“Nothing else—nothing else,” his affable captor assured him.
And for the remainder of a long drive through the noisy streets the three men sat upright in the dim and musty cab in silence.
CHAPTER XXV — SANS RANCUNE
A large French fishing-lugger was drifting northward on the ebb tide with its sails flapping idly against the spars. It had been a fine morning, and the Captain, a man from Fécamp, where every boy that is born is born a sailor, had been fortunate in working his way in clear weather across the banks that lie northward of the Thames.
He had predicted all along in a voice rendered husky by much shouting in dirty weather that the fog-banks would be drifting in from the sea before nightfall. And now he had that mournful satisfaction which is the special privilege of the pessimistic. These fog-banks, the pest of the east coast, are the materials that form the light fleecy clouds which drift westward in sunny weather like a gauze veil across the face of the sky. They roll across the North Sea from their home in the marshes of Holland on the face of the waters, and the mariner, groping his way with dripping eyelashes and a rosy face through them, can look up and see the blue sky through the rifts overhead. When the fog-bank touches land it rises, slowly lifted by the warm breath of the field. On the coast-line it lies low; a mile inland it begins to break into rifts, so that any one working his way down one of the tidal rivers, sails in the counting of twenty seconds from sunshine into a pearly shadow. Five miles inland there is a transparent veil across the blue sky slowly sweeping toward the west, and rising all the while, until those who dwell on the higher lands of Essex and Suffolk perceive nothing but a few fleecy clouds high in the heavens.
The lugger was hardly moving, for the tide had only turned half an hour ago.
“Provided,” the Captain had muttered within the folds of his woollen scarf rolled round and round his neck until it looked like a dusky life-belt—“provided that they are ringing their bell on the Shipwash, we shall find our way into the open. Always sea-sick, this traveller, always sea-sick!”
And he turned with a kindly laugh to Loo Barebone, who was lying on a heap of old sails by the stern rail, concealing as well as he could the pangs of a consuming hunger.