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_ Sir James Ovington's carriage was waiting without, and in it the
Avon family, so tragically separated and so strangely re-united,
were borne away to the squire's hospitable home. When they had
gone, my uncle mounted his curricle, and drove Ambrose and myself to
the village.
"We had best see your father at once, nephew," said he. "Sir
Lothian and his man started some time ago. I should be sorry if
there should be any hitch in our meeting."
For my part, I was thinking of our opponent's deadly reputation as a
duellist, and I suppose that my features must have betrayed my
feelings, for my uncle began to laugh.
"Why, nephew," said he, "you look as if you were walking behind my
coffin. It is not my first affair, and I dare bet that it will not
be my last. When I fight near town I usually fire a hundred or so
in Manton's back shop, but I dare say I can find my way to his
waistcoat. But I confess that I am somewhat accable, by all that
has befallen us. To think of my dear old friend being not only
alive, but innocent as well! And that he should have such a
strapping son and heir to carry on the race of Avon! This will be
the last blow to Hume, for I know that the Jews have given him rope
on the score of his expectations. And you, Ambrose, that you should
break out in such a way!"
Of all the amazing things which had happened, this seemed to have
impressed my uncle most, and he recurred to it again and again.
That a man whom he had come to regard as a machine for tying cravats
and brewing chocolate should suddenly develop fiery human passions
was indeed a prodigy. If his silver razor-heater had taken to evil
ways he could not have been more astounded.
We were still a hundred yards from the cottage when I saw the tall,
green-coated Mr. Corcoran striding down the garden path. My father
was waiting for us at the door with an expression of subdued delight
upon his face.
"Happy to serve you in any way, Sir Charles," said he. "We've
arranged it for to-morrow at seven on Ditching Common."
"I wish these things could be brought off a little later in the
day," said my uncle. "One has either to rise at a perfectly absurd
hour, or else to neglect one's toilet."
"They are stopping across the road at the Friar's Oak inn, and if
you would wish it later--"
"No, no; I shall make the effort. Ambrose, you will bring up the
batteris de toilette at five."
"I don't know whether you would care to use my barkers," said my
father. "I've had 'em in fourteen actions, and up to thirty yards
you couldn't wish a better tool."
"Thank you, I have my duelling pistols under the seat. See that the
triggers are oiled, Ambrose, for I love a light pull. Ah, sister
Mary, I have brought your boy back to you, none the worse, I hope,
for the dissipations of town."
I need not tell you how my dear mother wept over me and fondled me,
for you who have mothers will know for yourselves, and you who have
not will never understand how warm and snug the home nest can be.
How I had chafed and longed for the wonders of town, and yet, now
that I had seen more than my wildest dreams had ever deemed
possible, my eyes had rested upon nothing which was so sweet and so
restful as our own little sitting-room, with its terra-cotta-
coloured walls, and those trifles which are so insignificant in
themselves, and yet so rich in memories--the blow-fish from the
Moluccas, the narwhal's horn from the Arctic, and the picture of the
Ca Ira, with Lord Hotham in chase! How cheery, too, to see at one
side of the shining grate my father with his pipe and his merry red
face, and on the other my mother with her fingers ever turning and
darting with her knitting-needles! As I looked at them I marvelled
that I could ever have longed to leave them, or that I could bring
myself to leave them again.
But leave them I must, and that speedily, as I learned amidst the
boisterous congratulations of my father and the tears of my mother.
He had himself been appointed to the Cato, 64, with post rank,
whilst a note had come from Lord Nelson at Portsmouth to say that a
vacancy was open for me if I should present myself at once.
"And your mother has your sea-chest all ready, my lad, and you can
travel down with me to-morrow; for if you are to be one of Nelson's
men, you must show him that you are worthy of it."
"All the Stones have been in the sea-service," said my mother,
apologetically to my uncle, "and it is a great chance that he should
enter under Lord Nelson's own patronage. But we can never forget
your kindness, Charles, in showing our dear Rodney something of the
world."
