“Admitted—with the blessing of the Great Physician—that is the natural cure.”
“Very true, George, but you wisely spoke of small doses. I am not sure that it would be safe to tell Monsieur Laronde that we have actually found his wife and child. He also is too weak to bear much agitation.”
“Not so weak as you think, mother, though the sufferings of slave-life and subsequent anxiety have brought him very near to the grave. But I will break it to him judiciously. We will get my dear little Hester to do it.”
“Your Hester!” exclaimed Mrs Foster, in surprise. “I trust, George, that you, a mere midshipman, have not dared to speak to that child of—”
“Make your mind easy, mother,” replied the middy, with a laugh, “I have not said a word. Haven’t required to. We have both spoken to each other with our eyes, and that is quite enough at present. I feel as sure of my little Hester as if we were fairly spliced. There goes the breakfast-bell. Will you be down soon?”
“No. I am too happy to-day to be able to eat in public, George. Send it up to me.”
The breakfast-room in that seaside villa presented an interesting company, for the fugitives had stuck together with feelings of powerful sympathy since they had landed in England. Hugh Sommers was there, but it was not easy to recognise in the fine, massive, genial gentleman, in a shooting suit of grey, the ragged, wretched slave who, not long before, had struggled like a tiger with the janissaries on the walls of Algiers. And Hester was there, of course, with her sunny hair and sunny looks and general aspect of human sunniness all over, as unlike to the veiled and timid Moorish lady, or the little thin-nosed negress, as chalk is to cheese! Edouard Laronde was also there, and he, like the others, had undergone wonderful transformation in the matter of clothing, but he had also changed in body, for a severe illness had seized him when he landed, and it required all Mrs Foster’s careful nursing to “pull him through,” as the middy styled it. Brown the sailor was also there, for, being a pleasant as well as a sharp man, young Foster resolved to get him into the Navy, and, if possible, into the same ship with himself. Meanwhile he retained him to assist in the search for Marie Laronde and her daughter. Last, but by no means least, Peter the Great was there—not as one of the breakfast party, but as a waiter.
Peter had from the first positively refused to sit down to meals in a dining-party room!
“No, Geo’ge,” he said, when our middy proposed it to him, on the occasion of their arrival at his mother’s home—“No, Geo’ge. I won’t do it. Das flat! I’s not bin used to it. My proper speer is de kitchen. Besides, do you t’ink I’d forsake my Angelica an’ leabe her to feed alone downstairs, w’ile her husband was a-gorgin’ of his-self above? Neber! It’s no use for you, Geo’ge, to say you’d be happy to see her too, for she wouldn’t do it, an’ she’s as obsnit as me—an’ more! Now you make your mind easy, I’ll be your mudder’s black flunkey—for lub, not for munny. So you hole your tongue, Geo’ge!”
Thus the arrangement came to be made—at least for a time.