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I was walking along the cliff track, one afternoon, between Porthlooe and Lanihale church-town, when, a few yards ahead, I heard a man's voice declaiming in monotone some sentences which I could not catch; and rounding the corner, came upon Laquedem and July.
I was fingering the card when the door opened again and admitted a young man in a caped overcoat and tall boots bemired high above the ankles. He halted on the threshold and bowed. "Mr. ?" "Joseph Laquedem," said he in a pleasant voice. "I guess your errand," said I, "though it was a Mr. Isaac Laquedem whom I expected. Your father, perhaps?"
"May I have your hand on that?" "With pleasure," I answered, and, having shaken hands, conducted him to the door. From that day the affection between Joseph Laquedem and July Constantine, and their frequent companionship, were open and avowed. Scandal there was, to be sure; but as it blazed up like straw, so it died down.
She pointed; and well I remember the gesture the very gesture of the hand in the fresco the forefinger extended, the thumb shut within the palm. "The sand . . . he told me . . ." Her eyes were wide and fixed. She spoke, not excitedly at all, but rather as one musing, much as she had answered Laquedem on the morning when he waved the daisy-chain before her.
The vulgar knowledge amounts to little more than this that Laquedem, a young Hebrew of extraordinary commercial gifts, first came to our parish in 1807 and settled here as managing secretary of a privateering company at Porthlooe; that by his aptitude and daring in this and the illicit trade he amassed a respectable fortune, and at length opened a private bank at Porthlooe and issued his own notes; that on August 15, 1810, a forced "run" which, against his custom, he was personally supervising, miscarried, and he met his death by a carbine-shot on the sands of Sheba Cove; and, lastly, that his body was taken up and conveyed away by the girl Julia Constantine, under the fire of the preventive men.
"You may guess, Mr. Laquedem, that as her vicar, and having known her and her affliction all her life, I take something of a fatherly interest in the girl." "And having known her so long, do you not begin to observe some change in her, of late?" "Why, to be sure," said I, "she seems brighter." He nodded. "I have done that; or rather, love has done it." "Be careful, sir!" I cried.
I knew, moreover, that a run of goods was contemplated: and without questions of mine it did not become a parish priest in those days to know too much it had reached my ears that Laquedem was himself in Roscoff bargaining for the freight.
"What do you remember?" Her expression, which for a moment had been thoughtful, wavered and changed into a vague foolish smile. "I can't tell . . . something . . . it was sand, I think . . ." "Who is she?" asked Mr. Laquedem. "Her name is Julia Constantine. Her parents are dead; an aunt looks after her a sister of her mother's." He turned and appeared to be studying the frescoes.
Mr. Laquedem conned all this for some while in silence, holding his chin with finger and thumb. "And it was here you discovered the plaque?" he asked at length. I pointed to the exact spot. "H'm!" he mused, "and that ship must be Greek or Levantine by its rig. Compare the crowns on her masts, too, with that on the plaque . . ." He stepped to the wall and peered into the frescoes.
When he came before the doors with the two burgers, he told them a great deal; but they were mostly stories of events which had happened many hundred years before. Hence the burgers gathered that their companion was Isaac Laquedem, the Jew who had refused to permit our Blessed Lord to rest for a moment at his door-step, and they left him full of terror.
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