"He gave us the Hanoverians to help us to drink! You are down at the heel, parson. If you could prove to me that Nelson is at the bottom of the sea, I might be ready to howl with you."
"So he may be, sir, so he may be, for all we know."
"Jasper, send for a good stiff glass of rum; Mr. Goffin is feeling a little faint and vapourish this evening. Yes, that was the best tussle we've had. It took me all I knew to keep your point out."
Parson Goffin's gloom was in sympathy with the gloom that overshadowed England during those months of May, June, and July. At Boulogne Napoleon waited for the chance that should give him control of the narrow sea—even for three days. Off Rochefort, Ferrol, and Brest the ships of Calder and Cornwallis kept up their grim blockade, while out yonder upon the Atlantic, Fate, Villeneuve, and Nelson faltered on the edge of the unknown. Nelson and his fleet had sailed away into the west, and men asked themselves what news the Atlantic would disgorge. Would it be the thunder of the French guns in the Channel, the breaking out of the ships blockaded in Brest and Rochefort, the sweeping of the Dover Straits, the red horror of invasion?
At Stonehanger Nance sat on the terrace wall and looked out toward the sea. The sunlight played upon her face and in her eyes, and gave them a brown radiance. There was a warmth and graciousness about her, a sadness that found its recompense in the richness of her thoughts and musings.
Her spiritual attitude toward her father was one of astonishment and compassion. She could pity him, even though she could not understand his motives. De Rothan was the scapegoat upon whom she laid the guilt and the burden of her resentment, though how Anthony Durrell had been inveigled into such schemes she could not imagine. What quarrel had he with England? He was a morose man, a silent man, and perhaps in a vague way she felt that he had been disappointed. Nance's nature was the very opposite of her father's. She was direct, generous, less ready to feel aggrieved. The flaming discontent of the fanatic is incomprehensible to healthy, humour-loving, sanguine people. There are men who will backbite their own country out of sheer hereditary cussedness. They are against everything that is—and Anthony Durrell was such a man.
He came out upon the terrace while Nance was there, and walked up and down under the house with his hands behind his back. There was a restless uncouthness even in the way he moved, for Durrell was one of those men who had been a sop at school, and a greenhorn at college. He had thrown a ball like a girl, and his legs and arms were not made to work like the limbs of a virile male. Books, philosophy, and theorising had filled his circle of consciousness. His liver had grown sluggish with a sedentary life, and now he was nothing but a lean and embittered figure of denunciation and discontent, impatient, ineffectual, passionate, yet weak.
Nance felt a kind of pity for him as she watched him go to and fro. She could not help contrasting him with Jasper Benham. As for De Rothan, he was a sinister figure dogging the footsteps of this lean, white-haired, narrow-shouldered man.
She crossed over to her father.
"Would you like a walk on the common? It is cooler now."