LXXVII
Morty—after an eclipse somewhat protracted—being at length emancipated from the shadow of the brocade bed-curtains, having changed his skin, shaved, and attired himself—by parental request—in his Mess-uniform, came down to the five o’clock dinner—a feast comprising every delicacy most beloved of the young man.
Morty was in great spirits. The solemn butler—who had presided over the sideboard of an Archbishop—condescended to smile at his jokes, and the three powdered footmen openly sniggered. All the female servants were gathered on the upper landing listening and giggling and admiring. Jowell, too, was in great form.
He had—like other bulky birds of the carrion-feeding kind—who display excitement when there are preparations amongst humans for hostilities—been clumsily flying from place to place, making Contracts and Arrangements. He would be at the Horse Guards one moment—at the Admiralty the next, at Plymouth, Southampton, or Portsmouth before you could turn round. He had seen all the fine sights his boy had missed.... The Queen’s Review of the Baltic Fleet, and the Embarkation of the Guards, as of the first Drafts of Regiments of the Line—and he described these stirring sights to his wife and son in the characteristic Jowellian way.
“It brought tears to My Eyes—it did, upon my word!” he assured his hearers, in reference to such and such a demonstration of patriotic enthusiasm. And whether he spoke the truth or not, the water certainly stood in thosebulging orbs of his, as he bade the archiepiscopal butler bring forth his most ancient white-sealed Port, wherein to pledge his newly-recovered son.
“To my dear boy’s health! Good luck to him, and God bless him!” he proposed, goggling fondly at the large young figure in the scarlet Mess-Jacket, through the tawny-golden wine. The next glass was swallowed to the toast of “The Queen, our Army and our Allies!” while the third was “Here’s to the Flour, Forage, Freightage, and Transport Trade. Large Profits and No returns!”
He chuckled so over this cryptic sentiment (which Cowell, Shoell, Sewell and Co. would have perfectly understood and enthusiastically applauded)—that he choked in his wine, and gasped and crowed so awfully that his wife—upon her way to the door, which Morty, with his recently-acquired gloss of good manners rather too obviously upon him, held open—was fain to pause behind her husband’s chair and pat him on the back. And then she kissed her son, whispering. “Not too much wine, my dearest!” And with a wistful smile at her one joy, went away to sit and knit at stockings for him, in a gorgeous gilded desert of drawing-rooms, opening one out of the other.
Left alone, Morty chatted with his sire, and found him well-informed and interesting. He knew so many things at first-hand. For instance, how many picked squadrons went to the Cavalry Division that was under orders for the East, and what vessels these warriors and their steeds would sail in. For as the British Government possessed but three available transports, Britannia may be said to have leaned with confidence, at this juncture, upon the bosom of Jowell. Who—it not being desirable that lofty officials should soil their fingers with such vulgar transactions—not only acted as the Government’s middleman or agent, in the hire and charter of such vessels of the Regular Screw Steamship Company; the Eastern and Occidental Steamship Company; and the Antipodean Company, as had been marked down for War-Service—and reaped very considerable profit and enrichment from such mediation—but for the conveyance of the heavier munitions of War; the Forage, the Commissariat Stores, and the horses of the Cavalry and Artillery—had been privileged to place his own private fleet of sailing-vessels and steamers at the service of an appreciative country.
It is to be whispered here, that the knowledge of ships and maritime matters indubitably possessed by Thompson Jowell had been gained by that great man in his earlier years, while serving in the humble capacity of private in a Regiment of Marines....
The private soared to become Quartermaster-Sergeant, and married the penniless orphan daughter of a Naval Surgeon. Being of a bilious temperament, and invariably deadly sick when upon sea-service, Thompson Jowell made haste to retire, upon a nest-egg that he had accumulated by the sweat of the brow of a true-born Englishman.... Which nest-egg, being invested in the shop, stock, and goodwill of a ship’s chandler and drysalter—later expanding into a rope walk (taken over for a bad trade-debt), and in process of time engulfing the business of a bankrupt forage merchant—was in time to hatch out the Great Contractor, the glory of his age.
