Works of W. W. Jacobs

by Jacobs, W. W.

  The captain’s face darkened. “Peter’s all right,” he said, slowly. “He’s not treated me — quite well,” he added, after a little hesitation.

  “It’s natural he should neglect you a bit, as things are,” said his friend.

  “Neglect?” said the captain, bitterly. “I wish he would neglect me. He’s turning out a perfect busybody, and he’s getting as artful as they make ’em. I never would have believed it of Peter. Never.”

  Hartley waited.

  “I met Cap’n Walsh the other night,” said Trimblett; “we hadn’t seen each other for years, and we went into the Golden Fleece to have a drink. You know what Walsh is when he’s ashore. And he’s a man that won’t be beaten. He had had four tries to get a ‘cocktail’ right that he had tasted in New York, and while he was superintending the mixing of the fifth I slipped out. The others were all right as far as I could judge; but that’s Walsh all over.”

  “Well?” said Hartley.

  “I came home and found Peter sitting all alone in the dumps,” continued the captain. “He has been very down of late, and, what was worse, he had got a bottle of whiskey on the table. That’s a fatal thing to begin; and partly to keep him company, but mainly to prevent him drinking more than was good for him, I helped him finish the bottle — there wasn’t much in it.”

  “Well?” said Hartley again, as the captain paused.

  “He got talking about his troubles,” said the captain, slowly. “You know how things are, and, like a fool, I tried to cheer him up by agreeing with him that Mrs. Chinnery would very likely make things easy for him by marrying again. In fact, so far as I remember, I even helped him to think of the names of one or two likely men. He said she’d make anybody as good a wife as a man could wish.”

  “So she would,” said Hartley, looking at him with sudden interest. “In fact, I have often wondered—”

  “He went on talking like that,” continued the captain, hastily, “and out of politeness and good feeling I agreed with him. What else could I do? Then — I didn’t take much notice of it because, as I said, he was drinking whiskey — he — he sort of wondered why — why—”

  “Why you didn’t offer to marry her?” interrupted Hartley.

  The captain nodded. “It took my breath away,” he said, impressively, “and I lost my presence of mind. Instead of speaking out plain I tried to laugh it off — just to spare his feelings — and said I wasn’t worthy of her.”

  “What did he say?” inquired Hartley, curiously, after another long pause.

  “Nothing,” replied the captain. “Not a single word. He just gave me a strange look, shook my hand hard, and went off to bed. I’ve been uneasy in my mind ever since. I hardly slept a wink last night; and Peter behaves as though there is some mysterious secret between us. What would you do?”

  Mr. Hartley took his friend’s arm and paced thoughtfully up and down the garden.

  “Why not marry her?” he said, at last.

  “Because I don’t want to,” said the captain, almost violently.

  “You’d be safer at sea, then,” said the other.

  “The ship won’t be ready for sea for weeks yet,” said Captain Trimblett, dolefully. “She’s going on a time-charter, and before she is taken over she has got to be thoroughly overhauled. As fast as they put one thing right something else is found to be wrong.”

  “Go to London and stay with your children for a bit, then,” said Hartley. “Give out that you are only going for a day or two, and then don’t turn up till the ship sails.”

  The captain’s face brightened. “I believe Vyner would let me go,” he replied. “I could go in a few days’ time, at any rate. And, by the way — Joan!”

  “Eh?” said Hartley.

  “Write to your brother-in-law at Highgate, and send her there for a time,” said the captain. “Write and ask him to invite her. Keep her and young Vyner apart before things go too far.”

  “I’ll see how things go for a bit,” said Hartley, slowly. “It’s awkward to write and ask for an invitation. And where do your ideas of fate come in?”. “They come in all the time,” said the captain, with great seriousness. “Very likely my difficulty was made on purpose for us to think of a way of getting you out of yours. Or it might be Joan’s fate to meet somebody in London at her uncle’s and marry him. If she goes we might arrange to go up together, so that I could look after her.”

  “I’ll think it over,” said his friend, holding out his hand. “I must be going.”

