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In a flash of recollection Randolph remembered the obtruding miner on the ferry boat, the same figure on the wharf corner, and the advantage taken of his absence with Miss Avondale. And Miss Avondale was the “party” this man’s shipmate was watching! He felt his face crimsoning, yet he dared not question him further, nor yet defend her. Captain Dornton noticed it, and with a friendly tact, which Randolph had not expected of him, rising again, laid his hand gently on the young man’s shoulder.
“Look here, lad,” he said, with his pleasant smile; “don’t you worry your head about the ways or doings of the Dornton family, or any of their friends. They’re a queer lot—including your humble servant. You’ve done the square thing accordin’ to your lights. You’ve ridden straight from start to finish, with no jockeying, and I shan’t forget it. There are only two men who haven’t failed me when I trusted them. One was you when I gave you my portmanteau; the other was Jack Redhill when he stole it from you.”
He dropped back in his chair again, and laughed silently.
“Then you did not fall overboard as they supposed,” stammered Randolph at last.
“Not much! But the next thing to it. It wasn’t the water that I took in that knocked me out, my lad, but something stronger. I was shanghaied.”
“Shanghaied?” repeated Randolph vacantly.
“Yes, shanghaied! Hocused! Drugged at that gin mill on the wharf by a lot of crimps, who, mistaking me for a better man, shoved me, blind drunk and helpless, down the steps into a boat, and out to a short-handed brig in the stream. When I came to I was outside the Heads, pointed for Guayaquil. When they found they’d captured, not a poor Jack, but a man who’d trod a quarterdeck, who knew, and was known at every port on the trading line, and who could make it hot for them, they were glad to compromise and set me ashore at Acapulco, and six weeks later I landed in ‘Frisco.”
“Safe and sound, thank Heaven!” said Randolph joyously.
“Not exactly, lad,” said Captain Dornton grimly, “but dead and sat upon by the coroner, and my body comfortably boxed up and on its way to England.”
“But that was nine months ago. What have you been doing since? Why didn’t you declare yourself then?” said Randolph impatiently, a little irritated by the man’s extreme indifference. He really talked like an amused spectator of his own misfortunes.
“Steady, lad. I know what you’re going to say. I know all that happened. But the first thing I found when I got back was that the shanghai business had saved my life; that but for that I would have really been occupying that box on its way to England, instead of the poor devil who was taken for me.”
A cold tremor passed over Randolph. Captain Dornton, however, was tolerantly smiling.
“I don’t understand,” said Randolph breathlessly.
Captain Dornton rose and, walking to the door, looked out into the passage; then he shut the door carefully and returned, glancing about the room and at the storm-washed windows. “I thought I heard some one outside. I’m lying low just now, and only go out at night, for I don’t want this thing blown before I’m ready. Got anything to drink here?”
Randolph replied by taking a decanter of whiskey and glasses from a cupboard. The captain filled his glass, and continued with the same gentle but exasperating nonchalance, “Mind my smoking?”
“Not at all,” said Randolph, pushing a cigar toward him. But the captain put it aside, drew from his pocket a short black clay pipe, stuffed it with black “Cavendish plug,” which he had first chipped off in the palm of his hand with a large clasp knife, lighted it, and took a few meditative whiffs. Then, glancing at Randolph’s papers, he said, “I’m not keeping you from your work, lad?” and receiving a reply in the negative, puffed at his pipe and once more settled himself comfortably in his chair, with his dark, bearded profile toward Randolph.