He was in a beaming, radiant mood upon this particular afternoon. Smiles garlanded his large visage, even his rummaging, sniffing nose was cocked at a less aggressive angle, say forty-five instead of sixty degrees.... As the wine warmed him—though he could drink enough of his old tawny port to float a jolly-boat, without overheating or muddling the hard, sharp little brain enclosed in his pear-shaped skull—the strings of his tongue were loosed, and he spoke to his son and heir as to a second self, unreservedly.
He had attended at the newly-created Transport Office at the Admiralty, and had secured fresh Contracts—and he had been to the Victualling Office—(also a sub-department of the first-named Institution) and there he had received such gracious usage at the hands of the presiding genius,Mr.Commissary-General Blunder, that it had brought the tears into his eyes again.
Pray take a glimpse ofMr.Commissary-General Blunder, whose name was later to be spelt by prejudiced Press correspondents and critics of the Commission of ’56 with an initial to be found much later in the alphabet.
Comparatively obscure, previously to this period, you found him suddenly become all-powerful in half-a-dozen Departments. He was indubitably an official of great experience, having been present at the later Peninsularbattles of the Duke’s time, in the character of a Director of Wagon Trains—unhappily abolished during the days of the Prince Regent, and not yet replaced by any organized means of Land Transport. Now you saw him as a little dry, meager man of seventy, his baldness covered with a black, scratch-wig, his sharp black eyes looking out over angular cheek-bones, scrawled with strange characters as though in official red-ink. Topped with the cocked-hat of a Brigadier-General, his little round pot-stomach buttoned up in the epauletted gold-laced swallowtail of Full Dress, he was barely a stately or imposing figure. But later, he was to reveal himself as a powerful Necromancer, who with so many strokes of a pen would create a squadron of paper horses, clap these unsubstantial beasts between the legs of as many solid, British troopers, and make the Nation pay for them in good hard money. Or, with a wave of the same inky wand he would command forage and rations, shirts and great-coats and blankets to be compounded and formed out of impalpable air; so that real horses and real men might feed upon these shadows and be clothed with them.
Newly endued with the power to pay away vast sums of Government money, it is little wonder thatMr.Commissary-General Blunder seemed to Jowell a being almost divine. By dint of perching him upon the piled-up bodies of his forty Commissariat staff-clerks, the Contractor saw him—and conveyed to his son the impression that he too saw him—as a giant rather than a dwarf.... Hearken to Thompson Jowell, enlarging in his idol’s praise....
“Comes into the Office—hangs up his hat himself—cracks a joke with the head of his staff of clerks—a Man Like That—who has authority, in case of need, to communicate direct with Foreign Governments—and can dip his hand in the Treasury as if it was his own breeches’ pocket.... ‘The weather’s warum, Colonel Jinkins,’ says he, in his sing-song Northern drawl—by the New Order they have military ranks according to grade, and, by Gosh! you should see ’em in their uniforms!—‘but by the latest adveece from the East we’re to have it warumer still!’ Says Jinkins: ‘Glad to hear it, Sir, and so isMr.Thompson Jowell, unless I’m mistaken?’ Says I: ‘My name being John Bull—it can’t be too hot for me!’ ‘Glaed to find you in such speerits,Mr.Jowell,’ says His Honor, takinga pinch of snuff and speaking as dry as chips and shavings—‘for when I saw you I was afraid you were going to aesk me for some of the Government’s money.... What?... You are?... Waell!—since we caen’t stave you off, sign your name to this Contract Demand Dischaerge Receipt, and I’ll make you out an Order on the Treasury.’ Wuff! goes the sand over the wet ink—none of your new-fangled blotting-paper at the Crown Offices. ‘There you are,Mr.Jowell!... Thirty-Five Thousand Pounds!’ And between me, and my boy, and the bedpost,” said Thompson Jowell, nodding over his wine at his son and heir, “that’s a mere flea-bite to what I am a-going to get out of this here Eastern Expedition—long before the end!”
“Gaw!” ejaculated the Ensign, who had inherited the paternal reverence for money. He added, with a tongue somewhat thickened by the frequency with which, in defiance of his mother’s warning, he had applied to the decanters. “You jolly old Croe—what the dooce was the tremendously wealthy feller’s name who was ordered to be burnt alive?—don’t I wish I was in your jolly old shoes, that’s all!”
