CHAPTER IX

AN EVENING WITH CAPTAIN BULSTED

A dream that my father lay like a wax figure in a bed gave me thoughts of

dying. I was ill and did not know it, and imagined that my despair at the

foot of the stairs of ever reaching my room to lie down peacefully was

the sign of death. My aunt Dorothy nursed me for a week: none but she and

my dogs entered the room. I had only two faint wishes left in me: one

that the squire should be kept out of my sight, the other that she would

speak to me of my mother's love for my father. She happened to say,

musing, 'Harry, you have your mother's heart.'

I said, 'No, my father's.'

From that we opened a conversation, the sweetest I had ever had away from

him, though she spoke shyly and told me very little. It was enough for me

in the narrow world of my dogs' faces, and the red-leaved creeper at the

window, the fir-trees on the distant heath, and her hand clasping mine.

My father had many faults, she said, but he had been cruelly used, or

deceived, and he bore a grievous burden; and then she said, 'Yes,' and

'Yes,' and 'Yes,' in the voice one supposes of a ghost retiring, to my

questions of his merits. I was refreshed and satisfied, like the parched

earth with dews when it gets no rain, and I was soon well.

When I walked among the household again, I found that my week of

seclusion had endowed me with a singular gift; I found that I could see

through everybody. Looking at the squire, I thought to myself, 'My father

has faults, but he has been cruelly used,' and immediately I forgave the

old man; his antipathy to my father seemed a craze, and to account for it

I lay in wait for his numerous illogical acts and words, and smiled

visibly in contemplation of his rough unreasonable nature, and of my

magnanimity. He caught the smile, and interpreted it.

'Grinning at me, Harry; have I made a slip in my grammar, eh?'

Who could feel any further sensitiveness at his fits of irritation,

reading him as I did? I saw through my aunt: she was always in dread of a

renewal of our conversation. I could see her ideas flutter like birds to

escape me. And I penetrated the others who came in my way just as

unerringly. Farmer Eckerthy would acknowledge, astonished, his mind was

running on cricket when I taxed him with it.

'Crops was the cart-load of my thoughts, Master Harry, but there was a

bit o' cricket in it, too, ne'er a doubt.'

My aunt's maid, Davis, was shocked by my discernment of the fact that she

was in love, and it was useless for her to pretend the contrary, for I

had seen her granting tender liberties to Lady Ilchester's footman.

Old Sewis said gravely, 'You've been to the witches, Master Harry'; and

others were sure 'I had got it from the gipsies off the common.'

The maids were partly incredulous, but I perceived that they disbelieved

as readily as they believed. With my latest tutor, the Rev. Simon Hart, I

was not sufficiently familiar to offer him proofs of my extraordinary

power; so I begged favours of him, and laid hot-house flowers on his

table in the name of my aunt, and had the gratification of seeing him

blush. His approval of my Latin exercise was verbal, and weak praise in

comparison; besides I cared nothing for praises not referring to my grand

natural accomplishment. 'And my father now is thinking of me!' That was

easy to imagine, but the certainty of it confirmed me in my conceit.

'How can you tell?--how is it possible for you to know people's

thoughts?' said Janet Ilchester, whose head was as open to me as a hat.

She pretended to be rather more frightened of me than she was.

'And now you think you are flattering me!' I said.

She looked nervous.

'And now you're asking yourself what you can do better than I can!'

She said, 'Go on.'

I stopped.

She charged me with being pulled up short.

I denied it.

'Guess, guess!' said she. 'You can't.'

My reply petrified her. 'You were thinking that you are a lady by birth

on both sides.'

At first she refused to admit it. 'No, it wasn't that, Harry, it wasn't

really. I was thinking how clever you are.'

'Yes, after, not before.'

'No, Harry, but you are clever. I wish I was half as clever. Fancy

reading people's ideas! I can read my pony's, but that's different; I

know by his ears. And as for my being a lady, of course I am, and so are

you--I mean, a gentleman. I was thinking--now this is really what I was

thinking--I wished your father lived near, that we might all be friends.

I can't bear the squire when he talks . . . . And you quite as good as

me, and better. Don't shake me off, Harry.'

