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Updated: June 27, 2025
Everything was put off in that way, and everything was being prepared likewise for to-morrow. There was a boxful of packets of various flower-seeds to choose from, for the front garden. "He will doubtless let you have your say about that, my dear," Captain Hagberd intimated to her across the railing. Miss Bessie's head remained bowed over her work. She had heard all this so many times.
"Owns both them rabbit-hutches, does he?" commented young Hagberd, scornfully; "just the thing he would be proud of. Can you tell me who's that chap coming to-morrow? You must know something of it. I tell you, it's a swindle on the old man nothing else."
When Captain Hagberd vaunted the necessity and propriety of a home and the delights of one's own fireside, she smiled a little, with her lips only. Her home delights had been confined to the nursing of her father during the ten best years of her life. A bestial roaring coming out of an upstairs window would interrupt their talk.
And, if not too tired with her drudgery, or worried beyond endurance by her father, she would laugh at him with a blush, and say: "That's all right, Captain Hagberd; I am not impatient." "Well, my dear, you haven't long to wait now," he would answer with a sudden bashfulness, and looking uneasily, as though he had suspected that there was something wrong somewhere.
Every mental state, even madness, has its equilibrium based upon self-esteem. Its disturbance causes unhappiness; and Captain Hagberd lived amongst a scheme of settled notions which it pained him to feel disturbed by people's grins. Yes, people's grins were awful. They hinted at something wrong: but what? He could not tell; and that stranger was obviously grinning had come on purpose to grin.
A man coming from the end of the street with a firm leisurely step passed on, but seemed to have caught sight of Captain Hagberd, because he turned back a pace or two. A cold white light lingered in the western sky. The man leaned over the gate in an interested manner. "You must be Captain Hagberd," he said, with easy assurance.
What was known of Captain Hagberd in the little seaport of Colebrook was not exactly in his favour. He did not belong to the place. He had come to settle there under circumstances not at all mysterious he used to be very communicative about them at the time but extremely morbid and unreasonable.
But she only said in self-mockery, and speaking to him as though he had been sane, "Why, Captain Hagberd, your son may not even want to look at me." He flung his head back and laughed his throaty affected cackle of anger. "What! That boy? Not want to look at the only sensible girl for miles around? What do you think I am here for, my dear my dear my dear?... What? You wait. You just wait.
Don't you have anything to do with him, Bessie. Bessie, I say!" They stood as if dumb. The old man fidgeted and mumbled to himself at the window. Suddenly he cried, piercingly: "Bessie I see you. I'll tell Harry." She made a movement as if to run away, but stopped and raised her hands to her temples. Young Hagberd, shadowy and big, stirred no more than a man of bronze.
"I have never been further than eighty fathoms from the land," was one of his boasts. Bessie Carvil heard all these things. In front of their cottage grew an under-sized ash; and on summer afternoons she would bring out a chair on the grass-plot and sit down with her sewing. Captain Hagberd, in his canvas suit, leaned on a spade. He dug every day in his front plot.
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