"I know, and her three houses were lost, too, I suppose?"
"Why should her houses be lost, young man?" Mr. Maliphant asked with severity. "Houses don't run away. This property doesn't run away. When she died she left a baby, she did, and when the baby was took—or was stolen—or something—Bunker said those houses were his. But not lost. You can't lose a house. You may lose a figurehead." He got up and looked outside to see if his were safe. "Or a big drum. But not a house."
"Oh!" Harry started. "Bunker said the houses were his, did he?"
"Of course he did."
"And if the baby had not died, those houses would still be the property of that baby, I suppose."
But Mr. Maliphant made no reply. He was now in the full enjoyment of the intoxication produced by his morning-pipe, and was sitting in his arm-chair with his feet on the fender, disposed, apparently, for silence. Presently he began to talk, as usual, to himself. Nor could he be induced, by any leading questions, to remember anything more of the things which Harry wanted him to remember. But he let his imagination wander. Gradually the room became filled with dead people, and he was talking with them. Nor did he seem to know that Harry was with him at all.
Harry slipped quietly away, shutting the door after him, so that the old man might be left quite alone with the ghosts.
The yard, littered with wood, crowded with the figureheads, all of which seemed turning inquiring and jealous eyes upon the stranger, was silent and ghostly. Thither came the old man every day, to sit before the fire in his little red-and-green doll's house, to cook his own beefsteak for himself, to drink his glass of grog after dinner, to potter about among his carved heads, to talk to his friends the ghosts, to guard his property, and to execute the orders which never came. For the shipbuilders who had employed old Mr. Maliphant were all dead and gone, and nobody knew of his yard any more, and he had it all to himself. The tide of time had carried away all his friends and left him alone; the memory of him among active men was gone; no one took any more interest in him, and he had ceased to care for anything: to look back was his only pleasure. No one likes to die at any time, but who would wish to grow so old?
And those houses. Why, if the old man's memory was right, then Bunker had simply appropriated his property. Was that, Harry asked, the price for which he traded the child away?
He went straight away to his cousin Dick, who, mindful of the recent speech at the club, was a little disposed to be resentful. It fortunately takes two to make a quarrel, however, and one of those two had no intention of a family row.