I shook her in the gentlest manner, not suspecting that she had read my

feelings fully as well as I her thoughts. Janet and I fell to talking of

my father incessantly, and were constantly together. The squire caught

one of my smiles rising, when he applauded himself lustily for the

original idea of matching us; but the idea was no longer distasteful to

me. It appeared to me that if I must some day be married, a wife who

would enjoy my narratives, and travel over the four quarters of the

globe, as Janet promised to do, in search of him I loved, would be the

preferable person. I swore her to secresy; she was not to tell her

brother Charley the subject we conversed on.

'Oh dear, no!' said she, and told him straightway.

Charley, home for his winter holidays, blurted out at the squire's table:

'So, Harry Richmond, you're the cleverest fellow in the world, are you?

There's Janet telling everybody your father's the cleverest next to you,

and she's never seen him!'

'How? hulloa, what 's that?' sang out the squire.

'Charley was speaking of my father, sir,' I said, preparing for thunder.

We all rose. The squire looked as though an apoplectic seizure were

coming on.

'Don't sit at my table again,' he said, after a terrible struggle to be

articulate.

His hand was stretched at me. I swung round to depart. 'No, no, not you;

that fellow,' he called, getting his arm level toward Charley.

I tried to intercede--the last who should have done it.

'You like to hear him, eh?' said the squire.

I was ready to say that I did, but my aunt, whose courage was up when

occasion summoned it, hushed the scene by passing the decanter to the

squire, and speaking to him in a low voice.

'Biter's bit. I've dished myself, that's clear,' said Charley; and he

spoke the truth, and such was his frankness that I forgave him.

He and Janet were staying at Riversley. They left next morning, for the

squire would not speak to him, nor I to Janet.

'I 'll tell you what; there 's no doubt about one thing,' said Charley;

'Janet's right--some of those girls are tremendously deep: you're about

the cleverest fellow I've ever met in my life. I thought of working into

the squire in a sort of collateral manner, you know. A cornetcy in the

Dragoon Guards in a year or two. I thought the squire might do that for

me without much damaging you;--perhaps a couple of hundred a year, just

to reconcile me to a nose out of joint. For, upon my honour, the squire

spoke of making me his heir--or words to that effect neatly

conjugated--before you came back; and rather than be a curate like that

Reverend Hart of yours, who hands raisins and almonds, and orange-flower

biscuits to your aunt the way of all the Reverends who drop down on

Riversley--I 'd betray my bosom friend. I'm regularly "hoist on my own

petard," as they say in the newspapers. I'm a curate and no mistake. You

did it with a turn of the wrist, without striking out: and I like neat

boxing. I bear no malice when I'm floored neatly.'

Five minutes after he had spoken it would have been impossible for me to

tell him that my simplicity and not my cleverness had caused his

overthrow. From this I learnt that simplicity is the keenest weapon and a

beautiful refinement of cleverness; and I affected it extremely. I pushed

it so far that I could make the squire dance in his seat with suppressed

fury and jealousy at my way of talking of Venice, and other Continental

cities, which he knew I must have visited in my father's society; and

though he raged at me and pshawed the Continent to the deuce, he was

ready, out of sheer rivalry, to grant anything I pleased to covet. At

every stage of my growth one or another of my passions was alert to twist

me awry, and now I was getting a false self about me and becoming liker

to the creature people supposed me to be, despising them for blockheads

in my heart, as boys may who preserve a last trace of the ingenuousness

denied to seasoned men.

Happily my aunt wrote to Mr. Rippenger for the address of little Gus

Temple's father, to invite my schoolfellow to stay a month at Riversley.

Temple came, everybody liked him; as for me my delight was unbounded, and

in spite of a feeling of superiority due to my penetrative capacity, and

the suspicion it originated, that Temple might be acting the plain

well-bred schoolboy he was, I soon preferred his pattern to my own. He

confessed he had found me changed at first. His father, it appeared, was

working him as hard at Latin as Mr. Hart worked me, and he sat down

beside me under my tutor and stumbled at Tacitus after his fluent Cicero.

I offered excuses for him to Mr. Hart, saying he would soon prove himself

the better scholar. 'There's my old Richie!' said Temple, fondling me on

the shoulder, and my nonsensical airs fell away from me at once.