"On the contrary, sister Mary," said my uncle, graciously, "your son
has been an excellent companion to me--so much so that I fear that I
am open to the charge of having neglected my dear Fidelio. I trust
that I bring him back somewhat more polished than I found him. It
would be folly to call him distingue, but he is at least
unobjectionable. Nature has denied him the highest gifts, and I
find him adverse to employing the compensating advantages of art;
but, at least, I have shown him something of life, and I have taught
him a few lessons in finesse and deportment which may appear to be
wasted upon him at present, but which, none the less, may come back
to him in his more mature years. If his career in town has been a
disappointment to me, the reason lies mainly in the fact that I am
foolish enough to measure others by the standard which I have myself
set. I am well disposed towards him, however, and I consider him
eminently adapted for the profession which he is about to adopt."
He held out his sacred snuff-box to me as he spoke, as a solemn
pledge of his goodwill, and, as I look back at him, there is no
moment at which I see him more plainly than that with the old
mischievous light dancing once more in his large intolerant eyes,
one thumb in the armpit of his vest, and the little shining box held
out upon his snow-white palm. He was a type and leader of a strange
breed of men which has vanished away from England--the full-blooded,
virile buck, exquisite in his dress, narrow in his thoughts, coarse
in his amusements, and eccentric in his habits. They walk across
the bright stage of English history with their finicky step, their
preposterous cravats, their high collars, their dangling seals, and
they vanish into those dark wings from which there is no return.
The world has outgrown them, and there is no place now for their
strange fashions, their practical jokes, and carefully cultivated
eccentricities. And yet behind this outer veiling of folly, with
which they so carefully draped themselves, they were often men of
strong character and robust personality. The languid loungers of
St. James's were also the yachtsmen of the Solent, the fine riders
of the shires, and the hardy fighters in many a wayside battle and
many a morning frolic. Wellington picked his best officers from
amongst them. They condescended occasionally to poetry or oratory;
and Byron, Charles James Fox, Sheridan, and Castlereagh, preserved
some reputation amongst them, in spite of their publicity. I cannot
think how the historian of the future can hope to understand them,
when I, who knew one of them so well, and bore his blood in my
veins, could never quite tell how much of him was real, and how much
was due to the affectations which he had cultivated so long that
they had ceased to deserve the name. Through the chinks of that
armour of folly I have sometimes thought that I had caught a glimpse
of a good and true man within, and it pleases me to hope that I was
right.
It was destined that the exciting incidents of that day were even
now not at an end. I had retired early to rest, but it was
impossible for me to sleep, for my mind would turn to Boy Jim and to
the extraordinary change in his position and prospects. I was still
turning and tossing when I heard the sound of flying hoofs coming
down the London Road, and immediately afterwards the grating of
wheels as they pulled up in front of the inn. My window chanced to
be open, for it was a fresh spring night, and I heard the creak of
the inn door, and a voice asking whether Sir Lothian Hume was
within. At the name I sprang from my bed, and I was in time to see
three men, who had alighted from the carriage, file into the lighted
hall. The two horses were left standing, with the glare of the open
door falling upon their brown shoulders and patient heads.
Ten minutes may have passed, and then I heard the clatter of many
steps, and a knot of men came clustering through the door.
"You need not employ violence," said a harsh, clear voice. "On
whose suit is it?"
"Several suits, sir. They 'eld over in the 'opes that you'd pull
off the fight this mornin'. Total amounts is twelve thousand
pound."
"Look here, my man, I have a very important appointment for seven
o'clock to-morrow. I'll give you fifty pounds if you will leave me
until then."
"Couldn't do it, sir, really. It's more than our places as
sheriff's officers is worth."
In the yellow glare of the carriage-lamp I saw the baronet look up
at our windows, and if hatred could have killed, his eyes would have
been as deadly as his pistol.
