Volume One—Chapter Nine.
Jealous Already.
Captain Ryecroft has lost more than rod and line; his heart is as good as gone too—given to Gwendoline Wynn. He now knows the name of the yellow haired Naiad—for this, with other particulars, she imparted to him on return up stream.
Neither has her confidence thus extended, nor the conversation leading to it, belied the favourable impression made upon him by her appearance. Instead, so strengthened it, that for the first time in his life he contemplates becoming a benedict. He feels that his fate is sealed—or no longer in his hands, but hers.
As Wingate pulls him on homeward, he draws out his cigar case, sets fire to a fresh weed, and, while the blue smoke wreaths up round the rim of his topee, reflects on the incidents of the day,—reviewing them in the order of their occurrence.
Circumstances apparently accidental have been strangely in his favour. Helped as by Heaven’s own hand, working with the rudest instruments. Through the veriest scum of humanity he has made acquaintance with one of its fairest forms. More than mere acquaintance, he hopes; for surely those warm words, and glances far from cold, could not be the sole offspring of gratitude! If so, a little service on the Wye goes a long way. Thus reflects he, in modest appreciation of himself, deeming that he has done but little. How different the value put upon it by Gwen Wynn!
Still he knows not this, or at least cannot be sure of it. If he were, his thoughts would be all rose-coloured, which they are not. Some are dark as the shadows of the April showers now and then drifting across the sun’s disc.
One that has just settled on his brow is no reflection from the firmament above—no vague imagining—but a thing of shape and form—the form of a man, seen at the top of the boat stair, as the ladies were ascending, and not so far off as to have hindered him from observing the man’s face, and noting that he was young, and rather handsome. Already the eyes of love have caught the keenness of jealousy. A gentleman evidently on terms of intimacy with Miss Wynn. Strange, though, that the look with which he regarded her on saluting, seemed to speak of something amiss! What could it mean! Captain Ryecroft has asked this question as his boat was rounding the end of the eyot, with another in the selfsame formulary of interrogation, of which but the moment before he was himself the subject:—“Who the deuce can he be?” Out upon the river, and drawing hard at his Regalia, he goes on:—
“Wonderfully familiar the fellow seemed! Can’t be a brother? I understood her to say she had none. Does he live at Llangorren? No. She said there was no one there in the shape of masculine relative—only an old aunt, and that little dark damsel, who is cousin or something of the kind. But who the deuce is the gentleman? Might he be a cousin?”
So propounding questions without being able to answer them, he at length addresses himself to the waterman, saying: