WHEREIN APPEARS A GENTLEMANLY CORSAIR AND A FRENCH-IRISH LORD
While it may be that the actual crisis of my manhood came to me on the day I first put on my Uncle Andrew's shoes, the sense of it was mine only when I met with Captain Thurot. I had put the past for ever behind me (as I fancied) when I tore the verses of a moon-struck boy and cast them out upon the washing-green at Hazel Den, but I was bound to foregather with men like Thurot and his friends ere the scope and fashion of a man's world were apparent to me. Whether his influence on my destiny in the long run was good or bad I would be the last to say; he brought me into danger, but—in a manner—he brought me good, though that perhaps was never in his mind.
You must fancy this Thurot a great tall man, nearly half a foot exceeding myself in stature, peak-bearded, straight as a lance, with plum-black eyes and hair, polished in dress and manner to the rarest degree and with a good humour that never failed. He sat under a swinging lamp in his cabin when Horn and I were brought before him, and asked my name first in an accent of English that was if anything somewhat better than my own.
“Greig,” said I; “Paul Greig,” and he started as if I had pricked him with a knife.
A little table stood between us, on which there lay a book he had been reading when we were brought below, some hours after the Seven Sisters had gone down, and the search for the Kirkcaldy boat had been abandoned. He took the lamp off its hook, came round the table and held the light so that he could see my face the clearer. At any time his aspect was manly and pleasant; most of all was it so when he smiled, and I was singularly encouraged when he smiled at me, with a rapid survey of my person that included the Hazel Den mole and my Uncle Andrew's shoes.
A seaman stood behind us; to him he spoke a message I could not comprehend, as it was in French, of which I had but little. The seaman retired; we were offered a seat, and in a minute the seaman came back with a gentleman—a landsman by his dress.
“Pardon, my lord,” said the captain to his visitor, “but I thought that here was a case—speaking of miracles—you would be interested in. Our friends here”—he indicated myself particularly with a gracious gesture—“are not, as you know, dropped from heaven, but come from that unfortunate ship we saw go under a while ago. May I ask your lordship to tell us—you will see the joke in a moment—whom we were talking of at the moment our watch first announced the sight of that vessel?”
His lordship rubbed his chin and smilingly peered at the captain.
“Gad!” he said. “You are the deuce and all, Thurot. What are you in the mood for now? Why, we talked of Greig—Andrew Greig, the best player of passe-passe and the cheerfullest loser that ever cut a pack.”
Thurot turned to me, triumphant.
“Behold,” said he, “how ridiculously small the world is. Ma foi! I wonder how I manage so well to elude my creditors, even when I sail the high seas. Lord Clancarty, permit me to have the distinguished honour to introduce another Greig, who I hope has many more of his charming uncle's qualities than his handsome eyes and red shoes. I assume it is a nephew, because poor Monsieur Andrew was not of the marrying kind. Anyhow, 'tis a Greig of the blood, or Antoine Thurot is a bat! And—Monsieur Greig, it is my felicity to bid you know one of your uncle's best friends and heartiest admirers—Lord Clancarty.”
“Lord Clancarty!” I cried, incredulous. “Why he figured in my uncle's log-book a dozen years ago.”
“A dozen, no less!” cried his lordship, with a grimace. “We need not be so particular about the period. I trust he set me down there a decently good companion; I could hardly hope to figure in a faithful scribe's tablets as an example otherwise,” said his lordship, laughing and taking me cordially by the hand. “Gad! one has but to look at you to see Andrew Greig in every line. I loved your uncle, lad. He had a rugged, manly nature, and just sufficient folly, bravado, and sinfulness to keep a poor Irishman in countenance. Thurot, one must apologise for taking from your very lips the suggestion I see hesitating there, but sure 'tis an Occasion this; it must be a bottle—the best bottle on your adorable but somewhat ill-found vessel. Why 'tis Andy Greig come young again. Poor Andy! I heard of his death no later than a month ago, and have ordered a score of masses for him—which by the way are still unpaid for to good Father Hamilton. I could not sleep happily of an evening—of a forenoon rather—if I thought of our Andy suffering aught that a few candles and such-like could modify.” And his lordship with great condescension tapped and passed me his jewelled box of maccabaw.
You can fancy a raw lad, untutored and untravelled, fresh from the plough-tail, as it were, was vastly tickled at this introduction to the genteel world. I was no longer the shivering outlaw, the victim of a Risk. I was honoured more or less for the sake of my uncle (whose esteem in this quarter my father surely would have been surprised at), and it seemed as though my new life in a new country were opening better than I had planned myself. I blessed my shoes—the Shoes of Sorrow—and for the time forgot the tragedy from which I was escaping.
