But I did not go direct to the Star and Garter. No, I lacked the courage
to say to John Paul: “You have trusted me, and this is how I have
rewarded your faith.” And the thought that Dorothy's father, of all
men, had served me thus, after what I had gone through, filled me with
a bitterness I had never before conceived. And when my brain became
clearer I reflected that Mr. Manners had had ample time to learn of my
disappearance from Maryland, and that his action had been one of design,
and of cold blood. But I gave to Dorothy or her mother no part in it.
Mr. Manners never had had cause to hate me, and the only reason I could
assign was connected with his Grace of Chartersea, which I dismissed as
absurd.
A few drops of rain warned me to seek shelter. I knew not where I was,
nor how long I had been walking the streets at a furious pace. But a
huckster told me I was in Chelsea; and kindly directed me back to Pall
Mall. The usual bunch of chairmen was around the hotel entrance, but
I noticed a couple of men at the door, of sharp features and unkempt
dress, and heard a laugh as I went in. My head swam as I stumbled up the
stairs and fumbled at the knob, when I heard voices raised inside, and
the door was suddenly and violently thrown open. Across the sill stood a
big, rough-looking man with his hands on his hips.
“Oho! Here be the other fine bird a-homing, I'll warrant,” he cried.
The place was full. I caught sight of Davenport, the tailor, with a
wry face, talking against the noise; of Banks, the man I had hired,
resplendent in my livery. One of the hotel servants was in the
corner perspiring over John Paul's chests, and beside him stood a man
disdainfully turning over with his foot the contents, as they were
thrown on the floor. I saw him kick the precious vellum-hole waistcoat
across the room in wrath and disgust, and heard him shout above the
rest: “The lot of them would not bring a guinea from any Jew in St.
Martin's Lane!”
In the other corner, by the writing-desk, stood the hatter and the
haberdasher with their heads together. And in the very centre of the
confusion was the captain himself. He was drest in his new clothes
Davenport had brought, and surprised me by his changed appearance, and
looked as fine a gentleman as any I have ever seen. His face lighted
with relief at sight of me.
“Now may I tell these rogues begone, Richard?” he cried. And turning
to the man confronting me, he added, “This gentleman will settle their
beggarly accounts.”
Then I knew we had to do with bailiffs, and my heart failed me.
“Likely,” laughed the big man; “I'll stake my oath he has not a groat to
pay their beggarly accounts, as year honour is pleased to call them.”
They ceased jabbering and straightened to attention, awaiting my reply.
But I forgot them all, and thought only of the captain, and of the
trouble I had brought him. He began to show some consternation as I went
up to him.
“My dear friend,” I said, vainly trying to steady my voice, “I beg, I
pray that you will not lose faith in me,--that you will not think any
deceit of mine has brought you to these straits. Mr. Dix did not know
me, and has had no word from my grandfather of my disappearance. And Mr.
Manners, whom I thought my friend, spurned me in the street before the
Duke of Chartersea.”
And no longer master of myself, I sat down at the table and hid my face,
shaken by great sobs, to think that this was my return for his kindness.
“What,” I heard him cry, “Mr. Manners spurned you, Richard! By all
the law in Coke and Littleton, he shall answer for it to me. Your
fairweather fowl shall have the chance to run me through!”
I sat up in bewilderment, doubting my senses.
“You believe me, captain,” I said, overcome by the man's faith; “you
believe me when I tell you that one I have known from childhood refused
to recognize me to-day?”
He raised me in his arms as tenderly as a woman might.
“And the whole world denied you, lad, I would not. I believe you--” and
he repeated it again and again, unable to get farther.
And if his words brought tears to my eyes, my strength came with them.
“Then I care not,” I replied; “I only to live to reward you.”
“Mr. Manners shall answer for it to me!” cried John Paul again, and made
a pace toward the door.
