CHAPTER XXIIITHE PARLOUR-LODGER
There was a tolerably snug parlour under the roof of the Fox and Fiddle, notwithstanding that its dimensions were small, its floor uneven, and its ceiling so low that a solitary inmate could not but feel enlivened by the company of the landlord’s family, who inhabited the rooms overhead. This apartment, which was usually occupied by some skipper from beyond seas, put forward certain claims to magnificence as well as comfort; and although the vaguest attempts at cleanliness seemed to have been suppressed, there was no little pretension apparent in the furniture, the chimney ornaments, and the “History of the Prodigal Son” on the walls. China shepherdesses stood on the mantelpiece, surmounted by the backbone of a shark. Two gilt chairs, with frayed velvet cushions, supported an unframed representation of a three-decker, with every available sail set, and British colours flying at the main, stemming a grass-green sea, under a sky of intense blue. A contracted square of real Turkey carpet covered a few feet in the middle, and the rest of the floor, ornamented at regular intervals by spittoons, stood inch-deep in dust. The hearth could not have been swept for days, nor the smouldering fire raked out for hours; but on a mahogany sideboard, that had obviously sustained at least one sea-voyage, stood a dozen different drinking-measures, surrounding a punch-bowl capacious enough to have baptized a full-grown pirate.
The occupant of this chamber was sitting at the table engrossed by a task that seemed to tax all his energies and employ his whole attention. He was apparently no adeptat accounts, and every time he added a column afresh, and found its result differed from his previous calculation, he swore a French oath in a whisper and began again. It was nearly dusk before the landlord came in with the candles, when his guest looked up, as if much relieved at a temporary interruption of work.
Butter-faced Bob was a plausible fellow enough, well fitted for the situation he filled, crimp, publican, free-trader, and, on occasion, receiver of stolen goods. From the seaman in the tap, to the skipper in the parlour, he prided himself on his facility in making conversation to his customers, saying the right thing to each; or, as he expressed it, “oiling the gear so as the crank should work easy.”
Setting down the candles, therefore, he proceeded to lubrication without delay.
“Sorry shall we be to lose ye, Captain! and indeed it will drive me out of the public line at last, to see the way as the best o’ friends must part. My dame, she says to me, it was but this blessed day as I set down to my nooning, says she, Bob, says she, whatever we shall do when the Captain’s gone foreign, says she, I, for one, can’t tell no more than the dead. You step round to the quay, says she, when you’ve a-taken a drink, and see if ‘The Bashful Maid’ ha’n’t histed her blue-Peter at the fore, and the Captain he’ll make a fair wind o’ this here sou’-wester, see if he won’t, and maybe weigh at the ebb; an’ it’ll break my heart, let alone the chil’en’s, to wish him a good voyage, it will. She’s about ready for sea, Captain,now; I see them gettin’ the fresh water aboard myself.”
The Captain, as his host called him, smiled good-humouredly.
“Your dame will have many a better lodger than I have been, Bob,” said he, fixing his bold eyes on the landlord, which the latter, who never seemed comfortable under an honest man’s gaze, avoided by peering into every corner of the room; “one that will stay longer with you, and entertain more friends than I have done. What of that? The heaviest purse makes the best lodger, and the highest score, the merriest landlord, at every hostelry in Europe. Well, I shall be ready for sea now, when I’ve got my complement; but I’m not going to cruise in the”—here the speakerstopped short and corrected himself—“not going to cruiseanywhere, short-handed.”
Bob’s eyes glistened, and he stole a look in the Captain’s face.
“How many would you be wanting?” said he, cautiously, “and where would they have to serve? First-class men is very bad to get hereaway, just now.”
“If I had a gunner, a boatswain’s-mate, and a good captain of the foretop, I’d weigh next tide, and chance it,” replied the other, cheerfully, but his chin fell while his eye rested on the pile of accounts, and he wondered how he could ever comb them into shape for inspection.
Bob thought of the seamen still drinking in his tap-room, and the obviously low state of their finances. It would work he decided, but it must be done under three influences, viz., beer, secrecy, and caution.
“Captain,” said he, shutting the door carefully, “I’d rather do you a turn than any lodger I’ve had yet. If I can help you to a hand or two, I’m the man as’ll do it. You’ll be willing to pay the expenses, I suppose?”
The Captain did not appear totally inexperienced in such matters, for, on asking the amount and receiving for answer a sum that would have purchased all the stock of liquors in the house over and over again, he showed neither indignation nor surprise, but observed quietly—
“Able seamen, of course?”
“Of course!” repeated Bob. “Honour, you know, Captain, honour!” If he had added “among thieves,” he would none the less clearly have expressed the situation. Reflecting for a moment, he approached his guest and whispered in his ear, “For the account?”
