It was his Fate, that, priding himself as he did upon the doggedness of will and tenacity of purpose that had combined with unscrupulousness in the making of his fortune, he could not recognize in his son the first-named qualities. He had begotten his own judge. Though he blinked the fact, it was presently to come to him, after a method unexpected, terrible, and strange.
The dizziness passed off; Jowell waddled on his thick short legs to the rusty fireplace, thrust the letter deep into the heart of the handful of coal that burned there, and held it down with the poker until it blazed up and was reduced to a grayish crisp of thin ash. Then he got a glass of water from the yellow washstand, went to his cupboard, and deliberately swallowed two Cockle’s pills.
Whenever Conscience woke up, and clamored behind the gorgeous waistcoat of the great Contractor, he was accustomed to silence her by the administration of a bumping dose. Purged of repentance and relieved, we may suppose, of scruples, his reply to Morty’s letter was a masterpiece in its way.
For it reminded the son, indirectly, of all that the father had done for him, and temptingly enlarged upon all that he meant to do.... At the end came the pregnant intimation that Mortimer was not to flurry himself about affairs that were no concern of his. And that—in a particular instance not more definitely specified, Sturdy Stephen Standfast was the name of his old Gov.
“For he don’t mean that letter! Not a word of it!” snorted Thompson Jowell, quite himself as he blotted the reply to Morty’s letter on the morning after the two Cockle’s pills. He added: “Throw his old Gov. over!... By Gosh! he ain’t capable of it. By Gosh! if an Angel came down from Heaven”—one would like to hear Jowell’s conception of Heaven—“and told me he was, I wouldn’t take its word.”
When it comes to a tussle between Old Standfast and Young Standfast, one may be pretty certain as to which is going to win.... Having marked out, in his blundering boyish way, a line of conduct, Mortimer Jowell meant to follow it unswervingly. Hence the answer to the letter was a blow to all his hopes. He wrote no more to his father, though the dowdy woman regularly received his ill-spelt letters! And being of a kindly, affectionate disposition, he was profoundly wretched, in anticipation of the coming hour when he must keep his word.
Gnawing suspense and mental anxiety, combined with the effects of a deadly climate, might have hurried the Ensign to the grave on the heels of many another brave young officer, had not Love, with all its distractions, fears, and longings, acted as a tonic, and braced the patient up.
The Mounted Irregulars whom Morty had learned to refer to as the Bashis, were encamped in what had been a vineyard by the roadside on the way to Aladyn. Their chief, reported to be the father of Golden Cloak, Morty knew by sight as a bronzed, fiercely-mustached, soldierly man of perhaps forty-five. Splendidly mounted, dressed in the dark blue single-breasted tunic with green facings, light blue red-striped pantaloons, long spurred boots, black sheepskin kalpak and gray cloak, you would have taken him for an Osmanli commander of regular horse—had it not been for the blue, silver striped shawl worn round his kalpak, in combination with his unstudied off-hand manner of administering chastisement to his ragged, strangely bedizened, variously-weaponed troopers, with the flat of the naked sword.
It was torture to know that the bright cynosure hailed from that rowdy camp of brigands.... Morty, who had never previously known concern as to the reputation of any young woman, was uneasy upon this score. He found the cool, cynical attitude of his brother officers intolerable. For Golden Cloak had flashed by, a shining meteor borne on a brown-black storm-cloud—and left behind a champion and a slave.
She had ridden her magnificent Kabarda, with its costly shabrack of blue cloth, gold-embroidered, and gold and scarlet bridle, astride, after the graceful fashion of Peruvian ladies. She was small, pale, slight in stature as a child.... Her tiny features, pure as pearl, illuminated with black Oriental eyes, flashing and melting under the arches of meeting eyebrows, were crowned by a little black lambskin kalpak, in which was set an aigrette of flashing diamonds. The miraculous cloak of shining curls covered her to mid-thigh.... But he could see that she wore a Hussar tunic of dark blue, with golden frogs, green welts, and trimmings of black lambskin, and that her girdle was of gold lace, crimson-striped. Also, that her ample trousers of light blue cloth ended in high boots of scarlet leather, golden-spurred.