At the same time I
could have desired another field of energy; and I was
the more grateful for the redeeming element of mystery.
Without that, though I might have gone ahead and done
as well, it would scarce have been with ardour; and
what inspired me that night with an impatient greed of
the sea, the island, and the wreck, was the hope that I
might stumble there upon the answer to a hundred
questions, and learn why Captain Trent fanned his red
face in the exchange, and why Mr. Dickson fled from the
telephone in the Mission Street lodging-house.
CHAPTER XI
IN WHICH JIM AND I TAKE DIFFERENT WAYS
I WAS unhappy when I closed my eyes; and it was to
unhappiness that I opened them again next morning, to a
confused sense of some calamity still inarticulate, and
to the consciousness of jaded limbs and of a swimming
head. I must have lain for some time inert and
stupidly miserable before I became aware of a
reiterated knocking at the door; with which discovery
all my wits flowed back in their accustomed channels,
and I remembered the sale and the wreck, and Goddedaal
and Nares, and Johnson and Black Tom, and the troubles
of yesterday and the manifold engagements of the day
that was to come.
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