"It is my opinion, too," the lawyer agreed. The gen-eral theory was that the captain had remained too long on board trying to save something of importance. Per-haps the chart which would clear him, or else something of value in his cabin. The painter of the boat had come adrift of itself it was supposed. However, strange to say, some little time before that voyage poor Whalley had called in his office and had left with him a sealed envelope addressed to his daughter, to be forwarded to her in case of his death. Still it was nothing very un-usual, especially in a man of his age. Mr. Van Wyk shook his head. Captain Whalley looked good for a hundred years.
"Perfectly true," assented the lawyer. "The old fellow looked as though he had come into the world full-grown and with that long beard. I could never, some-how, imagine him either younger or older--don't you know. There was a sense of physical power about that man too. And perhaps that was the secret of that some-thing peculiar in his person which struck everybody who came in contact with him. He looked indestructible by any ordinary means that put an end to the rest of us.
His deliberate, stately courtesy of manner was full of significance. It was as though he were certain of hav-ing plenty of time for everything. Yes, there was something indestructible about him; and the way he talked sometimes you might have thought he believed it himself. When he called on me last with that letter he wanted me to take charge of, he was not depressed at all. Perhaps a shade more deliberate in his talk and manner. Not depressed in the least. Had he a pre-sentiment, I wonder? Perhaps! Still it seems a misera-ble end for such a striking figure."
"Oh yes! It was a miserable end," Mr. Van Wyk said, with so much fervor that the lawyer looked up at him curiously; and afterwards, after parting with him, he remarked to an acquaintance--"Queer person that Dutch tobacco-planter from Batu Beru. Know anything of him?"
"Heaps of money," answered the bank manager. "I hear he's going home by the next mail to form a com-pany to take over his estates. Another tobacco district thrown open. He's wise, I think. These good times won't last for ever."
In the southern hemisphere Captain Whalley's daugh-ter had no presentiment of evil when she opened the envelope addressed to her in the lawyer's handwriting.
She had received it in the afternoon; all the boarders had gone out, her boys were at school, her husband sat upstairs in his big arm-chair with a book, thin-faced, wrapped up in rugs to the waist. The house was still, and the grayness of a cloudy day lay against the panes of three lofty windows.
In a shabby dining-room, where a faint cold smell of dishes lingered all the year round, sitting at the end of a long table surrounded by many chairs pushed in with their backs close against the edge of the perpetually laid table-cloth, she read the opening sentence: "Most pro-found regret--painful duty--your father is no more--in accordance with his instructions--fatal casualty--consolation--no blame attached to his memory. . . ."
Her face was thin, her temples a little sunk under the smooth bands of black hair, her lips remained resolutely compressed, while her dark eyes grew larger, till at last, with a low cry, she stood up, and instantly stooped to pick up another envelope which had slipped off her knees on to the floor.
She tore it open, snatched out the inclosure. . . .
"My dearest child," it said, "I am writing this while I am able yet to write legibly. I am trying hard to save for you all the money that is left; I have only kept it to serve you better. It is yours. It shall not be lost: it shall not be touched. There's five hundred pounds.
Of what I have earned I have kept nothing back till now. For the future, if I live, I must keep back some--a little--to bring me to you. I must come to you. I must see you once more.
"It is hard to believe that you will ever look on these lines. God seems to have forgotten me. I want to see you--and yet death would be a greater favor. If you ever read these words, I charge you to begin by thank-ing a God merciful at last, for I shall be dead then, and it will be well. My dear, I am at the end of my tether."
The next paragraph began with the words: "My sight is going . . ."
She read no more that day. The hand holding up the paper to her eyes fell slowly, and her slender figure in a plain black dress walked rigidly to the window. Her eyes were dry: no cry of sorrow or whisper of thanks went up to heaven from her lips. Life had been too hard, for all the efforts of his love. It had silenced her emotions. But for the first time in all these years its sting had departed, the carking care of poverty, the meanness of a hard struggle for bread. Even the image of her husband and of her children seemed to glide away from her into the gray twilight; it was her father's face alone that she saw, as though he had come to see her, always quiet and big, as she had seen him last, but with something more august and tender in his aspect.
She slipped his folded letter between the two buttons of her plain black bodice, and leaning her forehead against a window-pane remained there till dusk, per-fectly motionless, giving him all the time she could spare. Gone! Was it possible? My God, was it possi-ble! The blow had come softened by the spaces of the earth, by the years of absence. There had been whole days when she had not thought of him at all--had no time. But she had loved him, she felt she had loved him, after all.
