“Complimentary and refined, as usual, I see, colonel; I can’t congratulate you on any material alteration in that respect.”
“Why, man, you don’t expect me to compliment an old friend like you, do you? ‘with compliments crammed,’ you know the rest—haw! haw! But, come, stir your stumps, man! stir your stumps! breakfast’s all ready up yonder, and as capital a ham for you as you ever stuck your teeth in. I wait breakfast for no man, woman, or child living; you know me of old. Talking of women, where’s the Beebee? where’s sister? she’ll come, won’t she? My compts—Colonel Bluff’s compts—glad to see her; always proud to do the honours to the ladies. But who have you got in that boat astern, Belfield?”
“Oh, it’s a young friend of mine, Ensign Gernon, going to join his regiment, under our convoy and protection.”
“O! a griff, eh! a greenhorn: hungry as a hunter, I’ll be sworn; bring him along with you, bring him along, and we’ll fill him out. Rare fellows, your griffs, to play a knife and fork—rare trencher-men. I’d sooner keep some of them a week than a fortnight—haw! haw!”
“But colonel, had you not better take your breakfast with us? it’s ready, and then we’ll walk up and spend the rest of the day with you.”
“Breakfast with you! No, hang me if I do: d’ye mean to insult me, sir? What! a man, after a voyage, with hardly a shot in his locker, ask a gentleman on shore, with a Yorkshire ham on his table, to breakfast with him! never heard such a proposal in all my life! No, come, come along, or I must march you all up under a file of Jacks.”
All this, which I overheard very distinctly, and which was uttered at the top of an iron pair of lungs, was intended for heartiness and jocularity. No doubt there was kindness in it, and with mortals as rough as himself, it might doubtless have answered very well; but the captain, I could see, evidently winced under the infliction, though bent apparently on enduring it for a season, with proper resignation.
After finishing our toilets, and a few other little arrangements, we joined the colonel, who would take no refusal, on the bund or esplanade.
Captain Belfield introduced his sister and me. The colonel, on being presented to the former, raised his hat, and made as much of a bend as the sphericity of his form would allow; at the same time thrusting forth a leg far better adapted (to borrow the corn-law phraseology) for a “fixed duty” than the “sliding scale,” with the air of a finished man of gallantry.
There was something so irresistibly comic in the momentarily assumed suavity of this huge Ursa Major (or Ursa Colonel, as Paddy would say), this attempt at the easy movement of the lady’s man, that I was constrained to turn aside my head, in order to conceal a laugh.