The Grey Lady Part 10

But Eve was not thinking of Lloseta; she was thinking of the Casa d'Erraha.

"My father did not speak to me of his affairs," she said. "He was naturally rather reserved, and--and it was very sudden."

"Yes. So I learnt. That indeed is my excuse for intruding myself upon your notice at this time. I surmised that my poor friend's affairs had been left in some confusion. He was too thorough a gentleman to be competent in affairs. I thought that perhaps my small influence and my diminutive knowledge of Majorcan law--the Roman law, in point of fact--might be of some use to you."

"Thank you," she answered; "I think we settled everything before we left the island, although we did not see Senor Pena, your lawyer.

I--the Casa d'Erraha belongs to you!" she added, suddenly descending to feminine reiteration.

"Prove it," said the Count quietly.

"I cannot do that."

He shrugged his shoulders with a smile.

"Then," he said, "I am afraid you cannot shift your responsibility to my shoulders."

The girl looked at him with puzzled young eyes. He stood before her, dignified, eminently worthy of the great name he bore--a solitary, dark-eyed, inscrutable man, whose whole being subtly suggested hopelessness and an empty life. She shook her head.

"But I cannot accept the Casa d'Erraha on those terms."

The Count drew forward a chair and sat down.

"Listen," he said, with an explanatory forefinger upheld. "Three generations ago two men made a verbal agreement in respect to the estate of the Val d'Erraha. To-day no one knows what that agreement was. It may have been the ordinary 'rotas' of Minorca. It may not.

In those days the English held Minorca; my ancestor may therefore have been indebted to your great-grandfather, for we have some small estates in Minorca. You know what the islands are to-day. They are two hundred years behind Northern Europe. What must they have been a hundred and twenty years ago? We have no means of finding out what pa.s.sed between your great-grandfather and my grandfather. We only know that three generations of Challoners have lived in the Casa d'Erraha, paying to the Counts of Lloseta a certain proportion of the product of the estate. I do not mind telling you that the smallness of that proportion does away with the argument that the agreement was the ordinary 'rotas' of the Baleares. We know nothing--we can prove nothing. If you claimed the estate I might possibly wrest it from you--not by proof, but merely because the insular prejudice against a foreigner would militate against you in a Majorcan court of law. I cannot legally force you to hold the estate of the Val d'Erraha. I can only ask you as the daughter of one of my best friends to accept the benefit of a very small doubt."

Eve hesitated. What woman would not?

Captain Bontnor set down his cup very gravely on the table.

"I don't rightly understand," he said st.u.r.dily, "this 'rotas'

business. But it seems to me pretty plain that the estate never belonged to my late brother-in-law. Now what I say is, if the place belongs by right to Miss Challoner she'll take it. If it don't; well, then it don't, and she can't accept it as a present from anybody. Much obliged to you all the same."

The Count laughed pleasantly.

"My dear sir, it is not a present."

The Captain stuffed his hands very deeply into his pockets.

"Then it's worse--it's charity. And she has no need of that. Thank ye all the same," he replied.

He stared straight in front of him with a vague and rather painful suggestion of incapability that sometimes came over him. He was wondering whether he was doing right in this matter.

"If," he added, half to himself, as a sort of afterthought on the crying question of ways and means--"if it comes to that, I can go to sea again. There's plenty would be ready to give me a ship."

The Count was still smiling.

"There is no question," he said, "of charity. What has Miss Challoner done that I should offer her that? I am in ignorance as to her affairs. I do not know the extent of her income."

"As far as we can make out," said Eve gently, "there is nothing.

But I can work. I thought that my knowledge of Spanish might enable me to make a living."

"No," said Captain Bontnor, "I'm d--- I mean I should not like you to go governessing, my dear."

The Count was apparently reflecting.

"I have a compromise to propose," he said, addressing himself to Eve. "If we place the property in the hands of a third person--you know the value of land in Majorca--to farm and tend; if at the end of each year the profits be divided between us?"

But Eve's suspicions were aroused, and her woman's instinct took her further than did Captain Bontnor's st.u.r.dy sense of right and wrong.

"I am afraid," she said, rising from her chair, "that I must refuse.