We roamed the neighbourhood talking old school-days over, visiting

houses, hunting and dancing, declaring every day we would write for

Heriot to join us, instead of which we wrote a valentine to Julia

Rippenger, and despatched a companion one composed in a very different

spirit to her father. Lady Ilchester did us the favour to draw a

sea-monster, an Andromeda, and a Perseus in the shape of a flying British

hussar, for Julia's valentine. It seemed to us so successful that we

scattered half-a-dozen over the neighbourhood, and rode round it on the

morning of St. Valentine's Day to see the effect of them, meeting the

postman on the road. He gave me two for myself. One was transparently

from Janet, a provoking counterstroke of mine to her; but when I opened

the other my heart began beating. The standard of Great Britain was

painted in colours at the top; down each side, encricled in laurels, were

kings and queens of England with their sceptres, and in the middle I read

the initials, A. F-G. R. R., embedded in blue forget-me-hots. I could not

doubt it was from my father. Riding out in the open air as I received it,

I could fancy in my hot joy that it had dropped out of heaven.

'He's alive; I shall have him with me; I shall have him with me soon!' I

cried to Temple. 'Oh! why can't I answer him? where is he? what address?

Let's ride to London. Don't you understand, Temple? This letter's from my

father. He knows I'm here. I'll find him, never mind what happens.'

'Yes, but,' said Temple, 'if he knows where you are, and you don't know

where he is, there's no good in your going off adventuring. If a fellow

wants to be hit, the best thing he can do is to stop still.'

Struck by the perspicacity of his views, I turned homeward. Temple had

been previously warned by me to avoid speaking of my father at Riversley;

but I was now in such a boiling state of happiness, believing that my

father would certainly appear as he had done at Dipwell farm, brilliant

and cheerful, to bear me away to new scenes and his own dear society,

that I tossed the valentine to my aunt across the breakfast-table,

laughing and telling her to guess the name of the sender. My aunt

flushed.

'Miss Bannerbridge?' she said.

A stranger was present. The squire introduced us.

'My grandson, Harry Richmond, Captain William Bulsted, frigate

Polyphemus; Captain Bulsted, Master Augustus Temple.'

For the sake of conversation, Temple asked him if his ship was fully

manned.

'All but a mate,' said the captain.

I knew him by reputation as the brother of Squire Gregory Bulsted of

Bulsted, notorious for his attachment to my aunt, and laughing-stock of

the county.

'So you've got a valentine,' the captain addressed me. 'I went on shore

at Rio last year on this very day of the month, just as lively as you

youngsters for one. Saltwater keeps a man's youth in pickle. No valentine

for me! Paid off my ship yesterday at Spithead, and here I am again on

Valentine's Day.'

Temple and I stared hard at a big man with a bronzed skin and a rubicund

laugh who expected to receive valentines.

My aunt thrust the letter back to me secretly. 'It must be from a lady,'

said she.

'Why, who'd have a valentine from any but a lady?' exclaimed the captain.

The squire winked at me to watch his guest. Captain Bulsted fed heartily;

he was thoroughly a sailor-gentleman, between the old school and the new,

and, as I perceived, as far gone in love with my aunt as his brother was.

Presently Sewis entered carrying a foaming tankard of old ale, and he and

the captain exchanged a word or two upon Jamaica.

'Now, when you've finished that washy tea of yours, take a draught of our

October, brewed here long before you were a lieutenant, captain,' said

the squire.

'Thank you, sir,' the captain replied; 'I know that ale; a moment, and I

will gladly. I wish to preserve my faculties; I don't wish to have it

supposed that I speak under fermenting influences. Sewis, hold by, if you

please.'

My aunt made an effort to retire.

'No, no, fair play; stay,' said the squire, trying to frown, but

twinkling; my aunt tried to smile, and sat as if on springs.

'Miss Beltham,' the captain bowed to her, and to each one as he spoke,

'Squire Beltham, Mr. Harry Richmond; Mr. Temple; my ship was paid off

yesterday, and till a captain's ship is paid off, he 's not his own

master, you are aware. If you think my behaviour calls for comment,

reflect, I beseech you, on the nature of a sailor's life. A three-years'

cruise in a cabin is pretty much equivalent to the same amount of time

spent in a coffin, I can assure you; with the difference that you're hard

at work thinking all the time like the--hum.'

