CHAPTER XI
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.”