Page:Rideout--Beached keels.djvu/144

130 "Eccomi," said this swarthy apparition. His bright little eyes looked up and down, up and down, quick and distressed, like a monkey's. "Time now. Alla-board. Ebba-tide. You come, by damn, we go."

Angelo the Maltese was never given a bigger part to play in this world than that of an incapable sea-cook and a distorter of the simplest messages; but now for one instant it fell to him to speak important lines in the obscure tragedy of the Sebrights. To them his faltering knock at the door had sounded like the thunder of the Commander's statue; his mumbling, broken English, the words of a Fate large, inexorable, and as cold as the wind that blew into the room from over the bay and the dazzling snowfields. But Angelo did not guess his own importance, for he remained cringing in the doorway, against a background of bright snow and black water, looking up and down, up and down with his troubled eyes, scraping and shuffling his heavy brogans on the flint millstone.

He pulled from the breast pocket of his reefer a dingy letter.