The stranger appeared to enjoy both his fare and his company.
“Beautiful country hereabout, Mr. Bissant,” he declared heartily. “Beautiful, by George! Shore life for me, if ’twas all like this. I tell you, Miles, we’ll have a jolly time together. Show me your lighthouses to-morrow night, will you? Right! What are they, fixed? You know, once when I was wrecked off the Hook of Indramaiu—”
He rambled into stories of orient and tropic seas. Had they been of anthropophagi and antres vast, Miles could have listened no more hungrily; for even at second hand, this was the life which he once had dreamed. The sole incredibility was that such a brilliant tropic wanderer should now shine out in their gloomy, sequestered house. The mountain had come to Mahomet, the world to a captive. His grandfather, visiting Miles at bedtime, brought explanation.
“My boy,” he said—and for the first time in their life together he spoke with hesitation, almost as though making excuses to an equal—“my boy, Captain Florio is to be our—that is, hmm! well, our lodger.” Frowning at the candle flame, he brought out the word defiantly. “I should never consent to this—mercenary relation, but it seems—he was a friend of my son Christopher’s. He will stay with us for some time. It’s—it’s unnecessary to say more. Good-night.”
Humiliation underlay the speech—humiliation which Miles felt dimly, but could not share. A lodger’s money, even a damaged pride, counted little against the change from apathy to interest, from silence to fireside and table talk, from routine to variety. Next morning, indeed, five minutes after lessons, Miles had forgotten that the relation was mercenary.
“Hello,” Florio hailed him. In jersey and puttees, he looked like some heavy-weight amateur training in retirement. “Look here, how’s this? Caught Ella carrying water uphill from that gully below. There’s a spring above.” He waved up toward the site of the burned mansion.
“That hill’s too steep,” said Miles.
“Ho-ho!” laughed the other. “You’re a bright boy, aren’t you, now? Come along topside with me.”
Two joyful days followed, in which they built a little wooden aqueduct from the Admiral’s Spring down to a trough at Ella’s very door. When nails gave out, the seafarer joined their supports with marvelous temporary lashings. “Chinese trick,” he grinned. “Now we’ll run the flowage down into your gully. How’s that, señor?”
With ties no less secure he had bound Miles to admiration, as much by his manual cunning, his boyish enthusiasm for practical designs, as by his galloping accompaniment of strange tales. Hammering or sawing like a born carpenter, he recalled sharp, flashing pictures of life in antipodes,—pearl-divers in Polynesia, “sun-downers,” mutinous coolies at sea, plague-stricken pilgrims to Mecca dying like flies, aboard ship; midnight murderers in sampans.