The repetition of this formula suggested no comment to his companion, and he went on.
“The real memory of my childhood is my father, although I saw him only once. Salvator says I saw him oftener, but if so all the recollections jumble themselves together in my mind, to make a single impression. I was five years old; it was in the early summer, in 1875. My father had been fighting against the Prussians when I was born. By the time I was old enough to know people, he was away in Spain with Don Carlos. He died there, of wounds and fever, at Seo de Urgel, in August of that same year, 1875. But first he came to see us—it would have been in June, I think—and we were living at Cannes. He had some secret Carlist business, Salvator says. I knew nothing of that. I know only that I saw him, and understood very well who he was, and fixed him in my mind so that I should never, never forget him. How strange a thing it is about children! I have only the dimmest general idea of how my mother looked when I was that age; I cannot remember her at all in the odd clothes which her pictures show she wore then, though I saw them constantly. Yet my father comes once and I carry his image till Judgment Day.”
“Poor mothers!” sighed the girl, under her breath. “No, it was nothing. Go on.”
“I knew that he was a soldier, and that wherever there were wars he went to have his share of fighting. I suppose it was this which gripped my imagination, even as a baby. I could read when I was five, and Salvator had told me about our father’s battles. He had been in the Mutiny in India, and he was in Sicily against Garibaldi, and he was with the Austrians four years before I was born, and in the French Foreign Legion afterward. I think I knew all this when I saw him—and if I did not, then I feel that I could have learned it from just looking at him. He was like a statue of War. Ah, how I remember him—the tall, strong, straight, dark, hardfaced, silent man!”
“And you loved him!” commented his companion, with significance.
He shook his head smilingly. The analysis in retrospect of his own childish emotions had a pleasant interest for him. “No; there was no question of love, at all. For example, he liked Salvator—who was then a big boy of fifteen—and he took him off to Spain with him when he left. I cannot remember that he so much as put his hand on my head, or paid the slightest attention to me. He looked at me in a grave way if I put myself in front of his eyes, just as he looked at other things, but he would not turn his eyes to follow me if I moved aside. Do you know that to my fancy that was superb? I was not in the least jealous of Salvator. I only said to myself that when I was his age, I also would march to fight in my father’s battles. And I was proud that he did not bend to me, or put himself out to please me, this huge, cold-eyed, lion-like father of mine. If he had ever kissed me I should have been ashamed—for us both. But nothing was farther from his thoughts. He went away, and at the door he spoke for the first time in my hearing of me. He twisted his thumb toward me, where I stood in the shelter of my mother’s skirts. Mind, he’s an Englishman! he said—and turned on his heel. I have the words in my ears still. ‘Mind, he’s an Englishman!’”
“There is England!” she cried.
They stood up, and his eager eye, following the guidance of her finger, found the faint, broken, thin line of white on the distant water’s edge. Above it, as if they were a part of it, hung in a figured curtain soft clouds which were taking on a rosy tint from the declining sun. He gazed at the remote prospect in silence, but with a quickened breath.
“It is the first time that I have seen it like this—coming toward it, I mean, from somewhere else,” she remarked at last. “I had never been outside England before.”
He did not seem to hear her. With another lingering, clinging gaze at the white speck, he shook himself a little, and turned. “And now I want to tell you about this new, wonderful thing—about why I am this minute within sight of England. You will say it is very strange.”