Clubbe was looking straight in front of him. He turned in his disconcerting, monumental way and looked at his questioner, who had imitated with a perfect ingenuousness his own brief pause before the word mother. Colville smiled pleasantly at him.
“I tell you frankly, Captain,” he said, “it would suit me better if she wasn’t the mother.”
“I am not here to suit you,” murmured Captain Clubbe, without haste or hesitation.
“No. Well, let us say for the present that she was the mother. We can discuss that another time. When did she die?”
“Seven years after landing here.”
Colville made a mental calculation and nodded his head with satisfaction at the end of it. He lighted another cigarette.
“I am a business man, Captain,” he said at length. “Fair dealing and a clean bond. That is what I have been brought up to. Confidence for confidence. Before we go any further—” He paused and seemed to think before committing himself. Perhaps he saw that Captain Clubbe did not intend to go much further without some quid pro quo. “Before we go any further, I think I may take it upon myself to let you into the Marquis’s confidence. It is about an inheritance, Captain. A great inheritance and—well, that young fellow may well be the man. He may be born to greater things than a seafaring life, Captain.”
“I don’t want any marquis to tell me that,” answered Clubbe, with his slow judicial smile. “For I’ve brought him up since the cradle. He’s been at sea with me in fair weather and foul—and he is not the same as us.”