“You are in ’em, Morty, my own boy!” said the father, goggling at the younger Jowell tenderly. “Don’t think that what I do is done for myself—for I am a bloody humble man!” His little slanting forehead—so like the lid of a Noah’s Ark hooked tightly down over the jumbled beasts inside—the Lamb and the Dove being uppermost at that psychological moment—was full of anxious lines and corrugations. He mopped his overflowing eyes with his table-napkin, and his voice shook and wobbled with emotion as he went on:
“What I do is done for you—what I get is got for you! Remember that!” said Thompson Jowell, leaning forward over his dessert-plate until his vast expanse of shirt-front bulged—why are the shirt-fronts of great financiers invariably badly got up?—and two or three diamond studs unshipped their moorings, and the son caught a glimpse of the hairy bosom the hardy parent scorned to shield with a flannel vest. “Win distinction in the Field—out there!” Jowell waved a gross fat hand in the direction of the London Docks. “You can do it—it’s in your blood!—if you told me that it wasn’t I shouldn’t believe you!—andI shall see you General Sir Mortimer Jowell, K.C.B., before I die, please Heaven!”
“Gaw, Governor! how you pile it on,” responded the young man, who was not at all inclined to underestimate his own capacity for heroism. “You ambitious old Codger,” he elegantly pursued, “Military Knight Commanderships of the Bath don’t grow on every gooseberry-bush.... Why,” said Morty, opening his round brown eyes and shaking his bullet head at his parent, “even a first-class tip-top hero like our C.O.”—the young man referred to the gallant Colonel of the Cut Red Feathers—“hasn’t got that yet! And perhaps he don’t deserve it?... Oh, no!... Certainly not!” said Morty in a tone of sarcasm. “Not by no manner of means!...”
“And why hasn’t he got it? Not because he ain’t brave enough, or enough of a tip-top swell,” Jowell wagged his bristly head of upright gray hair sagely at his heir-apparent, and punctuated his periods by sips of the tawny port, “but because he hasn’t Money enough to back him. And whose fault is that but his own? Look at his position—think of his chances and opportunities!—and tell me whether he mightn’t be as rich as a Jew if he made use of ’em? Don’t you go to tell me he couldn’t—because I know best!”
“And so do I!—and hang me, if it don’t do him honor! I mean,” said Mortimer in a tone of disdain that mingled verjuice with the bumper Jowell was in the act of emptying, “his refusin’ to cabbage from the men’s rations, and firing, and clothing, and uniforms.... Everybody knows it’s done, and Government winks at it,” pursued the Ensign, getting very red about the gills, but looking straight out of the eyes that were so oddly clear and honest for a son of Jowell’s, into the muddier, more prominent orbs that goggled back at him. “But I’m confounded gladhesets that fine old face of his against it! and in his place I’m dam’ if I shouldn’t do the same myself!”
Jowell hastily set down his glass, and fell back in his armchair with a hot and clammy dew breaking out upon his large, and just now queerly-mottled countenance. He puffed and blew like a stout, shaven walrus for some moments before he could speak. Then he said—and the short, thick hand that held a choice cigar he had just taken from a chased casket of precious metal emblazoned withthe large and ornate coat-of-arms that had been bought at Heralds’ College, shook as he said it:
“But if he had a son, he’d alter his notions about Cabbaging. Not to tell you a lie, my boy!—and my name’s Jack Candid—and has been all my life long—I’m a Cabbager myself! Lord!—if I hadn’t made use o’ my opportunities for Cabbaging—you’d be a private in the ranks, or serving out flour and treacle in an apron behind a chandler’s counter, and your mother’d be at the washtub—or charing for a livelihood at eighteenpence a day....”
His thick voice shook and his surface grew more unwholesomely mottled, and his popping eyes whirled in their circular orbits. That this beloved son—in whose interests so many nefarious and tricky schemes had already been concocted and carried out—for whose ultimate aggrandizement Thompson Jowell had planned a crowning masterstroke of villainy that—the man’s conscience not being dead in him—jolted him up on end o’ nights with his heart thumping and every hair upon his body prickly with fright—should thus have turned and rent him, pierced him to the quick through his pachydermatous hide.
