But why this sudden stirring of his memory, just now of all times? Had anything unusual happened lately? Naturally, the inquiry sent her mind back, to yesterday first, then to the day before. No!—there was nothing there. Then to generalities. Was it the sea bathing?—the sea air? And then on a sudden she thought of the thing nearest at hand, that she should have thought of at first. Yes!—she would ask Dr. Conrad about that: Why hadn't she thought of that before—that galvanic battery?
Meanwhile, despite her injunctions to her husband to wait and be patient, his mind kept harking back on this curious recollection. Luckily, so it seemed to her—at any rate for the present—he did not seem to recall the Baron's recognition of himself, or to connect it with this illusion or revival. He appeared to recollect the Baron's personality, and his liberality with cigars, but little else. If he was to be reminded of this, it must be after she had talked over it with Vereker.
They struggled with the weather along the seaward face of the little
old fisher-town. The great wind was blowing the tar-laden atmosphere of the nets and the all-pervading smell of tar landward; and substituting flecks of driven foam, that it forced to follow landward too, for all they tried to stop and rest. The population was mostly employed getting the boats up as close to the houses as practice permitted, and the capstans were all a-creak with the strain; and one shrieked for a dab of lard, and got it, just as they passed. The man with Bessie and the anchor on his arms—for it was his—paused in his rotations with one elbow on his lever, and one foot still behind the taut cable he was crossing. His free hand saluted; and then, his position being defined, he was placed on a moral equality with his superiors, and could converse. The old-fashioned hat-touch, now dying out, is just as much a protest against the way social order parts man from man as it is an acknowledgment of its necessity.
The lover of Bessie and Elinor and Kate was disposed to ignore the efforts of the wind. There might, he said, be a bit of sea on, come two or three in the marn'n—at the full of the tide. The wind might get up a bit, if it went round suth'ard. The wind was nothing in itself—it was the direction it came from; it got a bad character from imputed or vicarious vice. It would be a bit rough to get a boat off—the lady might get a wetting.... At which point Rosalind interrupted. Nothing was further from her thoughts, she said, than navigation in any form. But had the speaker seen her daughter go by—the young lady that swam? For Sally was famous. He hadn't, himself, but maybe young Benjamin had. Who, taking leave to speak from this, announced frankly that he had seen a young lady, in company with her sweetheart, go by nigh an hour agone. The tattooed one diluted her sweetheart down to "her gentleman" reluctantly. In his land, and the one there would soon be for the freckled and blue-eyed Benjamin, there was no such artificial nonsense. Perhaps some sense of this showed itself in the way he resumed his work. "Now, young Benjamin—a-action!" said he; and the two threw themselves again against the pole of the mollified capstan.
If Rosalind fancied this little incident had put his previous experience out of her husband's mind she was mistaken. He said,
as they passed on in the direction of the jetty, "I think I should like to wind up capstans. It would suit me down to the ground." But then became thoughtful; and, just as they were arriving at the jetty, showed that his mind had run back by asking suddenly, "What was the fat Baron's name?"
"Diedrich Kammerkreutz." Rosalind gave him her nearest recollection, seeing nothing to be gained by doing otherwise. Any concealment, too, the chances were, would make matters worse instead of better.
"It was Kreutzkammer, in my—dream or whatever you call it." They stopped and looked at each other, and Rosalind replied, "It was Kreutzkammer. Oh dear!" rather as one who had lost breath from some kind of blow.
He saw her distress instantly, and was all alive to soothe it. "Don't be frightened, darling love!" he cried, and then his great good-humoured laugh broke into the tenderness of his speech, without spoiling it. He was so like Gerry, the boy that rode away that day in the dog-cart, when there was "only mamma for the girl."