'Ay, he thinks hard enough,' the squire struck in.

'Pardon me, sir; like the--hum--plumb-line on a leeshore, I meant to

observe. This is now the third--the fourth occasion on which I have

practised the observance of paying my first visit to Riversley to know my

fate, that I might not have it on my conscience that I had missed a day,

a minute, as soon as I was a free man on English terra firma. My brother

Greg and I were brought up in close association with Riversley. One of

the Beauties of Riversley we lost! One was left, and we both tried our

luck with her; honourably, in turn, each of us, nothing underhand;

above-board, on the quarter-deck, before all the company. I 'll say it of

my brother, I can say it of myself. Greg's chances, I need not remark,

are superior to mine; he is always in port. If he wins, then I tell

him--"God bless you, my boy; you've won the finest woman, the

handsomest, and the best, in or out of Christendom!" But my chance is my

property, though it may be value only one farthing coin of the realm, and

there is always pity for poor sinners in the female bosom. Miss Beltham,

I trespass on your kind attention. If I am to remain a bachelor and you a

maiden lady, why, the will of heaven be done! If you marry another, never

mind who the man, there's my stock to the fruit of the union, never mind

what the sex. But, if you will have one so unworthy of you as me, my hand

and heart are at your feet, ma'am, as I have lost no time in coming to

tell you.' So Captain Bulsted concluded. Our eyes were directed on my

aunt. The squire bade her to speak out, for she had his sanction to act

according to her judgement and liking.

She said, with a gracefulness that gave me a little aching of pity for

the poor captain: 'I am deeply honoured by you, Captain Bulsted, but it

is not my intention to marry.'

The captain stood up, and bowing humbly, replied 'I am ever your servant,

ma'am.'

My aunt quitted the room.

'Now for the tankard, Sewis,' said the captain.

Gradually the bottom of the great tankard turned up to the ceiling. He

drank to the last drop in it.

The squire asked him whether he found consolation in that.

The captain sighed prodigiously and said: 'It 's a commencement, sir.'

'Egad, it's a commencement 'd be something like a final end to any dozen

of our fellows round about here. I'll tell you what: if stout stomachs

gained the day in love-affairs, I suspect you'd run a good race against

the male half of our county, William. And a damned good test of a man's

metal, I say it is! What are you going to do to-day?'

'I am going to get drunk, sir.'

'Well, you might do worse. Then, stop here, William, and give my old Port

the preference. No tongue in the morning, I promise you, and pleasant

dreams at night.' The captain thanked him cordially, but declined, saying

that he would rather make a beast of himself in another place.

The squire vainly pressed his hospitality by assuring him of perfect

secresy on our part, as regarded my aunt, and offering him Sewis and one

of the footmen to lift him to bed. 'You are very good, squire,' said the

captain; 'nothing but a sense of duty restrains me. I am bound to convey

the information to my brother that the coast is clear for him.'

'Well, then, fall light, and for'ard,' said the squire, shaking him by

the hand. Forty years ago a gentleman, a baronet, had fallen on the back

of his head and never recovered.

'Ay, ay, launch stern foremost, if you like!' said the captain, nodding;

'no, no, I don't go into port pulled by the tail, my word for it, squire;

and good day to you, sir.'

'No ill will about this bothering love-business of yours, William?'

'On my soul, sir, I cherish none.'

Temple and I followed him out of the house, fascinated by his manners and

oddness. He invited us to jump into the chariot beside him. We were

witnesses of the meeting between him and his brother, a little sniffling

man, as like the captain as a withered nut is like a milky one.

'Same luck, William?' said Squire Gregory.

'Not a point of change in the wind, Greg,' said the captain.

They wrenched hands thereupon, like two carpet-shakers, with a report,

and much in a similar attitude.

