Part 46 (2/2)

Death's Property

CHAPTER I

A high laugh rang with a note of childlike merriment from the far end of the coffee-room as Bernard Merefleet, who was generally considered a bear on account of his retiring disposition, entered and took his seat near the door. It was a decidedly infectious laugh and perhaps for this reason it was the first detail to catch his attention and to excite his disapproval.

He frowned as he glanced at the menu in front of him.

He had arrived in England after an absence of twenty years in America, where he had made a huge fortune. He was hungering for the quiet unhurried speech of his fellow-countrymen, for the sights and sounds and general atmosphere of English life which for so long had been denied to him. And the first thing he heard on entering the coffee-room of this English hotel was the laugh of an American woman.

He had thought that in this remote corner of England--this little, old-world fis.h.i.+ng town, with its total lack of entertainment, its unfas.h.i.+onable beach, and its wild North Sea breakers--no unit of the great Western race would have set foot. He had believed its entire absence of attraction to be a sure safeguard, and he was unfeignedly disgusted to discover that this was not the case.

As he ate his dinner the high laugh broke in on his meditations again and again, and his annoyance grew to a sense of savage irritation. He had come over to England for a rest after a severe illness, and with an intense craving, after his twenty years of stress and toil, to stand aside and watch the world--the English, conservative world he loved--dawdle by.

He wanted to bury himself in an unknown fis.h.i.+ng-town and a.s.sociate with the simple, unflurried fisher-folk alone. It was a dream of his--a dream which he had imagined near its fulfilment when he had arrived in the peaceful little world of Old Silverstrand.

There was a large and fas.h.i.+onable watering-place five miles away. This was New Silverstrand, a town of red brick, self-centred and prosperous.

But he had not thought that its visitors would have overflowed into the old fis.h.i.+ng-town. He himself saw no attraction there save the peace of the sh.o.r.e and the turmoil of the sea. He had known and loved the old town in his youth, long before the new one had been built or even thought of. For New Silverstrand was a growth of barely ten years.

In all his wanderings his heart had always turned with a warm thrill of memory to the little old fis.h.i.+ng-town where much of his restless boyhood had been spent. He had returned to it as to a familiar friend and found it but slightly changed. A new hotel had been erected where the old Crayfish Inn had once stood. And this, so far as he had been able to judge in his first walk through the place on the evening of his arrival, was the sole alteration.

He had heard that the sh.o.r.e had crumbled beyond the town, but he had left that to be investigated on the morrow. The fis.h.i.+ng-harbour was the same; the brown-sailed fis.h.i.+ng-boats rocked with the well-remembered swing inside; the water poured roaring in with the same baffled fury; and children played as of old on the extreme and dangerous edge of the stone quay.

The memory of that selfsame quay roused deeper recollections in Merefleet's mind as he sat and dined alone at the little table near the door.

There came to him the thought, with a sudden, stabbing regret, of a little dark-eyed sister who had hung with him over that perilous edge and laughed at the impotent breakers below. He could hear the silvery echoes of her laughter across half a lifetime, could feel the warm hand that clasped his own. A magic touch swept aside the years and revealed the old, glad days of his boyhood.

Merefleet pushed away his plate and sat with fixed eyes, fascinated by the rosy vision. They were side by side in a fis.h.i.+ng-smack, he and the playmate of his childhood. There was an old fisherman in charge with grizzled hair, whose name, he recollected without effort, was Quiller.

He was showing the little maid how to tie a knot that was warranted never to come undone.

Merefleet watched the ardent, flushed face with a deep reverence. He had not seen it so vividly since the day he had kissed it for the last time and gone forth into the seething sea of life to fight the whirlpools.

Well, he had emerged triumphant so far as earthly success went. He had breasted the tide and risen above the billows. He was wealthy, and he was celebrated. No mortal power rose up in his path to baulk him of his desire. Only desire itself had failed him, and ambition had become mockery.

For twenty years he had not had time to stop and think. For twenty years he had wrestled ceaselessly with the panting crowd. He had bartered away the best years of his life to the gold G.o.d, and he was satiated with the success of this transaction.

In all that time he had not mourned, as he mourned to-night, the loss of the twin-sister who had been as his second and better self. He had not realised till he sat alone in the place, where as a boy he had never known solitude, how utterly flat and undesirable was the future that stretched out like a trackless desert at his feet.

And in that moment he would have cast away the whole bulk of his great possessions for one precious day of youth out of the many that had fled away for ever.

<script>