Finn gazed at him with a frown and a cheek purpled by indignation and contempt. The fellow fixed his dead black eye on me, and said, ‘I would rather go ’ome, sir.’
‘I dessay you would!’ burst out Finn. ‘How will ’ee travel? By locomotive or post-chay? By my grandmother’s bones! if one of my men had played such a trick on me as you’ve played on your master, I’d spreadeagle him with these here hands if he was as tall as my mainmast, and lay on till there wasn’t a rag of flesh left to tickle.’
I motioned silence with an indication with my head in the direction of Sir Wilfrid’s berth.
‘Take your choice, and be sharp about it,’ said I, turning hotly upon Muffin, whose very sleekness at such a time was a kind of insolence in him somehow; ‘either decide to be dealt with by Sir Wilfrid, who probably will shoot you for what you have done, or go to him after he has risen, tell him that you have made up your mind to discontinue your services as a valet, and that you have requested Captain Finn to place you upon the articles as a boy.’
‘Ay, as a boy,’ echoed Finn in a half-suppressed note of storm, and fetching his leg a mighty thump with his clenched fist.
Muffin’s left leg fell away, he clasped his hands in a posture of prayer upon his shirt-front, and, after looking in a weeping way from Finn to me, and from me to Finn, he said, snuffling as he spoke, ‘Gentlemen, give me an ’arf hour to think it over, I beg of you.’
I pulled out my watch. ‘I must have your decision by eight o’clock,’ said I. ‘See to it. If you do not decide for yourself, I shall choose for you, and give my cousin the whole truth; though for your sake,’ I added, with a menacing look at him, ‘as well as for his, I am very desirous indeed that he should remain ignorant of your conduct. Go!’
I sat talking with Finn. His indignation increased upon him as we spoke of Muffin’s behaviour.
‘It was enough to drive his honour clean mad, sir,’ he exclaimed. ‘Why, though there’s little I believes in outside what my senses tells me of, I allow I should feel like jumping overboard if so be on putting out the light I found a piece of adwice wrote upon the dark in letters of fire. But I’ll work his old iron up for that job. There’s something leagues out of the ordinary in that there slush made cove, sir. ’Taint that I hobjects to a man who never looks me in the eye. But there’s something in the appearance of that there Muffin which makes me think that if he could pull his heart out of his breast he’d find it like a piece of rotten ship’s bread, full of weevils and holes.’
‘The man is pining for the shore,’ said I. ‘The fellow thought to work upon the weak side of my cousin’s intellect. He meant no more, I believe, than to frighten Sir Wilfrid into returning. He remains a very good valet all the same, though we must have him out of this. He will not be the only servant in the world who has procured his or her ends by working on the master’s or mistress’s fears.’