WHEREIN APPEARS A GENTLEMANLY CORSAIR AND A FRENCH-IRISH LORD
While it may be that the actual crisis of my manhood came to me on the
day I first put on my Uncle Andrew's shoes, the sense of it was mine
only when I met with Captain Thurot. I had put the past for ever behind
me (as I fancied) when I tore the verses of a moon-struck boy and
cast them out upon the washing-green at Hazel Den, but I was bound
to foregather with men like Thurot and his friends ere the scope and
fashion of a man's world were apparent to me. Whether his influence on
my destiny in the long run was good or bad I would be the last to say;
he brought me into danger, but--in a manner--he brought me good, though
that perhaps was never in his mind.
You must fancy this Thurot a great tall man, nearly half a foot
exceeding myself in stature, peak-bearded, straight as a lance, with
plum-black eyes and hair, polished in dress and manner to the rarest
degree and with a good humour that never failed. He sat under a swinging
lamp in his cabin when Horn and I were brought before him, and asked my
name first in an accent of English that was if anything somewhat better
than my own.
“Greig,” said I; “Paul Greig,” and he started as if I had pricked him
with a knife.
A little table stood between us, on which there lay a book he had been
reading when we were brought below, some hours after the _Seven Sisters_
had gone down, and the search for the Kirkcaldy boat had been abandoned.
He took the lamp off its hook, came round the table and held the light
so that he could see my face the clearer. At any time his aspect was
manly and pleasant; most of all was it so when he smiled, and I was
singularly encouraged when he smiled at me, with a rapid survey of my
person that included the Hazel Den mole and my Uncle Andrew's shoes.
A seaman stood behind us; to him he spoke a message I could not
comprehend, as it was in French, of which I had but little. The seaman
retired; we were offered a seat, and in a minute the seaman came back
with a gentleman--a landsman by his dress.
“Pardon, my lord,” said the captain to his visitor, “but I thought that
here was a case--speaking of miracles--you would be interested in.
Our friends here”--he indicated myself particularly with a gracious
gesture--“are not, as you know, dropped from heaven, but come from that
unfortunate ship we saw go under a while ago. May I ask your lordship to
tell us--you will see the joke in a moment--whom we were talking of at
the moment our watch first announced the sight of that vessel?”
His lordship rubbed his chin and smilingly peered at the captain.
“Gad!” he said. “You are the deuce and all, Thurot. What are you in the
mood for now? Why, we talked of Greig--Andrew Greig, the best player of
_passe-passe_ and the cheerfullest loser that ever cut a pack.”
Thurot turned to me, triumphant.
“Behold,” said he, “how ridiculously small the world is. _Ma foi!_ I
wonder how I manage so well to elude my creditors, even when I sail the
high seas. Lord Clancarty, permit me to have the distinguished honour
to introduce another Greig, who I hope has many more of his charming
uncle's qualities than his handsome eyes and red shoes. I assume it is
a nephew, because poor Monsieur Andrew was not of the marrying
kind. Anyhow, 'tis a Greig of the blood, or Antoine Thurot is a bat!
And--Monsieur Greig, it is my felicity to bid you know one of your
uncle's best friends and heartiest admirers--Lord Clancarty.”
“Lord Clancarty!” I cried, incredulous. “Why he figured in my uncle's
log-book a dozen years ago.”
“A dozen, no less!” cried his lordship, with a grimace. “We need not be
so particular about the period. I trust he set me down there a decently
good companion; I could hardly hope to figure in a faithful scribe's
tablets as an example otherwise,” said his lordship, laughing and taking
me cordially by the hand. “Gad! one has but to look at you to see Andrew
Greig in every line. I loved your uncle, lad. He had a rugged, manly
nature, and just sufficient folly, bravado, and sinfulness to keep a
poor Irishman in countenance. Thurot, one must apologise for taking from
your very lips the suggestion I see hesitating there, but sure 'tis an
Occasion this; it must be a bottle--the best bottle on your adorable but
somewhat ill-found vessel. Why 'tis Andy Greig come young again. Poor
Andy! I heard of his death no later than a month ago, and have ordered
a score of masses for him--which by the way are still unpaid for to good
Father Hamilton. I could not sleep happily of an evening--of a forenoon
rather--if I thought of our Andy suffering aught that a few candles and
such-like could modify.” And his lordship with great condescension
tapped and passed me his jewelled box of maccabaw.
You can fancy a raw lad, untutored and untravelled, fresh from the
plough-tail, as it were, was vastly tickled at this introduction to the
genteel world. I was no longer the shivering outlaw, the victim of a
Risk. I was honoured more or less for the sake of my uncle (whose esteem
in this quarter my father surely would have been surprised at), and it
seemed as though my new life in a new country were opening better than I
had planned myself. I blessed my shoes--the Shoes of Sorrow--and for the
time forgot the tragedy from which I was escaping.