As for Morty—the adage that evil communications corrupt good manners may be reversed in his case with some appropriateness. This big, chuckle-headed young man was sloughing his skin in more senses than one. Since he had mingled daily and hourly in the society of men of honor and high-breeding, the Honorable and Reverend Alfred no longer appeared to him as a model to copy or even a person to tolerate. New ideals had risen up before the eyes of Jowell’s son.
The Colonel, who, like many another commanding officer, preferred to be a comparatively poor man, rather than use his prerogative of plunder, seemed to Morty more enviable than the parent who had piled up enormous riches by means he dimly realized to be dishonest and mean.... True, Jowell was never weary of assuring his boy that he, Mortimer, would never be ashamed of his old Governor. But Morty was, secretly, not at all certain on this point.
“I’m not the man to boast, Morty, my boy,” the father went on as the son wriggled in his chair with growing uneasiness. “Ben Bragg never was my name or nature, but many another man in my place would have Cabbagedwithout as good an object. You have been my object—ever since you were born. To be a Millionaire—and I am one, I tell you plainly! isn’t enough for me—being my boy’s father. I’ve made up my mind to be as rich as Coutts and Gurney rolled together—and by the Lord! I see my way clear. Draw close—fill up your glass, and listen.”
He pushed away the painted porcelain dessert-plate from before him so clumsily that it fell from the shining, slippery mahogany to the floor and was shattered; and went on, jabbing a thick stumpy finger at his son, to emphasize notable points; and sometimes banging a gross fist upon the table, so that choice hothouse fruit and crystallized dainties piled up in costly dishes escaped from their receptacles, and the lusters of the chandeliers trembled overhead.
“This here Eastern Expedition of the Army is the Big Thing I have been a-waiting for. It has put in my way opportunities such as I have only dreamed of up to now. If I didn’t grab ’em, other Contractors would—and small blame to ’em. That’s why I sank money in that fleet o’ nine sail and steam vessels, every one of ’em hired out to Government for Transport at up’ards o’ Two Hundred Poundsperday.”
He puffed and blew and snorted in his walrus-fashion, and, between wine, and the sense of his own importance, seemed to increase in bulk as he went on; punctuating his sentences with jabs of the podgy finger, and sometimes scratching in his stubby growth of hair with it, or tweaking at a gross and purple ear.
“I’m paid for the use o’ the ships, and I’m paid for the stuff that goes into ’em. Hay at Twenty Pounds per ton—thousands o’ tons—and thousands o’ barrels of Flour. Maybe some of the trusses of hay are packed round a core o’ cow-parsley, and road, or common-trimmings—them that talk of old hats and empty jam-tins are liars, and I’ll prove it in their teeth! Likely you’ll happen on a barrel o’ breadstuff here and there that’s sour or blue-moldy in the middle.... Fraud I scorn,” said Jowell, breathing noisily, “but Business is Business with me as other men. The bad with the good—the rotten with the sound—that’s the secret of successful dealing. Push the decanter over,will ye? David Drychops is my name this evening! Thanks, my own dear boy!”
He filled a bumper and drank with greedy, spluttering noises, and went on, sucking at his fleshy lips, that were moistened with the sweet red wine:
“Lord! if you knew as much of the tricks of the trade as I do!—you’d think your old Gov. a Angel without wings.... I tell you—and my name’s Nick Know—millions o’ golden pounds’ll be paid, before this here War is over, for Rot, and Rubbish—and nothing more. War Scares are got up—that’s what they are—to give opportunity for Cabbaging on the Grand Scale to Nobs and Bigwigs—War Office and Admiralty Bigwigs—whose names—if I whispered ’em—’ud take away your breath. And me and the other Contractors—men as they are lofty to, and patronize—are in their secrets, and up to every move and dodge of the game they couldn’t play without us—and their hands—white as they keep ’em—and with gems engraved with family crests that are heirlooms shining on ’em—are not a whit cleaner than what ours are—and there’s the naked truth!”
Fate spurred him on—who had never even to himself, or that gray confederate Cowell, spoken thus openly—to this unbosoming, else his son might have died believing him a worthy kind of man. In his urgent need for the love and respect and admiration of this hulking young scion of the house of Jowell, he emptied himself, to the foiling of his passionate desire.
