of the soaked shoes and pulled
them off; he also took off the mackinaw and the undercoat. The fellow,
appreciating that care was being given him, relaxed; he slept deeply
for short periods, stirred and started up, then slept again. Alan
stood watching, a strange, sinking tremor shaking him. This man had
come there to make a claim--a claim which many times before,
apparently, Benjamin Corvet had admitted. Luke came to Ben Corvet for
money which he always got--all he wanted--the alternative to giving
which was that Luke would "talk." Blackmail, that meant, of course;
blackmail which not only Luke had told of, but which Wassaquam too had
admitted, as Alan now realized. Money for blackmail--that was the
reason for that thousand dollars in cash which Benjamin Corvet always
kept at the house.

Alan turned, with a sudden shiver of revulsion, toward his father's
chair in place before the hearth; there for hours each day his father
had sat with a book or staring into the fire, always with what this man
knew hanging over him, always arming against it with the thousand
dollars ready for this man, whenever he came. Meeting blackmail,
paying blackmail for as long as Wassaquam had been in the house, for as
long as it took to make the once muscular, powerful figure of the
sailor who threatened to "talk" into the swollen, whiskey-soaked hulk
of the man dying now on the lounge.

For his state that day, the man blamed Benjamin Corvet. Alan, forcing
himself to touch the swollen face, shuddered at thought of the truth
underlying that accusation. Benjamin Corvet's act--whatever it might
be that this man knew--undoubtedly had destroyed not only him who paid
the blackmail but him who received it; the effect of that act was still
going on, destroying, blighting. Its threat of shame was not only
against Benjamin Corvet; it threatened also all whose names must be
connected with Corvet's. Alan had refused to accept any stigma in his
relationship with Corvet; but now he could not refuse to accept it.
This shame threatened Alan; it threatened also the Sherrills. Was it
not because of this that Benjamin Corvet had objected to Sherrill's
name appearing with his own in the title of the ship-owning firm? And
was it not because of this that Corvet's intimacy with Sherrill and his
comradeship with Constance had been alternated by times in which he had
frankly avoided them both? What Sherrill had told Alan and even
Corvet's gifts to him h