“You were saying just now you didn’t understand,” he went on slowly, without looking up; “so you must take your own bearings from what I’m telling you. When I met you that night I had just arrived from Melbourne. I had been lucky in some trading speculations I had out there, and I had some bills with me, but no money except what I had tucked in the skin of that portmanteau and a few papers connected with my family at home. When a man lives the roving kind of life I have, he learns to keep all that he cares for under his own hat, and isn’t apt to blab to friends. But it got out in some way on the voyage that I had money, and as there was a mixed lot of ‘Sydney ducks’ and ‘ticket of leave men’ on board, it seems they hatched a nice little plot to waylay me on the wharf on landing, rob me, and drop me into deep water. To make it seem less suspicious, they associated themselves with a lot of crimps who were on the lookout for our sailors, who were going ashore that night too. I’d my suspicions that a couple of those men might be waiting for me at the end of the wharf. I left the ship just a minute or two before the sailors did. Then I met you. That meeting, my lad, was my first step toward salvation. For the two men let you pass with my portmanteau, which they didn’t recognize, as I knew they would ME, and supposed you were a stranger, and lay low, waiting for me. I, who went into the gin-mill with the other sailors, was foolish enough to drink, and was drugged and crimped as they were. I hadn’t thought of that. A poor devil of a ticket of leave man, about my size, was knocked down for me, and,” he added, suppressing a laugh, “will be buried, deeply lamented, in the chancel of Dornton Church. While the row was going on, the skipper, fearing to lose other men, warped out into the stream, and so knew nothing of what happened to me. When they found what they thought was my body, he was willing to identify it in the hope that the crime might be charged to the crimps, and so did the other sailor witnesses. But my brother Bill, who had just arrived here from Callao, where he had been hunting for me, hushed it up to prevent a scandal. All the same, Bill might have known the body wasn’t mine, even though he hadn’t seen me for years.”
“But it was frightfully disfigured, so that even I, who saw you only once, could not have sworn it was NOT you,” said Randolph quickly.
“Humph!” said Captain Dornton musingly. “Bill may have acted on the square—though he was in a d–d hurry.”
“But,” said Randolph eagerly, “you will put an end to all this now. You will assert yourself. You have witnesses to prove your identity.”
“Steady, lad,” said the captain, waving his pipe gently. “Of course I have. But”—he stopped, laid down his pipe, and put his hands doggedly in his pockets—“IS IT WORTH IT?” Seeing the look of amazement in Randolph’s face, he laughed his low laugh, and settled himself back in his chair again. “No,” he said quietly, “if it wasn’t for my son, and what’s due him as my heir, I suppose—I reckon I’d just chuck the whole d–d thing.”
“What!” said Randolph. “Give up the property, the title, the family honor, the wrong done to your reputation, the punishment”—He hesitated, fearing he had gone too far.
Captain Dornton withdrew his pipe from his mouth with a gesture of caution, and holding it up, said: “Steady, lad. We’ll come to THAT by and by. As to the property and title, I cut and run from THEM ten years ago. To me they meant only the old thing—the life of a country gentleman, the hunting, the shooting, the whole beastly business that the land, over there, hangs like a millstone round your neck. They meant all this to me, who loved adventure and the sea from my cradle. I cut the property, for I hated it, and I hate it still. If I went back I should hear the sea calling me day and night; I should feel the breath of the southwest trades in every wind that blew over that tight little island yonder; I should be always scenting the old trail, lad, the trail that leads straight out of the Gate to swoop down to the South Seas. Do you think a man who has felt his ship’s bows heave and plunge under him in the long Pacific swell—just ahead of him a reef breaking white into the lagoon, and beyond a fence of feathery palms—cares to follow hounds over gray hedges under a gray November sky? And the society? A man who’s got a speaking acquaintance in every port from Acapulco to Melbourne, who knows every den and every longshoreman in it from a South American tienda to a Samoan beach-comber’s hut,—what does he want with society?” He paused as Randolph’s eyes were fixed wonderingly on the first sign of emotion on his weather-beaten face, which seemed for a moment to glow with the strength and freshness of the sea, and then said, with a laugh: “You stare, lad. Well, for all the Dorntons are rather proud of their family, like as not there was some beastly old Danish pirate among them long ago, and I’ve got a taste of his blood in me. But I’m not quite as bad as that yet.”
He laughed, and carelessly went on: “As to the family honor, I don’t see that it will be helped by my ripping up the whole thing and perhaps showing that Bill was a little too previous in identifying me. As to my reputation, that was gone after I left home, and if I hadn’t been the legal heir they wouldn’t have bothered their heads about me. My father had given me up long ago, and there isn’t a man, woman, or child that wouldn’t now welcome Bill in my place.”
“There is one who wouldn’t,” said Randolph impulsively.
“You mean Caroline Avondale?” said Captain Dornton dryly.
Randolph colored. “No; I mean Miss Eversleigh, who was with your brother.”
Captain Dornton reflected. “To be sure! Sibyl Eversleigh! I haven’t seen her since she was so high. I used to call her my little sweetheart. So Sybby remembered Cousin Jack and came to find him? But when did you meet her?” he asked suddenly, as if this was the only detail of the past which had escaped him, fixing his frank eyes upon Randolph.