“Take the case of a brand-new Government Transport I am a-loading with my own and other Contractors’ stuff at Portsmouth Dockyard,” he babbled on recklessly. “By Gosh! if you could see the inside of the barrels and crates and cases her holds are chock-full of—to the tune of Five Hundred Thousand Pounds! Thousands o’ barrels o’ salt beef and pickled pork that were laid down in brine before the Battle o’ Waterloo. Ay!—and thousands o’ tins of preserved meat that ’ud blow your head off with stink and stench—if they were ever to be opened!—and cases—thousands o’ cases o’ dead worms that were born of biscuit and lived on biscuit—and died when there was no more biscuit to live on—and ankers of Prime Jamaica Rum made of burnt sugar-and-water and Spirits of potato and beet—not to talk of the crates full of Shoell’s Army Bootsthatareboots—till you get down to where they’re nothing but odd sizes, and spoiled uppers, and scraps of old leather—and the Winter Clothing and comforts from Sewell’s Factories—watch-coats and guernsey frocks; coatees and trousers; woolen vests and drawers and socks atop, and Dunnage underneath—and nothing but Dunnage! Like the Medical Stores that are the sweepings of every Hospital in the United Kingdom. All packed under loose shot, and empty shell, and supplies of munitions for the Ordnance—to prevent ’em being too easily got at, d’ye twig?... Whoof! I’m short o’ breath!” snorted Jowell, fanning his large red face with his crumpled napkin. “Old Billy Blowhard, and no mistake about me!”
He had really talked himself into an apoplectic and congested condition, and now was fain to break off speech and muster a second wind, while his son, whose large ears were humming with these revelations, regarded him with a circular stare of surprise. But even as Morty’s mouth opened for speech, Thompson Jowell put up a coarse, ringed hairy hand and stopped him; and plunged back into the subject ere his son could get out a word.
“Don’t you say what you’re a-going to say!—and tell me that you don’t mind Government and the Nation being Cabbaged from—but as an officer holding the Queen’s Commission you’re damned if you like the notion of the British Army being served up on toast. I tell you—and my name’s Sure and Certain in the present instance—the British Army—God bless it!—won’t be a ha’porth the worse for anything on board the Transport I’ve told you of—even if anything on board of her was likely to be wanted—which won’t be the case—mark me! For this here Eastern Expedition will be back by the beginning of October at the latest; and—I tell you with all my cards on the table—this Two-Thousand-Six-Hundred-Ton steam-screw Transport I am a-talking of is as crank as a child’s tin boat.... Built of unseasoned Baltic pine she is—not a plank of honest English oak in her—the man who contracted with the Admiralty to supply the timber is a friend of mine—d’ye twig? She won’t weather out a Black Sea gale, by Gosh she won’t! If Old Moore and Mother Shipton and Zadkiel’s Almanac told me she would I should call ’em liars! A crank ship!—a damned crank ship!” said Thompson Jowell, thrusting his great crimson face and startingeyes near his son’s, and speaking in a husky whisper. “Nobody would be so wicked as to count on her Going Down—people don’t do such things!—if they owned to me that they did I wouldn’t believe ’em! But now the cat is out of the bag—and tip us your fist, my boy!”
He squeezed his son’s large, unresponsive hand, and, reluctantly releasing it, went on, in the flux of confidential talk that had seized and overmastered him: “And remember that you have a Brilliant Career before you—that’s what you have! Through you I mean the name of Jowell to strike root deep in the Old Country and spread wide and tower high. I ha’ lived small—here and at that little place of ours in Sloughshire—and haven’t launched out in a Scotch Castle and a Deer Forest and a Salmon River when I might—perhaps you’ve thought? What I say is—Wait until you come back from this campaign, and then you shall see a thing or two! Why have I bought up the village, field by field, and cottage by cottage, and whole streets o’ freehold shops and dwelling-houses in Market Drowsing Town? Because I mean you to be returned Member of Parliament for the Borough—and you shall sit in the Upper House among the other nobs as Baron Jowell by-and-by! There’s a pretty estate of ten thousand acres of park and stubble, covert and woodland, will be on the market presently—and a sixty acre o’ clay upland freehold within a mile o’ Market Drowsing—with a homestead and some good gore meadows—suitable to build a Stud Farm and Kennels on—as I’ve a mortgage on and mean to have by-and-by. And, by Gosh, my boy!—the County shall cap to you as Lord Lieutenant before you’re forty,” said Jowell, stretching the coarse hairy hand across the table. “Here’s my hand again on it—and so you know!”
