Book 1. Port Nassau - Chapter 4. Father And Son

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_ BOOK I. PORT NASSAU
CHAPTER IV. FATHER AND SON

The dinner set before Captain Vyell comprised a dish of oysters, a fish chowder, a curried crab, a fried fowl with white sauce, a saddle of tenderest mutton, and various sweets over which Manasseh had thrown the elegant flourishes of his art. The wine came from the Rhone valley--a Hermitage of the Collector's own shipment. The candles that lit the repast stood in the Collector's own silver candlesticks. As an old Roman general carried with him on foreign service, packed in panniers on mule-back, a tessellated pavement to be laid down for him at each camping halt and repacked when the troops moved forward, so did Captain Vyell on his progresses of inspection travel with all the apparatus of a good table.

Dicky, seated opposite his father in a suit of sapphire blue velvet with buttons of cut steel, partook only of the fried fowl and of a syllabub. He had his glass of wine too, and sipped at it, not liking it much, but encouraged by his father, who held that a fine palate could not be cultivated too early.

By some process of dishing-up best known to himself (but with the aid, no doubt, of the "dam scullion") Manasseh, who had cooked the dinner, also served it; noiselessly, wearing white gloves because his master abominated the sight of a black hand at meals. These gloves had a fascination for Dicky. They attracted his eyes as might the intervolved play of two large white moths in the penumbra beyond the candle-light, between his father's back and the dark sideboard; but he fought against the attraction because he knew that to be aware of a servant was an offence against good manners at table.

His father encouraged him to talk, and he told of his purchase--but not all the story. Not for worlds--instinct told him--must he mention the word he had heard spoken. Yet he got so far as to say,--

"The people here don't like us--do they, father?"

Captain Vyell laughed. "No, that's very certain. And, to tell you the truth, if I had known you were wandering the street by yourself I might have felt uneasy. Manasseh shall take you for a walk to-morrow. One can never be sure of the _canaille_."

"What does that mean?"

Captain Vyell explained. The _canaille_, he said, were the common folk, whose part in this world was to be ruled. He explained further that to belong to the upper or ruling class it did not suffice to be well-born (though this was almost essential); one must also cultivate the manners proper to that station, and appear, as well as be, a superior. Nor was this all; there were complications, which Dicky would learn in time; what was called "popular rights," for instance--rights which even a King must not be allowed to override; and these were so precious that (added the Collector) the upper classes must sometimes fight and lay down their lives for them.

Dick perpended. He found this exceedingly interesting--the more so because it came, though in a curiously different way, to much the same as Miss Quiney had taught him out of the catechism. Miss Quiney had used pious words; in Miss Quiney's talk everything--even to sitting upright at table--was mixed up with God and an all-seeing Eye; and his father--with a child's deadly penetration Dicky felt sure of it--was careless about God.

This, by the way, had often puzzled and even frightened him. God, like a great Sun, loomed so largely through Miss Quiney's scheme of things (which it were more precise, perhaps, to term a fog) that for certain, and apart from the sin of it and the assurance of going to hell, every one removed from God must be sitting in pitch-darkness. But lo! when his father talked everything became clear and distinct; there was no sun at all to be seen, but there was also no darkness. On the contrary, a hundred things grew visible at once, and intelligible and common-sensible as Miss Quiney never contrived to present them.

This was puzzling; and, moreover, the child could not tolerate the thought of his father's going to hell--to the flames and unbearable thirst of it. To be sure Miss Quiney had never hinted this punishment for her employer, or even a remote chance of it, and Dicky's good breeding had kept him from confronting her major premise with the particular instance of his father, although the conclusion of that syllogism meant everything to him. Or it may be that he was afraid. . . . Once, indeed, like Sindbad in the cave, he had seen a glimmering chance of escape. It came when, reading in his Scripture lesson that Christ consorted by choice with publicans and sinners, he had been stopped by Miss Quiney with the information that "publican" meant "a kind of tax-collector." "Like papa?" asked the child, and held his breath for the answer. "Oh, not in the least like your dear papa," Miss Quiney made haste to assure him; "but a quite low class of person, and, I should say, connected rather with the Excise. You must remember that all this happened in the East, a long time ago." Poor soul! the conscientiousness of her conscience (so to speak) had come to rest upon turning such corners genteelly, and had grown so expert at it that she scarcely breathed a sigh of relief. The child bent his head over the book. His eyes were hidden from her, and she never guessed what hope she had dashed.

It was a relief then--after being forced at one time or another to put aside or pigeon-hole a hundred questions on which Miss Quiney's teaching and his father's practice appeared at variance--to find a point upon which the certainty of both converged. Heaven and hell might be this or that; but in this world the poor deserved their place, and must be kept to it.

"That seems fine," said Dicky, after a long pause.

"What seems fine?" His father, tasting the mutton with approval, had let slip his clue to the child's thought.

"Why, that poor people have rights too, and we ought to stand up for them--like you said," answered Dicky, not too grammatically.

"They are our rights too, you see," said his father.

Dicky did not see; but his eagerness jumped this gap in the argument. "Papa," he asked with a sudden flush, "did you ever stand up to a King on the poor people's side, and fight--and all that?"

"Well, you see"--the Collector smiled--"I was never called upon. But it's in the blood. Has Miss Quiney ever told you about Oliver Cromwell?"

"Yes. He cut off King Charles's head. . . . I don't think Miss Quiney liked him for that, though she didn't say so."

The Collector was still smiling. "He certainly helped to cut off King Charles's head, and--right or wrong--it's remembered against him. But he did any amount of great things too. He was a masterful man; and perhaps the reason why Miss Quiney held her tongue is that he happens to be an ancestor of ours, and she knew it."

