Colville had been trying for some time to study the sailor’s face, quietly through his cigar smoke.
“Look here, Captain,” he said, after a pause. “Let us understand each other. There is a chance, just a chance, that we can prove this Loo Barebone to be the man we think him, but we must all stand together. We must be of one mind and one purpose. We four, Monsieur de Gemosac, you, Barebone, and my humble self. I fancy—well, I fancy it may prove to be worth our while.”
“I am willing to do the best I can for Loo,” was the reply.
“And I am willing to do the best I can for Monsieur de Gemosac, whose heart is set on this affair. And,” Colville added, with his frank laugh, “let us hope that we may have our reward; for I am a poor man myself, and do not like the prospect of a careful old age. I suppose, Captain, that if a man were overburdened with wealth he would scarcely follow a seafaring life, eh?”
“Then there is money in it?” inquired Clubbe, guardedly.
“Money,” laughed the other. “Yes—there is money for all concerned, and to spare.”
Captain Clubbe had been born and bred among a people possessing little wealth and leading a hard life, only to come to want in old age. It was natural that this consideration should carry weight. He was anxious to do his best for the boy who had been brought up as his own son. He could think of nothing better than to secure him from want for the rest of his days. There were many qualities in Loo Barebone which he did not understand, for they were quite foreign to the qualities held to be virtues in Farlingford; such as perseverance and method, a careful economy, and a rigid common sense. Frenchman had brought these strange ways into Farlingford when he was himself only a boy of ten, and they had survived his own bringing up in some of the austerest houses in the town, so vitally as to enable him to bequeath them almost unchastened to his son.
As has been noted, Loo had easily lived down the prejudices of his own generation against an un-English gaiety, and inconsequence almost amounting to emotion. And nothing is, or was in the solid days before these trumpet-blowing times, so unwelcome in British circles as emotion.
Frenchman had no doubt prepared the way for his son; but the peculiarities of thought and manner which might be allowed to pass in a foreigner would be less easily forgiven in Loo, who had Farlingford blood in his veins. For his mother had been a Clubbe, own cousin, and, as gossips whispered, once the sweetheart of Captain Clubbe himself and daughter of Seth Clubbe of Maiden’s Grave, one of the largest farmers on the Marsh.
“It cannot be for no particular purpose that the boy has been created so different from any about him,” Captain Clubbe muttered, reflectively, as he thought of Dormer Colville’s words. For he had that simple faith in an Almighty Purpose, without which no wise man will be found to do business on blue water.