The young man recounted at some length the dinner party at Dingwall’s, his conversation with Miss Eversleigh, and his interview with Sir William, but spoke little of Miss Avondale. To his surprise, the captain listened smilingly, and only said: “That was like Billy to take a rise out of you by pretending you were suspected. That’s his way—a little rough when you don’t know him and he’s got a little grog amidships. All the same, I’d have given something to have heard him ‘running’ you, when all the while you had the biggest bulge on him, only neither of you knew it.” He laughed again, until Randolph, amazed at his levity and indifference, lost his patience.
“Do you know,” he said bluntly, “that they don’t believe you were legally married?”
But Captain Dornton only continued to laugh, until, seeing his companion’s horrified face, he became demure. “I suppose Bill didn’t, for Bill had sense enough to know that otherwise he would have to take a back seat to Bobby.”
“But did Miss Avondale know you were legally married, and that your son was the heir?” asked Randolph bluntly.
“She had no reason to suspect otherwise, although we were married secretly. She was an old friend of my wife, not particularly of mine.”
Randolph sat back amazed and horrified. Those were HER own words. Or was this man deceiving him as the others had?
But the captain, eying him curiously, but still amusedly, added: “I even thought of bringing her as one of my witnesses, until”—
“Until what?” asked Randolph quickly, as he saw the captain had hesitated.
“Until I found she wasn’t to be trusted; until I found she was too thick with Bill,” said the captain bluntly. “And now she’s gone to England with him and the boy, I suppose she’ll make him come to terms.”
“Come to terms?” echoed Randolph. “I don’t understand.” Yet he had an instinctive fear that he did.
“Well,” said the captain slowly, “suppose she might prefer the chance of being the wife of a grown-up baronet to being the governess of one who was only a minor? She’s a cute girl,” he added dryly.
“But,” said Randolph indignantly, “you have other witnesses, I hope.”
“Of course I have. I’ve got the Spanish records now from the Callao priest, and they’re put in a safe place should anything happen to me—if anything could happen to a dead man!” he added grimly. “These proofs were all I was waiting for before I made up my mind whether I should blow the whole thing, or let it slide.”
Randolph looked again with amazement at this strange man who seemed so indifferent to the claims of wealth, position, and even to revenge. It seemed inconceivable, and yet he could not help being impressed with his perfect sincerity. He was relieved, however, when Captain Dornton rose with apparent reluctance and put away his pipe.
“Now look here, my lad, I’m right glad to have overhauled you again, whatever happened or is going to happen, and there’s my hand upon it! Now, to come to business. I’m going over to England on this job, and I want you to come and help me.”
Randolph’s heart leaped. The appeal revived all his old boyish enthusiasm, with his secret loyalty to the man before him. But he suddenly remembered his past illusions, and for an instant he hesitated.
“But the bank,” he stammered, scarce knowing what to say.
The captain smiled. “I will pay you better than the bank; and at the end of four months, in whatever way this job turns out, if you still wish to return here, I will see that you are secured from any loss. Perhaps you may be able to get a leave of absence. But your real object must be kept a secret from every one. Not a word of my existence or my purpose must be blown before I am ready. You and Jack Redhill are all that know it now.”
“But you have a lawyer?” said the surprised Randolph.
“Not yet. I’m my own lawyer in this matter until I get fairly under way. I’ve studied the law enough to know that as soon as I prove that I’m alive the case must go on on account of my heir, whether I choose to cry quits or not. And it’s just THAT that holds my hand.”
Randolph stared at the extraordinary man before him. For a moment, as the strange story of his miraculous escape and his still more wonderful indifference to it all recurred to his mind, he felt a doubt of the narrator’s truthfulness or his sanity. But another glance at the sailor’s frank eyes dispelled that momentary suspicion. He held out his hand as frankly, and grasping Captain Dornton’s, said, “I will go.”
