Page:'Twixt land and sea - tales (IA twixtlandseatale00conr).pdf/75

 slowly upon me as if in contemptuous provocation, only to be averted next moment with an exasperating indifference.

Of course the news of my assiduity had spread all over the little town. I noticed a change in the manner of my acquaintances and even something different in the nods of the other captains, when meeting them at the landing-steps or in the offices where business called me. The old-maidish head clerk treated me with distant punctiliousness and, as it were, gathered his skirts round him for fear of contamination. It seemed to me that the very niggers on the quays turned to look after me as I passed; and as to Jacobus’s boat-man his “Good-night, sah!” when he put me on board was no longer merely cordialit had a familiar, confidential sound as though we had been partners in some villainy.

My friend S the elder passed me on the other side of the street with a wave of the hand and an ironic smile. The younger brother, the one they had married to an elderly shrew, he, on the strength of an older friendship and as if paying a debt of gratitude, took the liberty to utter a word of warning.

“You're doing yourself no good by your choice of friends, my dear chap,” he said with infantile gravity.

As I knew that the meeting of the brothers Jacobus was the subject of excited comment in the whole of the sugary Pearl of the Ocean I wanted to know why I was blamed.

“I have been the occasion of a move which may end in a reconciliation surely desirable from the point of view of the proprieties—don’t you know?”