Gradually, however, as the day had worn on, they had struggled with and overcome their melancholy, mounting, indeed in the end to a flippant hilarity which fitted but incongruously with the gravity of their prospects.
But this was not till the day was nearing its close. The early afternoon had been a space of sighs and doleful head-shakings, for, at the close of the sale, Captain Dutt had led his old subordinates into the “Turk’s Head,” and here they had all spoken so wistfully and reverently about the “Jane Gladys” that the landlady had wondered how one of them could have come back wearing a green and pink tie from a funeral.
Mr. Horace Dobb, not averse from exhibiting the opulence of his new sphere in life to his former skipper, competed with that worthy for the honour of being prime host to the party. It was a challenge which Captain Dutt’s pride forbade him to refuse, and so round after round of refreshment was served, till by degrees a brisker mood descended upon the company.
It was not till past tea-time that the party had begun to break up. Mr. Clark was the first to leave, having suddenly remembered that he had faithfully promised to return to the ferry at one o’clock sharp. And next Mr. Dobb went, pleading the calls of business, and purchasing a cigar at the bar as he left, with excellent effect. For Captain Dutt, after silently and disapprovingly considering such an action on an ex-cook’s part, at last stigmatized it as a kind of Socialism, and bought Mr. Lock and Mr. Tridge a cigar apiece to re-establish his prestige.
Soon after, Captain Dutt reluctantly announced that he, too, must now depart, and Messrs. Tridge and Lock accompanied him to the nearest draper’s shop, where he sagely selected a bonnet to be presented to Mrs. Dutt the moment he got home. And when the skipper, already holding the hat-box before him in a propitiatory manner, had passed from their sight round a corner, Mr. Tridge and Mr. Lock looked hard and remindedly at each other, and then made search in their pockets.
As a result, the one party produced a shilling and five pennies, and the other party disclosed a florin and a halfpenny; frank and unabashed confession admitted these coins to be “change” which the skipper had forgotten to pick up amid the mental distractions of the afternoon.
Whereupon, congratulating themselves and each other on this presence of mind in face of opportunity, Mr. Lock and Mr. Tridge had retired to the tap-room of the “Royal William,” and had there abundantly developed their policy of drowning dull care.
By now the night was well advanced, and a fevered, reckless brilliance was illuminating Mr. Lock’s personality, lighting up all those manifold polite accomplishments of which he was a master. Thus, he had entertained the company with a series of imitations of bird-calls, and performed clever feats of legerdemain with corks and pennies and hats.
Mr. Tridge was in complete eclipse. He had tried hard to be not ungenial, but his temperament was different from Mr. Lock’s, and every minute of revelry only found him more and more subdued and morose. He had struggled against this psychological handicap, even to the extent of exhibiting to the company four or five styles of dancing with which he was familiar, but so morose and forbidding was his countenance as he jigged and gyrated that none dared claim his attention by offering applause, so that when he sat down again it was amid complete and discouraging silence.
Mr. Lock, however, shone still more effulgently as the evening progressed. Knotting his handkerchief into semblance of a doll, he affected that it was a wife and that he was its husband, and built up on these premises a highly diverting ventriloquial monologue.