No Name

The tall man who had passed Captain Wragge in the dark proceeded rapidly along the public walk, struck off across a little waste patch of ground, and entered the open door of the Aldborough Hotel. The light in the passage, falling full on his face as he passed it, proved the truth of Captain Wragge’s surmise, and showed the stranger to be Mr. Kirke, of the merchant service.

Meeting the landlord in the passage, Mr. Kirke nodded to him with the familiarity of an old customer. “Have you got the paper?” he asked; “I want to look at the visitors’ list.”

“I have got it in my room, sir,” said the landlord, leading the way into a parlor at the back of the house. “Are there any friends of yours staying here, do you think?”

Without replying, the seaman turned to the list as soon as the newspaper was placed in his hand, and ran his finger down it, name by name. The finger suddenly stopped at this line: “Sea-view Cottage; Mr. Noel Vanstone.” Kirke of the merchant-service repeated the name to himself, and put down the paper thoughtfully.

“Have you found anybody you know, captain?” asked the landlord.

“I have found a name I know—a name my father used often to speak of in his time. Is this Mr. Vanstone a family man? Do you know if there is a young lady in the house?”

“I can’t say, captain. My wife will be here directly; she is sure to know. It must have been some time ago, if your father knew this Mr. Vanstone?”

“It was some time ago. My father knew a subaltern officer of that name when he was with his regiment in Canada. It would be curious if the person here turned out to be the same man, and if that young lady was his daughter.”

“Excuse me, captain—but the young lady seems to hang a little on your mind,” said the landlord, with a pleasant smile.

Mr. Kirke looked as if the form which his host’s good-humor had just taken was not quite to his mind. He returned abruptly to the subaltern officer and the regiment in Canada. “That poor fellow’s story was as miserable a one as ever I heard,” he said, looking back again absently at the visitors’ list.

“Would there be any harm in telling it, sir?” asked the landlord. “Miserable or not, a story’s a story, when you know it to be true.”

Mr. Kirke hesitated. “I hardly think I should be doing right to tell it,” he said. “If this man, or any relations of his, are still alive, it is not a story they might like strangers to know. All I can tell you is, that my father was the salvation of that young officer under very dreadful circumstances. They parted in Canada. My father remained with his regiment; the young officer sold out and returned to England, and from that moment they lost sight of each other. It would be curious if this Vanstone here was the same man. It would be curious—”

He suddenly checked himself just as another reference to “the young lady” was on the point of passing his lips. At the same moment the landlord’s wife came in, and Mr. Kirke at once transferred his inquiries to the higher authority in the house.

“Do you know anything of this Mr. Vanstone who is down here on the visitors’ list?” asked the sailor. “Is he an old man?”

“He’s a miserable little creature to look at,” replied the landlady; “but he’s not old, captain.”

“Then he’s not the man I mean. Perhaps he is the man’s son? Has he got any ladies with him?”

The landlady tossed her head, and pursed up her lips disparagingly.

“He has a housekeeper with him,” she said. “A middle-aged person—not one of my sort. I dare say I’m wrong—but I don’t like a dressy woman in her station of life.”

Mr. Kirke began to look puzzled. “I must have made some mistake about the house,” he said. “Surely there’s a lawn cut octagon-shape at Sea-view Cottage, and a white flag-staff in the middle of the gravel-walk?”

“That’s not Sea-view, sir! It’s North Shingles you’re talking of. Mr. Bygrave’s. His wife and his niece came here by the coach to-day. His wife’s tall enough to be put in a show, and the worst-dressed woman I ever set eyes on. But Miss Bygrave is worth looking at, if I may venture to say so. She’s the finest girl, to my mind, we’ve had at Aldborough for many a long day. I wonder who they are! Do you know the name, captain?”

“No,” said Mr. Kirke, with a shade of disappointment on his dark, weather-beaten face; “I never heard the name before.”

After replying in those words, he rose to take his leave. The landlord vainly invited him to drink a parting glass; the landlady vainly pressed him to stay another ten minutes and try a cup of tea. He only replied that his sister expected him, and that he must return to the parsonage immediately.

On leaving the hotel Mr. Kirke set his face westward, and walked inland along the highroad as fast as the darkness would let him.

“Bygrave?” he thought to himself. “Now I know her name, how much am I the wiser for it! If it had been Vanstone, my father’s son might have had a chance of making acquaintance with her.” He stopped, and looked back in the direction of Aldborough. “What a fool I am!” he burst out suddenly, striking his stick on the ground. “I was forty last birthday.” He turned and went on again faster than ever—his head down; his resolute black eyes searching the darkness on the land as they had searched it many a time on the sea from the deck of his ship.

After more than an hour’s walking he reached a village, with a primitive little church and parsonage nestled together in a hollow. He entered the house by the back way, and found his sister, the clergyman’s wife, sitting alone over her work in the parlor.

“Where is your husband, Lizzie?” he asked, taking a chair in a corner.

“William has gone out to see a sick person. He had just time enough before he went,” she added, with a smile, “to tell me about the young lady; and he declares he will never trust himself at Aldborough with you again until you are a steady, married man.” She stopped, and looked at her brother more attentively than she had looked at him yet. “Robert!” she said, laying aside her work, and suddenly crossing the room to him. “You look anxious, you look distressed. William only laughed about your meeting with the young lady. Is it serious? Tell me; what is she like?”

He turned his head away at the question.

She took a stool at his feet, and persisted in looking up at him. “Is it serious, Robert?” she repeated, softly.

Kirke’s weather-beaten face was accustomed to no concealments—it answered for him before he spoke a word. “Don’t tell your husband till I am gone,” he said, with a roughness quite new in his sister’s experience of him. “I know I only deserve to be laughed at; but it hurts me, for all that.”

“Hurts you?” she repeated, in astonishment.

“You can’t think me half such a fool, Lizzie, as I think myself,” pursued Kirke, bitterly. “A man at my age ought to know better. I didn’t set eyes on her for as much as a minute altogether; and there I have been hanging about the place till after nightfall on the chance of seeing her again—skulking, I should have called it, if I had found one of my men doing what I have been doing myself. I believe I’m bewitched. She’s a mere girl, Lizzie—I doubt if she’s out of her teens—I’m old enough to be her father. It’s all one; she stops in my mind in spite of me. I’ve had her face looking at me, through the pitch darkness, every step of the way to this house; and it’s looking at me now—as plain as I see yours, and plainer.”

He rose impatiently, and began to walk backward and forward in the room. His sister looked after him, with surprise as well as sympathy expressed in her face. From his boyhood upward she had always been accustomed to see him master of himself. Years since, in the failing fortunes of the family, he had been their example and their support. She had heard of him in the desperate emergencies of a life at sea, when hundreds of his fellow-creatures had looked to his steady self-possession for rescue from close-threatening death—and had not looked in vain. Never, in all her life before, had his sister seen the balance of that calm and equal mind lost as she saw it lost now.

“How can you talk so unreasonably about your age and yourself?” she said. “There is not a woman alive, Robert, who is good enough for you. What is her name?”

“Bygrave. Do you know it?”

“No. But I might soon make acquaintance with her. If we only had a little time before us; if I could only get to Aldborough and see her—but you are going away to-morrow; your ship sails at the end of the week.”

“Thank God for that!” said Kirke, fervently.

“Are you glad to be going away?” she asked, more and more amazed at him.