Miss Charlotte Carlaw, whose face was working strangely, turned her head away from him and beat one foot restlessly on the floor. “Why should I do that?” she asked at last in a low voice.
“Because you’re a woman,” replied the captain eagerly; “because—deny it if you will—you can’t shut out the thought of this boy we both love from your heart; because this girl in her loneliness may appeal to you in your loneliness, may give in time a kinder thought of him. You must not try to persuade me that you are so hard as you would have me believe. If you will not let me plead for the boy himself, let me plead for the woman he loved and lost—the woman who is friendless.”
She was silent for a long time and presently sat down in her old attitude with her hands resting on her stick and her forehead on her hands. And the captain watched her.
“You are a good man,” she said at last, without raising her head. “There’s never a day, never an hour when I do not think of him, and yet I can not call him back to me. But if you think—and you know so much better than I can hope to do—that it would be right and just for me to take this girl—that it would be better for her and better for me—then I’ll do it. And don’t boast of your feelings, sir,” she added, raising her head with something of a return of her old manner, “because I have my feelings too; perhaps I’ll even take her more warmly to my heart because he loved her. Lord! captain, what a blundering set of people we all are from the time we blunder into life till the time we blunder into the grave! I suppose I can leave all the arrangements in your hands; I seem somehow to have lost something of my old sense of power, something of my old strength lately; I want some one on whom I can rely. You will tell me what to do, won’t you?”
“If I might suggest,” said the captain, “I think the best thing for you to do would be to come down to her; to see her and take her away with you. Will you do that?”
“I will do whatever you think best,” she replied. And so the matter was settled.
The captain felt that the hardest part of his mission had yet to be performed; but he went home that very night and presented himself without delay before ’Linda. To his surprise, however, he found that she was perfectly passive, and willing to fall in with any suggestions he made. He told her that this old lady was quite blind and very lonely; that she had loved Comethup very dearly; that she wanted the girl’s companionship and help. At the same time the captain delicately suggested that it would be wiser for ’Linda to say nothing about Comethup in any way; he hinted that the point was a sore one with Miss Carlaw. ’Linda was silent for some time, and then she looked up at him quietly.
“I have done so much harm in my life,” she said, “although I hoped only to do good! If you think—if you really think that I may do any good—that I may make any atonement—I will do as you wish. I have trodden my own wilful path so long, I will tread any other you point out to me.”
“I think this is best,” said the captain gently.
Miss Charlotte Carlaw came down the next day and the captain conducted her to Medmer Theed’s shop. The carriage in which she had arrived was left standing in the street outside the old archway, and the captain, without a word, guided her through the shop and opened the inner door and led her through. Then he came out and closed the door, and left the two women alone. He had previously prepared the shoemaker for what was to happen, and the old man had accepted it without question and appeared satisfied that she should go. As the captain stood waiting in the little shop, Medmer Theed sat on his bench, hammering softly at the leather, as of old.