The demon of bitterness had entered into little Fyne. He amazed me as

though he had changed his skin from white to black. It was quite as

wonderful. And he kept it up, too.

"Luckily there are some advantages in the--the profession of a sailor. As

long as they defy the world away at sea somewhere eighteen thousand miles

from here, I don't mind so much. I wonder what that interesting old

party will say. He will have another surprise. They mean to drag him

along with them on board the ship straight away. Rescue work. Just

think of Roderick Anthony, the son of a gentleman, after all . . . "

He gave me a little shock. I thought he was going to say the "son of the

poet" as usual; but his mind was not running on such vanities now. His

unspoken thought must have gone on "and uncle of my girls." I suspect

that he had been roughly handled by Captain Anthony up there, and the

resentment gave a tremendous fillip to the slow play of his wits. Those

men of sober fancy, when anything rouses their imaginative faculty, are

very thorough. "Just think!" he cried. "The three of them crowded into

a four-wheeler, and Anthony sitting deferentially opposite that

astonished old jail-bird!"

The good little man laughed. An improper sound it was to come from his

manly chest; and what made it worse was the thought that for the least

thing, by a mere hair's breadth, he might have taken this affair

sentimentally. But clearly Anthony was no diplomatist. His brother-in-

law must have appeared to him, to use the language of shore people, a

perfect philistine with a heart like a flint. What Fyne precisely meant

by "wrangling" I don't know, but I had no doubt that these two had

"wrangled" to a profoundly disturbing extent. How much the other was

affected I could not even imagine; but the man before me was quite

amazingly upset.

"In a four-wheeler! Take him on board!" I muttered, startled by the

change in Fyne.

"That's the plan--nothing less. If I am to believe what I have been

told, his feet will scarcely touch the ground between the prison-gates

and the deck of that ship."

The transformed Fyne spoke in a forcibly lowered tone which I heard

without difficulty. The rumbling, composite noises of the street were

hushed for a moment, during one of these sudden breaks in the traffic as

if the stream of commerce had dried up at its source. Having an

unobstructed view past Fyne's shoulder, I was astonished to see that the

girl was still there. I thought she had gone up long before. But there

was her black slender figure, her white face under the roses of her hat.

She stood on the edge of the pavement as people stand on the bank of a

stream, very still, as if waiting--or as if unconscious of where she was.

The three dismal, sodden loafers (I could see them too; they hadn't

budged an inch) seemed to me to be watching her. Which was horrible.




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024