II
Yet back, deep back in Jinny’s baby consciousness, lay another home altogether, a home richer in comfort and love; giving not on a tumbling common, but on a strange, flat waterside—with stately dream-ships in swelling white, and black barges, and little boats with ochre or orange sails, and a pervading savour of salt and mud; the real Blackwater Hall she felt dimly, though its name escaped her.
In this overlaid life there was a filmy female figure that fed and bathed and rocked one, and kissed the place one had banged, and sometimes held one as passionately as if against some monster that was trying to tear one’s face from that flower-soft cheek; it could scarcely be that burly figure, spasmodically appearing and disappearing, for that too was kind in its different way, and had a knee less cumbered by clothes across which one could ride astride, and pullable hair on its face and curling smoke issuing from its mouth more profusely than from the kettle’s. Out of this general background, like mountains from a plain, stood out a few episodes of peculiar vividness, but of no apparent significance—in one she sat on a rough sea-wall playing with innumerable tiny white shells while a bird hovered over her crying, as if trying to induce her to follow it seaward, but before she could do so the female figure had appeared, frantically scolding and caressing, and had carried her, struggling and kicking, back to a cot. In another she was carried by the burly being to a little room with a strange little bulbous window and a queer smell, where she was kissed by an elderly figure with a cocked hat and a fixed eye that had a strange affinity to the window. Later she seemed to be living in the strange building that held this room: it had a canvas roof, a flag at one end and a mast with ropes at the other, yet puzzlingly was not a ship, for she saw herself running down the stairs to pat Methusalem in the road.
But these shadowy and usually submerged images all leapt into renewed vitality one delectable Wednesday when, clad in a new black dress, hurriedly stitched together by Miss Gentry, she divided the driving-board with her grandfather (looking odd in his white funeral smock beside her blackness), while Methusalem, equally refreshed and exhilarated by the novel roads, almost hurried them by square-towered hamlets and dear little bridges spanning crawling streams to the quaint cemetery where the old man’s sister was to lie. How Nip would have loved the expedition she thought in after days! But he had not yet adopted her.
It was on this trip that she began to hear things that solidified the filmy figures—but it was only from the Gaffer’s spasms of imprecation tailing off into anecdote that she was able in the course of years to piece together her parental history. Boldero, she learnt incidentally, was her real name, not Quarles: a correction that mattered less, since nobody had ever called her anything but Jinny. She gathered that the Gaffer had purposely neglected to perpetuate her father’s name: he was cancelled and annulled.
Roger Boldero, she came gradually to understand, was one of those superior souls of uncertain status who, having got command of a little sailing vessel, were wafted joyously to and fro, exchanging the silks and spirits of France and the tobacco of Holland for the coins of England without any regard for the benighted principles handicapping human intercourse by taxation. Although her father finally came to own the cargoes he ran, he was at first the mere carrier for speculative capitalists; under cover, moreover, of an honest freight of non-dutiable articles. Carrying was thus in Jinny’s blood, both by land and sea, and it is no marvel she made a success of it. But the conjuncture of the two bloods came by the queerest of accidents. The Tommy Devil—the fearsome name of Roger Boldero’s boat was only the Essex name for the swift that flew gigantically in gay wood over its cutwater—being caught one night in a sudden gale at a season of high tides, found herself driven towards a lee shore of her native county. It was a perilous situation, and rather than be dashed on the beach broadside on, Skipper Boldero put his helm up and daringly essayed to land nose first on the mud. But the lugger, whose lightness was so admirable against the King’s cutters, and which had been still further lightened of her ankers of brandy and stone bottles of Schiedam—these, through an interruption by the blockade men, “waiting to be called for” in certain “fleets” and ditches farther along the coast—could not keep her head against the veering welter. With desperate resourcefulness Boldero improvised a drogue by lashing spars and a spare sail to a rope and trailing it at the stern, and, thus steadied before the wind, the Tommy Devil escaped broaching to, and despite the following sea that tilted her figurehead into the depths, she was finally dumped high and wet on the beach, on the very verge of the sea-wall—both uninjured.
It was a fine piece of seamanship (though aided by the rare steepness of this bit of beach and the high water), and the storm beginning to abate and the water to recede, the sails were lowered and the skipper and crew turned thankfully in. They were not wanting in men—carrying of this kind needed large and able-minded crews—yet all hands being worn out by hours of battling with wind and wave—“dilvered,” as old Daniel put it—a watch was deemed superfluous for a vessel no longer at sea, and the Tommy Devil reposed from stem to stern with all the soundness of conscious virtue watched over by Providence.
Now it happened that Lieutenant Dap, commander of His Majesty’s Revenue Cutter, then prowling in the offing in quest of gin-tubs—he had been pressed as a youth, served under Nelson, and had exchanged to the Preventive Service when he married that rustic beauty Susannah Quarles, sister of Daniel—was returning with a lantern at the first peep of dawn to the “Leather Bottel,” to knock up his boat’s crew. His anxious day in Brandy Hole Creek—as everybody called the little place—had ended happily: Susannah’s seventh baby had been safely and punctually launched—and the proud and prolific father was anxious to be back sweeping up the prizes that led to preferment. It being a high occasion, and to impress Mrs. Dap’s neighbours, he had come ashore in a cocked hat, and he felt almost knocked into one when he beheld, towering over the sea-wall, the great masts of a vessel that loomed gigantic in that place and light. He rubbed his one eye—the other he had lost in his original struggle against the pressgang—but the mysterious jetsam remained, and a closer inspection showed it the kind of longish craft whose huge lugsails his clumsier man-o’-war could rarely overtake, despite his square sail yards. But boldly, as befitted a man with a Nelsonic eye, and without waiting even to summon his men, he hailed the stranded stranger. No reply. Nor did even a shower of such small stones as the muddy beach afforded have any effect on the uncanny bark. There was nothing left but to board her—which the hero achieved single-handed, clambering over the sagging bulwark and standing alone on the slanting deck.
Roger Boldero, aroused to find himself challenged by the cocked hat and stony eye of the Law, displayed, though blinking at the lantern, as great a sang-froid as in the presence of the elements. There was, in fact, far less danger. Of the forbidden articles only lace was left on board, and lace has been designed by the said watchful Providence to occupy small space and be easily invisible. A wink to his second in command, and two of the crew who were in excess of the legal number for that small tonnage, smuggled themselves overboard—here being one of the advantages of terra firma. The few odd kegs, flagons, and cigar-boxes were the ship’s own stores Boldero maintained, and he would be very glad if the “Commodore” would join him in sampling them now. Softened by the title, the bold Dap nevertheless declined: the vessel was his prize, he declared.
“And what is to prevent us taking you as our prize?” asked Roger blandly, having by now discovered that Dap was alone.