‘I never saw a crew leave a ship so quietly. They sneaked over the rail one after another, taking care not to bang their sea-chests too heavily. They looked our way, but not a single one had the stomach to come up and offer to shake hands with the mate, as is usual.

‘I followed him all over the empty ship to and fro, here and there, with no living soul about but the two of us, because the old ship-keeper, who had known him from a boy, had locked himself up in the galley—both doors. Suddenly poor Charley mutters in a sort of crazy voice, “I’m done here,” and strides down the gangway, with me at his heels, up the dock, out at the gate, on towards Tower Hill.^* He used to take rooms with a decent old landlady in America Square, to be near his work.

‘All at once he stops, turns short round, and comes straight at me. “Ned,” says he, “I am going home.” I had the good luck to sight a four-wheeler,^* and got him in. His legs were beginning to give way. In our hall he fell down on a chair, and I’ll never forget father’s and mother’s amazed, perfectly still faces as they stood over him. They hadn’t heard, and couldn’t understand what had happened to him till I blubbered out, “Maggie’s drowned.”

‘Mother let out a little cry. Father looks from him to me and from me to him as if comparing our faces—for, upon my soul, Charley did not resemble himself at all. Nobody moved; and the poor fellow raised his two big brown hands slowly to his throat and with one single tug rips everything open—collar, shirt, waistcoat, into rags—a perfect wreck and ruin of a man. Father and I got him up-stairs somehow, and mother pretty nearly killed herself nursing him through a brain-fever.’

The man in tweeds nodded at me significantly.

‘Ah! there was nothing that could be done with that brute. She had a devil in her.’

‘Where’s your brother now?’ I asked, expecting to hear he was dead. But he was commanding a ship on the China coast and had not been home for years.

Old Jermyn fetched a heavy sigh, and, the handkerchief being now sufficiently dry, put it up tenderly to his red and dejected nose.

‘You understand now,’ the man in tweeds started again, ‘why I was glad to hear that lunatic Wilmot had managed to dash her brains out on some rocks in Spencer Gulf.^* She was a ravening beast. A ship may be given a certain latitude in her temper—but when it comes to killing women! … Old Colchester put his foot down and resigned; and—would you believe it?—Apse & Sons wrote to him asking whether he wouldn’t reconsider his decision! Anything for the sake of the Apse Family! Old Colchester went to the office then and said that he would reconsider: he would take charge again, on condition of taking her out into the North Sea and scuttling her! He was nearly off his chump. He used to be irongray, but he had gone snow-white in a fortnight. And Mr Lucian Apse (they had known each other as young men) pretended not to notice it. Eh! Here’s infatuation, if you like. Here’s pride for you.

‘They jumped at the first man they could get to take her, for fear of the scandal of the Apse Family not being able to find a skipper. He was a festive soul, I believe, but he stuck to her grim and hard. Wilmot was second mate. A harumscarum fellow and pretending to a great scorn for all the girls. The fact is, he was really timid. But only let one of them do as much as lift her little finger in encouragement and there was nothing that could hold him. As apprentice he deserted abroad after a petticoat, once, and would have gone to the dogs then if his skipper hadn’t taken the trouble to find him and lug him by the ears out of some house of perdition or other.

‘It was said that one of the firm had been heard to express a hope that she would be lost soon. I can hardly credit it, unless it might have been Mr Alfred Apse, whom the family didn’t think much of. They had him in the office, but he was considered a bad egg altogether, always flying off to racemeetings and coming home drunk. You would have thought that a ship so full of deadly tricks would run herself