Vanstone, the captain, might mislay his temper, and the first mate
expend himself in polysyllabic invective, young Penberthy cease to
dream, stewards, engineers, carpenters, cooks, quartermasters, seamen,
firemen, do their most willing and urgent best, nevertheless the
morning of next day, and even the afternoon of it, still found Richard
Calmady seated at the locker-table of the white-walled deck-cabin, his
voyage towards self-obliteration not yet begun.

Charts were outspread before him, upon which, at weary intervals, he
essayed to trace the course of his coming wanderings. But his brain was
dull, he had no power of consecutive thought. That same madness of
going was upon him with undiminished power, yet he knew not where he
wanted to go, hardly why he wanted to go, only that a blind obsession
of going drove him. He was miserably troubled about other matters
too--about that same brief letter he had written to Helen before
leaving the villa. He was convinced that he had written such a letter,
but struggle as he might to remember the contents of it they remained
to him a blank. He was haunted by the fear that in that letter he had
committed some irremediable folly, had bound himself to some absurdly
unworthy course of action. But what it might be escaped and, in
escaping, tortured him. And then, this surely was Friday, and Morabita
sang at the San Carlo to-night? And surely he had promised to be there,
and to meet the famous _prima donna_ and sup with her after the
performance, as in former days at Vienna? He had not always been quite
kind to her, poor, dear, fat, good-natured, silly soul! He could not
fail her now.--And then he went back to a chart of the South Pacific
again. Only he could not see it plainly, but saw, instead of it, the
great folio of copper-plate engravings lying on the broad window-seat
of the eastern bay of the Long Gallery at home. He was sitting there to
watch for the race-horses coming back from exercise, Tom Chifney
pricking along beside them on his handsome cob. And the long-ago,
boyish desperation of longing for wholeness, for freedom, brought a
moistness to his eyes, and a lump into his throat. And all the while
the coal dust drifted in at each smallest crevice and aperture, and the
air was vibrant with rasping, jarring uproar and nauseous with the
stale, heavy odours of the city and the port. And steadily,
ceaselessly, the descending rain drummed upon the roofing overhead.

At length a stu