To the Duke of York’s chambers in Whitehall came a mincing
exquisite, with a guitar slung from his neck by a broad silver ribbon.
He was dressed in silvered white from chin to toe, and he strutted
exactly like a white leghorn cock surveying his seraglio. His long,
straw-coloured hair was elaborately curled over his temples; the
lashes to his eyes were like pale spun glass; a tiny cherished
moustachio, pointed upwards at the tips, stood either side his round
nose like a couple of thorns to a gooseberry. He hummed as he walked,
flourishing a beringed and scented hand to such palace minions as met
and saluted him by the way, and reaching the Duke’s quarters,
acknowledged, with a charming condescension, the respectful greetings
of M. Prosper, gentleman of the Chamber to his Highness, who accosted
him at the door of the anteroom.
“Ha, my good Prothper! I thee you well, _j’ethpère bien_?”
“Vair well--most--milord of Arran. You are to come this way, sair. His
Royal ’Ighness ’e expectorate you.”
Bowing and waving his arms, as if he were “shooing” on a fowl, M.
Prosper conducted the visitor by a private passage to the Duke’s
closet, where, committing him to the hands of a page, he bobbed and
ducked himself away. And the next moment the Earl found himself in the
presence of the Lord High Admiral.
James Stuart was seated at a table liberally strewn with documents,
writing, and mathematical implements. There were no gimcracks visible
on it, unless a little bronze ship, which served for a paper-weight,
deserved the title. The aspect of the room, like his own, inornate,
businesslike, severe, was in odd contrast with the silken frippery
which came to invade it. One would have guessed some particular
purpose to lie behind the permitted violation of those austere
privacies. His Highness was minutely examining a chart when the
lordling entered. Standing over him and occasionally dabbing a
forefinger, like a discoloured banana, on some specified shoal or
anchorage, was a huge individual, in a full-skirted blue coat, trimmed
with the coarse lace called trolly-lolly, whose bearing spoke
unmistakably of the sea. This was Captain Stone, of the _Naseby_
frigate, in fact--a practical sailorman, much in favour with his royal
master. He was a rough-and-ready specimen of his class, with manners
as blunt as his features. He turned to stare at the sugary apparition
as it sailed into view, and a grin of derision, which he made no
effort to conceal, widened his already ample features.
“Ha, my lord!” said the Duke; “you are welcome. Be seated, sir, be
seated. I shall be disengaged in one moment. Stone, oblige me by
removing your hat from that chair, that my lord of Arran may come to
anchor.”
The bulky sea-captain, with a most offensive affectation of alacrity,
skipped to obey. He swept the chair with his hat; more, he produced
from somewhere an enormous blue handkerchief like a small ensign, and
elaborately polished the seat with it.
“Now,” says he, “if your lordship’s breeches will deign to
reconsecrate the altar my top-gear hath profaned.”
The Duke, his elbow leaned on the table, shaded his face with his
palm, and laughed noiselessly. As for the sweet puppy himself,
self-esteem had thickened his moral cuticle beyond penetration by
anything less than a pickaxe of ridicule. He closed his lids, and,
with an ineffable smile and wave of the hand, dropped languidly into
the proffered place. Duke and Captain continued for a while their
investigation of the chart. Then the former put it away, and, leaning
back in his chair, addressed a question to the latter.
“What is this I hear, Captain, of decent folk impressed illegally in
the City by order of my Lord Mayor?”
The burly seaman shrugged his shoulders.
“He’s an ass, sir, that Bludworth, yet an ass in some sort deserving
commendation.”
“In what way?”
“Why, in the way that leads by short-cuts to disputed ends. He gets
there, while your wise man talks.”
“Aye, but he tramples rights to do it.”
“He may. We must have men.”
“They were given no press money, I understand.”
“He had none to give them. Still, we must have men.”
“The thing should be in order. There were those among them, I hear, of
quite respectable estate.”
“Aye, but we must have men, I say. Your fool, on occasion, can have
his uses.”
The Duke, as if involuntarily, shot a swift glance towards the seated
figure.
“Could they, under the circumstances,” he said, “be broke for
desertion?”
“I leave that,” answered the seaman dryly, “to your Highness.”
“’Tis not the way, at least, to make the King’s service popular.”
“Well, I could venture a better way.”
He meant, of course, the settlement of long arrears of pay--a chronic
scandal in the Navy. But the obvious was not palatable. The Duke, just
raising his eyebrows at the speaker, bent them in a frown, and sat
drumming for some moments with his fingers on the table. Suddenly he
turned to Arran.
“What would _you_ suggest, my lord,” said he, “to make the Navy
popular? The lay opinion, given an intelligence such as yours, is
often valuable in these matters.”
His lordship, exquisitely flattered, sat up.
“I should offer a handthome bounty, Thir,” said he--with perhaps some
vivid recollection of personal sufferings endured in the Channel--“to
the man who should devith or invent a thertain cure for
thea-thickneth.”
