“Well, so’ve you—much the same sort,” cried Ann, too cross for similes or logic.
Very much offended, I got up, but delivered this shaft before I departed: “All those sailors were my friends equally, so it made no odds to me which of them was wounded. And how was I to know Davy Jones was your young man, when it’s my belief you didn’t know it yourself yesterday.”
But the door slammed abruptly just behind my more backward leg, and the rest of my remark was cut off.
I wended my way into the main street, and soon found the centre of attraction to be the old hostelry, the “Royal Oak.” Men and boys, and many of the gentler sex also, swarmed round its window and its quaint old porch. The interior was filled with officers discussing the position of affairs. With a good deal of trouble and squeezing, and being in those days of an eel-like figure, I slipped and shoved myself close to one of the windows, where, balancing on my hands and with my nose glued to the pane, I inspected all those men of mark, and tried to find out what their intentions might be.
This position might, affording as it did ample opportunity for the horse-play of the rude, seem infra dig. to those who have only known me in my later years; but it must be remembered I was then but a boy not given to stand on my dignity and strongly moved by curiosity, or perhaps I might call it by the higher title—desire of knowledge.
For a good space there was not much to observe, save the various uniforms of the gentlemen and their manner of taking snuff and of laying their hands on their swords. Of a sudden I felt rather than heard a thrill of excitement in the crowd behind me: this soon resolved itself into a most unmistakable pushing and making-way on the part of some, and of craning forward and tiptoeing on the part of others around me.
With difficulty I turned my head, and I beheld a most unexpected sight. Two French officers were striving to make their way through the hindering, turbulent crowd, the nearer members of which shrank from them as though they bore with them the plague, while the more distant ones pressed forward to catch a sight of these foreigners in the same way that people like to gaze on the more savage members of a menagerie. This caused the strange lurch, the ebb and flow in the crowd. But still the men kept on making for the door of the inn, and no one actually opposed their passage.
One of them carried in his hand a white flag, and almost before I could believe the evidence of my eyes—for the ears had no work to do, every one being too much astonished to speak—the two envoys from the French camp were disappearing through the entrance and being ushered into the presence of Lord Cawdor and his officers.
Now I had reason to be proud of my ’vantage-place. Once more my face was pressed, with considerable outside pressure indeed, against the pane, and I saw with my own eyes that French aide-de-camp, Monsieur Leonard, present, with many a bow and flourish, the written communication from his general to Lord Cawdor. At the sight of those grimaces the crowd around me awoke from their trance of astonished silence—from the absolute stupefaction which had possessed them as it had possessed me. Consciousness and speech returned to them, and took the outward form of maledictions.
I, however, was more interested in watching the demeanour of the gentlemen within than of my fellow-townsmen without the house. His lordship, though his back was not so supple as the Frenchman’s, still received the letter with every mark of good breeding; and after a few formalities opened the communication.