“Not so fast, not so fast, captain, or admiral, or whatever you are,”
said the bailiff, stepping in his way, for he was used to such scenes;
“as God reigns, the owners of all these fierce titles be fire-eaters,
who would spit you if you spilt snuff upon 'em. Come, come, gentlemen,
your swords, and we shall see the sights o' London.”
This was the signal for another uproar, the tailor shrieking that John
Paul must take off the suit, and Banks the livery; asking the man in the
corner by the sea-chests (who proved to be the landlord) who was to pay
him for his work and his lost cloth. And the landlord shook his fist
at us and shouted back, who was to pay him his four pounds odd, which
included two ten-shilling dinners and a flask of his best wine? The
other tradesmen seized what was theirs and made off with remarks
appropriate to the occasion. And when John Paul and my man were divested
of their plumes, we were marched downstairs and out through a jeering
line of people to a hackney coach.
“Now, sirs, whereaway?” said the bailiff when we were got in beside one
of his men, and burning with the shame of it; “to the prison? Or I has a
very pleasant hotel for gentlemen in Castle Yard.”
The frightful stories my dear grandfather had told me of the Fleet came
flooding into my head, and I shuddered and turned sick. I glanced at
John Paul.
“A guinea will not go far in a sponging-house,” said he, and the
bailiff's man laughed.
The bailiff gave a direction we did not hear, and we drove off. He
proved a bluff fellow with a bloat yet not unkindly humour, and despite
his calling seemed to have something that was human in him. He
passed many a joke on that pitiful journey in an attempt to break our
despondency, urging us not to be downcast, and reminding us that the
last gentleman he had taken from Pall Mall was in over a thousand
pounds, and that our amount was a bagatelle. And when we had gone
through Temple Bar, instead of keeping on down Fleet Street, we jolted
into Chancery Lane. This roused me.
“My friend has warned you that he has no money,” I said, “and no more
have I.”
The bailiff regarded me shrewdly.
“Ay,” he replied, “I know. But I has seen many stripes o' men in my
time, my masters, and I know them to trust, and them whose silver I must
feel or send to the Fleet.”
I told him unreservedly my case, and that he must take his chance of
being paid; that I could not hear from America for three months at
least. He listened without much show of attention, shaking his head from
side to side.
“If you ever cheated a man, or the admiral here either, then I begin
over again,” he broke in with decision; “it is the fine sparks from the
clubs I has to watch. You'll not worry, sir, about me. Take my oath I'll
get interest out of you on my money.”
Unwilling as we both were to be beholden to a bailiff, the alternative
of the Fleet was too terrible to be thought of. And so we alighted after
him with a shiver at the sight of the ugly, grimy face of the house, and
the dirty windows all barred with double iron. In answer to a knock we
were presently admitted by a turnkey to a vestibule as black as a tomb,
and the heavy outer door was locked behind us. Then, as the man cursed
and groped for the keyhole of the inner door, despair laid hold of me.
Once inside, in the half light of a narrow hallway, a variety of noises
greeted our ears,--laughter from above and below, interspersed with
oaths; the click of billiard balls, and the occasional hammering of
a pack of cards on a bare table before the shuffle. The air was close
almost to suffocation, and out of the coffee room, into which I glanced,
came a heavy cloud of tobacco smoke.
“Why, my masters, why so glum?” said the bailiff; “my inn is not such a
bad place, and you'll find ample good company here, I promise you.”
And he led us into a dingy antechamber littered with papers, on every
one of which, I daresay, was written a tragedy. Then he inscribed
our names, ages, descriptions, and the like in a great book, when we
followed him up three flights to a low room under the eaves, having but
one small window, and bare of furniture save two narrow cots for beds, a
broken chair, and a cracked mirror. He explained that cash boarders got
better, and added that we might be happy we were not in the Fleet.
“We dine at two here, gentlemen, and sup at eight. This is not the Star
and Garter,” said he as he left us.
It was the captain who spoke first, though he swallowed twice before the
words came out.
