"I do not believe you," I said, not angrily nor resentfully, as might have been earlier in our acquaintance, but with a painful, slow positiveness. "Perhaps I was wrong in assuming the place I did in Wallencamp, but it was not in the way you think. I don't know—I can't see the way myself, clearly—always, but I believe that what you have said is utterly false!"
"At least," continued the fisherman, in the old gay, frivolous tone, which I heard now for the first time during this conversation; "I can make her tenfold and abundant reparation—ah, you don't know—I say you don't understand these people. It's a disagreeable subject; let it go! But I'm very rich, you know," with an easy laugh, and the air of a man only conscious, at last, of his good worldly fortune, and the exquisite fit of his clothes. "Oh, I've got no end of money. After all, that's the chief thing in this world. If a fellow's ordinarily clever and good-natured, with a good reputation in town, what's a little row in the suburban districts! It's an awfully insignificant affair, anyway, it seems to me. We may as well talk sense, and the plainer the better. People don't employ lenses for shortsightedness in that particular—common sense, I mean. You walk without seeing, Miss Hungerford, and you're bound to get infernally cheated, in some shape. Why not me, I say, as well as another?"
Still, the fisherman's words roused no bitterness in me. His hardened recklessness of speech served rather to strengthen me in the part I had to play of the unapproachably sublime.
"I cannot consider that question," I said, with my hand on the door.
He swept my face with a keen glance that had lost none of its derisive quality.
"So it's true, then!" he said. "The ultimatum has been reached, at last, in the possessor of a pretty face and a broken fiddle! and dreams for the restoration of the race are to end in a broken-down hovel by the sea, in darning the Cradlebow's socks, and dressing the clams for dinner, while the bucolic George Olver and the versatile Harvey, and all the rest of the awkward, moon-gazing crew, take turns in sitting on the door-step, and dilating on the weather! Ravishing idyll but it lacks substantiality. It lacks seriousness."
I heard that mocking laugh again without emotion, except it might be for a faint, far-off echo in my breast of the fisherman's own scorn. Above all, I was weary, and willing to make my escape.
"We cannot help each other by standing here talking," I said, and added a "good bye."
It was the last time, probably, that I should see the fisherman's face; but he refused the valediction with a toss of the head.
"Oh, no!" he said; "it isn't time for my obsequies. I shall return to town for a few days or weeks only; this detestable place has always thrown a spell over me. I can't rid myself of it. Like the natives of Wallencamp, I always drift back to it again."