30 DICKENSIAN CHRISTMAS CLASSICS: Complete Christmas Novels & Tales (Illustrated Edition). Charles Dickens

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      “Did any man ever say she warn’t beautiful?” retorted the captain. “If so, go and lick him.”

      The young man laughed fretfully in spite of himself, and said—

      “It’s not that, it’s not that.”

      “Wa’al, then, what is it?” said the captain in a more soothing tone.

      The young fisherman mournfully composed himself to tell the captain what it was, and began: “We were to have been married next Monday week——”

      “Were to have been!” interrupted Captain Jorgan. “And are to be? Hey?”

      Young Raybrock shook his head, and traced out with his forefinger the words, “poor father’s five hundred pounds,” in the written paper.

      “Go along,” said the captain. “Five hundred pounds? Yes?”

      “That sum of money,” pursued the young fisherman, entering with the greatest earnestness on his demonstration, while the captain eyed him with equal earnestness, “was all my late father possessed. When he died, he owed no man more than he left means to pay, but he had been able to lay by only five hundred pounds.”

      “Five hundred pounds,” repeated the captain. “Yes?”

      “In his lifetime, years before, he had expressly laid the money aside to leave to my mother,—like to settle upon her, if I make myself understood.”

      “Yes?”

      “He had risked it once—my father put down in writing at that time, respecting the money—and was resolved never to risk it again.”

      “Not a spec'lator,” said the captain. “My country wouldn’t have suited him. Yes?”

      “My mother has never touched the money till now. And now it was to have been laid out, this very next week, in buying me a handsome share in our neighbouring fishery here, to settle me in life with Kitty.”

      The captain’s face fell, and he passed and repassed his sun-browned right hand over his thin hair, in a discomfited manner.

      “Kitty’s father has no more than enough to live on, even in the sparing way in which we live about here. He is a kind of bailiff or steward of manor rights here, and they are not much, and it is but a poor little office. He was better off once, and Kitty must never marry to mere drudgery and hard living.”

      The captain still sat stroking his thin hair, and looking at the young fisherman.

      “I am as certain that my father had no knowledge that any one was wronged as to this money, or that any restitution ought to be made, as I am certain that the sun now shines. But, after this solemn warning from my brother’s grave in the sea, that the money is Stolen Money,” said Young Raybrock, forcing himself to the utterance of the words, “can I doubt it? Can I touch it?”

      “About not doubting, I ain’t so sure,” observed the captain; “but about not touching—no—I don’t think you can.”

      “See then,” said Young Raybrock, “why I am so grieved. Think of Kitty. Think what I have got to tell her!”

      His heart quite failed him again when he had come round to that, and he once more beat his sea-boot softly on the floor. But not for long; he soon began again, in a quietly resolute tone.

      “However! Enough of that! You spoke some brave words to me just now, Captain Jorgan, and they shall not be spoken in vain. I have got to do something. What I have got to do, before all other things, is to trace out the meaning of this paper, for the sake of the Good Name that has no one else to put it right. And still for the sake of the Good Name, and my father’s memory, not a word of this writing must be breathed to my mother, or to Kitty, or to any human creature. You agree in this?”

      “I don’t know what they’ll think of us below,” said the captain, “but for certain I can’t oppose it. Now, as to tracing. How will you do?”

      They both, as by consent, bent over the paper again, and again carefully puzzled out the whole of the writing.

      “I make out that this would stand, if all the writing was here, ‘Inquire among the old men living there, for’—some one. Most like, you’ll go to this village named here?” said the captain, musing, with his finger on the name.

      “Yes! And Mr. Tregarthen is a Cornishman, and—to be sure!—comes from Lanrean.”

      “Does he?” said the captain quietly. “As I ain’t acquainted with him, who may he be?”

      “Mr. Tregarthen is Kitty’s father.”

      “Ay, ay!” cried the captain. “Now you speak! Tregarthen knows this village of Lanrean, then?”

      “Beyond all doubt he does. I have often heard him mention it, as being his native place. He knows it well.”

      “Stop half a moment,” said the captain. “We want a name here. You could ask Tregarthen (or if you couldn’t I could) what names of old men he remembers in his time in those diggings? Hey?”

      “I can go straight to his cottage, and ask him now.”

      “Take me with you,” said the captain, rising in a solid way that had a most comfortable reliability in it, “and just a word more first. I have knocked about harder than you, and have got along further than you. I have had, all my sea-going life long, to keep my wits polished bright with acid and friction, like the brass cases of the ship’s instruments. I’ll keep you company on this expedition. Now you don’t live by talking any more than I do. Clench that hand of yours in this hand of mine, and that’s a speech on both sides.”

      Captain Jorgan took command of the expedition with that hearty shake. He at once refolded the paper exactly as before, replaced it in the bottle, put the stopper in, put the oilskin over the stopper, confided the whole to Young Raybrock’s keeping, and led the way down-stairs.

      But it was harder navigation below-stairs than above. The instant they set foot in the parlour the quick, womanly eye detected that there was something wrong. Kitty exclaimed, frightened, as she ran to her lover’s side, “Alfred! What’s the matter?” Mrs. Raybrock cried out to the captain, “Gracious! what have you done to my son to change him like this all in a minute?” And the young widow—who was there with her work upon her arm—was at first so agitated that she frightened the little girl she held in her hand, who hid her face in her mother’s skirts and screamed. The captain, conscious of being held responsible for this domestic change, contemplated it with quite a guilty expression of countenance, and looked to the young fisherman to come to his rescue.

      “Kitty, darling,” said Young Raybrock, “Kitty, dearest love, I must go away to Lanrean, and I don’t know where else or how much further, this very day. Worse than that—our marriage, Kitty, must be put off, and I don’t know for how long.”

      Kitty stared at him, in doubt and wonder and in anger, and pushed him from her with her hand.

      “Put off?” cried Mrs. Raybrock. “The marriage put off? And you going to Lanrean! Why, in the name of the dear Lord?”

      “Mother dear, СКАЧАТЬ