The Yarn of Old Harbour Town

by William Clark Russell

"What's your name again?" he said.

"Paul, your honour," answered the fellow, brightening instinctively with the face Mr Lawrence now viewed him with.

"No other name?—no matter; Paul will do very well for the books."

He mused a little with his eyes fastened upon the ship's decks. For a space he was deeply sunk in thought. Presently his eyes rose to the figure before him, and he examined him as curiously as though he had never before seen him.

"Be here," said he, "on Saturday next. It may be that I'll give you the berth. No more words. Off with you!"

The fellow made a dash with his hand at a red forelock, and in his crooked gait went through the gangway and walked away up to the wharf, just as Mr Eagle rose out of the main-hatch.

Mr Lawrence walked to "The Swan." The entrance was under a covered way into which the stage coach drove for baiting. Mr Lawrence walked into the bar and observed a letter fixed in a frame of red tape stretched across a board covered with green baize. As he was in the habit of receiving letters at this house he looked at this one and saw that it was addressed to him. He pulled it out of its mesh of tape, and addressing a middle-aged, comely woman who sat in the window in the bar where she supplied lookers-in with pots of frothing beer, or directed them to such parts of the house as they desired to visit, he asked when that letter had been left, and was answered that the letter carrier had brought it in about two hours before.

He seemed to know the handwriting on the envelope, and there was a frown upon his face as he broke the big seal. He read it where he stood. It was a letter from a Captain Rousby informing him that he owed him the sum of one hundred guineas, that this money as a debt of honour had been payable immediately on proof of the loss of the wager, but that so far from having received it, Captain Rousby had been waiting for nine months without obtaining further satisfaction than the now wearisome and well-worn excuse that Mr Lawrence could not immediately pay, that he was expecting to obtain employment in the course of the month which would enable him to discharge this debt with interest if Captain Rousby thought proper. The Captain informed Mr Lawrence that last week Mrs Rousby had presented him with twins, a catastrophe which greatly increased his expenses at a time when he was without employment, and when money was never more urgently needed. Captain Rousby then went on to inform Mr Lawrence that if a portion of this debt, say twenty-five guineas, was not sent to him by the first of June, it would be his unpleasant duty to visit Old Harbour Town, call upon Sir William Lawrence and state the facts of the case to him as an officer and a gentleman. If he could obtain no satisfaction from the Admiral, it would be his painful duty—a duty that must be singularly distasteful to a man who had been a messmate and shipmate of Mr Lawrence—to take such steps as his lawyer might advise.

When Mr Lawrence had read this letter through, he was in the act of crushing it by one of those spasmodic motions of the hand which accompany a sudden violent gust of wrath, he met the eyes of the female in the bar fixed upon him; in her gloomy beer-flavoured recess, faintly luminous with hanging rows of highly-polished drinking pots, and a sideboard well within laden with metal vessels for drinking from and for holding drink, the landlady of "The Swan," for such was this decoration of the bar, had manifestly been studying his face whilst he read. She knew him very well, and she was also well acquainted with his habits. In a breath on meeting her eyes he changed his resolution, and folded up the letter into its original creases, giving her a smile which did not seem in the least degree forced, and saying to her in his pleasantest manner, "Is the ordinary on?" and receiving her answer after she had darted a look at an invisible clock in her room, "In another three minutes, sir," he passed on and went upstairs.