Chapter Twenty Nine.
Fellows who knock about the world sailoring and so on cannot help coming to the conclusion that its compass is narrower than stay-at-home folk might be inclined to believe, for you can hardly stir a step without knocking across some one whom you previously imagined to have been miles and miles away, separated, perhaps, by an ocean from yourself.
I had scarcely stepped into the train from Southampton, bound Londonwards, en route for Liverpool, having only landed from the mail steamer that brought me direct all the way from Colon that very morning, when whom should I see looking at me from the opposite corner of the railway carriage but a big, bushy-haired, brown-bearded man whom I did not know from Adam.
“Faith,” exclaimed this gentleman, after a moment’s scrutiny, a broad grin lighting up his face and his eyes twinkling with a comical expression that would alone have made me recognise him, had I not heard his delightful, to me at any rate, Irish brogue, “ye’re ayther Dick Haldane or the divvle!” stretching out both hands to grasp mine.
I was as pleased to see him, as may readily be believed, as the genial Irishman was to see me, I was sure, even without his telling me so.
“Well,” said I, after we had pretty nigh wrung each other’s hands off in friendly greeting, “and how are you all getting on aboard the dear old barquey? I want to hear about everybody.”
“Begorrah, Dick, give me toime to recover me bre’th, me bhoy, an’ thin I’ll till ye ivverythin’,” and then he continued in a bashful sort of way, unlike his usual off-hand manner, “I’ve lift the say for good, an’ sit up for a docther ashore on me own hook, faith.”
“Why!” I exclaimed in great surprise, “how’s that?”
“Bedad, you’d betther axe y’r sister.”
“What! my sister Janet?”
“Faith, yis; the very same little darlint of a colleen. Dick, ye spalpeen, jist lit me shake y’r fist agin, lad. I’m the happiest man in the wurrld!”
“Whee-e-e-e-eew,” I whistled through my teeth. “This is indeed a surprise!”
Then it all came out, Garry telling a long yarn about his calling at my mother’s house to ask about me some few months back, and meeting there Elsie, whom he had no difficulty in identifying, he said, as “the little girl of the ghost-ship,” though she had grown a bit taller and was more good-looking than he remembered her at the time he saw her on board the Saint Pierre. But, good-looking as she was, he did not think her to be compared to my sister Janet, with whom he had evidently fallen in love at first sight and very deeply so, too!
On his subsequently declaring his passion, impetuous as usual, after a very short acquaintance, my mother insisted as a first step to entertaining his suit that he should leave the sea, as he had another profession by which he was quite capable of supporting a wife as well as himself, if he so pleased.
“Faith, and I wint an’ bought a practis’ at onst, havin’ a snig little sum stowed away in the bank,” continued Garry, “the savin’s of me pay for the last five year an’ more, besides that money we all got for salvagin’ the French ship, sure, of which I nivver spint a ha’poth. But aven thin, Dick, ould chap, yer dear ould mother wern’t satisfied, bless her ould heart. She sid that yer sisther an’ mesilf wu’ld have to wait to git marri’d till you came home, ye spalpeen; an’ not thin aven, if so be as how ye’d turn nasty an’ disagreyable, an’ refuse yer consint. Faith, ye won’t now, will ye? or, bedad, I’ll be afther breakin’ ivvrey bone in y’r body, avic, an’ thin have to plasther ye up ag’in.”
To avoid such a terrible contingency I there and then gave my hearty consent to the arrangement he and Janet, with my mother’s concurrence, had thus planned without my knowledge; although, really, if I had been inclined to grumble at not being informed previously of what now so unexpectedly transpired, I had only time and distance to blame, not the parties concerned, for the engagement was of so recent a date that the news of it, though on the way through the post, had not reached Venezuela when I left.
After I had answered a lot of Garry O’Neil’s questions concerning myself and the time I had passed in South America, speaking, too, of poor Colonel Vereker, whose death he had learnt from my mother, I began again, asking in my turn all about my old shipmates, and, of course, his own also.
“Faith, the skipper is foine and flourishin’,” he informed me, “an’ the ould barquey as good an’ as sound as ivver she was. Do you ricollict ould Stokes?”
“Of course I do,” I said. “Is he still chief?”
“No, no; he retired a year ago or more on a pinsion which the company gave him for his long service; an’ little Grummet—ye rimimber him?—well, he’s promoted, sure, to ould Stokes’ billet. The ould chap, though, is alive an’ hearty, an’ as asthamataky as ivver!”
“What’s become of Mr Fosset?”
