Dynevor Terrace; Or, The Clue of Life Volume I Part 30

'Keep quiet, Jem, go and look out some of those library books, like a wise man.'

'A wise man would be at a loss here,' said James, casting his eye along the battered purple backs of the circulating-library books.

'Wisdom won't condescend! Ah! thank you, this will do nicely. Those colours--yes; and the Seaside Book. I'll choose one or two. What is most popular here?'

James began to whistle; but Louis, taking up a volume, became engrossed beyond the power of hints, and hardly stepped aside to make way for some ladies who entered the shop. A peremptory touch of the arm at length roused him, and holding up the book to the shopman, he put it into his pocket, seized his ash-stick, put his arm into his cousin's, and hastened into the street.

'Did you ever see--' began Jem.

'Most striking. I did not know you had met with her. What an idea--the false self conjuring up phantoms--'

'What are you talking of? Did you not see her?'

'Elizabeth Barrett. Was she there?'

'Is that her name? Do you know her?'

'I had heard of her, but never--'

'How?--where? Who is she?'

'I only saw her name in the t.i.tle-page.'

'What's all this? You did not see her?'

'Who? Did not some ladies come into the shop?'

'Some ladies! Is it possible? Why, I touched you to make you look.'

'I thought it was your frenzy about the tide. What now?--'

James made a gesture of despair. 'The loveliest creature I ever saw.

You may see her yet, as she comes out. Come back!'

'Don't be so absurd,' said Fitzjocelyn, laughing, and, with instinctive dislike of staring, resisting his cousin's effort to wheel him round.

'What, you will?' withdrawing his arm. 'I shall put off without you, if you don't take care.'

And, laughing, he watched Jem hurry up the sloping street and turn the corner, then turned to pursue his own way, his steps much less lame and his looks far more healthful than they had been a month before. He reached the quay--narrow, slippery, and fishy, but not without beauty, as the green water lapped against the hewn stones, and rocked the little boats moored in the wide bay, sheltered by a richly-wooded promontory. 'Jem in a fit of romance! Well, whose fault will it be if we miss the tide? I'll sit in the boat, and read that poem again.-- Oh! here he comes, out of breath. Well, Jem, did the heroine drop glove or handkerchief? Or, on a second view, was she minus an eye?'

'You were,' said James, hurrying breathlessly to unmoor the boat.

'Let me row,' said Louis; 'your breath and senses are both lost in the fair vision.'

'It is of no use to talk to you--'

'I shall ask no questions till we are out of the harbour, or you will be running foul of one of those colliers--a tribute with which the Fair Unknown may dispense.'

The numerous black colliers and lighters showed that precautions were needful till they had pushed out far enough to make the little fishy town look graceful and romantic; and the tide was ebbing so fast, that Louis deemed it prudent to spend his strength on rowing rather than on talking.

James first broke silence by exclaiming--'Do you know where Beauchastel is?'

'On the other side of the promontory. Don't you remember the spire rising among the trees, as we see it from the water?'

'That church must be worth seeing. I declare I'll go there next Sunday.'

Another silence, and Louis said--'I am curious to know whether you saw her.'

'She was getting into the carriage as I turned the corner; so I went back and asked Bull who they were.'

'I hope she was the greengrocer's third cousin.'

'Pshaw! I tell you it was Mrs. Mansell and her visitors.'

'Oho! No wonder Beauchastel architecture is so grand. What an impudent fellow you are, Jem!'

'The odd thing is,' said James, a little ashamed of Louis having put Mansell and Beauchastel together, as he had not intended, 'that it seems they asked Bull who we were. I thought one old lady was staring hard at you, as if she meant to claim acquaintance, but you shot out of the shop like a sky-rocket.'

'Luckily there's no danger of that. No one will come to molest us here.'

'Depend on it, they are meditating a descent on his lords.h.i.+p.'

'You shall appear in my name, then.'

'Too like a bad novel: besides, you don't look respectable enough for my tutor. And, now I think of it, no doubt she was asking Bull how he came to let such a disreputable old shooting-jacket into his shop.'

The young men worked up an absurd romance between them, as merrily they crossed the estuary, and rowed up a narrow creek, with a whitewashed village on one side, and on the other a solitary house, the garden sloping to the water, and very nautical--the vane, a union-jack waved by a brilliant little sailor on the top of a mast, and the arbour, half a boat set on end; whence, as James steered up to the stone steps that were one by one appearing, there emerged an old, grizzly, weather-beaten sailor, who took his pipe from his mouth, and caught hold of the boat.

'Thank you, Captain!' cried Fitzjocelyn. 'I've brought home the boat safe, you see, by my own superhuman exertions--no thanks to Mr. Frost, there!'

'That's his way, Captain,' retorted Jem, leaping out, and helping his cousin: 'you may thank me for getting him home at all! But for me, he would have his back against the counter, and his head in a book, this very moment.'

'Ask him what he was after,' returned Louis.

'Which of us d'ye think most likely to lag, Captain Hannaford?' cried Jem, preventing the question.

'Which would you choose to have on board?'

'Ye'd both of ye make more mischief than work,' said the old seaman, who had been looking from one to the other of the young men, as if they were performing a comedy for his special diversion.

'So you would not enter us on board the Eliza Priscilla?' cried Louis.

'No, no,' said the old man, shrewdly, and with an air of holding something back; whereupon they both pressed him, and obtained for answer, 'No, no, I wouldn't sail with you'--signing towards Fitzjocelyn--'in my crew: ye'd be more trouble than ye're worth. And as to you, sir, if I wouldn't sail with ye, I'd like still less to sail under you.'

He finished with a droll, deprecating glance, and Louis laughed heartily; but James was silent, and as soon as they had entered the little parlour, declared that it would not do to encourage that old skipper--he was waylaying them like the Ancient Mariner, and was actually growing impudent.

'An old man's opinion of two youngsters is not what I call impudence,'

began Louis, with an emphasis that made Jem divert his attack.

Those two cousins had never spent a happier month than in these small lodgings, built by the old retired merchant-seaman evidently on the model of that pride of his heart, the Eliza Priscilla, his little coasting trader, now the charge of his only surviving son; for this was a family where drowning was like a natural death, and old Captain Hannaford looked on the probability of sleeping in Ebbscreek churchyard, much as Bayard did at the prospect of dying in his bed. His old deaf wife kept the little cabin-like rooms most exquisitely neat; and the twelve-years-old Priscilla, the orphan of one of the lost sons, waited on the gentlemen with an old-fas.h.i.+oned, womanly deportment and staid countenance that, in the absence of all other grounds of distress, Louis declared was quite a pain to him.