Cerise: A Tale of the Last Century

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

“Ask me no questions,” answered the Captain, significantly. “You know as well as I do that your price covers everything. Is it a bargain?”

“That would make a difference, you see, Captain,” urged Bob, determined to get all he could. “It’s not what it used to be, and the Government is uncommon hard upon a look-out man now, if he makes a mistake in the colours of a prize. In King James’s time, I’ve seen the gentlemen-rovers drinking at this very table with the mayor and the magistrates, ay, and sending up their compliments and what not, maybe, to the Lord-Lieutenant himself. Why, that very mug as you see there was given me by poor Captain Delaval; quite the gentleman he was! An’ he made no secret where he took it from, nor how they cut the Portuguese chap’s throat as was drinking from it in the after-cabin. And now, it’s as likely as not the Whigs would hang a man in chains for such a thing. I tell you, Captain, the hands don’t fancy it. They can’t cruise a mile along-shore without running foul of a gibbet with a pi—I mean, with a skeleton on it, rattling and grinning as if he was alive. It makes a difference, Captain—it makes a difference!”

“Take it or leave it,” replied the other, looking like a man who had made his highest bid, which no consideration would induce him to increase by a shilling.

Bob evidently thought so. “A bargain be it,” said he, with a villainous smile on his shining face, and muttering something about his wish to oblige a customer and the high respect he entertained for his guest’s character, in all its relations, public, private, and nautical, he shambled out of the room, leaving the latter to tackle once more with his accounts.

A shade of melancholy crossed the Captain’s brow, deeper and darker than was to be attributed to the unwelcome nature of his employment or the sombre surroundings of his position. The light of two tallow-candles, by which he worked was not indeed enlivening, bringing into indistinct relief the unsightly furniture and the gloomy pictures on the walls. The yard-dog, too, behind the house, had not entirely discontinued his lamentations, and the dip and wash of a retiring tide upon the shingle no farther off than the end of the street was like the voice from some unearthly mourner in its solemn and continuous wail. It told of lonely nights far out on the wild dark sea; of long shifting miles of surf thundering in pitiless succession on the ocean shore; of mighty cliffs and slabs of dripping rock, flinging back their defiance to the gale in the spray of countless hungry, leaping waves, that toss and madden round their prey ere she breaks up and goes to pieces in the storm. More than all, it told of desolation, and doubt, and danger, and death, and the uncertainty beyond.

But to him, sitting there between the candles, his head bent over his work, it seemed the voice of a counsellor and a friend. Each wave that, fuller than ordinary, circled up with a fiercer lash, to ebb with a louder, angrier, and more protracted hiss, seemed to brighten the man’s face, and he listened like a prisoner who knows the step that leads him out to life, and liberty, and love. At such times he would glance round the room, congratulating himself that his charts, his instruments, his telescope, were all safe on board, and perhaps, would rise, take a turn or two, and open the window-shutter for a consoling look at a certain bright speck in the surrounding darkness, which might be either in earth, or sea, or air, and was indeed the anchor-light in the foretop of his ship. Then he would return, refreshed and comforted, to his accounts.

He was beginning to hope he had really got the better of these, and had so far succeeded that two consecutive columns permitted themselves to be added up with an appearance of probability, when an unusually long-drawn howl from the house-dog, following the squeak of a fiddle, distracted him from his occupation, and provoked him to swear once more in a foreign tongue.

It was difficult to make calculations, involving a thousand probabilities, with that miserable dog howling at regular intervals. It was impossible to speculate calmly on the value of his cargo, the quantity of his powder, and the chances of peace and war. While he sat there he knew well enough that his letters of marque would bear him out in pouncing on any unfortunate merchantman he could come across under Spanish colours, but there had been whispers of peace in London, and the weekly news-letter (substitute for our daily paper), read aloud that afternoon in the coffee-house round the corner, indorsed the probability of these rumours. By the time he reached his cruising-ground, the treaty might have been signed which would change a privateer into a pirate, and the exploit that would earn a man his knighthood this week might swing him at his own yard-arm the next. In those times, however, considerable latitude, if not allowed, was at least claimed by these kindred professions, and the calculator in the parlour of the Fox and Fiddle seemed unlikely to be over-scrupulous in the means by which he hoped to attain his end.

He had resolved on earning, or winning, or taking, such a sum of money as would render him independent of fortune for life. He had an object in this which he deemed worthy of any sacrifice he could offer. Therefore he had fitted out and freighted his brigantine partly at his own expense, partly at that of certain confiding merchants in Leadenhall Street, so as to combine the certain gains of a peaceful trader with the more hazardous venture of a licensed sea-robber who takes by the strong hand. If the license should expire before his rapacity was satisfied, he would affect ignorance while he could, and when that was no longer practicable, throw off all disguise and hoist the black flag openly at the main.