Yes, it was the countryside, which brought about dreams without slumber, rubbing all roughness away. Adam who had been in the tropics had never known anything as soporific as this.
But he hadn't come all the way out here, and paid all that horse hire, to admire the scenery. He cleared his throat.
"I asked you a question. I want an answer."
Lord Tillinghast nodded gravely. Though a man who had spent much of his life abroad, engaged in the honorable business of lying for his country, when he spoke it was not in the candied accents of the diplomat. He was unexpectedly straightforward. His voice, though not raised, carried conviction.
"The answer is 'No.' I am not your father."
He rose. Not glancing at his guest, he went to the window, where he stood, bathed in what in those parts passed for sunlight.
"I hope that whatever reason you may have to suspect me, you'll do nothing about it. I hope this for your own sake, Captain. Believe me, you would only make yourself appear ridiculous.
"I am not your father. I'm not anybody's father. I can't be. It, ah, it pains me to talk about this, and I shan't go into details, but you're entitled to know. Captain, that many years ago, before I inherited the title, a serving maid accused me of paternity. I denied this, but the case came to court. I would have settled it quietly, but my father insisted that I fight it out. He feared that half the female servants in the house, even half the women in the village, might start bringing suits if Maybelle was successful with hers. Well, I put up an unanswerable defense. Three distinguished physicians testified that they had examined me and that for reasons which they went into at great length—right there in open court— they were sure that I could not ever father a child. Oh, I won my case! And no doubt it was all very amusing—for everybody except me. I became a byword. Doggerel was written about me, songs were sung. In every taproom for fifty miles around you were bound to hear somebody or other tell some version or other of the story of how the Earl of Tillinghast lost his manhood. It was a boyhood accident, Captain, and sufficiently gruesome. But they didn't know that—wouldn't have cared if they did. They made up fantastic stories. For all I know, they still do.
That's why I've spent so little of my time at my seat, though I dearly love this part of the country. But it doesn't really hurt any more now. When you get as old as I am, Captain, nothing hurts very much. So I've come back."
Standing there at the window, slightly stooped, his hands behind his back, his head bowed, he suggested a saint.
"Now I don't remember your mother. But I can only guess—and I mean this with all respect, Captain—I can only guess that perhaps she named me as your father for purposes of defiance. Maybe that was her answer to a world that had mistreated her. For you understand, Captain, that in these parts to say a child is the son or daughter of the Earl of Tillinghast is the equivalent of saying that you refuse to name the father. Or if somebody else says that, then it's with a sneer. In the old days when a wench got into trouble they used to giggle and say that it must have been the fairies that brought that baby. Nowadays, around here, they say that it must have been the Earl."
Adam wetted his lips.
"You mean, it's a—a sort of joke?"
"Yes, it's a—joke."
Adam rose, patting his back his cuffs, straightening his sword belt. He picked up his tricorne. He bowed.
"You have been extremely kind, sir. Permit me to avow to you that I'm obliged from the bottom of my heart. I sure am."
"Won't you stay a bit, Captain? Have a glass of wine? Or perhaps a cup of this tea they bring all the way from China?"
"Thank you, no, sir. I'm about to start for home."
"Ah? And where is your home, Captain?"
"Newport, sir. In the Colony of Rhode Island."
Under a rat-gray sky the seas were all chuff and spit; and it looked as if a spell of weather was making up; so Adam, though he would have admired to stage a gam, ordered full canvas kept on and no recognition of the pinkie, the fishing boat they had sighted.
The latter, however, refused to be snubbed. She yawed wildly, all but fouling Goodwill's rudder, and the two men aboard of her set up such a shouting and mad windmilling of their arms that Adam at last fell off. The pinkie came alongside.
"What in tarnation's the matter?" he grumped.
He knew both men, Newport men, who of course had recognized the schooner; but he had never before seen them like this, jibbering, jabbering, waving their hands. Abe Moore and Henry Pearson certainly weren't drunk; nor were they in distress—their boat was tight, their faces full. Yet they hopped about like kids who have to go to the head.
A sudden fear flooded Adam.
"Say, nothing's happened to Deborah Selden, has there?"
They stared at him. They couldn't know about that letter he had written to Deborah from London, sending it on ahead. They were not to guess that he had opened his heart, pleading for forgiveness, saying, almost in so many words, that if she'd still have him he would be proud and happy to make her his wife; nor could Henry and Abe know that Adam had been fretting inwardly, worried as he was that Deborah would decide against union with so soiled a sailor.
"What's she got to do with it?"
"To do with what?" Adam said.
They looked around. Everybody was topside—and close at hand.
"Maybe we better go below," muttered Henry.
Mr. Holyoake, recently promoted from bosun, rubbered out his lower lip and caught it between fingers and let it plop back.
"You reckon he's scared?" a hand asked.
Mr. Holyoake shook an indignant head.
"He don't scare easy, that man."
Nevertheless the new mate knew that something was wrong. For some time now the skipper had been looking not morose exactly, nor even sad, but—well, sovther. He'd looked that way all through the run. Lately, the last few days, he had been twitchety—for him.
"Couldn't find a better cabin mate," Mr. Holyoake more than once told the hands. "Thoughtful. Tidy, too. I don't think he's worried about anything. I think it's just that he misses that Mr. Forbes, the man whose job I got, and maybe Bond and young Rellison, too."
An added consideration, Mr. Holyoake had pointed out, might be that hogshead lashed on the afterdeck during the pull up from the islands and unloaded with such care in London. It'd held rum all right—you could hear the gurgle—but it'd held more than that.
"A woman, from what they tell me. A beautiful red-headed woman. He never told me that. But he used to stand by the binnacle there, hour after hour, with his head a little to one side like as if he was listening to something."
A queer way, somebody had commented, to be moving a woman.
Whereupon Mr. Holyoake had snapped in a tone very similar to the tone Adam himself used on that scandalized sexton in the lovely little glade under the willows:
"How else you going to carry her five thousand miles, when she happens to be dead?"
Adam in fact was not depressed. The burying of Maisie had saddened him, but it was a sort of sweet sadness, a gentle melancholy. More sobering, though this, too, was in the nature of a relief from pain and strain, was the news of his birth. He had always assumed that he was a bastard but now he knew that he was only an ordinary bastard, and maybe this was better? No dead man's hands fastened themselves upon him now. He didn't have anything to live up to, except what he'd done for himself. He could join his fellow men on terms of equality.