  “I’ll come a little way with you,” said the captain, leading the way into the house. “I don’t suppose Peter will be in yet, but he might; and I’ve had more of him lately than I want.”

  He took up his hat and, opening the door, followed Hartley out into the road. The evening was warm, and they walked slowly, the captain still discoursing on fate and citing various instances of its working which had come under his own observation. He mentioned, among others, the case of a mate of his who found a wife by losing a leg, the unfortunate seaman falling an easy victim to the nurse who attended him.

  “He always put it down to the effects of the chloroform,” concluded the captain; “but my opinion is, it was to be.”

  He paused at Hartley’s gate, and was just indulging in the usual argument as to whether he should go indoors for a minute or not, when a man holding a handkerchief to his bleeding face appeared suddenly round the corner of the house and, making a wild dash for the gate, nearly overturned the owner.

  “It looks like our milkman!” said Hartley, recovering his balance and gazing in astonishment after the swiftly retreating figure. “I wonder what was the matter with him?”

  “He would soon know what was the matter with him if I got hold of him,” said the wrathful captain.

  Hartley opened the door with his key, and the captain, still muttering under his breath, passed in. Rosa’s voice, raised in expostulation, sounded loudly from the kitchen, and a man’s voice, also raised, was heard in response.

  “Sounds like my bo’sun,” said the captain, staring as he passed into the front room. “What’s he doing here?”

  Hartley shook his head.

  “Seems to be making himself at home,” said the captain, fidgeting. “He’s as noisy as if he was in his own house.”

  “I don’t suppose he knows you are here,” said his friend, mildly.

  Captain Trimblett still fidgeted. “Well, it’s your house,” he said at last. “If you don’t mind that lanky son of a gun making free, I suppose it’s no business of mine. If he made that noise aboard my ship—”

  Red of face he marched to the window and stood looking out. Fortified by his presence, Hartley rang the bell.

  “Is there anybody in the kitchen?” he inquired, as Rosa answered it. “I fancied I heard a man’s voice.”

  “The milkman was here just now,” said Rosa, and, eying him calmly, departed.

  The captain swung round in wrathful amazement.

  “By — ,” he spluttered; “I’ve seen — well — by — b-r-r-r —— — Can I ring for that d —— d bo’sun o’ mine?

  “Certainly,” said Hartley.

  The captain crossed to the fireplace and, seizing the bell-handle, gave a pull that made the kitchen resound with wild music. After a decent interval, apparently devoted to the allaying of masculine fears, Rosa appeared again.

  “Did you ring, sir?” she inquired, gazing at her master.

  “Send that bo’sun o’ mine here at once!” said the captain, gruffly.

  Rosa permitted herself a slight expression of surprise. “Bo’sun, sir?” she asked, politely.

  “Yes.”

  The girl affected to think. “Oh, you mean Mr. Walters?” she said, at last.

  “Send him here,” said the captain.

  Rosa retired slowly, and shortly afterward something was heard brushing softly against the wall of the passage. It ceased for a time, and just as the captain’s patience was nearly at an end there was a sharp exclamatio
n, and Mr. Walters burst suddenly into the room and looked threateningly over his shoulder at somebody in the passage.

  “What are you doing here?” demanded Captain Trimblett, loudly.

  Mr. Walters eyed him uneasily, and with his cap firmly gripped in his left hand saluted him with the right. Then he turned his head sideways toward the passage. The captain repeated his question in a voice, if anything, louder than before.

  The strained appearance of Mr. Walters’s countenance relaxed.

  “Come here for my baccy-box, wot I left here the other day,” he said, glibly, “when you sent me.”

  “What were you making that infernal row about, then?” demanded the captain.

  Mr. Walters cast an appealing glance toward the passage and listened acutely. “I was — grumbling because — I couldn’t — find it,” he said, with painstaking precision.

  “Grumbling?” repeated the captain. “That ugly voice of yours was enough to bring the ceiling down. What was the matter with that man that burst out of the gate as we came in, eh?”

  The boatswain’s face took on a wooden expression.

  “He — his nose was bleeding,” he said, at last.

