With a fine morning his courage revived, but as voyage succeeded voyage he became more and more perplexed. The devotion of the cook was patent to all men, but Miss Jewell was as changeable as a weather-glass. The skipper would leave her one night convinced that he had better forget her as soon as possible, and the next her manner would be so kind, and her glances so soft, that only the presence of the ever-watchful cook prevented him from proposing on the spot. The end came one evening in October. The skipper had hurried back from the City, laden with stores, Miss Jewell having, after many refusals, consented to grace the tea- table that afternoon. The table, set by the boy, groaned beneath the weight of unusual luxuries, but the girl had not arrived. The cook was also missing, and the only occupant of the cabin was the mate, who, sitting at one corner, was eating with great relish.
"Ain't you going to get your tea?" he inquired.
"No hurry," said the skipper, somewhat incensed at his haste. "It wouldn't have hurt you to have waited a bit."
"Waited?" said the other. "What for?"
"For my visitors," was the reply.
The mate bit a piece off a crust and stirred his tea. "No use waiting for them," he said, with a grin. "They ain't coming."
"What do you mean?" demanded the skipper.
"I mean," said the mate, continuing to stir his tea with great enjoyment"I mean that all that kind'artedness of yours was clean chucked away on that cook. He's got a berth ashore and he's gone for good. He left you 'is love; he left it with Bill Hemp."
"Berth ashore?" said the skipper, staring.
"Ah!" said the mate, taking a large and noisy sip from his cup. "He's been fooling you all along for what he could get out of you. Sleeping aft and feeding aft, nobody to speak a word to 'im, and going out and being treated by the skipper; Bill said he laughed so much when he was telling 'im that the tears was running down 'is face like rain. He said he'd never been treated so much in his life."
"That'll do," said the skipper, quickly.
"You ought to hear Bill tell it," said the mate, regretfully. "I can't do it anything like as well as what he can. Made us all roar, he did. What amused 'em most was you thinking that that gal was cookie's sister."
The skipper, with a sharp exclamation, leaned forward, staring at him.
"They're going to be married at Christmas," said the mate, choking in his cup.
The skipper sat upright again, and tried manfully to compose his features. Many things he had not understood before were suddenly made clear, and he remembered now the odd way in which the girl had regarded him as she bade him good-night on the previous evening. The mate eyed him with interest, and was about to supply him with further details when his attention was attracted by footsteps descending the companion- ladder. Then he put down his cup with great care, and stared in stolid amazement at the figure of Miss Jewell in the doorway.
"I'm a bit late," she said, flushing slightly.
She crossed over and shook hands with the skipper, and, in the most natural fashion in the world, took a seat and began to remove her gloves. The mate swung round and regarded her open-mouthed; the skipper, whose ideas were in a whirl, sat regarding her in silence. The mate was the first to move; he left the cabin rubbing his shin, and casting furious glances at the skipper.
"You didn't expect to see me?" said the girl, reddening again.
"No," was the reply.
The girl looked at the tablecloth. "I came to beg your pardon," she said, in a low voice.
"There's nothing to beg my pardon for," said the skipper, clearing his throat. "By rights I ought to beg yours. You did quite right to make fun of me. I can see it now."
"When you asked me whether I was Bert's sister I didn't like to say 'no,' continued the girl; "and at first I let you come out with me for the fun of the thing, and then Bert said it would be good for him, and thenthen"
"Yes," said the skipper, after a long pause.
The girl broke a biscuit into small pieces, and arranged them on the cloth. "Then I didn't mind your coming so much," she said, in a low voice.
The skipper caught his breath and tried to gaze at the averted face.
The girl swept the crumbs aside and met his gaze squarely. "Not quite so much," she explained.
"I've been a fool," said the skipper. "I've been a fool. I've made myself a laughing-stock all round, but if I could have it all over again I would."
"That can never be," said the girl, shaking her head. "Bert wouldn't come."
"No, of course not," asserted the other.
The girl bit her lip. The skipper thought that he had never seen her eyes so large and shining. There was a long silence.
"Good-by," said the girl at last, rising.
The skipper rose to follow. "Good-by," he said, slowly; "and I wish you both every happiness."
"Happiness?" echoed the girl, in a surprised voice. "Why?"
"When you are married."
"I am not going to be married," said the girl. "I told Bert so this afternoon. Good-by."
The skipper actually let her get nearly to the top of the ladder before he regained his presence of mind. Then, in obedience to a powerful tug at the hem of her skirt, she came down again, and accompanied him meekly back to the cabin.