"Oliver Cromwell?" Dicky repeated the name slowly, with awe.

"He was my great-great-grandfather, and you can add on another 'great' for yourself. I am called Oliver after him. They even say," added Captain Vyell, sipping his wine, "that I have some of his features; and so, perhaps, will you when you grow up. But of your chance of that you shall judge before long. I am having a copy of his portrait sent over from England."

For a moment or two these last remarks scarcely penetrated to the boy's hearing. Like all boys, he naturally desired greatness; unlike most, he was conscious of standing above the crowd, but without a guess that he derived the advantage from anything better than accident. His father had the good fortune to be rich. For himself--well, Dicky was born with one of those simple natures that incline rather to distrust than to overrate their own merits. None the less he desired and loved greatness--thus early, and throughout his life--and it came as a tremendous, a magnificent shock to him that he enjoyed it as a birthright. The repetition of "great"--"he was my great-great-grandfather;" "you can add another 'great' for yourself"-- hummed in his ears. A full half a minute ticked by before he grasped at the remainder of his father's speech, and, like a breaking twig, it dropped him to bathos.

"But--but--" Dicky passed a hand over his face--"Miss Quiney said that Oliver Cromwell was covered with warts!"

Captain Vyell laughed outright.

"Women have wonderful ways of conveying a prejudice. Warts? Well, there, at any rate, we have the advantage of old Noll." The Collector, whose sense of hearing was acute and fastidious, broke off with a sharp arching of the eyebrows and a glance up at the ceiling, or rather (since ceiling there was none) at the oaken beams which supported the floor overhead. "Manasseh," he said quickly, "be good enough to step upstairs and inform our landlady that the pitch of her voice annoys me. She would seem to be rating a servant girl above."

"Yes, sah."

"Pray desire her to take the girl away and scold her elsewhere."

Manasseh disappeared, and returned two minutes later to report that "the woman would give no furdah trouble." He removed the white cloth, set out the decanters with an apology for the mahogany's indifferent polish, and withdrew again to prepare his master's coffee.

At once a silence fell between father and son. Dicky had expected to hear more of Oliver Cromwell. He stared across the dull shine of the table at his parent's coat of peach-coloured velvet and shirt front of frilled linen; at the lace ruffle on the wrist, the signet ring on the little finger, the hand--firm, but fine--as it reached for a decanter or fell to playing with a gold toothpick. He loved this father of his with the helpless, concentred love of a motherless child; admired him, as all must admire, only more loyally. To feel constraint in so magnificent a presence was but natural.

It would have astonished him to learn that his father, lolling there so easily and toying with a toothpick, shared that constraint. Yet it was so. Captain Vyell did not understand children. Least of all did he understand this son of his begetting. He could be kind to him, even extravagantly, by fits and starts; desired to be kind constantly; could rally and chat with him in hearing of a third person, though that third person were but a servant waiting at table. But to sit alone facing the boy and converse with him was a harder business, and gave him an absurd feeling of _gene_; and this (though possibly he did not know it) was the real reason why, having brought Dicky in the coach for a treat, he himself had ridden all day in saddle.

Dicky was the first to resume conversation.

"Papa," he asked, still pondering the problem of rich and poor, "don't some of the old families die out?"

"They do."

"Then others must come up to take their place, or the people who do the ruling would come to an end."

"That's the way of it, my boy." The Collector nodded and cracked a walnut. "New families spring up; and a devilish ugly show they usually make of it at first. It takes three generations, they say, to breed a gentleman; and, in my opinion, that's under the mark."

"And a lady?"

"Women are handier at picking up appearances; 'adaptable' 's the word. But the trouble with them is to find out whether they have the real thing or not. For my part, if you want the real thing, I believe there are more gentlemen than gentlewomen in the world; and Batty Langton says you may breed out the old Adam, but you'll never get rid of Eve. . . . But, bless my soul, Dicky, it's early days for you to be discussing the sex!"

Dicky, however, was perfectly serious.

"But I _do_ mean what you call the real thing, papa. Couldn't a poor girl be born so that she had it from the start? Oh, I can't tell what I mean exactly--"

"On the contrary, child, you are putting it uncommonly well; at any rate, you are making me understand what you mean, and that's the A and Z of it, whether in talk or in writing. 'Is there--can there be--such a thing as a natural born lady?' that's your question, hey?" The Collector peeled his walnut and smiled to himself. In other company--Batty Langton's, for example--he would have answered cynically that to him the phenomenon of a natural born lady would first of all suggest a doubt of her mother's virtue. "Well, no," he answered after a while; "if you met such a person, and could trace back her family history, ten to one you'd discover good blood somewhere in it. Old stocks fail, die away underground, and, as time goes on, are forgotten; then one fine day up springs a shoot nobody can account for. It's the old sap taking a fresh start. See?"

Dicky nodded. It would take him some time work out the theory, but he liked the look of it.

His drowsed young brain--for the hour was past bedtime--applied it idly to a picture that stood out, sharp and vivid, from the endless train of the day's impressions: the picture of a girl with quiet, troubled eyes, composed lips, and hands that beat upon a blazing curtain, not flinching at the pain. . . . And just then, as it were in a dream, he beat of her hands echoed in a soft tapping, the door behind his father opened gently, and Dicky sat up with a start, wide awake again and staring, for the girl herself stood in the doorway. _

Read next: Book 1. Port Nassau: Chapter 5. Ruth

Read previous: Book 1. Port Nassau: Chapter 3. Two Guineas

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