moment on the body of Huish, might have picked him up, and flung him

down, and wiped the cabin with him, in a frenzy of cruelty that seemed

half moral. But the moment passed; and the abortive crisis left the man

weaker. The stakes were so high--the pearls on the one hand--starvation

and shame on the other. Ten years of pearls! The imagination of Davis

translated them into a new, glorified existence for himself and his

family. The seat of this new life must be in London; there were deadly

reasons against Portland, Maine; and the pictures that came to him were

of English manners. He saw his boys marching in the procession of a

school, with gowns on, an usher marshalling them and reading as he

walked in a great book. He was installed in a villa, semi-detached;

the name, Rosemore, on the gateposts. In a chair on the gravel walk, he

seemed to sit smoking a cigar, a blue ribbon in his buttonhole, victor

over himself and circumstances, and the malignity of bankers. He saw the

parlour with red curtains and shells on the mantelpiece--and with the

fine inconsistency of visions, mixed a grog at the mahogany table ere he

turned in. With that the Farallone gave one of the aimless and nameless

movements which (even in an anchored ship and even in the most profound

calm) remind one of the mobility of fluids; and he was back again under

the cover of the house, the fierce daylight besieging it all round and

glaring in the chinks, and the clerk in a rather airy attitude, awaiting

his decision.

He began to walk again. He aspired after the realisation of these

dreams, like a horse nickering for water; the lust of them burned in his

inside. And the only obstacle was Attwater, who had insulted him from

the first. He gave Herrick a full share of the pearls, he insisted on

182

The Ebb-Tide