The private soared to become Quartermaster-Sergeant, and married the penniless orphan daughter of a Naval Surgeon. Being of a bilious temperament, and invariably deadly sick when upon sea-service, Thompson Jowell made haste to retire, upon a nest-egg that he had accumulated by the sweat of the brow of a true-born Englishman.... Which nest-egg, being invested in the shop, stock, and goodwill of a ship’s chandler and drysalter—later expanding into a rope walk (taken over for a bad trade-debt), and in process of time engulfing the business of a bankrupt forage merchant—was in time to hatch out the Great Contractor, the glory of his age.
He was in a beaming, radiant mood upon this particular afternoon. Smiles garlanded his large visage, even his rummaging, sniffing nose was cocked at a less aggressive angle, say forty-five instead of sixty degrees.... As the wine warmed him—though he could drink enough of his old tawny port to float a jolly-boat, without overheating or muddling the hard, sharp little brain enclosed in his pear-shaped skull—the strings of his tongue were loosed, and he spoke to his son and heir as to a second self, unreservedly.
He had attended at the newly-created Transport Office at the Admiralty, and had secured fresh Contracts—and he had been to the Victualling Office—(also a sub-department of the first-named Institution) and there he had received such gracious usage at the hands of the presiding genius, Mr. Commissary-General Blunder, that it had brought the tears into his eyes again.
Pray take a glimpse of Mr. Commissary-General Blunder, whose name was later to be spelt by prejudiced Press correspondents and critics of the Commission of ’56 with an initial to be found much later in the alphabet.
Comparatively obscure, previously to this period, you found him suddenly become all-powerful in half-a-dozen Departments. He was indubitably an official of great experience, having been present at the later Peninsular battles of the Duke’s time, in the character of a Director of Wagon Trains—unhappily abolished during the days of the Prince Regent, and not yet replaced by any organized means of Land Transport. Now you saw him as a little dry, meager man of seventy, his baldness covered with a black, scratch-wig, his sharp black eyes looking out over angular cheek-bones, scrawled with strange characters as though in official red-ink. Topped with the cocked-hat of a Brigadier-General, his little round pot-stomach buttoned up in the epauletted gold-laced swallowtail of Full Dress, he was barely a stately or imposing figure. But later, he was to reveal himself as a powerful Necromancer, who with so many strokes of a pen would create a squadron of paper horses, clap these unsubstantial beasts between the legs of as many solid, British troopers, and make the Nation pay for them in good hard money. Or, with a wave of the same inky wand he would command forage and rations, shirts and great-coats and blankets to be compounded and formed out of impalpable air; so that real horses and real men might feed upon these shadows and be clothed with them.
Newly endued with the power to pay away vast sums of Government money, it is little wonder that Mr. Commissary-General Blunder seemed to Jowell a being almost divine. By dint of perching him upon the piled-up bodies of his forty Commissariat staff-clerks, the Contractor saw him—and conveyed to his son the impression that he too saw him—as a giant rather than a dwarf.... Hearken to Thompson Jowell, enlarging in his idol’s praise....
“Comes into the Office—hangs up his hat himself—cracks a joke with the head of his staff of clerks—a Man Like That—who has authority, in case of need, to communicate direct with Foreign Governments—and can dip his hand in the Treasury as if it was his own breeches’ pocket.... ‘The weather’s warum, Colonel Jinkins,’ says he, in his sing-song Northern drawl—by the New Order they have military ranks according to grade, and, by Gosh! you should see ’em in their uniforms!—‘but by the latest adveece from the East we’re to have it warumer still!’ Says Jinkins: ‘Glad to hear it, Sir, and so is Mr. Thompson Jowell, unless I’m mistaken?’ Says I: ‘My name being John Bull—it can’t be too hot for me!’ ‘Glaed to find you in such speerits, Mr. Jowell,’ says His Honor, taking a pinch of snuff and speaking as dry as chips and shavings—‘for when I saw you I was afraid you were going to aesk me for some of the Government’s money.... What?... You are?... Waell!—since we caen’t stave you off, sign your name to this Contract Demand Dischaerge Receipt, and I’ll make you out an Order on the Treasury.’ Wuff! goes the sand over the wet ink—none of your new-fangled blotting-paper at the Crown Offices. ‘There you are, Mr. Jowell!... Thirty-Five Thousand Pounds!’ And between me, and my boy, and the bedpost,” said Thompson Jowell, nodding over his wine at his son and heir, “that’s a mere flea-bite to what I am a-going to get out of this here Eastern Expedition—long before the end!”
“Gaw!” ejaculated the Ensign, who had inherited the paternal reverence for money. He added, with a tongue somewhat thickened by the frequency with which, in defiance of his mother’s warning, he had applied to the decanters. “You jolly old Croe—what the dooce was the tremendously wealthy feller’s name who was ordered to be burnt alive?—don’t I wish I was in your jolly old shoes, that’s all!”
“You are in ’em, Morty, my own boy!” said the father, goggling at the younger Jowell tenderly. “Don’t think that what I do is done for myself—for I am a bloody humble man!” His little slanting forehead—so like the lid of a Noah’s Ark hooked tightly down over the jumbled beasts inside—the Lamb and the Dove being uppermost at that psychological moment—was full of anxious lines and corrugations. He mopped his overflowing eyes with his table-napkin, and his voice shook and wobbled with emotion as he went on: