Dinner was served on deck, the officers messing aft
under the slack of the spanker, the men fraternising
forward. Trent appeared in excellent spirits, served
out grog to all hands, opened a bottle of Cape wine for
the after-table, and obliged his guests with many
details of the life of a financier in Cardiff. He had
been forty years at sea, had five times suffered
shipwreck, was once nine months the prisoner of a
pepper rajah, and had seen service under fire in
Chinese rivers; but the only thing he cared to talk of,
the only thing of which he was vain, or with which he
thought it possible to interest a stranger, was his
career as a money-lender in the slums of a seaport
town.
The afternoon spell told cruelly on the Currency
Lasses. Already exhausted as they were with
sleeplessness and excitement, they did the last hours
of this violent employment on bare nerves; and, when
Trent was at last satisfied with the condition of his
rigging, expected eagerly the word to put to sea. But
the captain seemed in no hurry. He went and walked by
himself softly, like a man in thought.
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