CHAPTER III
THE SAFFRON MAN
As warmth in a dying man, so life in the village of Kilmarnock had retreated from the extremities. Gray cabins stood for the most part with sunken roof and yawning window; here and there, where a wall had fallen out, they exposed, as for the stage purposes of some unacted melodrama, the intimacy of all their little rooms at once,—the ragged wallpaper, the zigzag mounting scar of stairs long vanished, the hearthstones choked, in winter with snow, as now with autumn chickweed. Beyond these dead environs, a brook, with cool and hearty noises, tumbled out of its brown alder-shadow to halt, slacken, and wriggle in a delta of deep-channeled rivulets through seaweed and long mud-flats. And here, where fairy falls descended to that vile foreshore, the heart of the village beat feebly in a half-dozen houses, weather-silvered.
In the post-office,—a littered, gloomy shed which was also carpenter’s shop, wheel-wright’s factory, and woolen mill,—a few sad old men sat always, talking slowly and vaguely; while underneath, the roaring brook made the floor-boards vibrate, and flashed through chinks and knot-holes the whiteness of cascade foam.
“Mornin’, Miles,” wheezed Mr. Quinn, the postmaster. An elephantine man,—old Mr. Bissant called him Quinbus Flestrin, after the man-mountain Gulliver,—he rummaged with slow, fat hands in Her Majesty’s salt-box. “Here’s that letter you folks be’n waitin’ for,” he puffed. “Didn’t know you had relations over there, neither. Poor hand they write, I must say. Oh, now I ketch it! ‘A. Florio, Es-quair.’ That’s him that’s stayin’ up to your place, ain’t it?”
Miles nodded, all impatience.
“‘Care of Richard Bissant, Es-quair,’” read Quinbus gravely, holding the letter at different lengths of focus. “Say, they tell me he ain’t a boarder, after all! Now, I thought he might be a rusticator, like the city feller to Lovat’s that’s got the narvous prostrates. They say his fingers fidges dretful, that feller.”
Miles listened politically, and was at last rewarded with Tony’s letter.
“Hear ye got noo neighbors down your way,” began Quinbus, but his auditor escaped.
His news, moreover, went unheeded; for in three steps down the grass-ribbed street Miles overtook a surprise. A little man trundling a keg of nails in a barrow set down the handles with a sigh, and turned. His hair was grayer, his cheek engraved with deeper lines, his aspect less cheerful and thriving; but the swart face and shifting black eyes were those of Abram the Magician.
It was like a piece of boyhood restored. Halting, Miles ventured the question,—