  “I know that,” said the captain, grimly; “but what made it bleed?”

  For a moment Mr. Walters looked like a man who has been given a riddle too difficult for human solution. Then his face cleared again.

  “He — he told me — he was object — subject to it,” he stammered. “Been like it since he was a baby.”

  He shifted his weight to his other foot and shrugged eloquently the shoulder near the passage.

  “What did you do to him?” demanded the captain, in a low, stern voice.

  “Me, sir?” said Mr. Walters, with clumsy surprise. “Me, sir? I — I — all I done — all I done — was ta put a door-key down his back.”

  “Door-key?” roared the captain.

  “To — to stop the bleeding, sir,” said Mr. Walters, looking at the floor and nervously twisting his cap in his hands. “It’s a old-fashioned—”

  “That’ll do,” exclaimed the captain, in a choking voice, “that’ll do. I don’t want any more of your lies. How dare you come to Mr. Hartley’s house and knock his milkman about, eh? How dare you? What do you mean by it?”

  Mr. Walters fumbled with his cap again. “I was sitting in the kitchen,” he said at last, “sitting in the kitchen — hunting ‘igh and low for my baccy-box — when this ‘ere miserable, insulting chap shoves his head in at the door and calls the young lady names.”

  “Names?” said the captain, frowning, and waving an interruption from Hartley aside. “What names?”

  Mr. Walters hesitated again, and his brow grew almost as black as the captain’s.

  “‘Rosy-lips,’” he said, at last; “and I give ‘im such a wipe acrost—”

  “Out you go,” cried the wrathful captain. “Out you go, and if I hear your pretty little voice in this house again you’ll remember it, I can tell you. D’ye hear? Scoot!”

  Mr. Walters said “Thank you,” and, retiring with an air of great deference, closed the door softly behind him.

  “There’s another of them,” said Captain Trimblett subsiding into a chair. “And from little things I had heard here and there I thought he regarded women as poison. Fate again, I suppose; he was made to regard them as poison all these years for the sake of being caught by that tow-headed wench in your kitchen.”

  CHAPTER XII

  BY no means insensible to the difficulties in the way, Joan Hartley had given no encouragement to Mr. Robert Vyner to follow up the advantage afforded him by her admission at the breakfast-table. Her father’s uneasiness, coupled with the broad hints which Captain Trimblett mistook for tactfulness, only confirmed her in her resolution; and Mr. Vyner, in his calmer moments, had to admit to himself that she was right — for the present, at any rate. Meantime, they were both young, and, with the confidence of youth, he looked forward to a future in which his father’s well-known views on social distinctions and fitting matrimonial alliances should have undergone a complete change. As to his mother, she merely seconded his father’s opinions, and, with admiration born of love and her marriage vows, filed them for reference in a memory which had on more than one occasion been a source of great embarrassment to a man who had not lived for over fifty years without changing some of them.

  Deeply conscious of his own moderation, it was, therefore, with a sense of annoyance that Mr. Robert Vyner discovered that Captain Trimblett was actually attempting to tackle him upon the subject which he considered least suitable for discussion. They were sitting in his office, and the captain, in pursuance of a promise to Hartley, after two or three references to the weather, and a long account of an uninteresting conversation with a policeman, began to get on to dangerous ground.

  “I’ve been in the firm’s service a good many years now,” he began.

  “I hope you’ll be in as many more,” said Vyner, regarding him almost affectionately.

  “Hartley has been with you a long time, too,” continued Trimblett, slowly. “We became chums the first time we met, and we’ve been friends ever since. Not just fair-weather friends, but close and hearty; else I wouldn’t venture to speak to you as I’m going to speak.”

  Mr. Vyner looked up at him suddenly, his face hard and forbidding. Then, as he saw the embarrassment in the kindly old face before him, his anger vanished and he bent his head to hide a smile.

  “Fire away,” he said, cordially.

  “I’m an old man,” began the captain, solemnly.

  “Nonsense,” interrupted Robert, breezily. “Old man indeed! A man is as old as he feels, and I saw you the other night, outside the Golden Fleece, with Captain Walsh—”

  “I couldn’t get away from him,” said the captain, hastily.

