All which Harrington said in French that Bagasse might perfectly understand him. The old man sat, with a touched face, looking at the floor for some time after the young scholar had ceased to speak. Looking up, at length, with an unsteady eye, he saw that the sad, introverted expression had returned to the pallid features before him. In fact, Harrington’s thoughts had dropped away to the trouble on his mind, and he was wondering why the Captain did not come.
“Missr Harrington,” said Bagasse, in a voice, a little lower and hoarser than usual, “you make me vair proud—you do me vair mush honor. But ah, my joay haf mush melancolee wis him, for you look so pale, so bad. Ex-cuse me, Missr Harrington—but was is ze mattair wis you? Why, you look so white, so sorrowfool? Ah, tell you old Bagasse zat he may say ze leetel word wis comfort in him! You marry ze beautifool, dear ladee wife—mon Dieu! zat sall make you so happy zan evairybody. Why zen you haf zat face? Zat is not ze face for ze new husband—sacrebleu, no! Now why is zat?”
Harrington paused a moment before replying, struggling to repress the agitation he felt not only at the rude tenderness of the old Frenchman’s words and manner, but at the aching sense it brought him of the grief that had clouded his sweet and perfect happiness.
“Don’t ask me, Bagasse,” he faltered. “Kind old friend, I wish I could tell you, but there are reasons”—
A low knock at the door made him break off in the midst of his sentence.
“No, don’t go,” he said to the fencing-master, who had moved to rise. “Come in,” he cried.
The door opened slowly, and to the astonishment of Harrington, Driscoll the stevedore entered. Harrington smiled vaguely, and bent his head with an absent and wondering air in reply to the abashed and awkward bow the Irishman made as he came in.
“Why, Mr. Driscoll,” he said, slowly, “I didn’t expect to see you, though I’m glad you came. Take a chair. How are you?”
“Purty well, thank ye kindly, Mr. Harrington,” replied Driscoll, taking off his old straw hat, and wiping his forehead with his coat sleeve, without looking at the young man.
Harrington, wondering at his curious air of awkward bashfulness, and beginning to feel a rising perturbation, as he remembered that he had seen the man in Atkins’ office not long before, blankly stared at him. He was a strong, thick-set, stooping man, dressed in coarse canvas trowsers, all stained with pitch and dirt; a soiled red flannel shirt; and a short frowsy old coat with large horn buttons. He had what is commonly called a thoroughly Irish face—which means not the Irish face of Jeremy Taylor or Edmund Burke, but the face of an Irish peasant after despotism, political, social, and religious, has wrought on him and his ancestry for a certain period, giving him some abjectness, some lawlessness, some clownishness, some stupidity, some insensibility, an aspect of hard work and poor fare and low condition, and degrading his forehead, clouding his eye, lowering his nose, making his lips loose, his gums prominent, his cheeks scrawny, his throat scraggy, and barbarizing the manhood of him generally. Such, with the addition of tan and freckles got from labor in the sun, and also the grime and sweat of that labor, was the visage of Driscoll. The only other thing Harrington noticed about him was that he kept his left hand tightly clenched while he wiped his face with the rough sleeve of his right arm.