“Bless me, the talk a man will put out when he’s a bit over the rope and thinking of ould times,” he said.
“Sign that I’m thirsty,” he added; and then walked toward the window. “But the father could never forgive hisself,” he said, as he was stepping through, “and if I done wrong to a woman neither could I—I’ve that much of the ould man in me anyway.”
When he got back to the room the air was dense with tobacco-smoke, and his guests were shouting for his company. “Capt’n Davy!” “Where’s Capt’n Davy?” “Aw, here’s the man himself?” “Been studying the stars, Capt’n?” “Well, that’s a bit of navigation.” “Navigation by starlight—I know the sort. Navigating up alongside a pretty girl, eh, Capt’n?”
There were rough jokes, and strange stories, and more liquor and loud laughter, and for a time Davy took his part in everything. But after a while he grew quiet again, and absent in manner, and he glanced up at intervals in the direction of the window, A new thought had come to him. It made the sweat to break out at the top of his forehead, and then he heard no more of the clatter around him than the rum-humdrum as of a train in a tunnel, pierced sometimes by the shrill scream as of an occasional whistle. Presently he rolled up again, and went out once more to Lovibond.
The thought that had seized him was agony, and he could not broach it at once. So he beat about it for a moment, and then came down on it with a crash.
“Sitting alone, is she, poor thing?” he said.
“Alone,” said Lovibond.
“I know, I know,” said Davy. “Like a bird on a bough calling mournful for her mate; but he’s gone, he’s down, maybe worse, but lost anyway. Yet if he should ever come back now—eh?”
“He’ll have to be quick then,” said Lovibond; “for she intends to go home to her people soon.”
“Did you say she was for going home?” said Davy, eagerly. “Home where—where to—to England?”