And this makes it the more marvellous that what I am about to tell, happening as it did at the very gates of the Porth, should have escaped the sharpest eyes in the place.
The Vicar's custom was to read with me for a couple of hours in the morning and again for an hour and a half before dinner. We had followed this routine rigidly and punctually for three months or so when, one evening in June, he returned from the Porth a good ten minutes late, very hot and dusty, and even so took a turn or two up and down the room with his hands clasped behind his coat-tails before settling down to correct my iambics.
"John Emmet is dead," he announced, pausing before the window with his back towards me and gazing out upon the ill-kept lawn.
"Wasn't he the coxswain of the life-boat?" I asked.
"Ah, to be sure, you never saw him, did you? He took to his bed before you came . . . a long illness. Well, well, it's all over!" Parson West sighed. "He saved, or helped to save, a hundred and fifteen lives, first and last. A hundred and fifteen lives!"
"I've heard something of the sort down at the Porth. A hundred and fifty, I think they said. They seemed very proud of him down there."
"Why?" The Vicar faced round on me, and added after a moment abruptly—
"He didn't belong to them: he was not even born in this parish."
"Where then?"
He disregarded the question. "Besides, the number was a hundred and fifteen: that's just the pity."
I did not understand: but he had seated himself at table and was running through my iambics. In the third verse he underlined a false quantity with blue pencil and looked up for an explanation. While I confessed the fault, his gaze wandered away from me and fell upon his fingers drumming upon the table's edge. A slant of red sunshine touched the signet-ring on his little finger, which he moved up and down watching the play of light on the rim of the collet. He was not listening. By-and-by he glanced up, "I beg your pardon—" stammered he, and leaving the rest of my verses uncorrected, pointed with his pencil to the concluding one. "That's not Greek," he said.