They birled the bottle between them, Clancarty and Thurot, myself virtually avoiding it, but clinking now and then, and laughing with them at the numerous exploits they recalled of him that was the bond between us; Horn elsewhere found himself well treated also; and listening to these two gentlemen of the world, their allusions, off-hand, to the great, their indications of adventure, travel, intrigue, enterprise, gaiety, I saw my horizon expand until it was no longer a cabin on the sea I sat in, with the lamplight swinging over me, but a spacious world of castles, palaces, forests, streets, churches, casernes, harbours, masquerades, routs, operas, love, laughter, and song. Perhaps they saw my elation and fully understood, and smiled within them at my efforts to figure as a little man of the world too—as boys will—but they never showed me other than the finest sympathy and attention.
I found them fascinating at night; I found them much the same at morning, which is the test of the thing in youth, and straightway made a hero of the foreigner Thurot. Clancarty was well enough, but without any method in his life, beyond a principle of keeping his character ever trim and presentable like his cravat. Thurot carried on his strenuous career as soldier, sailor, spy, politician, with a plausible enough theory that thus he got the very juice and pang of life, that at the most, as he would aye be telling me, was brief to an absurdity.
“Your Scots,” he would say to me, “as a rule, are too phlegmatic—is it not, Lord Clancarty?—but your uncle gave me, on my word, a regard for your whole nation. He had aplomb—Monsieur Andrew; he had luck too, and if he cracked a nut anywhere there was always a good kernel in it.” And the shoes see how I took the allusion to King George, and that gave me a flood of light upon my new position.
I remembered that in my uncle's log-book the greater part of the narrative of his adventures in France had to do with politics and the intrigues of the Jacobite party. He was not, himself, apparently, “out,” as we call it, in the affair of the 'Forty-five, because he did not believe the occasion suitable, and thought the Prince precipitous, but before and after that untoward event for poor Scotland, he had been active with such men as Clancarty, Lord Clare, the Murrays, the Mareschal, and such-like, which was not to be wondered at, perhaps, for our family had consistently been Jacobite, a fact that helped to its latter undoing, though my father as nominal head of the house had taken no interest in politics; and my own sympathies had ever been with the Chevalier, whom I as a boy had seen ride through the city of Glasgow, wishing myself old enough to be his follower in such a glittering escapade as he was then embarked on.
But though I thought all this in a flash as it were, I betrayed nothing to Captain Thurot, who seemed somewhat dashed at my silence. There must have been something in my face, however, to show that I fully realised what he was feeling at, and was not too complacent, for Clancarty laughed.
“Sure, 'tis a good boy, Thurot,” said he, “and loves his King George properly, like a true patriot.”
“I won't believe it of a Greig,” said Captain Thurot. “A pestilent, dull thing, loyalty in England; the other thing came much more readily, I remember, to the genius of Andrew Greig. Come! Monsieur Paul, to be quite frank about it, have you no instincts of friendliness to the exiled house? M. Tête-de-fer has a great need at this particular moment for English friends. Once he could count on your uncle to the last ditch; can he count on the nephew?”
“M. Tête-de-fer?” I repeated, somewhat bewildered.
“M. Tête-de-mouche, rather,” cried my lord, testily, and then hurried to correct himself. “He alluded, Monsieur Greig, to Prince Charles Edward. We are all, I may confess, his Royal Highness's most humble servants; some of us, however—as our good friend, Captain Thurot—more actively than others. For myself I begin to weary of a cause that has been dormant for eight years, but no matter; sure one must have a recreation!”
I looked at his lordship to see if he was joking. He was the relic of a handsome man, though still, I daresay, less than fifty years of age, with a clever face and gentle, just tinged by the tracery of small surface veins to a redness that accused him of too many late nights; his mouth and eyes, that at one time must have been fascinating, had the ultimate irresolution that comes to one who finds no fingerposts at life's cross-roads and thinks one road just as good's another. He was born at Atena, near Hamburg (so much I had remembered from my uncle's memoir), but he was, even in his accent, as Irish as Kerry. Someway I liked and yet doubted him, in spite of all the praise of him that I had read in a dead man's diurnal.
“Fi donc! vous devriez avoir honte, milord,” cried Thurot, somewhat disturbed, I saw, at this reckless levity.
“Ashamed!” said his lordship, laughing; “why, 'tis for his Royal Highness who has taken a diligence to the devil, and left us poor dependants to pay the bill at the inn. But no matter, Master Greig, I'll be cursed if I say a single word more to spoil a charming picture of royalty under a cloud.” And so saying he lounged away from us, a strange exquisite for shipboard, laced up to the nines, as the saying goes, parading the deck as it had been the Rue St. Honoré, with merry words for every sailorman who tapped a forehead to him.
Captain Thurot looked at him, smiling, and shrugged his shoulders.
“Tête-de-mouche! There it is for you, M. Paul—the head of a butterfly. Now you—” he commanded my eyes most masterfully—“now you have a Scotsman's earnestness; I should like to see you on the right side. Mon Dieu, you owe us your life, no less; 'tis no more King George's, for one of his subjects has morally sent you to the bottom of the sea in a scuttled ship. I wish we had laid hands on your Risk and his augers.”
But I was learning my world; I was cautious; I said neither yea nor nay.