rising” young man in the city, not making any year less than his clear
twelve hundred. “Now that he isn’t there to make them, his mourning
widow can’t live as she had then, can she?” Mrs. Bundy asked.
Baron was not prepared to say that she could, but he thought of another
way she might live as he sat, the next day, in the train which rattled
him down to Dover. The place, as he approached it, seemed bright and
breezy to him; his roamings had been neither far enough nor frequent
enough to make the cockneyfied coast insipid. Mrs. Bundy had of course
given him the address he needed, and on emerging from the station he was
on the point of asking what direction he should take. His attention
however at this moment was drawn away by the bustle of the departing
boat. He had been long enough shut up in London to be conscious of
refreshment in the mere act of turning his face to Paris. He wandered
off to the pier in company with happier tourists and, leaning on a rail,
watched enviously the preparation, the agitation of foreign travel. It
was for some minutes a foretaste of adventure; but, ah, when was he to
have the very draught? He turned away as he dropped this interrogative
sigh, and in doing so perceived that in another part of the pier two
ladies and a little boy were gathered with something of the same
wistfulness. The little boy indeed happened to look round for a moment,
upon which, with the keenness of the predatory age, he recognised in our
young man a source of pleasures from which he lately had been weaned. He
bounded forward with irrepressible cries of “Geegee!” and Peter lifted
him aloft for an embrace. On putting him down the pilgrim from Jersey
Villas stood confronted with a sensibly severe Miss Teagle, who had
followed her little charge. “What’s the matter with the old woman?” he
asked himself as he offered her a hand which she treated as the merest
detail. Whatever it was, it was (and very properly, on the part of a
loyal _suivante_) the same complaint as that of her employer, to whom,
from a distance, for Mrs. Ryves had not advanced an inch, he flourished
his hat as she stood looking at him with a face that he imagined rather
white. Mrs. Ryves’s response to this salutation was to shift her
position in such a manner as to appear again absorbed in the Calais boat.
Peter Baron, however, kept hold of the child, whom Miss Teagle artfully
endeavoured to wrest from him—a policy in which he was aided by Sidney’s
own rough but instinctive loyalty; and he was thankful for the happy
effect of being dragged by his jubilant friend in the very direction in
which he had tended for so many hours. Mrs. Ryves turned once more as he
came near, and then, from the sweet, strained smile with which she asked
him if he were on his way to France, he saw that if she had been angry at
his having followed her she had quickly got over it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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