'These young gentlemen will testify to you solemnly, Greg, that I took no

unfair advantage,' said the captain; 'no whispering in passages, no

appointments in gardens, no letters. I spoke out. Bravely, man! And now,

Greg, referring to the state of your cellar, our young friends here mean

to float with us to-night. It is now half-past eleven A.M. Your

dinner-hour the same as usual, of course? Therefore at four P.M. the hour

of execution. And come, Greg, you and I will visit the cellar. A dozen

and half of light and half-a-dozen of the old family--that will be about

the number of bottles to give me my quietus, and you yours--all of us!

And you, young gentlemen, take your guns or your rods, and back and be

dressed by the four bell, or you 'll not find the same man in Billy

Bulsted.'

Temple was enraptured with him. He declared he had been thinking

seriously for a long time of entering the Navy, and his admiration of the

captain must have given him an intuition of his character, for he

persuaded me to send to Riversley for our evening-dress clothes,

appearing in which at the dinner-table, we received the captain's

compliments, as being gentlemen who knew how to attire ourselves to suit

an occasion. The occasion, Squire Gregory said, happened to him too often

for him to distinguish it by the cut of his coat.

'I observe, nevertheless, Greg, that you have a black tie round your neck

instead of a red one,' said the captain.

'Then it came there by accident,' said Squire Gregory.

'Accident! There's no such thing as accident. If I wander out of the

house with a half dozen or so in me, and topple into the brook, am I

accidentally drowned? If a squall upsets my ship, is she an accidental

residue of spars and timber and old iron? If a woman refuses me, is that

an accident? There's a cause for every disaster: too much cargo, want of

foresight, want of pluck. Pooh! when I'm hauled prisoner into a foreign

port in time of war, you may talk of accidents. Mr. Harry Richmond, Mr.

Temple, I have the accidental happiness of drinking to your healths in a

tumbler of hock wine. Nominative, hic, haec, hoc.'

Squire Gregory carried on the declension, not without pride. The Vocative

confused him.

'Claret will do for the Vocative,' said the captain, gravely; 'the more

so as there is plenty of it at your table, Greg. Ablative hoc, hac, hoc,

which sounds as if the gentleman had become incapable of speech beyond

the name of his wine. So we will abandon the declension of the article

for a dash of champagne, which there's no declining, I hope. Wonderful

men, those Romans! They fought their ships well, too. A question to you,

Greg. Those heathen Pagan dogs had a religion that encouraged them to

swear. Now, my experience of life pronounces it to be a human necessity

to rap out an oath here and there. What do you say?'

Squire Gregory said: 'Drinking, and no thinking, at dinner, William.' The

captain pledged him.

'I 'll take the opportunity, as we're not on board ship, of drinking to

you, sir, now,' Temple addressed the captain, whose face was resplendent;

and he bowed, and drank, and said,

'As we are not on board ship? I like you!'

Temple thanked him for the compliment.

'No compliment, my lad. You see me in my weakness, and you have the

discernment to know me for something better than I seem. You promise to

respect me on my own quarter-deck. You are of the right stuff. Do I speak

correctly, Mr. Harry?'

'Temple is my dear friend,' I replied.

'And he would not be so if not of the right stuff! Good! That 's a way of

putting much in little. By Jove! a royal style.'

'And Harry's a royal fellow!' said Temple.

We all drank to one another. The captain's eyes scrutinized me

speculatingly.

'This boy might have been yours or mine, Greg,' I heard him say in a

faltering rough tone.

They forgot the presence of Temple and me, but spoke as if they thought

they were whispering. The captain assured his brother that Squire Beltham

had given him as much fair play as one who holds a balance. Squire

Gregory doubted it, and sipped and kept his nose at his wineglass,

crabbedly repeating his doubts of it. The captain then remarked, that

doubting it, his conscience permitted him to use stratagems, though he,

the captain, not doubting it, had no such permission.

'I count I run away with her every night of my life,' said Squire

Gregory. 'Nothing comes of it but empty bottles.'

'Court her, serenade her,' said the captain; 'blockade the port, lay

siege to the citadel. I'd give a year of service for your chances, Greg.

Half a word from her, and you have your horses ready.'

'She's past po'chaises,' Squire Gregory sighed.

'She's to be won by a bold stroke, brother Greg.'

'Oh, Lord, no! She's past po'chaises.'