Captain Stone, regardless of his company, burst into a roar of
laughter.
“By Gog, your Highness!” cried he, “here’s the pressman for our money.
To make the Navy popular, quotha--give them stomach for it! Aye, why
not? And lace our sails with silver twist, and hang a silken tassel at
the main, and pipe to quarters on a hurdy-gurdy! O, we’ll have our
Captain’s monkey yet with lovelocks to his head and white ribbons to
his shoon!”
His lordship, on whom this pickaxe had wrought at last, flushed up to
the eyes with anger and resentment. He rose to his feet.
“Thith monthtruth inthult,” he began; “I crave your Highnetheth
grath----” and stuck for lack of words.
The Duke, whose cue was nothing if not propitiation, turned in some
genuine wrath on the seaman.
“You forget yourself, sir,” he said sternly. “You will favour me by
retiring. Waiving the question of respect for his lordship’s opinions,
you fail in it to me, who invited them. Nor need you be so cocksure in
your own. Who knows what inclinations might have served us but for
dread of that malady! You must go.”
The Captain, not venturing to remonstrate, but seeing, as he thought,
through the other’s motive, obeyed, and so much without rancour that
he could not forbear some subdued sputtering laughter as he left the
room--an ebullition which, in fact, found its secret response in the
Duke’s own bosom. He addressed himself, the man gone, with a rather
twinkling blandishment to his remaining guest.
“A rough, untutored fellow, my lord; but reliable, according to his
lights. They are not penetrating, perhaps; yet clear as regards the
surface of things. You must forgive him. That was an original
suggestion of yours. He would not grasp its inner significance,
naturally. To cure sea-sickness, now. There is something in it.”
“I am happy,” minced the bantling, “in your Highnetheth commendation.
That _mal-de-mer_ is a very dithtrething thing. It maketh a man look a
fool; and a man dothn’t like to look a fool.”
The Duke considered.
“But for the character of the remedy? What do you say to music? Music
will not, according to Master George Herbert, cure the toothache: but
is sea-sickness the toothache, my lord?”
“Not the toothache; no, Thir.”
“Is it not rather, by all reports, a surging or vertigo of the brain,
induced by that reversal of the laws of equilibrium which transposes
the offices, as it were, of matter animate and matter inanimate?”
“I--I take your Highnetheth word for it.”
“Why, it is clear. We are designed and organized, are we not, to be
voluntary agents on a plane of stability?”
“Yeth, yeth, O yeth!”
“Very well. So we lie down or rise at will, the solid earth abetting.
But supposing the parts reversed, ourselves the willingly quiescent,
the earth the one to rise or fall? Would not our brain, devised on the
opposite principle, be naturally upset, carrying with it the stomach,
its most intimate relation?”
“I’m thure it would; quite thure to be thure.”
“Take my word for it. When we go to sea we are transposing the
functional processes of mind and matter. How, then, to render that
exchange nugatory? The sense of it is conveyed through what? The eyes,
is it not?”
“O yeth, indeed! You thee the heaving before you heave yourthelf.”
“Exactly--a sympathetic emotion, or motion. Our vision, then, is the
direct cause of sea-sickness. Why? Because in pursuing an unstable
thing it becomes itself unstable. And there I see light. The eyes are
at right angles to the ears, are they not? And we are agreed that the
sense of instability is conveyed through the eyes?”
“Through the eyeth.”
“Well, supposing now we introduce a second appeal to the senses
through the ears; that second appeal would traverse the first appeal,
would it not, at right angles, the two forming together a sort of
sensory cross-hatch, or truss, which would immediately produce the
stability necessary to keep the otherwise unsupported sight from
accommodating itself to the action of the waves? You follow me?”
“I think---- O yeth!”
“Your suggestion was a really very able one, my lord, and it speaks
loudly against the folly of scorning all ex-official criticism in
these matters. But, to follow our theorizing to a practical end. We
are at one, then, in believing it possible that the sense of sight
could be trussed and stiffened by the introduction of the sense of
sound. To make an effective business of it, however, that sense of
sound would have to be compelling enough to arrest and neutralize the
visual tendency; it would have to be, that is to say, exceedingly
strong and exceedingly sweet. It might be possible to introduce on
each of our ships a professional harpist, or lutist, to supply with
their music a prophylactic against sea-sickness; but one has to
remember that not all musicians are sailors, and that it might prove
disastrous to the moral should one fail in his own sea-legs at the
very moment he was trying to provide another with his.”
“Yeth; that ith very true.”
“Then, again, as to the force of the appeal. Not all performers have
that convincing mastery of their instruments, my lord, which according
to what I hear, is peculiarly your own.”
“O, truth, your Highneth flatterth me!”
