Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon

by Sir Hall Caine

Lovibond had been walking to and fro for more than an hour listening to the slumberous voices of the night, and hearing at intervals the louder bellowing from the room where Captain Davy and his cronies were sitting, when Davy himself came out.

“I can’t stand no more of it, and I’ve sent them home,” he said. “It’s like saying your prayers to a hornpipe, thinking of her and carrying on with them wastrels.”

He was sober in one sense only.

“Tell me more about the little girl in church. Aw, matey, matey! Something under my waistcoat went creep, creep, creep, same as a sarpent, when you first spake of her; but its easier to stand till that jaw inside anyway. Go on, sir. Love at first sight, was it? Aw, well, the eyes isn’t the only place that love is coming in at, or blind men would all be bachelors. Now mine came in at the ear.”

“Did you fall in love with her singing, Capt’n?” said Lovibond.

“Yes, did I,” said Davy, “and her spaking, too, and her whispering as well, but it wasn’t music that brought love in at my ear—my left ear it was, Matey.”

“Whatever was it then, Capt’n,” said Lovibond.

“Milk,” said Davy.

“Milk?” cried Lovibond, drawing up in their walk.

“Just milk,” said Davy again. “Come along and I tell you. It was this way. Ould Kinvig kep’ two cows, and we were calling the one Whitie and the other Brownie. Nelly and me was milking the pair of them, and she was like a young goat, that full of tricks, and I was same as a big calf, that shy. One evening—it was just between the lights—that’s when girls is like kittens, terr’ble full of capers and mischievousness—Nelly rigged up her kopie—that’s her milking-stool—agen mine, so that we sat back to back, her milking Brownie and me milking Whitie. ‘What she agate of now?’ thinks I, but she was looking as innocent as the bas’es themselves, with their ould solem faces when they were twisting round. Then we started, and there wasn’t no noise in the cow-house, but just the cows chewing constant, and, maybe, the rope running on their necks at whiles and the rattle of the milk in the pails. And I got to draeming same as I was used of, with the smell of the hay stealing down from the loft and the breath of the cows coming puff when they were blowing, and the tits in my hands agoing, when the rattle-rattle aback of me stopped sudden, and I felt a squish in my ear like the syringe at the doctor’s. ‘What’s that?’ thinks I. ‘Is it deaf I’m going?’ But it’s deaf I’d been and blind, too, and stupid for all down to that blessed minute, for there was Nessy laughing like fits, and working like mad, and drops of Brownie’s milk going trickling out of my ear on to my shoulder. ‘It’s not deafness,’ thinks I; ‘it’s love’; and my breath was coming and going and making noises like the smithy bellows. So I twisted my wrist and blazed back at her, and we both fired away, ding-dong, till the cows was as dry as Kinvig when he was teetotal, and the cow-house was like a snowstorm with a gale of wind through it, and you couldn’t see a face at the one of us for swansdown. That’s how Nelly and me ‘came engage.”