Читать книгу Men Against the Sea – Book Set. The Greatest Maritime Adventure Novels: The Bounty Trilogy, Lost Island, The Hurricane, Botany Bay, The Far Lands, Tales of the South Seas… онлайн

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“That he is not!” I replied, heartily. We pressed five pounds each upon him, and it did our hearts good to see the expression of amazement and delight on Muspratt’s face. We shook his hand warmly and he hurried away at once to book his seat in the Yarmouth coach. We stood looking after him as he made his way down the crowded street. He turned and waved to us from the corner, and disappeared.

“Well, Byam?” said Morrison. I gripped his hand.

“God bless you, lad!” he said. “We must never lose track of each other.” A moment later I was alone, among strangers, for the first time in five years.

I could not have wished for a kinder, more considerate host than Mr. Erskine, my father’s old friend. He had long been a widower, and still lived, with three elderly servants, in the house in Fig-Tree Court, near the Temple, where I had last visited him on my way to join the Bounty. The silence of that well-ordered house, where I had no appointments to keep and might do as I pleased from morning till night, was as healing to my spirit as the breath of the sea to a man at the end of a long illness. I wandered about the quiet streets in the vicinity of the Temple, or sat for hours by the window in my pleasant room overlooking Fig-Tree Court, where scarcely a dozen passers-by were to be seen in the course of an afternoon. And I thought of nothing. I had to accustom myself by degrees to the business of living—to the very thought that the gift of life was still mine to enjoy. Meanwhile, I was scarcely more animate than the two old trees that cast faint shadows on the pavement in the wan autumnal sun.