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But the evidence was strong enough for me, and on behalf of the barge-builder and a few others I went at once to that west-coast harbour. It was late at night when I arrived, and bewildering with rain, total darkness, and an upheaval of cobbles in by-ways that wandered to no known purpose. But a guide presently brought me to a providential window, and quarters in the Turk's Head.
Her strakes were a patchwork of various kinds of wood, though when she was tarred their diversity would be hidden from all but the searching of the elements. It was astonishing that Pascoe had done so well. It was still more astonishing that he should think it would serve. "I've given him a hand with it," remarked the barge-builder, "an' more advice than the old 'un 'ud take.
The barge-builder, for whom this had now ceased to be a joke, was vastly troubled by the complete disappearance of his neighbour, and shook his head over it. Then a few lines in an evening paper, from a port on the Devon coast, looked promising, though what they wished to convey was not quite clear, for it was a humorous paragraph.
And even at barge-builder Hansen's, where he got a lodging up in the tool-loft, and his food on the days when he got a chance of doing something useful, they wanted to know now why he had left his trade. As if that were any business of theirs! So Nikolai suddenly disappeared. On the quay, the harbour and the steamers, a fellow with his hands could surely get on just as well as any other.
"He turns out sea-going vessels," said Theodor, casting a contemptuous look at Timar. "He is not merely a barge-builder and for that matter his name is Signor Scaramelli." Timar was silent. He did not care to let out that he himself was having a large vessel built for the ocean trade by Scaramelli. "I am just rolling in money!" bragged Theodor. "Millions and millions pass through my hands.
"Yes," continued the barge-builder, luxuriating in it, "and I've often wondered what name he'd give her, and he done it this morning, in gold leaf. D'yer remember what she looked like? All right. Well, 'er name is the Heart's Desire, and her skipper will be back soon, if she don't fall apart too far off." Her skipper was not back soon, nor that day. We had no news of him the next day.
I had forgotten long ago, though but half Pascoe's age, what my ship was to be like, when I got her at last. Knowing she would never be seen at her moorings, I had, in a manner of speaking, posted her as a missing ship. One day I met at his door the barge-builder into whose cavernous loft I had stumbled on my first visit to Pascoe. He said it was a fine afternoon.
He pulled the tarpaulin back, and disclosed a vessel whose hull was nearing completion. I did not ask if it was Pascoe's work. It was such an amusing and pathetic surprise, that, with the barge-builder's leering face turned to me waiting for my guess, there was no need to answer. "He reckons," said the barge-builder, "that he can do a bit of cruising about the mouth of the Thames in that.
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