Bowell, who took over obsolete or damaged medical stores and necessaries from Britannia’s Hospitals and Infirmaries and Workhouses, and sold them back again without a blush upon his tallowy countenance; Powell, who bought thousands of tons of waste and spoiled paper from the Horse Guards and the Admiralty and other Government offices—where paper is wasted and spoiled—and transformed it into cardboard wherewith to strengthen busbies, shakos, helmets, and cocked-hats, and render them proof against bullets and grape, stroke of saber or cut of sword—were in like manner enriched at the mere cost of discomfort to many men, and a man’s life here and there.... But until the War broke out, and the Genius of Jowell spread its leathery bat-wings and soared—none of these enterprising spirits had ever dreamed what wealth, beyond the dreams of avarice, might be gathered and piled up, at cost of misery to thousands, and innumerable lives. When they realized this, they bowed their foreheads in the dust before the roomy patent-leather boots of Jowell, and mumbled them. He grew great in their eyes, and greater still. The sun rose to light his path, and set because he had done with it for the present.... They whispered to each other—behind their ringed and stumpy hands—that he was the devil, the very devil, sir! And as the earthly Vicar and representative of that dark potentate they worshiped him, having forgotten God.
LXXVII
Morty—after an eclipse somewhat protracted—being at length emancipated from the shadow of the brocade bed-curtains, having changed his skin, shaved, and attired himself—by parental request—in his Mess-uniform, came down to the five o’clock dinner—a feast comprising every delicacy most beloved of the young man.
Morty was in great spirits. The solemn butler—who had presided over the sideboard of an Archbishop—condescended to smile at his jokes, and the three powdered footmen openly sniggered. All the female servants were gathered on the upper landing listening and giggling and admiring. Jowell, too, was in great form.
He had—like other bulky birds of the carrion-feeding kind—who display excitement when there are preparations amongst humans for hostilities—been clumsily flying from place to place, making Contracts and Arrangements. He would be at the Horse Guards one moment—at the Admiralty the next, at Plymouth, Southampton, or Portsmouth before you could turn round. He had seen all the fine sights his boy had missed.... The Queen’s Review of the Baltic Fleet, and the Embarkation of the Guards, as of the first Drafts of Regiments of the Line—and he described these stirring sights to his wife and son in the characteristic Jowellian way.
“It brought tears to My Eyes—it did, upon my word!” he assured his hearers, in reference to such and such a demonstration of patriotic enthusiasm. And whether he spoke the truth or not, the water certainly stood in those bulging orbs of his, as he bade the archiepiscopal butler bring forth his most ancient white-sealed Port, wherein to pledge his newly-recovered son.
“To my dear boy’s health! Good luck to him, and God bless him!” he proposed, goggling fondly at the large young figure in the scarlet Mess-Jacket, through the tawny-golden wine. The next glass was swallowed to the toast of “The Queen, our Army and our Allies!” while the third was “Here’s to the Flour, Forage, Freightage, and Transport Trade. Large Profits and No returns!”
He chuckled so over this cryptic sentiment (which Cowell, Shoell, Sewell and Co. would have perfectly understood and enthusiastically applauded)—that he choked in his wine, and gasped and crowed so awfully that his wife—upon her way to the door, which Morty, with his recently-acquired gloss of good manners rather too obviously upon him, held open—was fain to pause behind her husband’s chair and pat him on the back. And then she kissed her son, whispering. “Not too much wine, my dearest!” And with a wistful smile at her one joy, went away to sit and knit at stockings for him, in a gorgeous gilded desert of drawing-rooms, opening one out of the other.
Left alone, Morty chatted with his sire, and found him well-informed and interesting. He knew so many things at first-hand. For instance, how many picked squadrons went to the Cavalry Division that was under orders for the East, and what vessels these warriors and their steeds would sail in. For as the British Government possessed but three available transports, Britannia may be said to have leaned with confidence, at this juncture, upon the bosom of Jowell. Who—it not being desirable that lofty officials should soil their fingers with such vulgar transactions—not only acted as the Government’s middleman or agent, in the hire and charter of such vessels of the Regular Screw Steamship Company; the Eastern and Occidental Steamship Company; and the Antipodean Company, as had been marked down for War-Service—and reaped very considerable profit and enrichment from such mediation—but for the conveyance of the heavier munitions of War; the Forage, the Commissariat Stores, and the horses of the Cavalry and Artillery—had been privileged to place his own private fleet of sailing-vessels and steamers at the service of an appreciative country.
It is to be whispered here, that the knowledge of ships and maritime matters indubitably possessed by Thompson Jowell had been gained by that great man in his earlier years, while serving in the humble capacity of private in a Regiment of Marines....