"Did you know my father, Mr. Maliphant?" asked Harry, by way of opening up the conversation. "He was a sergeant, you know, in the army."
Mr. Maliphant started and looked bewildered; he had been, in imagination, somewhere off Cape Horn, and he could not get back at a moment's notice. It irritated him to have to leave his old friends.
"Your father, young gentleman?" he asked in a vexed and trembling quaver. "Did I know your father? Pray, sir, how am I to know that you ever had a father?"
"You said, the other day, that you did. Think again. My father, you know, married Caroline Coppin."
"Ay, ay—Caroline Coppin—I remember Caroline Coppin. Oh, yes, sister, she was, to Bob—when Bob was third mate of an East Indiaman; a devil of a fellow was Bob, though but a boy, and if living now, which I must misdoubt, would be but sixty or thereabouts. Everybody, young man, knew Bob Coppin," ... here he relapsed into silence. When he spoke again, he carried on aloud the subject of his thoughts—"below he did his duty. Such a man, sir, was Bob Coppin."
"Thank you, Mr. Maliphant. I seem to know Bob quite well from your description. And now he's gone aloft, hasn't he? And when the word comes to pass all hands, there will be Bob with a hitch of his trousers and a kick of the left leg. But about my mother."
"Young gentleman, how am I to know that you were born with a mother? Law, law! One might as well"—— Here his voice dropped again, and he finished the sentence with the silent motion of his lips.
"Caroline Coppin, you know; your old friend."
He shook his head.
"No—oh, no! I knew her when she was as high as that table. My young friend, not my old friend, she was. How could she be my old friend? She married Sergeant Goslett, and he went out to India and—and—something happened there. Perhaps he was cast away. As many get cast away in those seas."