I pocketed the boatman’s newspaper, lest the cabin servant, coming into my cabin, should espy and carry it away. And I also put in my pocket some trifles which I had purchased as curios at one or another of the ports we had visited, and then going on deck I hailed the boat that had been keeping close to us, but that was now lying alongside a brig some little distance away, and bade the fellows put me ashore.
Sheet lightning was playing round the sea, but stars in plenty were shining over our mastheads; the water was very smooth; I did not feel the lightest movement of air. Forward on our ship a man was playing on the fiddle, and a group of seamen in lounging attitudes were listening to him. I also heard the voice of a man singing on the vessel lying astern of us: but all was hushed aboard the frigate; the white lines of her stowed canvas ruled the stars in pallid streaks as though snow lay upon the yards; no light showed aboard of her; she lay grim, hushed, big in the dusk with a suggestion of expectancy in the dominating sheer of her bows and in the hearkening steeve of her bowsprit, as though steed-like she was listening with cocked ears and wide nostrils; and yet, dark as it was, you would have known her for a British man-of-war, spite of the adjacency of some East and West Indiamen which looked in the gloom to float nearly as tall as she.
“It’s a quarter to eight, Bill,” exclaimed Captain Spalding, going to the companion way and standing in it, while he spoke to me with one foot on the ladder. “You will remember to keep your weather eye lifting, my lad. At the first slant I get my anchor; so stand by. Ye’d better ask Uncle Joe to keep his window open, that you may smell what you can’t see and hear what you can’t smell. My respects to Uncle Joe. Tell him if I’m detained here to-morrow I may pay him a visit, unless he has a mind for a cut of Deal beef and a piece of ship’s bread down in my cabin. Anyhow, my respects to him,” and he vanished.
I dropped into the mizzen chains, got into the galley, and was rowed ashore.
CHAPTER II.
I VISIT MY UNCLE AT DEAL.
The boat was swept to the beach, and I sprang on the shingle. I paid the men their charges, and paused a moment to realize the thrilling, inscrutable, memorable sensation which visits a man who, after a long absence, treads his native soil for the first time.
After the chocolate faces of the West, and the yellow faces of the East, and the copper-colored faces of the South; after two years of mosquitoes, of cathedral-like forests, of spacious roasting bays, of sharks and alligators, and league-broad rivers, and songless birds angelically plumed, and endless miles of ocean; after—but I should need a volume to catalogue all that follows this after—after the Royal Brunswicker, in a word, how exquisite was my happiness on feeling the Deal shingle under my foot; how rejoiced was I to be in a land of white men and women, who spoke my own native tongue with its jolly, hearty, round, old Kentish accent, and who lived in a kingdom of roast beef and Welsh mutton and the best ales which were ever brewed in this world!
While I paused, full of happy thought, the men who had brought me ashore dragged their boat up the shingle. Two or three others joined them, and the little company rushed the boat up in thunder. They then went rolling silently into Beach Street and disappeared. I was struck by the absence of animation fore and aft the beach. Many luggers and galley-punts lay high and dry, but only here and there did I observe the figure of a man, and, as well as I could make out in the evening dusk, the figure was commonly that of an old man. Here and there also a few children were playing, and here and there at an open door stood a woman gossiping with another. But though I saw lights in the public houses, no sounds of singing, of voices growling in argument, of maudlin calls, such as had been familiar to my ear in old times, issued from the doors or windows. I was surprised by this apparent lifelessness. A fleet of two hundred sail in the Downs should have filled the little town with bustle and business, with riotous sailors and clamorous wenches, and a coming and going of boats.
There were two ways by which my uncle’s house was to be reached—the one by the road, the other by the sand hills, a desolate waste of hummocky sand, stretching for some miles from the north end of Deal toward the town of Sandwich and the River Stour. I chose the road because I wanted to taste the country air, to sniff the aromas of the fields and the hedges as I marched along, and because I wished to put as much distance as the highway permitted between me and the sea. The sky overhead was clear; there was no moon as yet, but the stars shone in a showering of light, and there was much lightning, which glanced to the zenith and fell upon the white road I was stepping along; and now and again I caught a low hum of thunder—an odd, vibratory note, like the sound of an organ played in a church and heard at a distance on a still evening. The atmosphere was breathless, and I was mighty thankful; but sometimes I would catch myself whistling for an easterly wind, for I knew not from what quarter a breeze might come on such a still night, and if the first of it moved out of the south or west, then, even though my hands should be upon the knocker of my uncle’s door, I must make a bolt of it to the beach or lose my ship.
My Uncle Joe’s house was a sturdy, tidy structure of flint, massively roofed and fitted to outweather a century of hurricanes. He had designed and built it himself. It stood at about two miles from Deal, withdrawn from the road, snug, among a number of trees, elm and oak. Rooks cawed in those trees, and their black nests hung in them; and in winter the Channel gales, hoary with snow, shrieked through the hissing skeleton branches with a furious noise of tempest, that reminded Uncle Joe of being hove-to off the Horn.