“Ask me no questions,” answered the Captain, significantly. “You know as well as I do that your price covers everything. Is it a bargain?”
“That would make a difference, you see, Captain,” urged Bob, determined to get all he could. “It’s not what it used to be, and the Government is uncommon hard upon a look-out man now, if he makes a mistake in the colours of a prize. In King James’s time, I’ve seen the gentlemen-rovers drinking at this very table with the mayor and the magistrates, ay, and sending up their compliments andwhat not, maybe, to the Lord-Lieutenant himself. Why, that very mug as you see there was given me by poor Captain Delaval; quite the gentleman he was! An’ he made no secret where he took it from, nor how they cut the Portuguese chap’s throat as was drinking from it in the after-cabin. And now, it’s as likely as not the Whigs would hang a man in chains for such a thing. I tell you, Captain, the hands don’t fancy it. They can’t cruise a mile along-shore without running foul of a gibbet with a pi—I mean, with a skeleton on it, rattling and grinning as if he was alive. It makes a difference, Captain—it makes a difference!”
“Take it or leave it,” replied the other, looking like a man who had made his highest bid, which no consideration would induce him to increase by a shilling.
Bob evidently thought so. “A bargain be it,” said he, with a villainous smile on his shining face, and muttering something about his wish to oblige a customer and the high respect he entertained for his guest’s character, in all its relations, public, private, and nautical, he shambled out of the room, leaving the latter to tackle once more with his accounts.
A shade of melancholy crossed the Captain’s brow, deeper and darker than was to be attributed to the unwelcome nature of his employment or the sombre surroundings of his position. The light of two tallow-candles, by which he worked was not indeed enlivening, bringing into indistinct relief the unsightly furniture and the gloomy pictures on the walls. The yard-dog, too, behind the house, had not entirely discontinued his lamentations, and the dip and wash of a retiring tide upon the shingle no farther off than the end of the street was like the voice from some unearthly mourner in its solemn and continuous wail. It told of lonely nights far out on the wild dark sea; of long shifting miles of surf thundering in pitiless succession on the ocean shore; of mighty cliffs and slabs of dripping rock, flinging back their defiance to the gale in the spray of countless hungry, leaping waves, that toss and madden round their prey ere she breaks up and goes to pieces in the storm. More than all, it told of desolation, and doubt, and danger, and death, and the uncertainty beyond.
But to him, sitting there between the candles, his head bent over his work, it seemed the voice of a counsellor and a friend. Each wave that, fuller than ordinary, circled up with a fiercer lash, to ebb with a louder, angrier, and more protracted hiss, seemed to brighten the man’s face, and he listened like a prisoner who knows the step that leads him out to life, and liberty, and love. At such times he would glance round the room, congratulating himself that his charts, his instruments, his telescope, were all safe on board, and perhaps, would rise, take a turn or two, and open the window-shutter for a consoling look at a certain bright speck in the surrounding darkness, which might be either in earth, or sea, or air, and was indeed the anchor-light in the foretop of his ship. Then he would return, refreshed and comforted, to his accounts.
He was beginning to hope he had really got the better of these, and had so far succeeded that two consecutive columns permitted themselves to be added up with an appearance of probability, when an unusually long-drawn howl from the house-dog, following the squeak of a fiddle, distracted him from his occupation, and provoked him to swear once more in a foreign tongue.
It was difficult to make calculations, involving a thousand probabilities, with that miserable dog howling at regular intervals. It was impossible to speculate calmly on the value of his cargo, the quantity of his powder, and the chances of peace and war. While he sat there he knew well enough that his letters of marque would bear him out in pouncing on any unfortunate merchantman he could come across under Spanish colours, but there had been whispers of peace in London, and the weekly news-letter (substitute for our daily paper), read aloud that afternoon in the coffee-house round the corner, indorsed the probability of these rumours. By the time he reached his cruising-ground, the treaty might have been signed which would change a privateer into a pirate, and the exploit that would earn a man his knighthood this week might swing him at his own yard-arm the next. In those times, however, considerable latitude, if not allowed, was at least claimed by these kindred professions, and the calculator in the parlour of the Fox and Fiddle seemed unlikely to be over-scrupulousin the means by which he hoped to attain his end.
He had resolved on earning, or winning, or taking, such a sum of money as would render him independent of fortune for life. He had an object in this which he deemed worthy of any sacrifice he could offer. Therefore he had fitted out and freighted his brigantine partly at his own expense, partly at that of certain confiding merchants in Leadenhall Street, so as to combine the certain gains of a peaceful trader with the more hazardous venture of a licensed sea-robber who takes by the strong hand. If the license should expire before his rapacity was satisfied, he would affect ignorance while he could, and when that was no longer practicable, throw off all disguise and hoist the black flag openly at the main.
