“All hail, John Gore! Here are we, all on the right side of the table—as yet!”
John Gore’s eyes were fixed upon his father. He saw him turn sharply with the look of a man who sees in a mirror the face of an enemy behind his chair. He was on his feet almost instantly, his buxom face pleasant as a glass goblet full of Spanish wine.
“Jack, my lad, this is well timed! We are all friends here, or should be. Gentlemen, my son, Captain John Gore, just out of the saddle from Yorkshire. Never mind your boots, boy. You have a hungry look, and a dry look. Pull the bell-rope, Launce, and I’ll thank you. Supper is the song that a man wants to hear after a hard day’s ride.”
A boy in a pink velvet coat, and with the grand airs of a lord chamberlain, rose and offered John Gore his chair. The sea-captain bowed to the youngster in turn, though the child’s attitude of condescension was vastly quaint to a man who had dared more adventures in one year than the young fop would meet in a lifetime.
“You seem to have left a great many of your friends outside in the cold, gentlemen,” he said, still standing, and looking down the long table; “my father has enough chairs, and more than enough liquor.”
His coming had brought a momentary lull with it, and not a few of the gentry at the table were staring with some curiosity at a man who had seen the inside of a Barbary prison.
My lord caught his son’s words.
“What’s that you are saying, Jack?”
“These gentlemen have left some of their friends outside in their coaches. Sir Porteus, sir,” and he bowed to an apoplectic old fellow with a fringe of white hair and a tonsure like a monk’s, “there are people in your carriage. I trust you have not been too modest.”
The baronet stared boozily across the table.