“Most revered Jack,” quoth he, “you throw a request in a man’s face like a twenty-pound shot into a Dutchman’s hull. There is just the polite spark at the touch-hole to give one warning, your urbanity concerning the sherry. None the less, I like it. Candor makes me feel quite fat.”
“You will get these fellows of mine well berthed?”
“All captains and lieutenants in three weeks! I would have you come and see some of the scrofulous schemers who wriggle in and smirk at me—most days of the month. They are so polite, so considerate in suggesting how I may be made a fool and a rogue. And sea-captains, sir, seem to be the fated husbands of pretty wives. It makes a Prometheus of me at times, I assure you. And as for Mrs. Pepys there, somehow she always has a sneaking preference for the mild and simple bachelors!”
The secretary’s wife stared hard at her husband’s embroidered vest. The direction of such a glance is considered disconcerting when applied to gentlemen who are approaching maturity.
“Sam is always a fool where women are concerned,” she said, with an autocratic poise of the head.
“There now, sir—and I married her! How can she speak such truths? Some more pie? Nonsense apart, Jack, I will see these men of yours well placed.”
What with chattering on his own affairs and questioning John Gore on his voyage, Mr. Pepys appeared to forget that there was such an incubus as his Majesty’s business. He suggested a drive in the park. His own coach, so he said, had eclipsed the Mancini’s, as Hortense had eclipsed the Breton Rose. Then there was Nell to be seen in a new play at The King’s, but he would not wink at her. Mrs. Pepys should see to that. And their best bedroom stood empty! A man who had so much cosmopolitan gossip to impart could not be suffered to call a link-boy that night. They could sit out together on the “leads” after supper, and talk till the stars blinked and they both fell a-yawning.
The end of all this amiable bustle was that John Gore slept between Mr. Pepys’s best sheets, and spent a great part of the following day with him, looking at his books and plate, drinking his wine, and hearing his new maid sing one of the secretary’s old songs. For Mr. Pepys was such a bubble of mirth, such a book of shrewd sense, such a register of anecdotes, that his loquacity and his infinite good-fellowship made even romance linger in its onrush for an hour.
Late shadows were floating down the river before John Gore escaped from the secretary’s weak eyes and stalwart tongue. He had some small affairs of his own to attend to in the City and at the New Exchange in the Strand: some new harness at a saddler’s; stockings and shirts at a silk mercer’s; a case of long pistols at a gunsmith’s in a street near the New Exchange. The pistol-stocks were inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl, and he left them with the smith for an hour to have his name scrolled upon the barrels. A coffee-house and a Gazette filled up his leisure. And not being a man afraid of carrying a parcel through the public streets, he returned to the gunsmith’s shop, and went westward with the pistols under his arm.
He took some of the quieter ways past Charing Cross, where the city and the fields met in scattered gardens and narrow lanes. Apple boughs, already hung with fruit, drooped alluringly over high brick walls. Here and there came the scent of rosemary and sage, of clove-pinks, marjoram, and lavender. And through the bars of some iron gate you might see great sheaves of sweet-peas in bloom, or torch-lilies stiff and quaint, or rose-trees with the flowers falling and turning brown.