Part 6 (1/2)
Then she returned the one-pound note, a fresh settlement was effected, and she left him. At the door she said: ”And I am muckle obleeged to ye for your story and your goodness.”
While uttering these words, she half kissed her hand to him, with a lofty and disengaged gesture, such as one might expect from a queen, if queens did not wear stays; and was gone.
When his lords.h.i.+p, a few minutes after, sauntered out for a stroll, the first object he beheld was an exact human square, a handsome boy, with a body swelled out apparently to the size of a man's, with blue flannel, and blue cloth above it, leaning against a wall, with his hands in his pockets--a statuette of _insouciance._
This marine puff-ball was Flucker Johnstone, aged fourteen.
Stain his sister's face with diluted walnut-juice, as they make the stage gypsy and Red Indian (two animals imagined by actors to be one), and you have Flucker's face.
A slight moral distinction remains, not to be so easily got over.
She was the best girl in the place, and he a baddish boy.
He was, however, as sharp in his way as she was intelligent in hers.
This youthful mariner allowed his lords.h.i.+p to pa.s.s him, and take twenty steps, but watched him all the time, and compared him with a description furnished him by his sister.
He then followed, and brought him to, as he called it.
”I daur say it's you I'm to convoy to yon auld f.a.ggitt!” said this baddish boy.
On they went, Flucker rolling and pitching and yawing to keep up with the lordly galley, for a fisherman's natural waddle is two miles an hour.
At the very entrance of Newhaven, the new pilot suddenly sung out, ”Starboard!”
Starboard it was, and they ascended a filthy ”close,” or alley they mounted a staircase which was out of doors, and, without knocking, Flucker introduced himself into Jess Rutherford's house.
”Here a gentleman to speak till ye, wife.”
CHAPTER III.
THE widow was weather-beaten and rough. She sat mending an old net.
”The gentleman's welcome,” said she; but there was no gratification in her tone, and but little surprise.
His lords.h.i.+p then explained that, understanding there were worthy people in distress, he was in hopes he might be permitted to a.s.sist them, and that she must blame a neighbor of hers if he had broken in upon her too abruptly with this object. He then, with a blush, hinted at ten s.h.i.+llings, which he begged she would consider as merely an installment, until he could learn the precise nature of her embarra.s.sments, and the best way of placing means at her disposal.
The widow heard all this with a lackl.u.s.ter mind.
For many years her life had been unsuccessful labor; if anything had ever come to her, it had always been a misfortune; her incidents had been thorns--her events, daggers.
She could not realize a human angel coming to her relief, and she did not realize it, and she worked away at her net.
At this, Flucker, to whom his lords.h.i.+p's speech appeared monstrously weak and pointless, drew nigh, and gave the widow, in her ear, his version, namely, his sister's embellished. It was briefly this: That the gentleman was a daft lord from England, who had come with the bank in his breeks, to remove poverty from Scotland, beginning with her. ”Sae speak loud aneuch, and ye'll no want siller,” was his polite corollary.
His lords.h.i.+p rose, laid a card on a chair, begged her to make use of him, et cetera; he then, recalling the oracular prescription, said, ”Do me the favor to apply to me for any little sum you have a use for, and, in return, I will beg of you (if it does not bore you too much) to make me acquainted with any little troubles you may have encountered in the course of your life.”
His lords.h.i.+p, receiving no answer, was about to go, after bowing to her, and smiling gracefully upon her.
His hand was on the latch, when Jess Rutherford burst into a pa.s.sion of tears.