Patricia at the inn

by J. C. Snaith

He was not a prepossessing fellow. His face had all the cunning of his years. He had a pair of hard, colourless, averted eyes, divided by a hill of flesh, whose blue-veined prominence said where his profits went to; a close-kept mouth; and over and above it all a fixed expression of calculated greed, of sustained, unwavering rapacity. It was not a good countenance to look upon. But to-night it was as near benignity as it could ever be. For while he sat with the warm fire and the generous waters inflaming his ruddy jowl, his mind and person were never so composed. It made him purr internally, like the cat nestling in the cinders, to compare his own fortunate condition with that of those frozen men upon the sea. While he reproduced, and even enhanced, in his imagination the discomforts and the perils they endured, he thanked the god of his physical well-being for the happy chance that had saved him from being a mariner. He called upon the serving-maid to brew a stronger posset for her master’s constitution.

“Cold as the bowels o’ the ground,” he groaned in his fleshly happiness. “And b’aint it sing’lar how the frost crawls round me. Ugh, it’s in my toes now, and now it’s in my blood; and, Lord, I feels a little iceberg a-creepin’ down my spine! Zakes! if it were not for a drop o’ stingo I might be very poorly.”

He hugged his toasting limbs, and drew his stool yet closer to the blaze.

“Keep them dogs hot,” said the landlord, when the girl came with the fresh concoction. “Keep the faggots crackling. The night’s a stinger, isn’t she? Lord! I wouldn’t like to be upon the sea.”

He fell to tracing weird shapes in the fire, and presently to dreams of pleasant things. Suddenly he started from his doze, and called out to his son:

“Joseph, d’ye hear me? Put them shutters up, and drop the bolt across. There’ll be no comp’ny, so ye and Cicely can both get bed’ards. ’Tis a night to freeze a dog.”

But even as the landlord spoke, his judgment was shown to be for once at fault. For as his son opened the door and let in a few gusts of frost and sea-fog, a man was found upon the threshold. He was the first of all the unexpected visitors who came to the “Sea Rover” that wintry evening; he made the first among those strange incidents that were so soon to invade the peace of the landlord’s life.

The man from the night pushed Joseph aside, and lumbered into the shadows of the room. He proved to be a seafaring man, in a dogskin cap, with a pair of large earrings in his ears. Like the landlord, his visage bore no superficial graces. The rime glistened on every inch of him; and his tawny face, tanned by the winds and the seas, showed fiercely from out of it. There was only one eye to his countenance, but that shone on the landlord like a beacon; there was an oath on his lips; and he came to the fire and put his hands to the blaze, with an air of mastery that startled the drowsy host even more than his appearance. This was hardly a friendly smuggler here in the ordinary course of trade.

While the mariner melted the rime on his jerkin and thawed his frozen limbs, Master Gamaliel Hooker shook up his wits and asked what his pleasure was.

“A go o’ rum,” said the mariner, gruffly.