The next years saw him grow into a young man, silent, grave, with a tranquillity that a stranger might have mistaken for contentment. On one point, indeed, he was contented: his grandfather, who had rebuked his father’s memory, could find no major fault with the second generation.
One June evening he lay stretched on the mouldered planks of the Admiral’s deck, a book of next day’s lessons opened flat before him. A sunset swarm of midges, down-sifted by a breath of air, suddenly confused Euclid’s lines and dots with a dance of jigging motes. Miles swept an impatient hand, glanced off the page, and forgot both insects and trapezoids. A boat was making straight toward him,—a green “lap-streak” dinghy, rowed by some Yankee from across the river, and carrying on the stern thwart a jaunty passenger in light gray. No sooner had the boat nosed the undulating fringe of seaweed than the stranger sprang nimbly to the rocks, and scrambled over their slippery, tangled hummocks, in a diagonal course up the beach. He disappeared under a shoulder of the bank, and, as Miles still lay wondering, suddenly emerged from the firs beside the old quarter-deck.
“Hello!” he said, with an odd, pleasant intonation. “May I come in? Jolly little nook for reading, haven’t you? No, don’t get up. Just tell me how to strike the path to the house, above there, will you?”
Except the tender’s gig, no boat ever touched at Admiral’s Light. No such visitor, certainly, had landed within Miles’s recollection. Burly but active, with the body of a blacksmith or pugilist clad in pale gray flannels of a knowing, worldly cut, he seemed at once young and mature, sophisticated and breezily adventurous. The same hand which held two primly folded gloves bore on its back a foul anchor tattooed in blue. Bright gray eyes in a swarthy face, clean cutwater profile, reckless good-humor playing about the lips, bespoke one who had taken a man’s share of life with a boy’s share of amusement.
“Do you know the old gentleman that lives up there?” he continued. “Your grandfather, eh? Well, now, perhaps you can tell me. Had he a relative named Christopher?”
“That was my uncle,” said Miles, getting to his feet.
“The dickens! You!” cried the stranger, and grasped his hand. “You! Doesn’t that beat the merry Hell—elujah? You Kit Bissant’s nephew! He stood up for me when I was a prentice your size. Ever hear him tell about Florio? Tony Florio? No? That’s so, why should he? His nephew, by Jove! Isn’t it a funny little world, though?” With twinkling eyes, he studied the boy’s face, then turned abruptly. “I’m off to tackle the old gentleman. See you later!”
His footsteps rang hollow and distant on the gully foot-bridge. Miles, listening, felt unreasonably glad. Unreasonably, as often, in spite of all geography, a long hill suggests a hidden prospect of plain or ocean, as a turn of woodland road beckons to some joyful ambush or far-thought pilgrimage, so the landfall of this stranger, the alacrity and vigor of his contact, promised immediate events. Just what events, the youth, with all his eager surmise while climbing homeward through attenuate shadows, could not guess.
Their evening meal—a haddock usually, with cornbread, tea, berries, or cheese-cakes—the old man always called dinner, and further dignified by appearing in the crumpled broadcloth and linen of a bygone generation. To-night he entered with even greater solemnity, leading to their bare little table the sun-burned man in gray.
“My grandson Miles, Captain Florio,” he said. And bending his fierce old countenance toward the one flickering candle, he added in the same breath: “For the bounty of the present day, and of all days past and to come, we thank thee, O Lord, and now seek thy blessing.” With the same stiff ceremony, he did the honors for the haddock, presided over the raspberries, and ignored the flustered awkwardness of Ella.