V
Randolph’s request for a four months’ leave of absence was granted with little objection and no curiosity. He had acquired the confidence of his employers, and beyond Mr. Revelstoke’s curt surprise that a young fellow on the road to fortune should sacrifice so much time to irrelevant travel, and the remark, “But you know your own business best,” there was no comment. It struck the young man, however, that Mr. Dingwall’s slight coolness on receiving the news might be attributed to a suspicion that he was following Miss Avondale, whom he had fancied Dingwall disliked, and he quickly made certain inquiries in regard to Miss Eversleigh and the possibility of his meeting her. As, without intending it, and to his own surprise, he achieved a blush in so doing, which Dingwall noted, he received a gracious reply, and the suggestion that it was “quite proper” for him, on arriving, to send the young lady his card.
Captain Dornton, under the alias of “Captain Johns,” was ready to catch the next steamer to the Isthmus, and in two days they sailed. The voyage was uneventful, and if Randolph had expected any enthusiasm on the part of the captain in the mission on which he was now fairly launched, he would have been disappointed. Although his frankness was unchanged, he volunteered no confidences. It was evident he was fully acquainted with the legal strength of his claim, yet he, as evidently, deferred making any plan of redress until he reached England. Of Miss Eversleigh he was more communicative. “You would have liked her better, my lad, it you hadn’t been bewitched by the Avondale woman, for she is the whitest of the Dorntons.” In vain Randolph protested truthfully, yet with an even more convincing color, that it had made no difference, and he HAD liked her. The captain laughed. “Ay, lad! But she’s a poor orphan, with scarcely a hundred pounds a year, who lives with her guardian, an old clergyman. And yet,” he added grimly, “there are only three lives between her and the property—mine, Bobby’s, and Bill’s—unless HE should marry and have an heir.”
“The more reason why you should assert yourself and do what you can for her now,” said Randolph eagerly.
“Ay,” returned the captain, with his usual laugh, “when she was a child I used to call her my little sweetheart, and gave her a ring, and I reckon I promised to marry her, too, when she grew up.”
The truthful Randolph would have told him of Miss Evereleigh’s gift, but unfortunately he felt himself again blushing, and fearful lest the captain would misconstrue his confusion, he said nothing.
Except on this occasion, the captain talked with Randolph chiefly of his later past,—of voyages he had made, of places they were passing, and ports they visited. He spent much of the time with the officers, and even the crew, over whom he seemed to exercise a singular power, and with whom he exhibited an odd freemasonry. To Randolph’s eyes he appeared to grow in strength and stature in the salt breath of the sea, and although he was uniformly kind, even affectionate, to him, he was brusque to the other passengers, and at times even with his friends the sailors. Randolph sometimes wondered how he would treat a crew of his own. He found some answer to that question in the captain’s manner to Jack Redhill, the abstractor of the portmanteau, and his old shipmate, who was accompanying the captain in some dependent capacity, but who received his master’s confidences and orders with respectful devotion.
It was a cold, foggy morning, nearly two months later, that they landed at Plymouth. The English coast had been a vague blank all night, only pierced, long hours apart, by dim star-points or weird yellow beacon flashes against the horizon. And this vagueness and unreality increased on landing, until it seemed to Randolph that they had slipped into a land of dreams. The illusion was kept up as they walked in the weird shadows through half-lit streets into a murky railway station throbbing with steam and sudden angry flashes in the darkness, and then drew away into what ought to have been the open country, but was only gray plains of mist against a lost horizon. Sometimes even the vague outlook was obliterated by passing trains coming from nowhere and slipping into nothingness. As they crept along with the day, without, however, any lightening of the opaque vault overhead to mark its meridian, there came at times a thinning of the gray wall on either side of the track, showing the vague bulk of a distant hill, the battlemented sky line of an old-time hall, or the spires of a cathedral, but always melting back into the mist again as in a dream. Then vague stretches of gloom again, foggy stations obscured by nebulous light and blurred and moving figures, and the black relief of a tunnel. Only once the captain, catching sight of Randolph’s awed face under the lamp of the smoking carriage, gave way to his long, low laugh. “Jolly place, England—so very ‘Merrie.’” And then they came to a comparatively lighter, broader, and more brilliantly signaled tunnel filled with people, and as they remained in it, Randolph was told it was London. With the sensation of being only half awake, he was guided and put into a cab by his companion, and seemed to be completely roused only at the hotel.
