“Better take your girl home, ma’am, and keep her close while we’re in harbor.”
The look she turned on him under heavy glistening brows, that reminded the imaginative Scot of lizards, and were fit companions for her thick dilating nostrils, made him quail for a moment: like many sea martinets he was shy with women of all sorts. Then he reflected (never having heard of the black arts) that looks could not kill, and returned to the attack.
“I mean, madam, that France is not a decent sort and would have been chucked long since but for family influence.”
“What do you mean by not a decent sort, sir?”
“He’s dissipated, vicious—”
“All young men sow their wild oats.” Mrs. Edis had forgotten none of the early and mid-Victorian formulæ, and would have felt disdain for any young aristocrat who did not illustrate the most popular of them.
“That’s all very well, but France’s crop is sown in a soil fertile to rottenness, and it will take him a lifetime to exhaust it. I’d rather see a daughter of mine in her coffin than married to him, duke or no duke.”
Mrs. Edis favored him with another look, under which his hue deepened to purple: poor worm, he was but the son of an industrious merchant, and he knew that the sharp eyes of this old woman, despite the eagle in his glance and a spine like a ramrod, read his family history in his honest face.
“It’s God’s truth, ma’am. It’s not that I mind a young fellow’s being a bit wild; there’s plenty that are and make good husbands when their time comes. But with France it’s different.” He hesitated, then floundered for a moment as if unaccustomed to analysis of his fellows. “It’s not that he’s a cad—not in the ordinary sense—I mean as far as manners go—. I’ve never seen a man with better when it suits him—or more insolent when that suits him; and they’re more natural to him, I fancy, for he’s fair eaten up with pride—out of date in that respect, rather. It’s the fashion, nowadays, for the big-wigs to be affable and easy and democratic, whether they feel that way or not—however, I don’t mind a man’s feeling his birth and blood, for like as not he can’t help it, although it doesn’t make you love him. No. It’s more like this: I believe France to be entirely without heart. That’s something I never believed in until I met him—that a human being lived without a soft spot somewhere. But I’ve seen an expression in his eyes, especially after he’s been drinking, that appalls me, although I can only express it by a word commonplace enough—heartless. It’s that—a heartless glitter in his eyes, usually about as expressionless as glass marbles; and although I’m no coward, I’ve felt afraid of him. I don’t mean physically—but absolute lack of heart, of all human sympathy, must give a person an awful power—but it’s too uncanny for me to describe. I’m not much at words, ma’am, and, for the matter of that, I shouldn’t have got on the subject at all, it not being my habit to discuss my officers with any one, if this wasn’t the first time I’ve ever seen him devote himself to a respectable girl. But he’s smitten with that pretty child of yours, no doubt of it; and there are three handsome young married women in the room, too. I don’t like the look of it.”
“I do.” Mrs. Edis had not removed her eyes from the old sailor’s face as he endeavored to elucidate himself.