Denis Dent: A Novel

by E. W. Hornung

Mr. Merridew jumped up from the bedside. It was partly with temper that he was trembling now.

"Have you changed your mind already, Mr. Dent, or is all this so much affectation on your part? Did you mean what you said to me that night before we struck or did you not?"

"Every word of it," answered Denis, in a whisper that brought the other back to his former position on the bed, only now he was peering into eyes averted from his own.

"You do love her, don't you, Dent? I can see it—I can see it—whatever you may say!"

Denis could only nod. His weakness had come upon him very suddenly. But by an effort he was able to prevent it from rising to his eyes. And soon he was sufficient master of himself to attend to what Mr. Merridew was saying with so strange an eagerness of voice and manner.

"You must come back with us. That's what you must do. Melbourne's a perfect pandemonium: street upon street of tents, teeming with the very sweepings of the earth, and ship upon ship without a man on board. But there's a fine clipper, the Memnon by name, lying ready for sea at Geelong, and we'll all go home in her together. She's bound to be under-officered, and I suppose you would be happier so than as a passenger; but let this voyage be your last. You said you were as good a man ashore as at sea, if my memory serves me as well as yours. Well, now I can believe you, and in you, as I shall show you—as I shall very soon show you! I have no one to follow me in the firm, Denis—that's your name, isn't it?—and you don't mind my calling you by it, do you? But if you became my son, Denis ... can't you see ... can't you see?"

The man's tongue had run away with him, as the unlikeliest tongues will, under strong emotional strain: so we prattle of our newly dead, magnifying the good that we belittled in their lives. But here the strain was far greater; for she who had been dead was alive again; and this, this was her saviour, for whom nothing, not even the girl herself, was now too good.

"There is one thing you have forgotten," said Denis, without withdrawing his hand from the nervous grasp that now hurt considerably. "I had not got my answer—the other night. And how can I press her for it now? Don't answer yourself, sir, till you have thought it over, if I may ask that much of you, alone; and then I know you will agree with me. She ought not to be allowed to give me her answer now. And I—I ought to go away without seeing her again—until I have really shown myself——" He could not finish. His weakness and his sincerity were equally apparent: deeply moved, the elder man took his leave, with but one more syllable, and that to promise Denis, from the door, not to repeat a word of their conversation to Nan.

But Denis had not said all that it was in him to say, for in the first place he had not the heart, and in the next he was not too proud of his latest resolve; but it was a resolve no less, and already it might have been the resolve of his life.

"This is not the real man," he lay saying to himself. "The real man had his say on the poop—and the sounder man of the two. I won't take advantage of either of them. Let me make that money. I can, and I will. Then she shall give me her answer—not before."