'Humph! it's come to be half-bottle, half-beauty, with your worship,

Greg, I suspect.'

'No. I tell you, William, she's got her mind on that fellow. You can't

po'chay her.'

'After he jilted her for her sister? Wrong, Greg, wrong. You are muddled.

She has a fright about matrimony--a common thing at her age, I am told.

Where's the man?'

'In the Bench, of course. Where'd you have him?'

'I, sir? If I knew my worst enemy to be there, I'd send him six dozen of

the best in my cellar.'

Temple shot a walnut at me. I pretended to be meditating carelessly, and

I had the heat and roar of a conflagration round my head.

Presently the captain said, 'Are you sure the man's in the Bench?'

'Cock,' Squire Gregory replied.

'He had money from his wife.'

'And he had the wheels to make it go.' Here they whispered in earnest.

'Oh, the Billings were as rich as the Belthams,' said the captain, aloud.

'Pretty nigh, William.'

'That's our curse, Greg. Money settled on their male issue, and money in

hand; by the Lord! we've always had the look of a pair of highwaymen

lurking for purses, when it was the woman, the woman, penniless, naked,

mean, destitute; nothing but the woman we wanted. And there was one

apiece for us. Greg, old boy, when will the old county show such another

couple of Beauties! Greg, sir, you're not half a man, or you'd have

carried her, with your, opportunities. The fellow's in the Bench, you

say? How are you cocksure of that, Mr. Greg?'

'Company,' was the answer; and the captain turned to Temple and me,

apologizing profusely for talking over family matters with his brother

after a separation of three years. I had guessed but hastily at the

subject of their conversation until they mentioned the Billings, the

family of my maternal grandmother. The name was like a tongue of fire

shooting up in a cloud of smoke: I saw at once that the man in the Bench

must be my father, though what the Bench was exactly, and where it was, I

had no idea, and as I was left to imagination I became, as usual,

childish in my notions, and brooded upon thoughts of the Man in the Iron

Mask; things I dared not breathe to Temple, of whose manly sense I stood

in awe when under these distracting influences.

'Remember our feast in the combe?' I sang across the table to him.

'Never forget it!' said he; and we repeated the tale of the goose at

Rippenger's school to our entertainers, making them laugh.

'And next morning Richie ran off with a gipsy girl,' said Temple; and I

composed a narrative of my wanderings with Kiomi, much more amusing than

the real one. The captain vowed he would like to have us both on board

his ship, but that times were too bad for him to offer us a prospect of

promotion. 'Spin round the decanters,' said he; 'now's the hour for them

to go like a humming-top, and each man lend a hand: whip hard, my lads.

It's once in three years, hurrah! and the cause is a cruel woman. Toast

her; but no name. Here's to the nameless Fair! For it's not my intention

to marry, says she, and, ma'am, I'm a man of honour or I'd catch you

tight, my nut-brown maid, and clap you into a cage, fal-lal, like a

squirrel; to trot the wheel of mat-trimony. Shame to the first man down!'

'That won't be I,' said Temple.

'Be me, sir, me,' the captain corrected his grammar.

'Pardon me, Captain Bulsted; the verb "To be" governs the nominative case

in our climate,' said Temple.

'Then I'm nominative hic . . . I say, sir, I'm in the tropics, Mr. Tem

. . . Mr. Tempus. Point of honour, not forget a man's name. Rippenger,

your schoolmaster? Mr. Rippenger, you've knocked some knowledge into this

young gentleman.' Temple and I took counsel together hastily; we cried in

a breath: 'Here 's to Julia Rippenger, the prettiest, nicest girl

living!' and we drank to her.

'Julia!' the captain echoed us. 'I join your toast, gentlemen. Mr.

Richmond, Mr. Tempus-Julia! By all that's holy, she floats a sinking

ship! Julia consoles me for the fairest, cruellest woman alive. A rough

sailor, Julia! at your feet.'

The captain fell commendably forward. Squire Gregory had already dropped.

Temple and I tried to meet, but did not accomplish it till next morning

at breakfast. A couple of footmen carried us each upstairs in turn, as if

they were removing furniture.

Out of this strange evening came my discovery of my father, and the

captain's winning of a wife.