To-morrow | Page 5

become puzzled and
diffident, as though he had suspected that there was somewhere about
him something slightly com- promising, some embarrassing oddity;
and yet had remained unable to discover what on earth this something
wrong could be.
He was unwilling now to talk with the townsfolk. He had earned for
himself the reputation of an awful skinflint, of a miser in the matter of
living. He mumbled regretfully in the shops, bought in- ferior scraps of
meat after long hesitations; and discouraged all allusions to his costume.
It was as the barber had foretold. For all one could tell, he had
recovered already from the disease of hope; and only Miss Bessie
Carvil knew that he said noth- ing about his son's return because with
him it was no longer "next week," "next month," or even "next year." It
was "to-morrow."
In their intimacy of back yard and front gar- den he talked with her
paternally, reasonably, and dogmatically, with a touch of arbitrariness.
They met on the ground of unreserved confidence, which was
authenticated by an affectionate wink now and then. Miss Carvil had
come to look forward rather to these winks. At first they had
discomposed her: the poor fellow was mad. Afterwards she had learned
to laugh at them: there was no harm in him. Now she was aware of an
unacknowledged, pleasurable, incredulous emotion, expressed by a
faint blush. He winked not in the least vulgarly; his thin red face with a
well-modelled curved nose, had a sort of distinction--the more so that
when he talked to her he looked with a steadier and more in- telligent
glance. A handsome, hale, upright, ca- pable man, with a white beard.
You did not think of his age. His son, he affirmed, had resembled him
amazingly from his earliest babyhood.
Harry would be one-and-thirty next July, he declared. Proper age to get
married with a nice, sensible girl that could appreciate a good home. He
was a very high-spirited boy. High-spirited husbands were the easiest

to manage. These mean, soft chaps, that you would think butter
wouldn't melt in their mouths, were the ones to make a wom- an
thoroughly miserable. And there was nothing like a home--a fireside--a
good roof: no turning out of your warm bed in all sorts of weather. "Eh,
my dear?"
Captain Hagberd had been one of those sailors that pursue their calling
within sight of land. One of the many children of a bankrupt farmer, he
had been apprenticed hurriedly to a coasting skipper, and had remained
on the coast all his sea life. It must have been a hard one at first: he had
never taken to it; his affection turned to the land, with its innumerable
houses, with its quiet lives gathered round its firesides. Many sailors
feel and profess a rational dislike for the sea, but his was a pro- found
and emotional animosity--as if the love of the stabler element had been
bred into him through many generations.
"People did not know what they let their boys in for when they let them
go to sea," he expounded to Bessie. "As soon make convicts of them at
once." He did not believe you ever got used to it. The weariness of such
a life got worse as you got older. What sort of trade was it in which
more than half your time you did not put your foot inside your house?
Directly you got out to sea you had no means of knowing what went on
at home. One might have thought him weary of distant voyages; and
the longest he had ever made had lasted a fort- night, of which the most
part had been spent at anchor, sheltering from the weather. As soon as
his wife had inherited a house and enough to live on (from a bachelor
uncle who had made some money in the coal business) he threw up his
command of an East-coast collier with a feeling as though he had
escaped from the galleys. After all these years he might have counted
on the fingers of his two hands all the days he had been out of sight of
Eng- land. He had never known what it was to be out of soundings. "I
have never been further than eighty fathoms from the land," was one of
his boasts.
Bessie Carvil heard all these things. In front of their cottage grew an
under-sized ash; and on sum- mer afternoons she would bring out a
chair on the grass-plot and sit down with her sewing. Captain Hagberd,

in his canvas suit, leaned on a spade. He dug every day in his front plot.
He turned it over and over several times every year, but was not go- ing
to plant anything "just at present."