“Are you of the same mind, now, that you were an hour or two back? Do you wish to have that boy of mine on board your ship?” asked Luttrell.
“I’ll give you a thousand dollars for him down, Sir, and you shall keep the gimcracks.”
“You may take him. There must be no money-dealings between us now, Sir—I will sell you nothing. Come into the house with me; a very, few minutes will be sufficient.”
As they walked side by side towards the house, the American, with a quaint brevity, told all that Luttrell could have desired to know of him. He and his craft, the Quincey Squash, were well known at Liverpool and London, he was sole owner, and traded in everything, from “lumber” to Leghorn bonnets; he went everywhere, and ventured in everything; in fact, he liked an “assorted cargo of notions” better than a single freight. “I won’t say he’ll come back a rich man to you, Sir, in five years, but you may call me a Creole if he don’t know a bit of life. Just look here,” said he, as he opened a pocket-map and spread it over the table, “there’s ten years of my life marked out on that chart; these lines—some of ‘em pretty long ones—is my voyages.” Captain—for we must now give him his accustomed title—Captain Dodge spoke fluently, and vaingloriously, too, of all he had travelled, and all he had seen; of how he had traded for ivory on the Gold Coast, and for furs up at Hudson’s Bay; how he had panted in the tropics, and shivered at Behring’s Straits. If a little proud of his successes against Malays and Moors, it was not quite certain that he “had not done” a little mild buccaneering occasionally, when “freights were low and trade was heavy.” Not that Luttrell gathered much of what he narrated, for a strange confusion was in his brain, and as he gazed at the chart and tried to follow the lines, a dimness obscured his sight, and he had to turn away and wipe his eyes.
“Wud your honour like the dinner now?” whispered Molly Ryan from the door; “the strange gentleman that was sick is dyin’ of hunger.”
“Yes, we’re quite ready,” said Luttrell; and taking a key from a nail, he betook himself to a little closet which formed his cellar. A few bottles of port, and two or three of Burgundy—remnants of a stock which once had been famous—were all that survived, but he took them forth, saying, “I am unlikely to play the host again, let us make festival for the last time.”
CHAPTER XX. THE SUPPER AT ARRAN
With all the ardour of an Irish menial to do honour to her master’s hospitality, Molly Ryan had taken the unwonted step of laying out the dinner in the “sacristy” of the Abbey, which Luttrell had once on a time intended to have converted into a grand gallery for all his rare and curious objects, and from which he soon desisted, deterred by the cost.
It was a long, narrow, vaulted chamber, with four pointed windows in one wall, and blank niches to correspond to them in the other. If in the cold unflattering light of day it would have presented an air of cheerless gloom and destitution, not so did it look now, as a great fire of turf blazed and glowed on the ample hearth, and the light of four huge pine-torches flared red from the niches, and threw a warm and mellow glare over everything; while the board was spread with an abundance which would have been utterly wasteful, if some five-and-twenty sailors and fishermen without were not to revel at second-hand, and feed on what fell from the master’s table.