HIS LORDSHIP
Farmer Rose sat in his porch smoking an evening pipe. By his side, in a comfortable Windsor chair, sat his friend the miller, also smoking, and gazing with half-closed eyes at the landscape as he listened for the thousandth time to his host's complaints about his daughter.
"The long and the short of it is, Cray," said the farmer, with an air of mournful pride, "she's far too good-looking."
Mr. Cray grunted.
"Truth is truth, though she's my daughter," continued Mr. Rose, vaguely. "She's too good-looking. Sometimes when I've taken her up to market I've seen the folks fair turn their backs on the cattle and stare at her instead."
Mr. Cray sniffed; louder, perhaps, than he had intended. "Beautiful that rose-bush smells," he remarked, as his friend turned and eyed him.
"What is the consequence?" demanded the farmer, relaxing his gaze. "She looks in the glass and sees herself, and then she gets miserable and uppish because there ain't nobody in these parts good enough for her to marry."
"It's a extraordinary thing to me where she gets them good looks from," said the miller, deliberately.
"Ah!" said Mr. Rose, and sat trying to think of a means of enlightening his friend without undue loss of modesty.
"She ain't a bit like her poor mother," mused Mr. Cray.
"No, she don't get her looks from her," assented the other.
"It's one o' them things you can't account for," said Mr. Cray, who was very tired of the subject; "it's just like seeing a beautiful flower blooming on an old cabbage-stump."
The farmer knocked his pipe out noisily and began to refill it. "People have said that she takes after me a trifle," he remarked, shortly.
"You weren't fool enough to believe that, I know," said the miller. "Why, she's no more like you than you're like a warming-pannot so much."
Mr. Rose regarded his friend fixedly. "You ain't got a very nice way o' putting things, Cray," he said, mournfully.
"I'm no flatterer," said the miller; "never was. And you can't please everybody. If I said your daughter took after you I don't s'pose she'd ever speak to me again."
"The worst of it is," said the farmer, disregarding his remark, "she won't settle down. There's young Walter Lomas after her now, and she won't look at him. He's a decent young fellow is Walter, and she's been and named one o' the pigs after him, and the way she mixes them up together is disgraceful."
"If she was my girl she should marry young Walter," said the miller, firmly. "What's wrong with him?"
"She looks higher," replied the other, mysteriously; "she's always reading them romantic books full o' love tales, and she's never tired o' talking of a girl her mother used to know that went on the stage and married a baronet. She goes and sits in the best parlor every afternoon now, and calls it the drawing-room. She'll sit there till she's past the marrying age, and then she'll turn round and blame me."
"She wants a lesson," said Mr. Cray, firmly. "She wants to be taught her position in life, not to go about turning up her nose at young men and naming pigs after them."
Mr. Rose sighed.
"What she wants to understand is that the upper classes wouldn't look at her," pursued the miller.
"It would be easier to make her understand that if they didn't," said the farmer.
"I mean," said Mr. Cray, sternly, "with a view to marriage. What you ought to do is to get somebody staying down here with you pretending to be a lord or a nobleman, and ordering her about and not noticing her good looks at all. Then, while she's upset about that, in comes Walter Lomas to comfort her and be a contrast to the other."
Mr. Rose withdrew his pipe and regarded him open-mouthed.
"Yes; but how" he began.
"And it seems to me," interrupted Mr. Cray, "that I know just the young fellow to do itnephew of my wife's. He was coming to stay a fortnight with us, but you can have him with pleasureme and him don't get on over and above well."
"Perhaps he wouldn't do it," objected the farmer.
"He'd do it like a shot," said Mr. Cray, positively. "It would be fun for us and it 'ud be a lesson for her. If you like, I'll tell him to write to you for lodgings, as he wants to come for a fortnight's fresh air after the fatiguing gayeties of town."
"Fatiguing gayeties of town," repeated the admiring farmer. "Fatiguing"
He sat back in his chair and laughed, and Mr. Cray, delighted at the prospect of getting rid so easily of a tiresome guest, laughed too. Overhead at the open window a third person laughed, but in so quiet and well-bred a fashion that neither of them heard her.
The farmer received a letter a day or two afterwards, and negotiations between Jane Rose on the one side and Lord Fairmount on the other were soon in progress; the farmer's own composition being deemed somewhat crude for such a correspondence.
