He drew up a settle opposite the landlord’s stool and flung himself on to it. Then it was, in the full light of the candles, that the weather-beaten ugliness of the man was revealed. Violence had closed his right eye forever; a scar ran from his temple to his under-jaw; and in contradistinction to the greed, the subtlety, and the cunning of the host, there was a brutal insolence about the fellow that had a whimsicality in it too, as is sometimes to be observed in those indomitable characters who, conscious of their qualities, presume upon them. Master Hooker, distrustful by nature as he was, had already discovered this sinister audacity, and while that in itself was enough to unsettle the peace of his mind, it was the fact that a naked knife was gleaming under his visitor’s jerkin that most contributed to his discomposure.
For a time the landlord and the mariner sat watching one another. On the one side was a contemptuous carelessness; on the other a measure of suspicion amounting to hatred. But the landlord deemed it wiser to conceal his emotions under an appearance of friendliness. He proffered a pipe of tobacco to the mariner.
“You’re almighty kind, mate,” said the sailor, accepting a clay pipe from the mantelpiece and pressing in the contents of Gamaliel’s box.
It was the beginning of conversation. The landlord was eager to discover the particular business that had carried his visitor to the “Sea Rover,” of all the places in the world, at that hour and on such a night. Had he a cargo for disposal; was he waiting for his ship; was he running from the law; or had he come to cut the throats of himself, his son, and Cicely, and afterwards to despoil the inn? Certainly a more ill-favoured pirate he never saw.
The sailor, rather silent at first and ill-disposed to communicate his designs, gradually thawed into talk under the benign influences of hospitality. He even went to the length of revealing the business that had carried him so strangely there.
“You don’t happen, mate,” says he, with a leer,—“you don’t happen to ’a’ seen a young man wandering about this here coast, do you?”
“What kind of a young man might he be like?” says the landlord.
He had seen no young man whatever. He would certainly have remarked the smallest detail of his appearance, had he done so; for the first of all Gamaliel Hooker’s characteristics was his inveterate curiosity. It was this which led him to push a topic that otherwise would have had no interest for him.
“Well, mate,” says the mariner, “he ain’t very easy to describe, d’ye see. I’ve got to set eyes on him myself yet.”
“A seafaring man?” said the landlord.