“Relays!” exclaimed the Prince-Marshal. “Then you are safe. Shut him in! And you, coachman, be off! Drive as if you had the devil or old Turenne in your rear!”
It was about this moment that Célandine, rushing into her young lady’s room to comfort her, in the alarm, found Cerise extended, motionless and unconscious, on the floor.
CHAPTER XXI
THE FOX AND FIDDLE
Three dirty children with blue eyes, fair locks, and round, chubby faces, deepened by a warm peach-like tint beneath the skin, such as are to be seen in plenty along our southern seaboard, were busily engaged building a grotto of shells opposite their home, at the exact spot where its construction was most in the way of pedestrians passing through the narrow ill-paved street. Their shrill cries and blooming looks denoted the salubrious influence of sea air, while their nationality was sufficiently attested by the vigour with which the eldest, a young lady less than ten years of age, called out “Frenchie! Frenchie! Froggie! Froggie!” after a foreign-looking man with a pale face and dark eyes, who stepped over the low half-door that restrained her infant brothers and sisters from rolling out into the gutter, as if he was habitually a resident in the house. He appeared, indeed, a favourite with the children, for while they recalled him to assist their labours, which he did with a good-nature and address peculiarly winning to architects of that age, they chanted in his praise, and obviously with the intention of doing him high honour, a ditty of no particular tune, detailing the matrimonial adventures of an amphibious animal, supposed in the last century to bear close affinity to all Frenchmen, as related with a remarkable chorus by one Anthony Rowley; and the obliging foreigner, suspecting neither sarcasm nor insult, but only suffering torture from an utter absence of tune, hummed lustily in accompaniment.
Over the heads of these urchins hung their paternal sign-board, creaking and swinging in the breeze now freshening with an incoming tide. Its representation of a fox playing the fiddle was familiar to seafaring men as indicating a favourite house of call for the consumption of beer, tobacco, and that seductive compound known to several generations by the popular name of punch.
The cheerful fire, the red curtains, the sanded floor, the wooden chairs, and liberal measures of their jovial haunt, had been present to the mind’s eye of many an honest tar clinging wet and cold to a slippery yard, reefing topsails in a nor’-wester, or eating maggoty biscuit and sipping six-water grog, on half rations, homeward bound with a headwind, but probably none of them had ever speculated on the origin of the sign they knew so well and thought of so often. Why a fox and fiddle should be found together in a seaport town, what a fox had to do with a fiddle, or, however appropriate to their ideas of jollity the instrument might appear, wherefore its player should be represented as the cunning animal whom destiny had already condemned to be hunted by English country gentlemen, was a speculation on which they had no wish to embark. Neither have I. It is enough to know that the Fox and Fiddle sold loaded beer, strong tobacco, and scalding punch, to an extent not even limited by the consumer’s purse; for when Jack had spent all his rhino, the landlord’s liberality enabled him to run up a score, hereafter to be liquidated from the wages of a future voyage. The infatuated debtor, paying something like two hundred per cent. on every mouthful for this accommodation, by a farther arrangement, that he should engage with any skipper of the landlord’s providing, literally sold himself, body and soul, for a nipperkin of rum and half-a-pound of tobacco.
Nevertheless, several score of the boldest hearts and readiest hands in England were to be bought at this low price, and Butter-faced Bob, as his rough-spoken customers called the owner of the Fox and Fiddle, would furnish as many of them at a reasonable tariff, merchant and man-of-war’s men, as the captain wanted or the owners could afford to buy. It was no wonder his children had strong lungs, and round, well-fed cheeks.
“That’s a good chap!” observed a deep hoarse voice, which made the youngest grotto-builder start and shrink behind its sister, while a broad elderly figure rolled and lurched after the obliging foreigner into the house. It would have been as impossible to mistake the new-comer for a landsman as Butter-faced Bob himself for anything but a publican. His gait on the pavement was that of one who had so thoroughly got his sea-legs that he was, to the last degree, incommoded by the uneven though stable surface of the shore; and while he trod the passage, as being planked, with more confidence, he nevertheless ran his hand, like a blind man, along tables and other articles of furniture while he passed them, seeming, in every gesture, to be more ready with his arms than his legs.
Broad-faced, broad-shouldered, broad-handed, he looked a powerful, and at the same time a strong-constitutioned man, but grizzled hair and shaggy eyebrows denoted he was past his prime; while a reddened neck and tanned face, with innumerable little wrinkles round the eyes, suggested constant watchfulness and exposure in hard weather afloat, no less than swollen features and marked lines told of deep drinking and riotous living ashore.