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Updated: May 25, 2025
Miriam knew that he had not written. Like him, she knew that an end of some sort must soon come. And the end came an hour later. Some day, Barebone knew, Dormer Colville would arrive. Every morning he half looked for him on the sea-wall, between "The Black Sailor" and the rectory garden. Any evening, he was well aware, the smiling face might greet him in the lamp-lit drawing-room.
Loo Barebone laughed with an easy gaiety, which seemed infectious, though Marie did not join in it, but stood scowling in the doorway. "Yes," he said, "you have described them exactly. I know a hundred who are like great trees. Many are so, but they are kind and still like trees the English, when you know them, mademoiselle." "They?" she said, with her prettily arched eyebrows raised high.
At sea, life is so far simpler than in towns that there are only two ways: the right and the wrong. In the devious paths of a pavement-ridden man there are a hundred byways: there is the long, long lane of many turnings called Compromise. Loo Barebone had turned into this lane one night at the Hotel Gemosac, in the Ruelle St. Jacob, and had wandered there ever since.
Captain Clubbe had taught him the two ways of seamanship effectively enough. But the education fell short of the necessities of this crisis. Moreover, Barebone had in his veins blood of a race which had fallen to low estate through Compromise and Delay.
"So you need not pretend any more, monsieur," she said, seeing that Barebone was wise enough to keep silence. "I do not know who you are, mon ami," she went on, in a little burst of confidence; "and, as I told you just now, I do not care. And, as to that other matter, there is no ill-will. I only permit myself to wonder, sometimes, if she is pretty. That is feminine, I suppose.
On a long tack or running before the wind the bigger boat was immeasurably superior. Barebone had but one chance to make short tacks and he knew it. The Captain knew it also, and no landsman would have possessed the knowledge. He was trying to run the boat down now. Barebone might succeed in getting far enough away to be lost in the fog.
John Turner, laboriously putting two small numerals together, after his manner, had concluded that Loo Barebone was the reason. Even banking may, it seems, be carried on without the loss of all human weakness, especially if the banker be of middle age, unmarried, and deprived by an unromantic superfluity of adipose tissue of the possibility of living through a romance of his own.
Barebone knew it to be the sound of a caulker's hammer in the Government repairing yard on the south side. They were drifting past the mouth of the Harwich River. The leadsman called out a depth which Loo could have told without the help of line or lead. For he had served a long apprenticeship on these coasts under a captain second to none in the North Sea.
"One is not a Barebone or a Bourbon for nothing," observed Colville, in an aside to himself. "Gad! I wish I could say that I should not be afraid myself under similar circumstances. My heart was in my mouth, I can tell you, in that cabin when de Gemosac blurted it all out. It came suddenly at the end, and well! it rather hit one in the wind. And, as I say, one is not a Bourbon for nothing.
"So am I," answered Colville, with a side glance toward Barebone, a mere flicker of the eyelids. "Not unless it is a Napoleon of that ilk." "And he is not," completed Colville. "But " the Scotchman paused, for a waiter came at this moment to tell him that his dinner was ready at a table nearer to the fire.
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