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-nots. 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's 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.