ILLUSTRATIONS BY FRANK A. NANKIVELL
The carrier's cart—for my means afforded no more lordly style of travel—set me down at an elbow of white highroad, whence, between the sloping hills, I could see a V-shaped patch of blue, this half water and that sky; here and there the gable of a farmhouse with a plume of smoke streaming sidewise; and below me, in the exact point of the V, the masts and naked yards of a ketch at her moorings. Even in that sheltered harbor, to judge by the faint oscillations of her masts, she felt the tug of the waters around her keel. There had been a storm the night before; without, the sea ran strong about all these exposed coasts; and I knew that, hidden from sight behind the upper headland, the surf must be bursting in a cloud over the Brown Cow, and the perturbed tide setting like a mill-race between that great dun rock and the shore through the narrow gut we called the Cat's Mouth.
"You'll be noticing some changes, Mr. Nick?" the carrier hinted at last, lingering to observe me. "Well, there's a deal may happen in two or three years. You can't look to find things just the way you left 'em."
He used a certain respectful familiarity, having known me all my life, and, as he spoke, eyed me with the kind and open curiosity of a dog. He was a gentle little man, with a manner oddly compounded of the sailor's simplicity and the rustic's bootless cunning,—for he had followed both walks in his day,—and was popularly held to be somewhat weak-witted since a fall from the masthead to the decks of the brig Hyperion some years before.
"I am not near enough to see any changes yet, Crump," I answered him. "The changes, if any, show most, I dare say, in myself."
"So they do, sir; so they do," he assented heartily. "My wife used to say you were a pretty boy, and had the makings of a fine, personable man. First thing I thought, when I clapped eyes on you to-day, was: 'Well, this here's a lesson to Sarah not to be hasty in her judgments!' 'Tain't often I get the better o' Sarah, you know, sir. They tell me you've been in Italy and learned to paint?"
"I'm afraid I haven't quite learned all the art yet, Crump. It takes more than two or three years."
"Depends on the person, I shouldn't wonder," he said, wagging his head. "Some people are slow by nature. Could a man make his living by it, d'ye think, sir?"
I answered this devious inquiry as to my own financial standing by assuring him that I had
contrived so far to make mine. "I'm not riding in my coach-and-four yet, as you see, Crump, but the time may come."
"I'm sure I hope it will, Mr. Nick," he said rather dubiously. "But it's kind o' tempting Providence, seems to me. You might 'a' been walking your own quarter-deck, captain o' some tall East Indiaman by this, like your father and grandfather before you, making a safe, easy living, and looked up to by everybody."
I interrupted his moralizing to ask, as, indeed, I had already done more than once, without being able to get his attention: "How does my grandfather seem?"
Momentary gravity fell upon him. "He—he don't always answer the helm, Mr. Nicol," he said, and touched his forehead with a meaning look. "Barring that, I'd rate him seaworthy, for all he's cruised so long—nigh eighty year, ain't it?"
"I'm glad I came home," I said, concerned. "The old man should not be alone."
"He ain't exactly alone," said Crump, with an uneasy glance into my face. "He's signed on two new hands here lately—about a month ago, I b'lieve. I dessay he was making pretty heavy weather of it by himself, and so he—er—well——" He cleared his throat, hesitating in an odd embarrassment; he plainly felt that here was information bound to be distasteful, and set about imparting it with a painful diplomacy. "The cap'n—Cap'n Pendarves, your grandfather, sir, was, as you might say, short-handed, you being in foreign parts, and old John Behenna having slipped his cable 'long about the last o' May, as I was telling you; and so the cap'n he ups and ships these here—and—and, in fac', Mr. Nick, one of 'em's a woman!" He drew a long breath and wiped his forehead.
"You don't mean he's married!" I shouted, and with, I am afraid, a pretty strong term of disapproval.
"There, now, I thought you'd take it that way!" Crump remarked, not without gratification. "But it ain't so bad as that, Mr. Nicol." And he went on to explain, with a variety of nautical metaphors, that the couple, an elderly man and a young girl supposedly his grandchild, had appeared in Chepstow some weeks ago during fair-time; that the young woman "took observations," which I translated to mean that she told fortunes, supporting them both, it would seem, by the pennies she gained this way, for the man did no work, and was most often seen "hove to, transhipping cargo," at the bar of the Three Old Cronies or elsewhere, Crump said. He did not know how or when or where my grandfather had first fallen in with these vagabonds. For several successive days he had been noticed in their company, or laying a straight course for the little booth wherein the girl plied her mean trade; and then, all at once, to the stupefied astonishment of Chepstow,—where the captain was reckoned, with reason, a particularly hard, sour, dour sort of body, anything but friendly or hospitable,—the pair of them were discovered comfortably installed beneath the Pendarves' roof, as snug as if they had lived there all their lives and never meant to go away! The thing was a mystery; it went near to being a scandal. For a final touch, Crump assured me that these precious gentry were all but nameless; no one had ever heard the woman called anything, and the man's name defied pronunciation.
Upon all this agreeable intelligence, we parted, as Crump's way was by the round-about hill road, while I struck straight across by short cuts to my grandfathers house. If I had been content to loiter on the path heretofore, no amount of haste could satisfy me now. I doubt if any honest artist lad returning to the place of his birth after three years' absence ever met a grayer welcome. I had left my grandfather unimpaired, and it was well-nigh impossible to figure that harsh and domineering spirit in decay. Abram Pendarves belonged to the ancient hearty, savage race of British sea-captains, now fast waning to extinction. After a youth of wild and black adventure under the rule of just such salt-water despots as he himself became, he had spent some two score years practising the tyrannies and what one may call the brutal virtues he had learned on every sea and beneath every sky this planet owns; then came at last to settle down in the storm-beaten house on the cliffs by Chepstow (the house his father's father had built), whence he could see the surf whiten on the rocks and gulls forever circling about the Brown Cow. His was a narrow and surly old age, not overwell provided, for he had never been a thrifty man; and he found among the rattletrap furnishings of his neglected home one living chattel quite as worthless—a weird, lean goblin of a boy, his sole descendant, fatherless and motherless, playing lonely little games in corners, making crass drawings with a charred stick on the walls, and viewing the blossoming orchards of spring with a crazy delight in color. I fear there was not much affection between this ill-matched couple. For long years I saw in my grandfather only a coarse, violent old man, niggardly and censorious. And to him there
was doubtless something unwholesome and repellent in the most innocent of my tastes; I could not even sin roundly, like other boys, by pilfering or truantry, but must display an exotic passion for reading forbidden books, an abhorred dexterity at caricature. I think we were equally headstrong and unreasonable, I in my young way, he in his old one; and as I trudged along the quiet homeward paths, it shamed me to remember with what hard words we had parted.