To this end he had armed his brigantine with the heaviest guns she could carry; had taken in store of provisions, water, spare tackle, gunpowder, pistols, cutlasses, and musquetoons; had manned her with the best seamen and wildest spirits he could lay hands on. These items had run up a considerable bill. He was now preparing a detailed statement of the cost, for the information of his friends in Leadenhall Street.
And all this time, had he only known it, fortune was preparing for him, without effort on his part, the independence he would risk life and character to gain. That very sou’-wester wailing up the narrow street was rattling the windows of a castle on a hill hundreds of miles away, and disturbing the last moments of a dying man in his lordly bed-chamber; was driving before it, over a bleak, barren moor, pelting storms of rain to drench the cloaked and booted heir, riding post to reach that death-bed; sowing in a weak constitution the seeds of an illness that would allow him but a brief enjoyment of his inheritance; and the next in succession, the far-off cousin, was making up his accounts in the humble parlour of a seaport pot-house, because he was to sail for the Spanish main with the next tide.
“One, two, tree!”—thump—“one, two, tree!”—thump—“Balancez! Chassez. Un, deux, trois!” Thump after thump, louder and heavier than before. The raftersshook, the ceiling quivered. The Captain rose, irritated and indignant, to call fiercely for the landlord.
Butter-faced Bob, anticipating a storm, wisely turned a deaf ear, ensconcing himself in the back kitchen, whence he refused to emerge.
The Captain shouted again, and receiving no answer walked into the passage.
“Stow that noise!” he hallooed from the foot of the half-dozen wooden steps that led to the upper floor. “Who is to get any business done with a row like that going on aloft, as if the devil was dead and the ship gone overboard?” The Captain’s voice was powerful and his language plain, but the only reply he received was a squeak from the fiddle, a wail from the dog, and a “One, two, tree”—thump—louder than ever.
His patience began to fail.
“Zounds! man,” he broke out; “will you leave off that cursed noise, or must I come up andmakeyou?”
Then the fiddle stopped, the dog was silent, and children’s voices were heard laughing heartily.
The last sound would have appeased the Captain had his wrath been ever so high, but a strange, puzzled expression overspread his features while he received the following answer in an accent that denoted the speaker was no Englishman.
“You are a rude, gross man. I sall continue my instructions to my respectable young friends in the dance wizout your permission.Monsieur, you are insolent.Tiens!”
The last word carried with it such an amount of anger, defiance, and contempt as can only be conveyed in that monosyllable by a Frenchman. The Captain’s frown changed to a broad smile, but he affected wrath none the less, while he exclaimed in a coarse, sailor-like voice—
“Insolent! you dancing dog of a Mounseer! Insolent! I’ll teachyoumanners afore I’ve done with you. If you don’t drop itnow, this instant, I’ll come aloft in a pig’s whisper, and pull you down by the ears!”
“Ears!Les oreilles!” repeated the voice above stairs, in a tone of repressed passion, that seemed to afford his antagonist intense amusement. “Soyez tranquil, mesenfants.My children, do not derange yourselves. Sir, you have insulted me; you have insulted my society. You shall answer me.Monsieur! vous allez me rendre raison!”
Thus speaking, the dancing-master, for such was the foreign gentleman whose professional avocations the parlour-lodger had interrupted, made his appearance at the head of the stairs, with a small fiddle under his arm and a sheathed rapier in his hand; the passage below was quite dark, but the light from an open door behind him brought his figure into relief, whilst the skipper, on the contrary, remained unseen in the gloom. Notwithstanding that the one was in a towering passion, the other shook with suppressed laughter.
“Come on,” he shouted roughly, though he could scarce command his voice, adding in a more natural tone, and with a perfect French accent—“On prétend, dans les Mousquetaires du Roi, que Monsieur est de la première force pour l’epée!”
The effect was instantaneous. With one spring the dancing-master was upon him, kissing both his cheeks, hugging him in his arms, and repeating, with eyes full of tears—
“Captain George! Captain George! My comrade, my captain, my officer; and I thought I was without a friend in this miserable country; without a friend and without asou! Now I have found the one, I don’t care about the other. Oh, what happiness! What fortune! What luck!”
The former Captain of Musketeers seemed equally pleased, if in a less demonstrative manner, at this unexpected meeting, though he had been better prepared for so strange a termination of their dispute by his recognition of the other’s voice before he caught sight of his figure. Now he pulled him into the parlour, sent for Butter-faced Bob to fill the capacious punch-bowl, pressed him into a chair with both hands on his shoulders, and looked gravely into his face, saying—
“Eugène, I owe you my life, and I am a man who never left a debt unpaid.”