He was laughing noisily by this time, and crying alternately, with a merry shout and a husky croak, “Aw, dear, aw, dear; the days that was, sir—the days that was!”
Lovibond let him rattle on, and he talked of Nelly for an hour. He had stories without end of her, some of them as simple as a baby’s prattle, some as deep as the heart of man, and splitting open the very crust of the fires of buried passion.
It was late when they turned in for the night. The lights on the line of the land were all put out, and save for the reflection of the stars only the lamps of ships at anchor lit up the waters of the bay.
“Good night, capt’n,” said Lovi-bond. “I suppose you’ll go to bed now?”
“Maybe so, maybe no,” said Davy. “You see, I’m like Kinvig these days, and go to bed to do my thinking. The ould man’s cart-wheel came off in the road once, and we couldn’t rig it on again no how. ‘Hould hard, boys,’ says Kinvig; and he went away home and up to the loft, and whipped off his clothes, and into the blankets and stayed there till he’d got the lay of that cartwheel. Aw, yes, though—thinking, thinking, thinking constant—that’s me when I’m in bed. But it isn’t the lying awake I’m minding. Och, no; it’s the wakening up again. That’s like nothing in the world but a rusty nail going driving into your skull afore a blacksmith’s seven-pound sledge. Good night, mate; good night.”
CHAPTER IV.
Next day Lovibond saw Mrs. Quiggin at Castle Mona. He had come at once in obedience to her summons, and she took his sympathies by storm. It was hard for him to realize that he had not seen her somewhere before. He had seen her—in his own description of the girl in church, helped out, led on, directed, vivified, and transfigured by Capt’n Davy’s own impetuous picture, just as the mesmerist sees what he pretends to show by aid of the eye of the mesmerized. There she sat, like one for whom life had lost its savor. Her great slow eyes, her pale and quivering face,’ her long deep look as she took his hand, and her softly tightening grasp of it went through him like a knife. Not all his loyalty to Capt’n Davy could crush the thought that the man who had thrown away a jewel such as this must be a brute and a blockhead. But the sweet woman was not so lost to life that she did not see her advantage. There were some weary sighs and then she said:—
“I am in great, great trouble about my husband. They say he is wasting his money. Is it true?”
“Too true,” said Lovibond.