They birled the bottle between them, Clancarty and Thurot, myself
virtually avoiding it, but clinking now and then, and laughing with them
at the numerous exploits they recalled of him that was the bond between
us; Horn elsewhere found himself well treated also; and listening to
these two gentlemen of the world, their allusions, off-hand, to the
great, their indications of adventure, travel, intrigue, enterprise,
gaiety, I saw my horizon expand until it was no longer a cabin on the
sea I sat in, with the lamplight swinging over me, but a spacious world
of castles, palaces, forests, streets, churches, casernes, harbours,
masquerades, routs, operas, love, laughter, and song. Perhaps they saw
my elation and fully understood, and smiled within them at my efforts
to figure as a little man of the world too--as boys will--but they never
showed me other than the finest sympathy and attention.
I found them fascinating at night; I found them much the same at
morning, which is the test of the thing in youth, and straightway made a
hero of the foreigner Thurot. Clancarty was well enough, but without
any method in his life, beyond a principle of keeping his character ever
trim and presentable like his cravat. Thurot carried on his strenuous
career as soldier, sailor, spy, politician, with a plausible enough
theory that thus he got the very juice and pang of life, that at the
most, as he would aye be telling me, was brief to an absurdity.
“Your Scots,” he would say to me, “as a rule, are too phlegmatic--is it
not, Lord Clancarty?--but your uncle gave me, on my word, a regard for
your whole nation. He had aplomb--Monsieur Andrew; he had luck too, and
if he cracked a nut anywhere there was always a good kernel in it.” And
the shoes see how I took the allusion to King George, and that gave me a
flood of light upon my new position.
I remembered that in my uncle's log-book the greater part of the
narrative of his adventures in France had to do with politics and the
intrigues of the Jacobite party. He was not, himself, apparently, “out,”
as we call it, in the affair of the 'Forty-five, because he did not
believe the occasion suitable, and thought the Prince precipitous, but
before and after that untoward event for poor Scotland, he had been
active with such men as Clancarty, Lord Clare, the Murrays, the
Mareschal, and such-like, which was not to be wondered at, perhaps, for
our family had consistently been Jacobite, a fact that helped to its
latter undoing, though my father as nominal head of the house had taken
no interest in politics; and my own sympathies had ever been with the
Chevalier, whom I as a boy had seen ride through the city of Glasgow,
wishing myself old enough to be his follower in such a glittering
escapade as he was then embarked on.
But though I thought all this in a flash as it were, I betrayed nothing
to Captain Thurot, who seemed somewhat dashed at my silence. There must
have been something in my face, however, to show that I fully realised
what he was feeling at, and was not too complacent, for Clancarty
laughed.
“Sure, 'tis a good boy, Thurot,” said he, “and loves his King George
properly, like a true patriot.”
“I won't believe it of a Greig,” said Captain Thurot. “A pestilent,
dull thing, loyalty in England; the other thing came much more readily,
I remember, to the genius of Andrew Greig. Come! Monsieur Paul, to be
quite frank about it, have you no instincts of friendliness to the
exiled house? M. Tête-de-fer has a great need at this particular moment
for English friends. Once he could count on your uncle to the last
ditch; can he count on the nephew?”
“M. Tête-de-fer?” I repeated, somewhat bewildered.
“M. Tête-de-mouche, rather,” cried my lord, testily, and then hurried to
correct himself. “He alluded, Monsieur Greig, to Prince Charles Edward.
We are all, I may confess, his Royal Highness's most humble servants;
some of us, however--as our good friend, Captain Thurot--more actively
than others. For myself I begin to weary of a cause that has
been dormant for eight years, but no matter; sure one must have a
recreation!”
I looked at his lordship to see if he was joking. He was the relic of
a handsome man, though still, I daresay, less than fifty years of age,
with a clever face and gentle, just tinged by the tracery of small
surface veins to a redness that accused him of too many late nights;
his mouth and eyes, that at one time must have been fascinating, had
the ultimate irresolution that comes to one who finds no fingerposts at
life's cross-roads and thinks one road just as good's another. He was
born at Atena, near Hamburg (so much I had remembered from my uncle's
memoir), but he was, even in his accent, as Irish as Kerry. Someway I
liked and yet doubted him, in spite of all the praise of him that I had
read in a dead man's diurnal.
“_Fi donc! vous devriez avoir honte, milord_,” cried Thurot, somewhat
disturbed, I saw, at this reckless levity.
“Ashamed!” said his lordship, laughing; “why, 'tis for his Royal
Highness who has taken a diligence to the devil, and left us poor
dependants to pay the bill at the inn. But no matter, Master Greig, I'll
be cursed if I say a single word more to spoil a charming picture of
royalty under a cloud.” And so saying he lounged away from us, a strange
exquisite for shipboard, laced up to the nines, as the saying goes,
parading the deck as it had been the Rue St. Honoré, with merry words
for every sailorman who tapped a forehead to him.
Captain Thurot looked at him, smiling, and shrugged his shoulders.
“_Tête-de-mouche!_ There it is for you, M. Paul--the head of a
butterfly. Now you--” he commanded my eyes most masterfully--“now _you_
have a Scotsman's earnestness; I should like to see you on the right
side. _Mon Dieu_, you owe us your life, no less; 'tis no more King
George's, for one of his subjects has morally sent you to the bottom of
the sea in a scuttled ship. I wish we had laid hands on your Risk and
his augers.”
But I was learning my world; I was cautious; I said neither yea nor nay.