The short afternoon was drawing to a close when young Johnny Eyre came sailing in from Loch Fyne, himself and a boy of ten or twelve managing that crank little boat with its top-heavy sails. "Are you at work yet, Lavender?" he said. "I never saw such a beggar. It's getting quite dark."
"What sort of luncheon did Newstead give you, Johnny?"
"Oh, something worth going for, I can tell you. You want to live in Tarbert for a month or two to find out the value of decent cooking and good wine. He was awfully surprised when I described this place to him. He wouldn't believe you were living here in a cottage: I said a garret, for I pitched it hot and strong, mind you. I said you were living in a garret, that you never saw a razor, and lived on oatmeal porridge and whisky, and that your only amusement was going out at night and risking your neck in this delightful boat of mine. You should have seen him examining this remarkable vessel. And there were two ladies on board, and they were asking after you, too."
"I don't know. I didn't catch their names when I was introduced; but the noble skipper called one of them Polly."
"Ain't you coming ashore, Lavender? You can't see to work now."
"All right! I shall put my traps ashore, and then I'll have a run with you down Loch Fyne if you like, Johnny."
"Well, I don't like," said the handsome lad frankly, "for it's looking rather squally about. It seems to me you're bent on drowning yourself. Before those other fellows went, they came to the conclusion that you had committed a murder."
"Did they really?" Lavender said with little interest.
"And if you go away and live in that wild place you were talking of during the winter, they will be quite sure of it. Why, man, you'd come back with your hair turned white. You might as well think of living by yourself at the Arctic Pole."
Neither Johnny Eyre nor any of the men who had just left Tarbert knew anything of Frank Lavender's recent history, and Lavender himself was not disposed to be communicative. They would know soon enough when they went up to London. In the mean time they were surprised to find that Lavender's habits were very singularly altered. He had grown miserly. They laughed when he told them he had no money, and he did not seek to persuade them of the fact; but it was clear, at all events, that none of them lived so frugally or worked so anxiously as he. Then, when his work was done in the evening, and when they met alternately at each other's rooms to dine off mutton and potatoes, with a glass of whisky and a pipe and a game of cards to follow, what was the meaning of those sudden fits of silence that would strike in when the general hilarity was at its pitch? And what was the meaning of the utter recklessness he displayed when they would go out of an evening in their open sailing boats to shoot sea-fowl, or make a voyage along the rocky coast in the dead of night to wait for the dawn to show them the haunts of the seals? The Lavender they had met occasionally in London was a fastidious, dilettante, self-possessed, and yet not disagreeable fellow: this man was almost pathetically anxious about his work, oftentimes he was morose and silent, and then again there was no sort of danger or difficulty he was not ready to plunge into when they were sailing about that iron-bound coast. They could not make it out, but the joke among themselves was that he had committed a murder, and therefore he was reckless.