"I mean what I say," said Mr. Merridew, removing his hand.
It was the young man's turn to apologize, which he did with much frankness and more feeling.
"The truth is, sir, my parents have been dead for years; and yet they are nearly everything to me still—they were all the world until this voyage! My mother was Irish; her name would not be new to you, but it will keep. It may not be necessary for you to know it, or anything more about me, and in any case it can't alter me. But I am half-Irish through my mother—though you wouldn't think it."
"I would think it," remarked Mr. Merridew, blowing at his cigar as at a forge, until the red light found him looking wise through his spectacles, but the officer with one eye on his sails and no perceptible emotion in the other.
"My first name," he went on, "is as Irish as you like; it's Denis; and you may say that I've been living up to it for once!"
"Denis!" repeated Mr. Merridew, with interest. "Well, I know that name, anyhow; one of our partners—Captain Devenish's father—he's Denis Devenish, you know."
"Indeed," said Denis Dent, and there was a strange light in his spare eye. "Well, so much for my mother; my father was a Yorkshire dalesman, as his father and his father's father were before him. I am the first of them to leave the land."
"May I ask why?"
"It isn't our land any more. My father gave up everything to take my mother abroad, when her life was despaired of in England, and when her people—her own people—I can't trust myself to speak of them!"
And the young fellow turned abruptly aside, while Mr. Merridew puffed and peered at a massive though clean-cut face, whose only Irish feature was a pair of bright brown eyes, bold and resolute, yet quick to laughter, if quicker still to fire.