Sunday as it was, Capt"n Davy"s cronies came as usual at nightfall. They were a sorry gang, but Davy welcomed them with noisy cheer. The lights were brought in, and the company sat down to its accustomed amus.e.m.e.nts.
These were drinking and smoking, with gambling in disguise at intervals.
Davy lost tremendously, and laughed with a sort of wild joy at every failure. He was cheated on all hands, and he knew it. Now and again he called the cheaters by hard name, but he always paid them their money.
They forgave the one for the sake of the other, and went on without shame. Lovibond"s gorge rose at the spectacle. He was an old gambler himself, and could have stripped every rascal of them all as naked as a lettuce after a locust. His indignation got the better of him at last, and he went out on to the Head.
The calm sea lay like a dark pavement dotted with the reflection of the stars overhead. Lights in a wide half-circle showed the line of the bay.
Below was the black rock of the island of the Tower of Refuge, and the narrow strip of the old Red pier; beyond was the dark outline of the Head, and from the seaward breast of it shot the light of the lighthouse, like the glow of a kiln. It was as quiet and beautiful out there as it had been noisy and hideous within.
Lovibond had been walking to and fro for more than an hour listening to the slumberous voices of the night, and hearing at intervals the louder bellowing from the room where Captain Davy and his cronies were sitting, when Davy himself came out.
"I can"t stand no more of it, and I"ve sent them home," he said. "It"s like saying your prayers to a hornpipe, thinking of her and carrying on with them wastrels."
He was sober in one sense only.
"Tell me more about the little girl in church. Aw, matey, matey!
Something under my waistcoat went creep, creep, creep, same as a sarpent, when you first spake of her; but its easier to stand till that jaw inside anyway. Go on, sir. Love at first sight, was it? Aw, well, the eyes isn"t the only place that love is coming in at, or blind men would all be bachelors. Now mine came in at the ear."
"Did you fall in love with her singing, Capt"n?" said Lovibond.
"Yes, did I," said Davy, "and her spaking, too, and her whispering as well, but it wasn"t music that brought love in at my ear--my left ear it was, Matey."
"Whatever was it then, Capt"n," said Lovibond.
"Milk," said Davy.
"Milk?" cried Lovibond, drawing up in their walk.
"Just milk," said Davy again. "Come along and I tell you. It was this way. Ould Kinvig kep" two cows, and we were calling the one Whitie and the other Brownie. Nelly and me was milking the pair of them, and she was like a young goat, that full of tricks, and I was same as a big calf, that shy. One evening--it was just between the lights--that"s when girls is like kittens, terr"ble full of capers and mischievousness--Nelly rigged up her kopie--that"s her milking-stool--agen mine, so that we sat back to back, her milking Brownie and me milking Whitie. "What she agate of now?" thinks I, but she was looking as innocent as the bas"es themselves, with their ould solem faces when they were twisting round. Then we started, and there wasn"t no noise in the cow-house, but just the cows chewing constant, and, maybe, the rope running on their necks at whiles and the rattle of the milk in the pails. And I got to draeming same as I was used of, with the smell of the hay stealing down from the loft and the breath of the cows coming puff when they were blowing, and the t.i.ts in my hands agoing, when the rattle-rattle aback of me stopped sudden, and I felt a squish in my ear like the syringe at the doctor"s. "What"s that?" thinks I. "Is it deaf I"m going?" But it"s deaf I"d been and blind, too, and stupid for all down to that blessed minute, for there was Nessy laughing like fits, and working like mad, and drops of Brownie"s milk going trickling out of my ear on to my shoulder. "It"s not deafness," thinks I; "it"s love"; and my breath was coming and going and making noises like the smithy bellows. So I twisted my wrist and blazed back at her, and we both fired away, ding-dong, till the cows was as dry as Kinvig when he was teetotal, and the cow-house was like a snowstorm with a gale of wind through it, and you couldn"t see a face at the one of us for swansdown. That"s how Nelly and me "came engage."
He was laughing noisily by this time, and crying alternately, with a merry shout and a husky croak, "Aw, dear, aw, dear; the days that was, sir--the days that was!"