“Och, be jabbers! he’s a big man now. He’s a skipper on his own hook, jist loike Cap’en Applegarth. He’s got the ould Fairi Quane, the sicond best boat but one to the line. D’ye ricollict that ould thaife of a bo’sun we had on the Star of the North?”
“Why, you must mean poor old Masters! I should think I did.”
“That same, alannah. He wasn’t a bad sort of chap, an’ a good sayman, ivvry inch of him, though I used for to call him an ould thaife just ‘for fun an’ fancy’—as the old song says—well, he’s lift the ould barquey an’ gone with Cap’en Fosset in the Fairi Quane. But ye haven’t axed me onst afther yer ould fri’nd Spokeshave! Sure, now, ye haven’t forgot little ‘Conky,’ faith!”
“No, indeed,” said I, amused at his query and the funny wink that accompanied it. “What has become of that spiteful little beggar?”
“Begorrah, ye’ll laugh an’ be amused, but he’s marri’d to a wife as big as one of thim grannydeers we onst took in the ould barquey to Bermuda, d’ye rimimber? Faith, she’s saix feet hoigh, an’ broad in the b’ame in proporshi’n. They make a purty couple, bedad! an’ they do say she kapes him in order. Do ye rickolict what an argufyin’ chap Spokeshave was aboard?”
“I should think I did, indeed,” replied I. “I think he was the most cantankerous little beast I ever came across in my life, either afloat or ashore!”
“Faith, ye wouldn’t say that same now, Dick,” rejoined Garry with much earnestness. “The poor little beggar’s as make as a cat, for he daren’t call his sowl his own!”
I asked after some of the other men belonging to my old ship, including Accra Prout, whom the colonel wished to accompany us to Venezuela, the mulatto refusing on the plea that, though he should always love his “old massa,” he could not go with him for one insurmountable reason.
“Guess I’d hav’ ’sociate wid dem tam black raskels daan thaar, massa, an’ dis chile no like dat nohow. I’se nebbah ’sparrage my famerly by ’sociatin’ wid niggahs, massa, nebbah. De Prouts ’long good old plantation stock, an’ raise in Lousianner!”
This supercilious autocrat, it must be borne in mind, all the time being more than half a negro himself, though, for that matter, his heart was better and his disposition braver than many a white man who would have despised his coloured skin.
Some of the other hands about whom I inquired had left the old barquey and shipped aboard other vessels, so Garry told me; but at this I was not much surprised, sailors as a rule being fond of change and very unconservative in their habits.
With suchlike conversation my old mess-mate and I beguiled our long railway journey to Liverpool, which we reached the same evening, but before we had quite exhausted our respective questions and answers respecting everybody we had ever met or known during the time he and I had been to sea together.
My meeting with my dear mother and sister after so long an absence abroad can be well imagined, and so too my first interview with Elsie, whom I should hardly have known again, for how can I describe her beauty and grace, and though I had been prepared in some measure from accounts my mother had sent me, still they exceeded my expectations.
It would be impossible if I tried to picture her for “a month of Sundays,” as Captain Applegarth used to say on board the old barquey when he thought a fellow spent too much time over a job.
So to make a long story short and to avoid all further explanation, it need only be added that one fine day last summer, when the trees were all green and leafy, and the flowers abloom, and happy birds filling the air with song, Elsie and I were married.
Garry O’Neil joined his lot with that of my sister at the same time, the two brides being given away respectively by the skipper, who managed to run the Star of the North home in time for the wedding, and old Mr Stokes, the chief engineer of the old barquey, who had only to cross the road, instead of the Atlantic, to get to our house, as he lived near to us now—he also was present. Captain Applegarth, who was a very old friend of my mother’s and a kind one too, likewise, lived in a good substantial house surrounded by a lovely garden in our pretty, picturesque, old village.
To all whom it may concern, it may, in conclusion, be mentioned that this double-barrelled affair took place in the quaint, old-fashioned, non-ritualistic, semi-Gothic, and many-galleried old village church, of which so few remain now in England, situated close to our cottage, and where our widowed mother had, in our childhood, taught us to lisp our first prayers to heaven, our dead father resting in the ivy-grown and flower-adorned graveyard adjoining. The nuptial knot was tied by Parson Goldwire, as everybody called him in the neighbourhood, assisted by Matthew Jacon, the equally elderly parish clerk, without whose joint ministration on the occasion neither Janet nor myself would have believed the marriage ceremony had been properly solemnised, both my sister and myself standing in much awe of the learned divine and his inseparable “double,” and holding to the creed that the austere pair represented the very quintessence of orthodoxy.