The Launching of Roger Brook

throw away the best years of my youth scraping a living as a tinker.'

'I don't mean run away for good, stupid, but just for a month or two; until this threat to your happiness has blown over, or your father has been given another ship and ordered back to sea.'

For the first time he considered her suggestion seriously and, crossing the narrow room, sat down again beside her.

'I might do that,' he murmured. ' 'Tis certainly a possibility. But the forest is no good. The Egyptians might have you but they wouldn't have me. They'd think that I'd been sent to spy on them.'

'Go to London, then. 'Tis less than a hundred miles and you could walk there in a week.'

'Maybe, but I have not a single friend there, or even an acquaint­ance.'

'Had it been last month I could have given you a score of intro­ductions; but, alas! town will now be as empty as a drum and all my friends of the season gone back to their places in the country. Still, you're a likeable fellow, Roger, and would soon find plenty of people to help you.'

'I fear your wish is father to the thought, m'dear,' he said despondently. 'Among persons of quality the making of friendships is always easy, but in such a case I'd have put all that behind me. The poor live hard and for the most part are driven by their needs to batten upon one another. I know no trade and could be of little use to anyone except as a scrivener. I'd find myself starving within a week.'

'Nonsense!' she flashed at him. 'Where there's a will there's a way! You've a pair of hands and they could be put to a dozen different uses.'

Roger's fatal imagination was again working overtime. He had never been to London, but he knew enough about it to realise that the gilded world in which she had disported herself so gaily for a few weeks was very far from being the metropolis that a patronless and penniless young man would find should he go there. Old Ben, the Brooks' houseman, was a Londoner by birth, and he had often told Roger horrifying tales of the debtors' prison at Newgate, the Fleet, and the madhouse at Bedlam, where the lunatics, bearing their heads against the walls and eating the filthy straw on which they lay, were exhibited in chains to anyone who cared to tip the warder a shilling. From Old Ben's stories, too, he conjured up the noisome alleys haunted by disease-ridden Molls, the filth, the stench and the cut-purses who haunted the thieves-kitchens on the lookout for some greenhorn from the country whom they might despoil.

'No,' he said, after a moment, 'I wouldn't dare to go to London.'

'Then tramp the country,' she replied tartly. ' 'Tis high summer, and 'twon't harm you to sleep under a hedgerow now and then.'

'Not now and then, perhaps; but I'd have to live, and I couldn't beg my bread all the time. I've no trade, I tell you! and I'm not strong enough yet to do the full days' labour of a man. I'd face it if I had sufficient money to ensure me food for the time we have in mind, but I haven't—that's the rub.'

'I can set your mind at rest on that score,' swiftly volunteered Georgina. 'My Derby winnings have gone, alas, on furbelows, likewise my quarter's allowance from papa. But I've pretty trinkets that should fetch a tidy sum, and you shall have them. You could dispose of them with ease in Winchester or Southampton.'

'I couldn't take them from you,' Roger demurred.

'Be not a fool! I'll not give you the best or most valuable. Those I shall keep for my own adornment; but in my grandmother's box which has come to me there is a plenitude of old gewgaws that I'd ne'er be seen dead in. Yet they are of gold and should fetch a good price in a county town.'

'No, no! I'll not rob you. 'Tis part of your inheritance and you may need them some day to raise money for some project of your own.'

'Stuff and nonsense! As my father's heir I don't lack for fortune; and even if I did, my face and figure would soon make it for me. These oddments are but a bagatelle, and you must take them, Roger. 'Tis the only way to save yourself from the nightmare of this life at sea.'

Her words recalled Roger to his impending fate; yet he still hesitated. Even provided with a little store of gold, to abandon every­one he knew and the only way of life he understood, for a lonely and perhaps perilous existence, was no light undertaking. Certain aspects of the unknown had always had greater terrors for him than the known, and to be cast out of the world of security and comfort that had been his ever since his birth, into one of uncertainty and hardship, filled him with misgiving.

