Here Mr. Powell fairly burst into tears. “No one could help loving Captain Anthony. I leave you to imagine what he was to her. Yet before the week was out it was she who was helping me to pull myself together.”
“Is Mrs. Anthony in England now?” I asked after a while.
He wiped his eyes without any false shame. “Oh yes.” He began to look for matches, and while diving for the box under the table added: “And not very far from here either. That little village up there—you know.”
“No! Really! Oh I see!”
Mr. Powell smoked austerely, very detached. But I could not let him off like this. The sly beggar. So this was the secret of his passion for sailing about the river, the reason of his fondness for that creek.
“And I suppose,” I said, “that you are still as ‘enthusiastic’ as ever. Eh? If I were you I would just mention my enthusiasm to Mrs. Anthony. Why not?”
He caught his falling pipe neatly. But if what the French call effarement was ever expressed on a human countenance it was on this occasion, testifying to his modesty, his sensibility and his innocence. He looked afraid of somebody overhearing my audacious—almost sacrilegious hint—as if there had not been a mile and a half of lonely marshland and dykes between us and the nearest human habitation. And then perhaps he remembered the soothing fact for he allowed a gleam to light up his eyes, like the reflection of some inward fire tended in the sanctuary of his heart by a devotion as pure as that of any vestal.
It flashed and went out. He smiled a bashful smile, sighed:
“Pah! Foolishness. You ought to know better,” he said, more sad than annoyed. “But I forgot that you never knew Captain Anthony,” he added indulgently.
I reminded him that I knew Mrs. Anthony; even before he—an old friend now—had ever set eyes on her. And as he told me that Mrs. Anthony had heard of our meetings I wondered whether she would care to see me. Mr. Powell volunteered no opinion then; but next time we lay in the creek he said, “She will be very pleased. You had better go to-day.”