And Sarah indicated a tall, lean young man who was indeed walking up and down among the roses with long strides, and who now turned and came toward them.
Gay saw a burned, dark, sick-looking face, deep black eyes, a good suit that was somehow a little clumsy, on a tall figure that seemed a little clumsy, too. The man lifted his hat as he came toward them, and smiled under a curly thatch of very black, thick hair.
“Hello!” he said, in an oddly repressed sort of voice, holding out his hand. Gay could only smile bewilderedly, but David sprang forward with a sort of shout.
“Tom!” he said. “Tom Fleming! My God, you’ve come home!”
CHAPTER XIV
So there was this new fact with which to deal: Tom Fleming had come home. Tom, thirty, lean, burned a leathery brown by a thousand tropic suns, had apparently determined to return with infinitely less deliberation than he had exercised over his running away, almost twenty years before.
He made no particular explanation of his old reasons for departure; on the other hand, there was no mystery about it. The sea, and ships, adventure, danger, exploration, storms, had always been more real to Tom than his name and family and Wastewater. He had found them all, drunk deep of them all, between fourteen and thirty; he meant, of course, to go back to them some day.
Meanwhile, he had been ill, was still weak and shaken and unable to face even the serenest cruise. And so he had come home, “to see the folks,” he explained, with a grin on his brown face, which wore smooth deep folds about cheek-bones and chin, for all his leanness, that made him look older than he was.
In actual features he was as handsome as his handsome father. But Tom, garrulous, boastful, simply shrewd and childishly ignorant, was in no other way like Black Roger. Roger had been an exquisite, loving fine linen, fine music and books, the turn of a phrase, or the turn of a woman’s wrist. All these were an unknown world to Tom, and Tom seemed to know it, and to be actuated in his youthful, shallow bombast by the fear that these others—these re-discovered relatives—might fancy him ashamed of it.
Tom never was ashamed of anything, he instantly gave them to understand. No, sir, he had knocked men down, he had run risks, he had been smarter than the others, he had “foxed” them! In Archangel or Tahiti, Barbadoes or Yokohama, Tom’s adventures had terminated triumphantly. Women had always been his friends, scores of women. Mysterious Russian women who were really the political power behind international movements, beautiful Hawaiian girls, stunning Spanish señoritas in Buenos Aires, he held them all in the hollow of his lean, brown-hided hand.