I seemed to see a wistful eye and a trembling lip in the letters, and I hated the thought of Edmund beaten. I think I wanted him to prove me wrong to myself. And yet the sending of the money was oddly annoying, though I neither missed it nor grudged it. It somehow thickened that film on our affections.
Thus as I have said for over a year I had heard nothing until this telegram arrived.
I trust I have explained my reluctance to order the champagne, and my final capitulation to Bates’s reproachful eye.
CHAPTER II
THE BRANDY HOLE
EDMUND’S appearance on arrival was a surprise.
Instead of the fo’c’sle kit, or the uniform of a needy officer of the mercantile marine, which had disfigured his previous appearances, he came arrayed in blue serge. He wore a suit designed by a tailor with a soul for his art, somehow suggesting an association with the sea in lines that everywhere emphasised the grace and strength of his figure, while conforming to the strictest tradition of Savile Row. Everything about him was in keeping. His luggage, that great index of a man’s prosperity, was of the solidest and richest leather, not too new, and with the exquisite surface and the rich tone that leather acquires under the hands of a first-rate servant.
I had never seen Edmund like this. His air of distinction disconcerted me. It made me proud of him, but shy also. This was such a new, strange Edmund. And yet just the same in his warm affection.
His presence blew away all the mists of distrust and resentment as though they were a miasma of my own creation, the remembrance of which shamed me to a feeling of meanness. I felt paltry in my own eyes.
I remembered what he had said of life, and felt myself an empty wagon on a side-track.
A queer shudder of apprehension went down my spine at the thought that he had but to couple me to his motive force and I would be a helpless thing to be dragged behind him.