Chapter 4 - Page 2

would perhaps be the means, if everything
else failed, of obtaining some work which, keeping his body and soul
together (not a matter of great outlay), would enable him to be of use
to his daughter. To his mind it was her own money which he employed, as
it were, in backing her father and solely for her benefit. Once at work,
he would help her with the greater part of his earnings; he was good for
many years yet, and this boarding-house business, he argued to himself,
whatever the prospects, could not be much of a gold-mine from the first
start. But what work? He was ready to lay hold of anything in an honest
way so that it came quickly to his hand; because the five hundred pounds
must be preserved intact for eventual use. That was the great point.
With the entire five hundred one felt a substance at one's back; but
it seemed to him that should he let it dwindle to four-fifty or even
four-eighty, all the efficiency would be gone out of the money, as though
there were some magic power in the round figure. But what sort of work?

Confronted by that haunting question as by an uneasy ghost, for whom he
had no exorcising formula, Captain Whalley stopped short on the apex
of a small bridge spanning steeply the bed of a canalized creek with
granite shores. Moored between the square blocks a seagoing Malay prau
floated half hidden under the arch of masonry, with her spars lowered
down, without a sound of life on board, and covered from stem to stern
with a ridge of palm-leaf mats. He had left behind him the overheated
pavements bordered by the stone frontages that, like the sheer face of
cliffs, followed the sweep of the quays; and an unconfined spaciousness
of orderly and sylvan aspect opened before him its wide plots of rolled
grass, like pieces of green carpet smoothly pegged out, its long ranges
of trees lined up in colossal porticos of dark shafts roofed with a
vault of branches.

Some of these avenues ended at the sea. It was a terraced shore; and
beyond, upon the level expanse, profound and glistening like the gaze
of a dark-blue eye, an oblique band of stippled purple lengthened itself
indefinitely through the gap between a couple of verdant twin islets.
The masts and spars of a few ships far away, hull down in the outer
roads, sprang straight from the water in a fine maze of rosy lines
penciled on the clear shadow of the eastern board. Captain Whalley gave
them a long glance. The ship, once his own, was anchored out there. It
was staggering to think that it was open to him no longer to take a boat
at the jetty and get himself pulled off to her when the evening came. To
no ship. Perhaps never more. Before the sale was concluded, and till the
purchase-money had been paid, he had spent daily some time on board the