United States or Isle of Man ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He advertised still in the Sunday papers for Harry Hagberd. These sheets were read in foreign parts to the end of the world, he informed Bessie. At the same time he seemed to think that his son was in England so near to Colebrook that he would of course turn up "to-morrow."
Come back home a day too soon." One of the windows upstairs ran up. "A grinning, information fellow," said the voice of old Hagberd, up in the darkness. "Don't you have anything to do with him. It will spoil everything." She heard Harry Hagberd say, "Hallo, dad," then a clanging clatter. The window rumbled down, and he stood before her again. "It's just like old times.
Her hands would be red with the bit of washing she had done, but her forearms were white and shapely, and she would look at her father's landlord in silence in an informed silence which had an air of knowledge, expectation and desire. "It rots the wood," repeated Captain Hagberd. "It is the only unthrifty, careless habit I know in you. Why don't you have a clothes line out in your back yard?"
Some joker had written to him about a seafaring man with some such name who was supposed to be hanging about some girl or other, either in Colebrook or in the neighbourhood. "Funny, ain't it?" The old chap had been advertising in the London papers for Harry Hagberd, and offering rewards for any sort of likely information.
Noticing a stranger listening to him with a vacant grin, he explained, stretching out his legs cynically, that this queer old Hagberd, a retired coasting-skipper, was waiting for the return of a son of his. The boy had been driven away from home, he shouldn't wonder; had run away to sea and had never been heard of since. Put to rest in Davy Jones's locker this many a day, as likely as not.
The old man spun round, pulling out his spade, startled by the strange voice. "Yes, I am," he answered nervously. The other, smiling straight at him, uttered very slowly: "You've been advertising for your son, I believe?" "My son Harry," mumbled Captain Hagberd, off his guard for once. "He's coming home tomorrow." "The devil he is!"
"I could give you some real information about your son the very latest tip, if you care to hear." "No," shouted Hagberd. He began to pace wildly to and fro, he shouldered his spade, he gesticulated with his other arm. "Here's a fellow a grinning fellow, who says there's something wrong. I've got more information than you're aware of. I've all the information I want.
He had made himself helpless beyond his affliction, to enslave her better. She stood still for a moment, setting her teeth in the dusk, then turned and walked slowly indoors. Captain Hagberd went back to his spade. The shouting in Carvil's cottage stopped, and after a while the window of the parlour downstairs was lit up.
Their brown nets, like the cobwebs of gigantic spiders, lay on the shabby grass of the slope; and, looking up from the end of the street, the people of the town would recognise the two Carvils by the creeping slowness of their gait. Captain Hagberd, pottering aimlessly about his cottages, would raise his head to see how they got on in their promenade.
Not even the dying echo of a footstep. Nothing. The thundering of the surf, the voice of the restless sea itself, seemed stopped. There was not a sound no whisper of life, as though she were alone and lost in that stony country of which she had heard, where madmen go looking for gold and spurn the find. Captain Hagberd, inside his dark house, had kept on the alert.
Word Of The Day