“What I do is done for you—what I get is got for you! Remember that!” said Thompson Jowell, leaning forward over his dessert-plate until his vast expanse of shirt-front bulged—why are the shirt-fronts of great financiers invariably badly got up?—and two or three diamond studs unshipped their moorings, and the son caught a glimpse of the hairy bosom the hardy parent scorned to shield with a flannel vest. “Win distinction in the Field—out there!” Jowell waved a gross fat hand in the direction of the London Docks. “You can do it—it’s in your blood!—if you told me that it wasn’t I shouldn’t believe you!—and I shall see you General Sir Mortimer Jowell, K.C.B., before I die, please Heaven!”
“Gaw, Governor! how you pile it on,” responded the young man, who was not at all inclined to underestimate his own capacity for heroism. “You ambitious old Codger,” he elegantly pursued, “Military Knight Commanderships of the Bath don’t grow on every gooseberry-bush.... Why,” said Morty, opening his round brown eyes and shaking his bullet head at his parent, “even a first-class tip-top hero like our C.O.”—the young man referred to the gallant Colonel of the Cut Red Feathers—“hasn’t got that yet! And perhaps he don’t deserve it?... Oh, no!... Certainly not!” said Morty in a tone of sarcasm. “Not by no manner of means!...”
“And why hasn’t he got it? Not because he ain’t brave enough, or enough of a tip-top swell,” Jowell wagged his bristly head of upright gray hair sagely at his heir-apparent, and punctuated his periods by sips of the tawny port, “but because he hasn’t Money enough to back him. And whose fault is that but his own? Look at his position—think of his chances and opportunities!—and tell me whether he mightn’t be as rich as a Jew if he made use of ’em? Don’t you go to tell me he couldn’t—because I know best!”
“And so do I!—and hang me, if it don’t do him honor! I mean,” said Mortimer in a tone of disdain that mingled verjuice with the bumper Jowell was in the act of emptying, “his refusin’ to cabbage from the men’s rations, and firing, and clothing, and uniforms.... Everybody knows it’s done, and Government winks at it,” pursued the Ensign, getting very red about the gills, but looking straight out of the eyes that were so oddly clear and honest for a son of Jowell’s, into the muddier, more prominent orbs that goggled back at him. “But I’m confounded glad he sets that fine old face of his against it! and in his place I’m dam’ if I shouldn’t do the same myself!”
Jowell hastily set down his glass, and fell back in his armchair with a hot and clammy dew breaking out upon his large, and just now queerly-mottled countenance. He puffed and blew like a stout, shaven walrus for some moments before he could speak. Then he said—and the short, thick hand that held a choice cigar he had just taken from a chased casket of precious metal emblazoned with the large and ornate coat-of-arms that had been bought at Heralds’ College, shook as he said it:
“But if he had a son, he’d alter his notions about Cabbaging. Not to tell you a lie, my boy!—and my name’s Jack Candid—and has been all my life long—I’m a Cabbager myself! Lord!—if I hadn’t made use o’ my opportunities for Cabbaging—you’d be a private in the ranks, or serving out flour and treacle in an apron behind a chandler’s counter, and your mother’d be at the washtub—or charing for a livelihood at eighteenpence a day....”
His thick voice shook and his surface grew more unwholesomely mottled, and his popping eyes whirled in their circular orbits. That this beloved son—in whose interests so many nefarious and tricky schemes had already been concocted and carried out—for whose ultimate aggrandizement Thompson Jowell had planned a crowning masterstroke of villainy that—the man’s conscience not being dead in him—jolted him up on end o’ nights with his heart thumping and every hair upon his body prickly with fright—should thus have turned and rent him, pierced him to the quick through his pachydermatous hide.
As for Morty—the adage that evil communications corrupt good manners may be reversed in his case with some appropriateness. This big, chuckle-headed young man was sloughing his skin in more senses than one. Since he had mingled daily and hourly in the society of men of honor and high-breeding, the Honorable and Reverend Alfred no longer appeared to him as a model to copy or even a person to tolerate. New ideals had risen up before the eyes of Jowell’s son.
The Colonel, who, like many another commanding officer, preferred to be a comparatively poor man, rather than use his prerogative of plunder, seemed to Morty more enviable than the parent who had piled up enormous riches by means he dimly realized to be dishonest and mean.... True, Jowell was never weary of assuring his boy that he, Mortimer, would never be ashamed of his old Governor. But Morty was, secretly, not at all certain on this point.
“I’m not the man to boast, Morty, my boy,” the father went on as the son wriggled in his chair with growing uneasiness. “Ben Bragg never was my name or nature, but many another man in my place would have Cabbaged without as good an object. You have been my object—ever since you were born. To be a Millionaire—and I am one, I tell you plainly! isn’t enough for me—being my boy’s father. I’ve made up my mind to be as rich as Coutts and Gurney rolled together—and by the Lord! I see my way clear. Draw close—fill up your glass, and listen.”