam-collared shore and shining sea—brought another miracle almost as great as that which had transformed somber night to radiant morning. This miracle was the complete reversal of the situation at Snug Harbor, and the return of peace and happiness. But all this cannot be told in two breaths. We must not run too far ahead of our story.
So, to go on in orderly fashion we must know that Ezra’s carefully prepared supper turned out to be a melancholy failure. The somber dejection of the three old men at table, and then the miserable evening of the captain and the doctor on the piazza, talking of old days with infinite regret, of the present with grief and humiliation, of the future with black bodings, made a sorry time of it all.
Night brought but little sleep to Captain Briggs. The doctor slept well enough, and Ezra seconded him. But the good fortune of oblivion was not for the old captain. Through what seemed a black eternity he lay in the bunk in his cabin, brooding, agonizing, listening to the murmur of the sea, the slow tolling of hours from the tall clock in the hallway. The cessation of the ticking of his chronometer left a strange vacancy in his soul. Deeply he mourned it.