“Don’t you say what you’re a-going to say!—and tell me that you don’t mind Government and the Nation being Cabbaged from—but as an officer holding the Queen’s Commission you’re damned if you like the notion of the British Army being served up on toast. I tell you—and my name’s Sure and Certain in the present instance—the British Army—God bless it!—won’t be a ha’porth the worse for anything on board the Transport I’ve told you of—even if anything on board of her was likely to be wanted—which won’t be the case—mark me! For this here Eastern Expedition will be back by the beginning of October at the latest; and—I tell you with all my cards on the table—this Two-Thousand-Six-Hundred-Ton steam-screw Transport I am a-talking of is as crank as a child’s tin boat.... Built of unseasoned Baltic pine she is—not a plank of honest English oak in her—the man who contracted with the Admiralty to supply the timber is a friend of mine—d’ye twig? She won’t weather out a Black Sea gale, by Gosh she won’t! If Old Moore and Mother Shipton and Zadkiel’s Almanac told me she would I should call ’em liars! A crank ship!—a damned crank ship!” said Thompson Jowell, thrusting his great crimson face and starting eyes near his son’s, and speaking in a husky whisper. “Nobody would be so wicked as to count on her Going Down—people don’t do such things!—if they owned to me that they did I wouldn’t believe ’em! But now the cat is out of the bag—and tip us your fist, my boy!”
He squeezed his son’s large, unresponsive hand, and, reluctantly releasing it, went on, in the flux of confidential talk that had seized and overmastered him: “And remember that you have a Brilliant Career before you—that’s what you have! Through you I mean the name of Jowell to strike root deep in the Old Country and spread wide and tower high. I ha’ lived small—here and at that little place of ours in Sloughshire—and haven’t launched out in a Scotch Castle and a Deer Forest and a Salmon River when I might—perhaps you’ve thought? What I say is—Wait until you come back from this campaign, and then you shall see a thing or two! Why have I bought up the village, field by field, and cottage by cottage, and whole streets o’ freehold shops and dwelling-houses in Market Drowsing Town? Because I mean you to be returned Member of Parliament for the Borough—and you shall sit in the Upper House among the other nobs as Baron Jowell by-and-by! There’s a pretty estate of ten thousand acres of park and stubble, covert and woodland, will be on the market presently—and a sixty acre o’ clay upland freehold within a mile o’ Market Drowsing—with a homestead and some good gore meadows—suitable to build a Stud Farm and Kennels on—as I’ve a mortgage on and mean to have by-and-by. And, by Gosh, my boy!—the County shall cap to you as Lord Lieutenant before you’re forty,” said Jowell, stretching the coarse hairy hand across the table. “Here’s my hand again on it—and so you know!”
“Haw, haw, haw! You’re going to go it, Governor, ain’t you?—with a vengeance!” said the son, with heartiness rather forced. He added, repressing a hiccup, for his potations had half-fuddled him: “But what’s this sixty-acre you’re talking about for a Stud Farm within a mile of Market Drowsing?... Gaw!—you don’t mean to say you mean my Cousin Sarah’s bit o’ land?”
“She’s not your cousin—if Burke took his Bible oath she was I wouldn’t believe him!” said Thompson Jowell, his large cheeks purpling as he bent his brows upon his son. “She’s a Poor Relation of mine—and what is it to you how I get land? If you’re to be a Nobleman, Land is what you want—and Land is what you must have. Trust your old Gov.!—my name’s Stephen Staunch where you’re concerned, ain’t it? And now tell me—when do you leave for the East, and what’s your barkey? Is she a regular good ’un? The British Queen, dy’e say?... She’s a clipper of a ship,” said Jowell, rummaging in a hairy nostril. “One o’ my own—I bought her from the Newfoundland Emigration Labor Company for a mere song, better than new! She sails on the 18th from Southampton, with a draft of the Hundredth Lancers; six officers, and seventy Rank-and-File, and the Admiralty Agent, the Honorable Mr. Skiffington. My Hay in the fore-hold, troop-horses in the after-hold,” said Jowell, smiling and winking knowingly. “Dunnage under the horses—barrels of Cowell’s salt beef under the Dunnage—it ain’t my lookout if it gets spoiled—and Cowell wouldn’t object, I rather fancy!... And now we’ll adjourn to the drawing-room,” said Jowell, scraping back his chair, and getting up on his short, thick legs, and gripping his son affectionately by the elbows—his inferior stature not permitting him to reach the Ensign’s broad shoulders. He ended, looking with moist, smiling tenderness in the owlish, rather tipsy young face, as he shook Morty to and fro. “And we’ll have a little music.... You shall tip us ‘Vilikins And His Dinah’—if anybody told me Robson could sing it better I wouldn’t believe ’em. And I’m damned if I haven’t half a mind to give you ‘Marble Halls.’”
Morty obliged with “Vilikins”—the newest thing out in ditties of the comic order, and Jowell was as good as his word with the operatic selection to which he referred. “I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls” is a melody with many turns and flourishes, and Jowell executed them conscientiously, not sparing one....
If Britannia, leaning with complete confidence at this juncture upon that stout and sturdy stem of tough old British oak, had peeped in and beheld the great Contractor—gathered with his family about the grand piano in the most sumptuous of the telescopic drawing-rooms—and beating time all wrong as he murdered the tune with simple, whole-hearted enjoyment,—she might have withdrawn her helmeted head in the conviction that here Was an honest man.
Though in Morty’s muddled mind some degree of dubiousness was created, as to the exact description of “Marble Halls” merited by a man who was cramming a crank-built transport of Baltic oak with rot and rubbish to the tune of Five Hundred Thousand Pounds. He was secretly wondering whether—in the estimation of his demigod, the Colonel of the Cut Red Feathers, a cool stone cell in Newgate Jail might not meet the case?—when Mrs. Jowell—at his own request—tried to sing ‘Home, Sweet Home’—and broke down in the second bar. He was wondering still, when three silver bedroom candlesticks arrived on a tray so massive, that the footman who bore it staggered. He was wondering yet, as his parents accompanied him up the broad, shallow staircase, and parted from him on the threshold of his palatial, gorgeous bedroom, with blessings and kisses and tears.
He could not have done with wondering. The scene closes upon him, standing—in an Oriental dressing-robe of sumptuous fabric superimposed above the long-tailed garment of the night, before his colossal, gilt-plate-laden dressing-table—saying, as he regarded his own foolish, tipsy young face in the great glittering mirror:
“Well, Blow Me Tight, if I don’t believe the Governor is the very devil!” He added, as he crowned himself with a tasseled nightcap and blundered into bed: “And he may be a regular tip-top business man—but I’m hanged if I cotton to such games. No, sir! I’m dam’ if I do like ’em! I’m Blest if I do—so there!”