No Name by Wilkie Collins (good books for 7th graders TXT) 📕

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 flagstaff 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 today. 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