“They must go along with us too. They are a worthless, skulking pair of fellows, I fear; but we must keep ’em.”
“They get no dollars?” said I.
“Not so much as shall buy them soap. We have saved their lives; that’s good pay for such service as they’ll render. What shall you do with your money?”
“Well, I have often considered, captain,” I answered. “I believe I shall buy a little house, put what remains out at interest, and go a-fishing for the rest of my days. And you?”
“First of all,” he answered, “I shall knock off the sea. I shall then strike deep inland and look for a little estate in the heart of a midland shire. I do not know that I shall marry. Should I marry, it will be with a lady of my own degree in life. I will play the gentleman only so far as I am entitled by my condition to represent one. I will be no sham. There is no yardarm high enough for the hanging of the men who, having got or inherited money, set up as country gentlemen, still splashed with the mud of the gutter out of which their fathers crawled, shaking themselves—illiterate, vulgar, scorned by the footmen who stand behind their chairs, belly-crawlers, title-lickers, toadies. Faugh! I once made a rhyme on shams—four lines—the only rhymes I ever made in my life:
“Pull up your blinds that all the world may see
The house you live in and the man you be.
The blinds are up, and now the sun hath shone:
The house is empty and the man is gone.”
“By which you mean to imply——” said I.
“By which I mean to imply,” he interrupted, “that if the lines don’t tell their own story they must be deuced bad.”
He stopped to look at the compass. The night was dark, but the dusk had cleared. The clouds raced swiftly over the stars, and the wind blew strong, but with no increase of weight since we had taken in the studding sails. The brig rushed along, leaving a meteor’s line of light astern of her. The dim squares of her royals swayed on high with the floating stroke of a pendulum. I admired the dark and pallid picture of the little fabric speeding lonely through this vast field of night.
Greaves came from the binnacle and stood beside me.