“You can’t move an inch,” said Dap.
“But we shall float off as soon as the tide rises.”
“Precisely. But it won’t come as high again, not till the next spring tide. Meanwhiles I’ve a gig’s crew ashore and a cutter within gunshot.”
Boldero was taken aback. He realized that he was—in nautical parlance—“neaped.” What a miserable misadventure! What a reward for his seamanship! But, masking his consternation, he rejoined with a smile, “Then you can’t take your prize in tow either.” He proceeded to point out laughingly that there was no question of capture on either side, that there was not a tittle of evidence against him, that he was an honest trader, as his manifest and cargo would show—and that even if His Majesty, through his admirable if over-zealous representative, insisted on taxing his own little modicum of alcohol and tobacco, it had not been technically landed. The nice point whether a cargo which lands inside its ship instead of outside can be said to have landed, side-tracked the question of the status of the ship herself, and entailed so great a consumption of the cheroots and liquor—despite the unearthly hour—that their fiscal value must have been considerably reduced. But the obdurate Dap still insisting they were dutiable, Roger Boldero invited him to seal them up till he sailed, as he had certainly no intention of landing them here. He pointed out, however, that though the tide, like Time, waited for no man, he would have to wait for the tide; and that during this disagreeable interval the hope of again offering the “Commodore” the cordial, if lop-sided, hospitality of his cabin must disappear if the fomenters of friendship were put in bond. Even this argument might have shattered itself against Dap’s fuddled sense of duty had not the twice aforesaid Providence now sent on board a rival cocked hat with a feather salient. With the growing light the local exciseman—of the shoregoing branch of the service—had likewise discovered the strange quarry. But the gleam in the hunter’s eye died when Lieutenant Dap introduced him to his friend Boldero, who was celebrating with him the birth of his seventh baby, and whose society for the next month would, he was sure, add to the amenities of life in Brandy Hole Creek.
And “my friend Boldero” did not fail to become it, for Lieutenant Dap’s cruising was confined to the waters on whose border he had built his nest: and he was frequently hove to. And during those tedious four weeks, made still more tedious by rain, Boldero had himself rowed out more than once to the “Channel groper” whose black hull, copious white boats, formidable guns and flaming-flannelled red-capped crew were plainly visible from the beached lugger; and he moved genially among the blue-trousered tars and did full justice to the Lieutenant’s gin-toddy and had his fingers often in the Lieutenant’s snuff-box and lent a sympathetic ear to his methods and devices against those rascally smugglers with their manœuvre of rowing dead to windward.
Their spirit-casks were slung with ropes, the Lieutenant explained, so that their confederates on shore could load them easily on their horses, but only the other night the blockade-men had discomfited a formidable shore-gang of fifty who, despite their stout ashpoles, had been unable to carry off anything except their wounded. He would have caught the lugger, too, had she not kept doubling.
The commander of the amphibious Tommy Devil even shared in an exciting, if unsuccessful, chase after a suspicious landing-party, going out with a galley-crew in a rain-storm in a borrowed tarpaulin petticoat. And once the one-eyed hero—who felt himself none the less a Nelson because his eye had been lost in resisting entry into the navy—returned Roger Boldero’s visit, and after broaching sundry of the happily unsealed kegs, the two skippers repaired arm in arm—the attitude was necessary—to see the seventh baby and present the fond mother with material for a lace cap.
Now while Daniel Quarles’s sister had been lying as helpless as the lugger, his last unmarried daughter, Emma, a beauty still more engaging, was housekeeping for Aunt Susannah and minding the other four children (two were dead). She had come in Daniel Quarles’s cart, and her father was to fetch her again as soon as Susannah was up (or down). He should already have come for her, but the rains had made such glue of the roads that a queerly spelt letter came instead, saying he would wait till they hardened. This delay, brief as it was, sufficed to bring the neaped mariner under the spell of the landlocked village maid, so sweet to look on, so serviceable about a house, and so motherly with a baby that the novel thought of matrimony was popped into a rover’s head. She, for her part, was still more swiftly subjugated by the jolly Roger and the Tommy Devil, and the mutual confession was precipitated by the opposite menaces of tide and cart, each threatening to bear them apart. It was a race between these and the course of true love, which must flow rapid to flow at all. But it did not flow smooth, for when Daniel Quarles arrived to convey his daughter home and found a rival vehicle waiting uncouthly on the beach to bear her off, he roundly damned the “furriner” who aspired to be his son-in-law, and he included in his maledictions the Preventive Service and all its works, especially the new baby, not to mention the times and the tides. For though he had long ago found grace and become a Wesleyan, he had embraced the new doctrine with the old robustiousness. The natural man was no more to be mitigated than a hedgehog. Had he become a Quaker, he would have turned the other cheek in a violent collision with the striker’s jaw. He enjoyed being angry, and that his wrath was “righteous” only added to its zest. And “righteous” it now was.
The trouble was not that Captain Boldero was a Churchman: the fellow was flippantly ready to embrace anything on earth that included Emma. It was not even that Daniel “suspicioned” him a smuggler. Smuggling—even if you had a brother-in-law in the Government—was quite as respectable as poaching, and in days when the rural labourer could not have lived had he not eked out his obolus by occasional rabbits (with the necessary vegetables), only an obtuse squirearchy could hold that sinful.
But even the squire had no opprobrium for the smuggler: gentry and peasantry were at one in backing up the manly patriot who thwarted a wicked Government, supplied Britons with the cup that cheers and their country with a fine naval reserve and early information of Froggy’s movements. The shores of Essex as of all Britain were honeycombed—apart from their large natural resources and their ruins and haunted houses—with artificial hiding-places, cellars, vaults, and secret passages, and every man’s hand was against the Ishmael of the Customs House. Farmers left their gates open at night to facilitate the cavalcades and coaches-and-six, and were but little surprised to find tea or tobacco coming up overnight on their fields like mushrooms. Even parsons were disposed to regard such treasures as drifted their way as heaven-sent flotsam, and Government circles themselves—in that era of purchasable votes and votable purchases—had not the ethical toploftiness which characterizes all Governments to-day. No, it was not Boldero the Smuggler, but Boldero the Smoker that found himself hurled into outer darkness the day poor shrinking Emma was borne off in her father’s cart. “No puffing pirate shall cross my threshold,” swore Daniel, but the accent was on the puffing, not the pirate. For tobacco had become tabu in the Wesleyan ranks: the godless practice of smoking was formally forbidden to the ministers. Swiss Protestantism indeed had once included its prohibition in the Ten Commandments. If Methodism did not thus re-edit the Decalogue, its horror of the abomination was no less keen, and a change of practice being always easier than a change of heart, Daniel Quarles had poured a deal of spiritual energy into the sacrifice of his pipe. The “rapscallion Boldero,” he declared, not only sinned himself, but was the cause of sin in others, trafficking as he did in the unholy weed. If Emma insisted on a “smoker,” wasn’t there the miller at Long Bradmarsh, he inquired with grim facetiousness, meaning that the grotesque Griggs had a vote by living in a house with a chimney.