The observation was not remarkable for originality, but I liked it. I like the reflective turn, no matter how beaten the path it may select for its exercise.
“It's a short trip,—some five or six hours at most,” said he; “but it's wonderful what ugly weather one sees in it. It's always so in these narrow seas.”
“Yes,” said I, concurringly, “these petty channels, like the small events of our life, are often the sources of our greatest perils.”
He gave a little short grunt: it might have been assent, and it might possibly have been a rough protest against further moralizing; at all events, he resumed his paper, and read away without speaking. I had time to examine him well, now, at my leisure, and there was nothing in his face that could give me any clew to the generous nature of his offer to me. No, he was a hard-featured, weather-beaten, rather stern sort of man, verging on fifty seven or eight. He looked neither impulsive nor confiding, and there was in the shape of his mouth, and the curve of the lines around it, that peremptory and almost cruel decision that marks the sea-captain. “Well,” thought I, “I must seek the explanation of the riddle elsewhere. The secret sympathy that moved him must have its root in me; and, after all, history has never told that the dolphins who were charmed by Orpheus were peculiar dolphins, with any special fondness for music, or an ear for melody; they were ordinary creatures of the deep,—fish, so to say, taken ex-medio acervo of delphinity. The marvel of their captivation lay in the spell of the enchanter. It was the thrilling touch of his fingers, the tasteful elegance of his style, the voluptuous inthralment of the sounds he awakened, that worked the miracle. This man of the sea has, therefore, been struck by something in my air, bearing, or address; one of those mysterious sympathies which are the hidden motives that guide half our lives, had drawn him to me, and he said to himself, 'I like that man. I have met more pretentious people, I have seen persons who desire to dominate and impose more than he, but there is that about him that somehow appeals to the instincts of my nature, and I can say I feel myself his friend already.'”
As I worked at my little theory, with all the ingenuity I knew how to employ on such occasions, I perceived that he had put up his newspaper, and was gathering together, in old traveller fashion, the odds and ends of his baggage.
“Here we are,” said he, as we glided into the station, “and in capital time too. Don't trouble yourself about your traps. My steward will be here presently, and take all your things down to the packet along with my own. Our steam is up; so lose no time in getting aboard.”
I had never less inclination to play the loiterer. The odious attaché was still in my neighborhood, and until I had got clear out of his reach I felt anything but security. He, I remembered, was for Calais, so that, by taking the Ostend boat, I was at once separating myself from his detestable companionship. I not only, therefore, accepted the captain's offer to leave all my effects to the charge of the steward; but no sooner had the train stopped, than I sprang out, hastened through the thronged station, and made at all my speed for the harbor.
Is it to increase the impediments to quitting one's country, and, by interposing difficulties, to give the exile additional occasion to think twice about expatriating himself, that the way from the railroad to the dock at Dover is made so circuitous and almost impossible to discover? Are these obstacles invented in the spirit of those official details which make banns on the church-door, and a delay of three weeks precede a marriage, as though to say, Halt, impetuous youth, and bethink you whither you are going? Are these amongst the wise precautions of a truly paternal rule? If so, they must occasionally even transcend the original intention, for when I reached the pier, the packet had already begun to move, and it was only by a vigorous leap that I gained the paddle-box, and thus scrambled on board.
“Like every one of you,” growled out my weather-beaten friend; “always within an ace of being left behind.”
“Every one of us!” muttered I. “What can he have known of the Potts family, that he dares to describe us thus characteristically? And who ever presumed to call us loiterers or sluggards?”