“Come, Richard, come, laddie,” he said, “'tis no so bad it micht-na be
waur. We'll mak the maist o' it.”
“I care not for myself, Captain Paul,” I replied, marvelling the more at
him, “but to think that I have landed you here, that this is my return
for your sacrifice.”
“Hoots! How was ye to foresee Mr. Manners was a blellum?” And he broke
into threats which, if Mr. Marmaduke had heard and comprehended, would
have driven him into the seventh state of fear. “Have you no other
friends in London?” he asked, regaining his English.
I shook my head. Then came--a question I dreaded.
“And Mr. Manners's family?”
“I would rather remain here for life,” I said, “than to them now.”
For pride is often selfish, my dears, and I did not reflect that if I
remained, the captain would remain likewise.
“Are they all like Mr. Manners?”
“That they are not,” I returned with more heat than was necessary; “his
wife is goodness itself, and his daughter--” Words failed me, and I
reddened.
“Ah, he has a daughter, you say,” said the captain, casting a
significant look at me and beginning to pace the little room. He was
keener than I thought, this John Paul.
If it were not so painful a task, my dears, I would give you here some
notion of what a London sponging-house was in the last century. Comyn
has heard me tell of it, and I have seen Bess cry over the story.
Gaming was the king-vice of that age, and it filled these places
to overflowing. Heaven help a man who came into the world with that
propensity in the early days of King George the Third. Many, alas,
acquired it before they were come to years of discretion. Next me, at
the long table where we were all thrown in together,--all who could not
pay for private meals,--sat a poor fellow who had flung away a patrimony
of three thousand a year. Another had even mortgaged to a Jew his
prospects on the death of his mother, and had been seized by the
bailiffs outside of St. James's palace, coming to Castle Yard direct
from his Majesty's levee. Yet another, with such a look of dead hope
in his eyes as haunts me yet, would talk to us by the hour of the
Devonshire house where he was born, of the green valley and the peaceful
stream, and of the old tower-room, caressed by trees, where Queen Bess
had once lain under the carved oak rafters. Here he had taken his young
wife, and they used to sit together, so he said, in the sunny oriel over
the water, and he had sworn to give up the cards. That was but three
years since, and then all had gone across the green cloth in one mad
night in St. James's Street. Their friends had deserted them, and the
poor little woman was lodged in Holborn near by, and came every morning
with some little dainty to the bailiff's, for her liege lord who had so
used her. He pressed me to share a fowl with him one day, but it would
have choked me. God knows where she got the money to buy it. I saw her
once hanging on his neck in the hall, he trying to shield her from the
impudent gaze of his fellow-lodgers.
But some of them lived like lords in luxury, with never a seeming
regret; and had apartments on the first floor, and had their tea and
paper in bed, and lounged out the morning in a flowered nightgown, and
the rest of the day in a laced coat. These drank the bailiff's best port
and champagne, and had nothing better than a frown or haughty look for
us, when we passed them at the landing. Whence the piper was paid I knew
not, and the bailiff cared not. But the bulk of the poor gentlemen were
a merry crew withal, and had their wit and their wine at table, and knew
each other's histories (and soon enough ours) by heart. They betted away
the week at billiards or whist or picquet or loo, and sometimes measured
swords for diversion, tho' this pastime the bailiff was greatly set
against; as calculated to deprive him of a lodger.
Although we had no money for gaming, and little for wine or tobacco, the
captain and I were received very heartily into the fraternity. After
one afternoon of despondency we both voted it the worst of bad policy
to remain aloof and nurse our misfortune, and spent our first evening
in making acquaintances over a deal of very thin “debtor's claret.” I
tossed long that night on the hard cot, listening to the scurrying rats
among the roof-timbers. They ran like the thoughts in my brain. And
before I slept I prayed again and again that God would put it in my
power to reward him whom charity for a friendless foundling had brought
to a debtor's prison.
Not so much as a single complaint or reproach had passed his lips!