“You shall prove it.” He smiled very pleasantly. “But, believe me, my
lord, I am infinitely your debtor for a suggestion which _may_ go far
to revolutionize the whole question of impressment and the popularity
of the Navy. Now, will you not give me a taste of the quality which
has come to enter so aptly into the context of our discussion? You
know I play a little on the guitar myself, but not so well as to
refuse a hint or two from a master of the instrument. There was a
question of a saraband. I would fain take a lesson in its
presentation.”
“Corbetti’th, your Highneth meanth.” The puppy--strange scion of a
house distinguished, in the persons of its head and firstborn, for
both courage and nobility--glowed with gratified vanity. He really
believed at last that ’twas he himself had originated that exquisite
specific against the curse of the ocean, and that the Duke was his
admiring debtor for it. He struck an attitude, slung his guitar into
position, and, receiving a nod from his auditor, forthwith touched out
the measure of Signor Francesco’s saraband. It was a quite graceful
composition, and he played it well.
The Duke was enraptured.
“It is in truth a most sweet and moving piece,” he said, “and masterly
rendered. I have never known to be displayed a more perfect accord
between composer, performer, and instrument. Yet, if they were to be
considered in order of merit, I should put, without hesitation, the
executant in the first place and the guitar in the least.”
“Yet it’th a good guitar, Thir,” ventured the glowing youth. He lifted
and eyed with beatific patronage that faithful recorder of his genius.
“Good,” answered the Duke; “yet good is not good enough to be the
servant of the best. But where, indeed, could one look for an
instrument worthy of an Orpheus?”
“O, I bluth, your Highneth! Yet I will not thay but what I might give
a better account of mythelf on an inthtrument pothethed by my
thithter, my lady Chethterfield. It ith a wonder, that. Corbetti
himthelf hath declared it.”
“Indeed?” James spoke abstractedly, seeming hardly to attend. “Now,
will you make me your debtor, my lord, for a hint or two. It would
flatter my poor skill to expend it on so rare a melody.”
He was so full of compliment and ingratiation, that the first
diffidence of the sweet Earl was soon exchanged for a vanity
approaching condescension. He took his royal pupil in hand, and
conducted him over the opening bars of the composition. But the Duke,
strange to say, proved himself a most sad bungler. He could not, for
some reason, master the air, and finally, with a shrug of impatience,
he desisted, and begged his instructor to repeat to him his own
version of certain ingenious passages.
“I will murder the innocents no longer,” quoth he, handing back the
instrument. “Render them again in living phrase, and so take the taste
of my own villainy out of my mouth.”
“It is thith way,” said his lordship, and went on thrumming most
mellifluously.
“Ah!” said the Duke. “If one could take the way of genius only by
having it pointed out to one! Yet, did not that last note ring a
little false?”
“No, by my fay, Thir.”
“You may be right. Yet methinks I have a very hair-splitting ear. It
will quarrel on so little as a fraction of a tone. Not the player, but
the string, maybe, was to blame. Even your best of instruments will
lack perfection, betraying weak places in their constitution, like
broken letters in a printed type. Sound it again. ... Ah! it is not
quite true, indeed.”
“Your Highneth, thith ith a very ordinary fair guitar; but, ath I
thay, I know a better.”
“True; my lady Shrewsbury’s.”
“No.”
“Not? I thought you mentioned hers?”
“Not herth. My lady Chetherfield’th.”
“O! Your sister’s. So, she is the possessor of that masterpiece. Is it
indeed so excellent?”
“None better, I dare to venture, in all the world.”
“My lord, you must let me hear you on it. So near the perfect
achievement, and yet to fall short of it by a hair! ’Twas not to be
endured. We must visit your sister, you and I together, and beg this
favour of her kindness.”
Now, even the Court of the Restoration had its codes of
etiquette--more particular, in some odd ways, than to-day’s--and among
them was none which permitted a prince of the blood royal to
condescend to social intercourse with a young married woman without
danger to her reputation. Arran, to be sure, knew this well enough,
shallow dandiprat as he was, and the slight qualm he felt over the
proposition was evidence of a certain suspicion awakened in him for
the first time. But it was faint, and no proof against his vanity. He
was not so base as to design any deliberate treachery to his own flesh
and blood; but his conscience was an indeterminate quantity, easily at
the mercy of any plausible rascal. He considered, and decided that the
inclusion of himself in the Duke’s suggestion was the surest proof
that there could be no _arrière pensée_ behind it. An intrigant,
bent on some nefarious conquest, would not propose a brother to assist
him in his purpose. He gave a little embarrassed laugh, nevertheless,
and hung his foolish head.
“If your Highneth thinkth it worth your Highnetheth while,” he said.
“Worth, my lord, worth?” said the Duke warmly. “What is this genius of
yours worth, if not the most perfect of mediums through which to give
itself expression?”
“You are very good.”
“I am very impatient, and shall continue so, until we have given
effect to this arrangement.”