It had been arranged that Randolph should first go down to Chillingworth rectory and call on Miss Eversleigh, and, without disclosing his secret, gather the latest news from Dornton Hall, only a few miles from Chillingworth. For this purpose he had telegraphed to her that evening, and had received a cordial response. The next morning he arose early, and, in spite of the gloom, in the glow of his youthful optimism entered the bedroom of the sleeping Captain Dornton, and shook him by the shoulder in lieu of the accolade, saying: “Rise, Sir John Dornton!”
The captain, a light sleeper, awoke quickly. “Thank you, my lad, all the same, though I don’t know that I’m quite ready yet to tumble up to that kind of piping. There’s a rotten old saying in the family that only once in a hundred years the eldest son succeeds. That’s why Bill was so cocksure, I reckon. Well?”
“In an hour I’m off to Chillingworth to begin the campaign,” said Randolph cheerily.
“Luck to you, my boy, whatever happens. Clap a stopper on your jaws, though, now and then. I’m glad you like Sybby, but I don’t want you to like her so much as to forget yourself and give me away.”
Half an hour out of London the fog grew thinner, breaking into lace-like shreds in the woods as the train sped by, or expanding into lustrous tenuity above him. Although the trees were leafless, there was some recompense in the glimpses their bare boughs afforded of clustering chimneys and gables nestling in ivy. An infinite repose had been laid upon the landscape with the withdrawal of the fog, as of a veil lifted from the face of a sleeper. All his boyish dreams of the mother country came back to him in the books he had read, and re-peopled the vast silence. Even the rotting leaves that lay thick in the crypt-like woods seemed to him the dead laurels of its past heroes and sages. Quaint old-time villages, thatched roofs, the ever-recurring square towers of church or hall, the trim, ordered parks, tiny streams crossed by heavy stone bridges much too large for them—all these were only pages of those books whose leaves he seemed to be turning over. Two hours of this fancy, and then the train stopped at a station within a mile or two of a bleak headland, a beacon, and the gray wash of a pewter-colored sea, where a hilly village street climbed to a Norman church tower and the ivied gables of a rectory.
Miss Eversleigh, dignifiedly tall, but youthfully frank, as he remembered her, was waiting to drive him in a pony trap to the rectory. A little pink, with suppressed consciousness and the responsibilities of presenting a stranger guest to her guardian, she seemed to Randolph more charming than ever.
But her first word of news shocked and held him breathless. Bobby, the little orphan, a frail exotic, had succumbed to the Northern winter. A cold caught in New York had developed into pneumonia, and he died on the passage. Miss Avondale, although she had received marked attention from Sir William, returned to America in the same ship.
“I really don’t think she was quite as devoted to the poor child as all that, you know,” she continued with innocent frankness, “and Cousin Bill was certainly most kind to them both, yet there really seemed to be some coolness between them after the child’s death. But,” she added suddenly, for the first time observing her companion’s evident distress, and coloring in confusion, “I beg your pardon—I’ve been horribly rude and heartless. I dare say the poor boy was very dear to you, and of course Miss Avondale was your friend. Please forgive me!”
Randolph, intent only on that catastrophe which seemed to wreck all Captain Dornton’s hopes and blunt his only purpose for declaring himself, hurriedly reassured her, yet was not sorry his agitation had been misunderstood. And what was to be done? There was no train back to London for four hours. He dare not telegraph, and if he did, could he trust to his strange patron’s wise conduct under the first shock of this news to his present vacillating purpose? He could only wait.
Luckily for his ungallant abstraction, they were speedily at the rectory, where a warm welcome from Mr. Brunton, Sibyl’s guardian, and his family forced him to recover himself, and showed him that the story of his devotion to John Dornton had suffered nothing from Miss Eversleigh’s recital. Distraught and anxious as he was, he could not resist the young girl’s offer after luncheon to show him the church with the vault of the Dorntons and the tablet erected to John Dornton, and, later, the Hall, only two miles distant. But here Randolph hesitated.
“I would rather not call on Sir William to-day,” he said.
“You need not. He is over at the horse show at Fern Dyke, and won’t be back till late. And if he has been forgathering with his boon companions he won’t be very pleasant company.”
“Sibyl!” said the rector in good-humored protest.
“Oh, Mr. Trent has had a little of Cousin Bill’s convivial manners before now,” said the young girl vivaciously, “and isn’t shocked. But we can see the Hall from the park on our way to the station.”