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And when I turned to look at Torode the dumb misery in his eyes assured me in my own mind that it was so, for I had seen just that look in Krok's eyes many a time. Another whole week I waited, visiting Krok three times in all, and the last time finding him living quite contentedly in the finished house.
Then we turned to the south-west and made for Jersey. As soon as it was light I saw Krok's eyes dwelling on our passenger with a very natural curiosity. Torode was unknown to him as to most of us, but there was a whole world of enquiry in his face as he sat looking down on the unconscious face below studying it, pondering it, catching, I thought, at times half glimpses of the past in it.
Of Libuša's sisters, Kazi and Teta, nothing but their names is known even in legend; they passed into oblivion on Krok's demise, for he ordained that Libuša, his youngest daughter, should succeed him.
At first I was but a dull scholar, and the letters had to be dinned into my careless little head many times before they stuck there, and anything was sufficient to draw me from my task, a louder blast outside than usual, or the sight of Krok's nimble fingers, or of my grandfather's deep absorption, which at that time I could not at all understand, and which seemed to me extraordinary, and made me think of old Mother Mauger, who was said to be a witch, and who lost herself staring into her fire just as my grandfather did into his books.
And after that, boy as I was, and as wild and thoughtless as most, I do not think I ever wounded Krok's soul again, for it was like striking a faithful dog or a horse that was doing his best. But better times came to Krok, at all events when my mother began to teach me my letters.
Well do I remember the puzzlement in old Krok's face when the mischief that dwells in every boy set me to changing the proper order of his stones, and the eagerness with which he awaited the evening lesson to compare the new wrong order of things with his recollections of the original correct one, and then the mild look of reproachful enquiry he would turn upon me.
And so the yellow cockleshell became Carette's golden bridge, and thereafter her comings and goings knew no bounds but her own wilful will and the states of the tides and the weather. Krok's ideas in the matter of seigneurial rights of flotsam and jetsam were by no means as strict as his master's, especially where Carette was concerned. In his mute, dog-like way he worshipped Carette.
He was very intelligent and quick of hearing, but dumb, and it was said that he had been captured by Algerine pirates when a boy and had his tongue cut out by them. This, however, I was in a position to contradict, for I had once got a glimpse of Krok's tongue and so knew that he had one, though his face was so covered with hair that one might have doubted almost if he even had a mouth.
And once and again Carette fell on earlier times still, and we were boy and girl together under the Autelets and Tintageu, or swimming in Havre Gosselin, and trembling through the Gouliot caves behind Krok's tapping stick. And we talked of Aunt Jeanne's party, and our Riding Day, and Black Boy, and Gray Robin. And she told me much of the Miss Maugers, and their school, and her school-fellows.
Krok knew it all like a book, only better; for actual books were of late acquaintance with him, and these other things he had studied, in his way, for half his life. In the hardest working life there are always off times, and Krok's Sundays, outside the simple necessities of farm life, had always been his own.
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