  “So far as I could see you were not trying,” continued the remorseless Robert. “You were instructing him in the more difficult and subtle movements of a hornpipe, and I must say I thought your elasticity was wonderful — wonderful.”

  “It was just the result of an argument I had with him,” said the captain, looking very confused, “and I ought to have known better. But, as I was saying, I am an old man, and—”

  “But you look so young,” protested Mr. Vyner.

  “Old man,” repeated the captain, ignoring the remark. “Old age has its privileges, and one of them is to give a word in season before it is too late.”

  “‘A stitch in time saves nine,” quoted Robert, with an encouraging nod.

  “And I was speaking to Hartley the other day,” continued the captain. “He hasn’t been looking very well of late, and, as far as I can make out, he is a little bit worried over the matter I want to speak to you about.”

  Robert Vyner’s face hardened again for a moment. He leaned back in his chair and, playing with his watch-chain, regarded the other intently. Then he smiled maliciously.

  “He told me,” he said, nodding.

  “Told you?” repeated the captain, in astonishment.

  Mr. Vyner nodded again, and bending down pretended to glance at some papers on his table.

  “Green-fly,” he said, gravely. “He told me that he syringes early and late. He will clear a tree, as he thinks, and while he has gone to mix another bucket of the stuff there are several generations born. Bassett informs me that a green-fly is a grandfather before it is half an hour old. So you see it is hopeless. Quite.”

  Captain Trimblett listened with ill-concealed impatience. “I was thinking of something more important than green-flies,” he said, emphatically.

  “Yes?” said Vyner, thoughtfully.

  It was evident that the old sailor was impervious to hints. Rendered unscrupulous by the other’s interference, and at the same time unwilling to hurt his feelings, Mr. Vyner bethought himself of a tale to which he had turned an unbelieving ear only an hour or two before.

  “Of course, I quite forgot,” he said, apologetically. “How stupid of me! I hope
that you’ll accept my warmest congratulations and be very, very happy. I can’t tell you how pleased I am. But for the life of me I can’t see why it should worry Hartley.”

  “Congratulations?” said the captain, eying him in surprise. “What about?”

  “Your marriage,” replied Robert. “I only heard of it on my way to the office, and your talking put it out of my head.”

  “Me?” said Captain Trimblett, going purple with suppressed emotion. “My marriage? I’m not going to be married. Not at all.”

  “What do you mean by ‘not at all?” inquired Mr. Vyner, looking puzzled. “It isn’t a thing you can do by halves.”

  “I’m not going to be married at all,” said the captain, raising his voice. “I never thought of such a thing. Who — who told you?”

  “A little bird,” said Robert, with a simpering air.

  Captain Trimblett took out a handkerchief, and after blowing his nose violently and wiping his heated face expressed an overpowering desire to wring the little bird’s neck.

  “Who was it?” he repeated.

  “A little bird of the name of Sellers — Captain Sellers,” replied Robert. “I met him on my way here, hopping about in the street, simply brimming over with the news.”

  “There isn’t a word of truth in it,” said the agitated captain. “I never thought of such a thing. That old mischief-making mummy must be mad — stark, starin’ mad.”

  “Dear me!” said Robert, regretfully. “He seems such a dear old chap, and I thought it was so nice to see a man of his age so keenly interested in the love-affairs of a younger generation. Anybody might have thought you were his own son from the way he talked of you.”

  “I’ll ‘son’ him!” said the unhappy captain, vaguely.

  “He is very deaf,” said Robert, gently, “and perhaps he may have misunderstood somebody. Perhaps somebody told him you were not going to be married. Funny he shouts so, isn’t it? Most deaf people speak in a very low voice.”

  “Did he shout that?” inquired Captain Trimblett, in a quivering voice.

  “Bawled it,” replied Mr. Vyner, cheerfully; “but as it isn’t true, I really think that you ought to go and tell Captain Sellers at once. There is no knowing what hopes he may be raising. He is a fine old man; but perhaps, after all, he is a wee bit talkative.”