“Haw, haw, haw! You’re going to go it, Governor, ain’t you?—with a vengeance!” said the son, with heartiness rather forced. He added, repressing a hiccup, for his potations had half-fuddled him: “But what’s this sixty-acre you’re talking about for a Stud Farm within a mile of Market Drowsing?... Gaw!—you don’t mean to say you mean my Cousin Sarah’s bit o’ land?”
“She’s not your cousin—if Burke took his Bible oath she was I wouldn’t believe him!” said Thompson Jowell, his large cheeks purpling as he bent his brows upon hisson. “She’s a Poor Relation of mine—and what is it to you how I get land? If you’re to be a Nobleman, Land is what you want—and Land is what you must have. Trust your old Gov.!—my name’s Stephen Staunch where you’re concerned, ain’t it? And now tell me—when do you leave for the East, and what’s your barkey? Is she a regular good ’un?The British Queen, dy’e say?... She’s a clipper of a ship,” said Jowell, rummaging in a hairy nostril. “One o’ my own—I bought her from the Newfoundland Emigration Labor Company for a mere song, better than new! She sails on the 18th from Southampton, with a draft of the Hundredth Lancers; six officers, and seventy Rank-and-File, and the Admiralty Agent, the HonorableMr.Skiffington. My Hay in the fore-hold, troop-horses in the after-hold,” said Jowell, smiling and winking knowingly. “Dunnage under the horses—barrels of Cowell’s salt beef under the Dunnage—it ain’t my lookout if it gets spoiled—and Cowell wouldn’t object, I rather fancy!... And now we’ll adjourn to the drawing-room,” said Jowell, scraping back his chair, and getting up on his short, thick legs, and gripping his son affectionately by the elbows—his inferior stature not permitting him to reach the Ensign’s broad shoulders. He ended, looking with moist, smiling tenderness in the owlish, rather tipsy young face, as he shook Morty to and fro. “And we’ll have a little music.... You shall tip us ‘Vilikins And His Dinah’—if anybody told me Robson could sing it better I wouldn’t believe ’em. And I’m damned if I haven’t half a mind to give you ‘Marble Halls.’”
Morty obliged with “Vilikins”—the newest thing out in ditties of the comic order, and Jowell was as good as his word with the operatic selection to which he referred. “I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls” is a melody with many turns and flourishes, and Jowell executed them conscientiously, not sparing one....
If Britannia, leaning with complete confidence at this juncture upon that stout and sturdy stem of tough old British oak, had peeped in and beheld the great Contractor—gathered with his family about the grand piano in the most sumptuous of the telescopic drawing-rooms—and beating time all wrong as he murdered the tune with simple, whole-hearted enjoyment,—she might have withdrawn herhelmeted head in the conviction that here Was an honest man.
Though in Morty’s muddled mind some degree of dubiousness was created, as to the exact description of “Marble Halls” merited by a man who was cramming a crank-built transport of Baltic oak with rot and rubbish to the tune of Five Hundred Thousand Pounds. He was secretly wondering whether—in the estimation of his demigod, the Colonel of the Cut Red Feathers, a cool stone cell in Newgate Jail might not meet the case?—when Mrs. Jowell—at his own request—tried to sing ‘Home, Sweet Home’—and broke down in the second bar. He was wondering still, when three silver bedroom candlesticks arrived on a tray so massive, that the footman who bore it staggered. He was wondering yet, as his parents accompanied him up the broad, shallow staircase, and parted from him on the threshold of his palatial, gorgeous bedroom, with blessings and kisses and tears.
He could not have done with wondering. The scene closes upon him, standing—in an Oriental dressing-robe of sumptuous fabric superimposed above the long-tailed garment of the night, before his colossal, gilt-plate-laden dressing-table—saying, as he regarded his own foolish, tipsy young face in the great glittering mirror:
“Well, Blow Me Tight, if I don’t believe the Governor is the very devil!” He added, as he crowned himself with a tasseled nightcap and blundered into bed: “And he may be a regular tip-top business man—but I’m hanged if I cotton to such games. No, sir! I’m dam’ if I do like ’em! I’m Blest if I do—so there!”