"Oh, the devil!" he groaned, head in hands.
The future loomed wrapped in unspeakable darkness, lightened by no least ray of hope. It had been bad enough to lose a comfortable living through a gigantic convulsion of Nature; but to think that he had lost all else through his own egregious folly, to find himself reduced to the kennels--!
So Care found him again in those weary hours,--came and sat by his side, slipping a grisly hand in his and tightening its grip until he could have cried out with the torment of it; the while whispering insidiously subtile, evil things in his ear. And he had not even Hope to comfort him; at any previous stage he had been able to distil a sort of bitter-sweet satisfaction from the thought that he was suffering for the love of his life. But now--now Dorothy was lost, gone like the glamour of Romance in the searching light of day.
Stryker, emerging from his room for breakfast, found the passenger with a hostile look in his eye and a jaw set in ugly fashion. His eyes, too, were the abiding-place of smoldering devils; and the captain, recognizing them, considerately forbore to stir them up with any untimely pleasantries. To be sure, he was autocrat in his own ship, and Kirkwood's standing aboard was _nil_; but then there was just enough yellow in the complexion of Stryker's soul to incline him to sidestep trouble whenever feasible. And besides, he entertained dark suspicions of his guest--suspicions he scarce dared voice even to his inmost heart.
The morning meal, therefore, passed off in constrained silence. The captain ate voraciously and vociferously, pushed back his chair, and went on deck to relieve the mate. The latter, a stunted little Cockney with a wizened countenance and a mind as foul as his tongue, got small change of his attempts to engage the passenger in conversation on topics that he considered fit for discussion. After the sixth or eighth snubbing he rose in dudgeon, discharged a poisonous bit of insolence, and retired to his berth, leaving Kirkwood to finish his breakfast in peace; which the latter did literally, to the last visible scrap of food and the ultimate drop of coffee, poor as both were in quality.
To the tune of a moderating wind, the morning wearied away. Kirkwood went on deck once, for distraction from the intolerable monotony of it all, got a sound drenching of spray, with a glimpse of a dark line on the eastern horizon, which he understood to be the low littoral of Holland, and was glad to dodge below once more and dry himself.