I--I think I understand why papa always spoke of you as he did. I am very grateful to you. I know now that you have been trying to give me D'Erraha. It was a generous thing to do--a most generous thing. I think people would hardly believe me if I told them. I can only thank you; for I have no possible means of proving to you how deeply I feel it. Somehow"--she paused, with tears and a sad little smile in her eyes--"somehow it is not the gift that I appreciate so much as--as your way of trying to give it."

The Spaniard spread out his two hands in deprecation.

"My child," he murmured gently, "I have not another word to say."

CHAPTER VIII. THE DEAL.

Oh, the little more, and how much it is!

And the little less, and what worlds away!

A howling gale of wind from the south-east, and driving snow and darkness. The light of Cap Grisnez struggling out over the blackness of the Channel, and the two Foreland lights twinkling feebly from their snow-clad heights. A night to turn in one's bed with a sleepy word of thanksgiving that one has a bed to turn in, and no pressing need to turn out of it.

The smaller fry of Channel shipping have crept into Dungeness or the Downs. Some of them have gone to the bottom. Two of them are breaking up on the Goodwins.

The Croonah Indian liner is pounding into it all, with white decks and whistling shrouds. The pa.s.sengers are below in their berths.

Some of them--and not only the ladies--are sending up little shamefaced supplications to One who watches over the traveller in all places and at all times.

And on the bridge of the Croonah a man all eyes and stern resolve and maritime instinct. A man clad in his thickest clothes, and over all of them his black oilskins. A man with three hundred lives depending upon his keen eyes, his knowledge, and his judgment. A man whose name is Luke FitzHenry.

The captain has gone below for a few minutes to thaw, leaving the ship to FitzHenry. He does it with an easy conscience--as easy, that is, as the maritime conscience can well be in a gale of wind, with the Foreland lights ahead and infinite possibilities all around. The captain drinks his whisky and hot water with a certain slow appreciation of the merits of that reprehensible solution, and glances at the aneroid barometer on the bulkhead of his cabin.

Overhead, on the spidery bridge, far up in the howling night, Luke FitzHenry, returning from the enervating tropics, stares sternly into the night, heedless of the elemental warfare. For Luke FitzHenry has a grudge against the world, and people who have that take a certain pleasure in evil weather.

"The finest sailor that ever stepped," reflects the captain of his second officer--and he no mean mariner himself.

The Croonah had groped her way up Channel through a snowstorm of three days' duration, and the brunt of it had fallen by right of seniority on the captain and his second officer. Luke FitzHenry was indefatigable, and, better still, he was without enthusiasm. Here was the steady, unflinching combativeness which alone can master the elements. Here was the true genius of the sea.

With his craft at his fingers' ends, Luke had that instinct of navigation by which some men seem to find their way upon the trackless waters. There are sailors who are no navigators just as there are hunting men who cannot ride. There are navigators who will steer you from London to Petersburg without taking a sight, from the Thames to the Suez Ca.n.a.l without looking at their s.e.xtant.

Such a sailor as this was Luke FitzHenry. Perfectly trained, he a.s.similated each item of experience with an insatiable greed for knowledge--and it was all maritime knowledge. He was a sailor and nothing else. But it is already something--as they say in France-- to be a good sailor.

Luke FitzHenry was a man of middle height, st.u.r.dy, with broad shoulders and a slow step. His clean-shaven face was a long oval, with pessimistic, brooding eyes--eyes that saw everything except the small modic.u.m of good which is in all human things, and to this they were persistently blind. Taking into consideration the small, set mouth, it was eminently a pugnacious face--a face that might easily degenerate to the coa.r.s.eness of pa.s.sion in the trough of a losing fight. But, fortunately, Luke's lines were cast upon the great waters, and he who fights the sea must learn to conquer, not by pa.s.sionate effort, but by consistent, cool resolve. Those who worked with him feared him, and in so doing learnt the habit of his ways. The steersman, with one eye on the binnacle, knew always where to find him with the other; for Luke hardly moved during his entire watch on deck. He took his station at the starboard end of the narrow bridge when he came on duty, and from that spot he rarely moved. These little things betray a man, if one only has the patience to piece them together.

Those who go down to the sea in ships, and even those who take their pleasure on the great water, know the relative merits of the man who goes to his post and stays there, and of him who is all over the ship and restless.

Luke was standing now like a statue--black and gleaming amid the universal grey of the winter night, and his deep eyes, cat-like, pierced the surrounding gloom.