Part 6

“Hadn’t you better go in?” he suggested, after watching for a while the nape of her neck, a patch of dazzling white skin and soft shadow above the sombre line of her shoulders. Her wrap had slipped down to her elbows. “You’ll have all the town coming out presently. I’ll wait here a bit.”

Her wrap fell to the ground, and he stooped to pick it up; she had vanished. He threw it over his arm, and approaching the window squarely he saw a monstrous form of a fat man in an armchair, an unshaded lamp, the yawning of an enormous mouth in a big flat face encircled by a ragged halo of hair--Miss Bessie’s head and bust. The shouting stopped; the blind ran down. He lost himself in thinking how awkward it was. Father mad; no getting into the house. No money to get back; a hungry chum in London who would begin to think he had been given the go-by. “Damn!” he muttered. He could break the door in, certainly; but they would perhaps bundle him into chokey for that without asking questions--no great matter, only he was confoundedly afraid of being locked up, even in mistake. He turned cold at the thought. He stamped his feet on the sodden grass.

“What are you?--a sailor?” said an agitated voice.

She had flitted out, a shadow herself, attracted by the reckless shadow waiting under the wall of her home.

“Anything. Enough of a sailor to be worth my salt before the mast. Came home that way this time.”

“Where do you come from?” she asked.

“Right away from a jolly good spree,” he said, “by the London train--see? Ough! I hate being shut up in a train. I don’t mind a house so much.”

“Ah,” she said; “that’s lucky.”

“Because in a house you can at any time open the blamed door and walk away straight before you.”

“And never come back?”

“Not for sixteen years at least,” he laughed. “To a rabbit hutch, and get a confounded old shovel...”

“A ship is not so very big,” she taunted.

“No, but the sea is great.”

She dropped her head, and as if her ears had been opened to the voices of the world, she heard, beyond the rampart of sea-wall, the swell of yesterday’s gale breaking on the beach with monotonous and solemn vibrations, as if all the earth had been a tolling bell.

“And then, why, a ship’s a ship. You love her and leave her; and a voyage isn’t a marriage.” He quoted the sailor’s saying lightly.

“It is not a marriage,” she whispered.

“I never took a false name, and I’ve never yet told a lie to a woman. What lie? Why, the lie--. Take me or leave me, I say: and if you take me, then it is...” He hummed a snatch very low, leaning against the wall.

“Oh, ho, ho Rio! And fare thee well, My bonnie young girl, We’re bound to Rio Grande.”

“Capstan song,” he explained. Her teeth chattered.

“You are cold,” he said. “Here’s that affair of yours I picked up.” She felt his hands about her, wrapping her closely. “Hold the ends together in front,” he commanded.

“What did you come here for?” she asked, repressing a shudder.

“Five quid,” he answered, promptly. “We let our spree go on a little too long and got hard up.”

“You’ve been drinking?” she said.

“Blind three days; on purpose. I am not given that way--don’t you think. There’s nothing and nobody that can get over me unless I like. I can be as steady as a rock. My chum sees the paper this morning, and says he to me: ‘Go on, Harry: loving parent. That’s five quid sure.’ So we scraped all our pockets for the fare. Devil of a lark!”

“You have a hard heart, I am afraid,” she sighed.

“What for? For running away? Why! he wanted to make a lawyer’s clerk of me--just to please himself. Master in his own house; and my poor mother egged him on--for my good, I suppose. Well, then--so long; and I went. No, I tell you: the day I cleared out, I was all black and blue from his great fondness for me. Ah! he was always a bit of a character. Look at that shovel now. Off his chump? Not much. That’s just exactly like my dad. He wants me here just to have somebody to order about. However, we two were hard up; and what’s five quid to him--once in sixteen hard years?”

“Oh, but I am sorry for you. Did you never want to come back home?”

“Be a lawyer’s clerk and rot here--in some such place as this?” he cried in contempt. “What! if the old man set me up in a home to-day, I would kick it down about my ears--or else die there before the third day was out.”