"I wish he didn't want it kept so secret," said Miss Rose, pondering over the final letter. "I should like to let the Grays and one or two more people know he is staying with us. However, I suppose he must have his own way."
"You must do as he wishes," said her father, using his handkerchief violently.
Jane sighed. "He'll be a little company for me, at any rate," she remarked. "What is the matter, father?"
"Bit of a cold," said the farmer, indistinctly, as he made for the door, still holding his handkerchief to his face. "Been coming on some time."
He put on his hat and went out, and Miss Rose, watching him from the window, was not without fears that the joke might prove too much for a man of his habit. She regarded him thoughtfully, and when he returned at one o'clock to dinner, and encountered instead a violent dust-storm which was raging in the house, she noted with pleasure that his sense of humor was more under control.
"Dinner?" she said, as he strove to squeeze past the furniture which was piled in the hall. "We've got no time to think of dinner, and if we had there's no place for you to eat it. You'd better go in the larder and cut yourself a crust of bread and cheese."
Her father hesitated and glared at the servant, who, with her head bound up in a duster, passed at the double with a broom. Then he walked slowly into the kitchen.
Miss Rose called out something after him.
"Eh?" said her father, coming back hopefully.
"How is your cold, dear?"
The farmer made no reply, and his daughter smiled contentedly as she heard him stamping about in the larder. He made but a poor meal, and then, refusing point-blank to assist Annie in moving the piano, went and smoked a very reflective pipe in the garden.
Lord Fairmount arrived the following day on foot from the station, and after acknowledging the farmer's salute with a distant nod requested him to send a cart for his luggage. He was a tall, good-looking young man, and as he stood in the hall languidly twisting his mustache Miss Rose deliberately decided upon his destruction.
"These your daughters?" he inquired, carelessly, as he followed his host into the parlor.
"One of 'em is, my lord; the other is my servant," replied the farmer.
"She's got your eyes," said his lordship, tapping the astonished Annie under the chin; "your nose too, I think."
"That's my servant," said the farmer, knitting his brows at him.
"Oh, indeed!" said his lordship, airily.
He turned round and regarded Jane, but, although she tried to meet him half-way by elevating her chin a little, his audacity failed him and the words died away on his tongue. A long silence followed, broken only by the ill-suppressed giggles of Annie, who had retired to the kitchen.
"I trust that we shall make your lordship comfortable," said Miss Rose.
"I hope so, my good girl," was the reply. "And now will you show me my room?"
Miss Rose led the way upstairs and threw open the door; Lord Fairmount, pausing on the threshold, gazed at it disparagingly.
"Is this the best room you have?" he inquired, stiffly.
"Oh, no," said Miss Rose, smiling; "father's room is much better than this. Look here."
She threw open another door and, ignoring a gesticulating figure which stood in the hall below, regarded him anxiously. "If you would prefer father's room he would be delighted for you to have it. Delighted."
"Yes, I will have this one," said Lord Fairmount, entering. "Bring me up some hot water, please, and clear these boots and leggings out."
Miss Rose tripped downstairs and, bestowing a witching smile upon her sire, waved away his request for an explanation and hastened into the kitchen, whence Annie shortly afterwards emerged with the water.
It was with something of a shock that the farmer discovered that he had to wait for his dinner while his lordship had luncheon. That meal, under his daughter's management, took a long time, and the joint when it reached him was more than half cold. It was, moreover, quite clear that the aristocracy had not even mastered the rudiments of carving, but preferred instead to box the compass for tit-bits.
He ate his meal in silence, and when it was over sought out his guest to administer a few much-needed stage-directions. Owing, however, to the ubiquity of Jane he wasted nearly the whole of the afternoon before he obtained an opportunity. Even then the interview was short, the farmer having to compress into ten seconds instructions for Lord Fairmount to express a desire to take his meals with the family, and his dinner at the respectable hour of 1 p.m. Instructions as to a change of bedroom were frustrated by the reappearance of Jane.
His lordship went for a walk after that, and coming back with a bored air stood on the hearthrug in the living-room and watched Miss Rose sewing.
"Very dull place," he said at last, in a dissatisfied voice.
"Yes, my lord," said Miss Rose, demurely.
"Fearfully dull," complained his lordship, stifling a yawn. "What I'm to do to amuse myself for a fortnight I'm sure I don't know."
Miss Rose raised her fine eyes and regarded him intently. Many a lesser man would have looked no farther for amusement.
"I'm afraid there is not much to do about here, my lord," she said quietly. "We are very plain folk in these parts."