'No,' he said. 'No, Georgina, I can't do it. You forget that I've led an even more sheltered life than you and am not yet sixteen. That is too young to face the world alone, even for the few months that you suggest.'

'Ah!' she sneered, 'There you've hit upon it. You're not a man, as you would like to think. Only a timorous little boy.' 'I'm nothing of the kind!' he declared angrily.

'Well, you behave like one,' she retorted. 'And you are certainly not a man yet; any girl could tell that with half a look at you.' 'What the devil do you mean?'

'What I say! And disabuse yourself of the idea that a midshipman's uniform could turn you into one. It couldn't; any more than being presented at Court turns a girl into a woman.'

Roger flushed to his temples. 'Oh, you mean that!' he said softly.

For a moment they sat there staring at one another. The tower was now swaying slightly again and they both had that strange feeling of being utterly alone, entirely divorced from the everyday existence that was going on far below them. As the blood mounted to Roger's face he could feel his heart beating wildly. Georgina's dark eyes were unnaturally bright. Her red lips were a little parted and she was smiling at him; a queer, enigmatic, mocking little smile.

Suddenly he pulled her towards him and their mouths met in a violent kiss. Her lips seemed to melt under the pressure of his and the feel of the soft contours of her body against his own set his brain on fire. The kiss ended only when they were forced to draw breath, and a second later he exclaimed:

'By heaven! I'll show you if I'm a man, or not!' Then, as their mouths hungrily closed on each other's again, he thrust her back against the cushions and crushed her to him in a fierce embrace.

For several minutes they lay there, now lost to all sense of time, place, age, or convention; their youthful passions rising to fever pitch from a series of avid caresses during which his trembling hands became ever more audacious.

Suddenly she pushed him roughly away from her with a breathless cry of: 'Fie, Roger! Stop it now! I'll let no man handle me so unless he loves me.'

'But I do! I do!' he blurted out, now wrought up to an un­governable pitch of excitement. 'Georgina, I've always loved you! I've loved you since the very first moment I set eyes on you!'

'It isn't true! I'll not believe it!' she whispered, her face now as flushed as his. But she did not attempt to repel his renewed caresses, only whispered again: 'Roger! You mustn't! Desist now, I beg. You're not a man, only a boy, and 'tis folly to pretend otherwise.'

'I'll show you that I'm a man,' he muttered, and as their lips met again he pressed her down beneath him. For a moment their two hearts palpitated wildly against one another and he stared down into her face with eager yet fearful eyes; then he gasped: 'Do you want me to prove it?'

Her only reply was a half-hysterical laugh and a tightening of her soft arms round his neck.

CHAPTER V

THE ROAD TO FORTUNE

ROGER sat staring out of the turret window that overlooked the vast sweep of the bay, but his eyes no more took in the ancient Abbey of Christchurch or the waves creaming against the jagged rocks of the Needles, than they had the details of the view from the roof of his own home first thing that morning.

His face was red, his hair tumbled and he had great difficulty in keeping his hands from trembling. Never before had his young soul plumbed such depths of abject misery. Only a short time before he had been fired with a mad elation and almost swooned with rapture in the intoxication of a hitherto unexperienced pleasure. It had been all too short, yet, while it lasted, far beyond his wildest imaginings. But now, the awful consciousness of all that his act implied was fully borne in upon him. It seemed that for the past twenty-four hours his evil angel had held undisputed sway over his affairs. A midshipman's commission had been sprung upon him without warning; he had got drunk and defied his father; and now he had seduced Georgina.

He did not dare to look at her, as he was desperately afraid that she would either burst into floods of tears or wither him to the very soul with one outraged glance from her black eyes.

Then she whispered: 'Roger, what ails thee, m'dear? Doest thou not like me any more?'

Her whisper brought him some relief. She was not angry, only frightened. 'Indeed I do,' he gulped, still not