Part 5

“You wouldn’t say so if you had seen him chasing me upstairs with a hard leather strap,” he said; “I haven’t forgotten it in sixteen years.”

She got warm from head to foot under another soft, subdued laugh. At the rat-tat-tat of the knocker her heart flew into her mouth.

“Hey, dad! Let me in. I am Harry, I am. Straight! Come back home a day too soon.”

One of the windows upstairs ran up.

“A grinning, information fellow,” said the voice of old Hagberd, up in the darkness. “Don’t you have anything to do with him. It will spoil everything.”

She heard Harry Hagberd say, “Hallo, dad,” then a clanging clatter. The window rumbled down, and he stood before her again.

“It’s just like old times. Nearly walloped the life out of me to stop me going away, and now I come back he throws a confounded shovel at my head to keep me out. It grazed my shoulder.”

She shuddered.

“I wouldn’t care,” he began, “only I spent my last shillings on the railway fare and my last twopence on a shave--out of respect for the old man.”

“Are you really Harry Hagberd?” she asked. “Can you prove it?”

“Can I prove it? Can any one else prove it?” he said jovially. “Prove with what? What do I want to prove? There isn’t a single corner in the world, barring England, perhaps, where you could not find some man, or more likely woman, that would remember me for Harry Hagberd. I am more like Harry Hagberd than any man alive; and I can prove it to you in a minute, if you will let me step inside your gate.”

“Come in,” she said.

He entered then the front garden of the Carvils. His tall shadow strode with a swagger; she turned her back on the window and waited, watching the shape, of which the footfalls seemed the most material part. The light fell on a tilted hat; a powerful shoulder, that seemed to cleave the darkness; on a leg stepping out. He swung about and stood still, facing the illuminated parlour window at her back, turning his head from side to side, laughing softly to himself.

“Just fancy, for a minute, the old man’s beard stuck on to my chin. Hey? Now say. I was the very spit of him from a boy.”

“It’s true,” she murmured to herself.

“And that’s about as far as it goes. He was always one of your domestic characters. Why, I remember how he used to go about looking very sick for three days before he had to leave home on one of his trips to South Shields for coal. He had a standing charter from the gas-works. You would think he was off on a whaling cruise--three years and a tail. Ha, ha! Not a bit of it. Ten days on the outside. The Skimmer of the Seas was a smart craft. Fine name, wasn’t it? Mother’s uncle owned her....”

He interrupted himself, and in a lowered voice, “Did he ever tell you what mother died of?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Miss Bessie, bitterly; “from impatience.”

He made no sound for a while; then brusquely: “They were so afraid I would turn out badly that they fairly drove me away. Mother nagged at me for being idle, and the old man said he would cut my soul out of my body rather than let me go to sea. Well, it looked as if he would do it too--so I went. It looks to me sometimes as if I had been born to them by a mistake--in that other hutch of a house.”

“Where ought you to have been born by rights?” Bessie Carvil interrupted him, defiantly.

“In the open, upon a beach, on a windy night,” he said, quick as lightning. Then he mused slowly. “They were characters, both of them, by George; and the old man keeps it up well--don’t he? A damned shovel on the--Hark! who’s that making that row? ‘Bessie, Bessie.’ It’s in your house.”

“It’s for me,” she said, with indifference.

He stepped aside, out of the streak of light. “Your husband?” he inquired, with the tone of a man accustomed to unlawful trysts. “Fine voice for a ship’s deck in a thundering squall.”

“No; my father. I am not married.”

“You seem a fine girl, Miss Bessie, dear,” he said at once.

She turned her face away.

“Oh, I say,--what’s up? Who’s murdering him?”

“He wants his tea.” She faced him, still and tall, with averted head, with her hands hanging clasped before her.