Lovibond let him rattle on, and he talked of Nelly for an hour. He had stories without end of her, some of them as simple as a baby"s prattle, some as deep as the heart of man, and splitting open the very crust of the fires of buried pa.s.sion.
It was late when they turned in for the night. The lights on the line of the land were all put out, and save for the reflection of the stars only the lamps of ships at anchor lit up the waters of the bay.
"Good night, capt"n," said Lovi-bond. "I suppose you"ll go to bed now?"
"Maybe so, maybe no," said Davy. "You see, I"m like Kinvig these days, and go to bed to do my thinking. The ould man"s cart-wheel came off in the road once, and we couldn"t rig it on again no how. "Hould hard, boys," says Kinvig; and he went away home and up to the loft, and whipped off his clothes, and into the blankets and stayed there till he"d got the lay of that cartwheel. Aw, yes, though--thinking, thinking, thinking constant--that"s me when I"m in bed. But it isn"t the lying awake I"m minding. Och, no; it"s the wakening up again. That"s like nothing in the world but a rusty nail going driving into your skull afore a blacksmith"s seven-pound sledge. Good night, mate; good night."
CHAPTER IV.
Next day Lovibond saw Mrs. Quiggin at Castle Mona. He had come at once in obedience to her summons, and she took his sympathies by storm. It was hard for him to realize that he had not seen her somewhere before.
He _had_ seen her--in his own description of the girl in church, helped out, led on, directed, vivified, and transfigured by Capt"n Davy"s own impetuous picture, just as the mesmerist sees what he pretends to show by aid of the eye of the mesmerized. There she sat, like one for whom life had lost its savor. Her great slow eyes, her pale and quivering face," her long deep look as she took his hand, and her softly tightening grasp of it went through him like a knife. Not all his loyalty to Capt"n Davy could crush the thought that the man who had thrown away a jewel such as this must be a brute and a blockhead.
But the sweet woman was not so lost to life that she did not see her advantage. There were some weary sighs and then she said:--
"I am in great, great trouble about my husband. They say he is wasting his money. Is it true?"
"Too true," said Lovibond.
"And that if he goes on as he is now going he will be penniless?"
"Not impossible," said Lovibond, "provided the mad fit last long enough."
"Is remonstrance quite useless, Mr. Lovibond?"
"Quite, Mrs. Quiggin."
The great slow eyes began to fill, and Lovibond"s gaze to seek the laces of his boots.
"It is sorrow enough to me, Mr. Lovibond, that my husband and I have quarreled and parted, but it will be the worst grief of all if some day I should have to think that I came into his life to wreck it."
"Don"t blame yourself for that, Mrs. Quiggin. It will be his own fault if he ruins himself."
"You are very good, Mr. Lovi-bond."
"Your husband will never blame you either."
"That will hardly reconcile me to his misfortunes."
["The man"s an a.s.s," thought Lovibond.]
"I shall not trouble him much longer with my presence here," Mrs.
Quiggin continued, and Lovibond looked up inquiringly.
"I am going back home soon," she added. "But if before I go some friend would help me to save my husband from himself----"
Lovibond rose in an instant. "I am at your service, Mrs. Quiggin," he said briskly. "Have you thought of anything?"
"Yes. They tell me that he is gambling, and that all the cheats of the island are winning from him."
"Well?"
The pale face turned very red, and quivered visibly about the lips.
"I have heard him say, when he has spoken of you, Mr. Lovibond, that--that--but will you forgive what I am going to tell you?"
"Anything," said Lovibond.
"That out on the coast _you_ could win from anybody. I remembered this when they told me that he was gambling, and I thought if you would play against my husband--for _me_------"
"I see what you mean, Mrs. Quiggin," said Lovibond.
"I don"t want the money, though he was so cruel as to say I had only married him for sake of it. But you could put it back into Dumbell"s Bank day by day as you got it."
"In whose name?" said Lovibond.
The great eyes opened very wide. "His, surely," she said falteringly.