"I can't mount the carriage unless you free my hands," said he.
"'Old 'ard, Bill, for 'e looks vicious. Let go o' one arm at a
time! Ah, would you then?"
"Corcoran! Corcoran!" screamed a voice, and I saw a plunge, a
struggle, and one frantic figure breaking its way from the rest.
Then came a heavy blow, and down he fell in the middle of the
moonlit road, flapping and jumping among the dust like a trout new
landed.
"He's napped it this time! Get 'im by the wrists, Jim! Now, all
together!"
He was hoisted up like a bag of flour, and fell with a brutal thud
into the bottom of the carriage. The three men sprang in after him,
a whip whistled in the darkness, and I had seen the last that I or
any one else, save some charitable visitor to a debtors' gaol, was
ever again destined to see of Sir Lothian Hume, the once fashionable
Corinthian.
Lord Avon lived for two years longer--long enough, with the help of
Ambrose, to fully establish his innocence of the horrible crime, in
the shadow of which he had lived so long. What he could not clear
away, however, was the effect of those years of morbid and unnatural
life spent in the hidden chambers of the old house; and it was only
the devotion of his wife and of his son which kept the thin and
flickering flame of his life alight. She whom I had known as the
play actress of Anstey Cross became the dowager Lady Avon; whilst
Boy Jim, as dear to me now as when we harried birds' nests and
tickled trout together, is now Lord Avon, beloved by his tenantry,
the finest sportsman and the most popular man from the north of the
Weald to the Channel. He was married to the second daughter of Sir
James Ovington; and as I have seen three of his grandchildren within
the week, I fancy that if any of Sir Lothian's descendants have
their eye upon the property, they are likely to be as disappointed
as their ancestor was before them. The old house of Cliffe Royal
has been pulled down, owing to the terrible family associations
which hung round it, and a beautiful modern building sprang up in
its place. The lodge which stood by the Brighton Road was so dainty
with its trellis-work and its rose bushes that I was not the only
visitor who declared that I had rather be the owner of it than of
the great house amongst the trees. There for many years in a happy
and peaceful old age lived Jack Harrison and his wife, receiving
back in the sunset of their lives the loving care which they had
themselves bestowed. Never again did Champion Harrison throw his
leg over the ropes of a twenty-four-foot ring; but the story of the
great battle between the smith and the West Countryman is still
familiar to old ring-goers, and nothing pleased him better than to
re-fight it all, round by round, as he sat in the sunshine under his
rose-girt porch. But if he heard the tap of his wife's stick
approaching him, his talk would break off at once into the garden
and its prospects, for she was still haunted by the fear that he
would some day go back to the ring, and she never missed the old man
for an hour without being convinced that he had hobbled off to wrest
the belt from the latest upstart champion. It was at his own very
earnest request that they inscribed "He fought the good fight" upon
his tombstone, and though I cannot doubt that he had Black Bank and
Crab Wilson in his mind when he asked it, yet none who knew him
would grudge its spiritual meaning as a summing up of his clean and
manly life.
Sir Charles Tregellis continued for some years to show his scarlet
and gold at Newmarket, and his inimitable coats in St. James's. It
was he who invented buttons and loops at the ends of dress
pantaloons, and who broke fresh ground by his investigation of the
comparative merits of isinglass and of starch in the preparation of
shirt-fronts. There are old fops still lurking in the corners of
Arthur's or of White's who can remember Tregellis's dictum, that a
cravat should be so stiffened that three parts of the length could
be raised by one corner, and the painful schism which followed when
Lord Alvanley and his school contended that a half was sufficient.
Then came the supremacy of Brummell, and the open breach upon the
subject of velvet collars, in which the town followed the lead of
the younger man. My uncle, who was not born to be second to any
one, retired instantly to St. Albans, and announced that he would
make it the centre of fashion and of society, instead of degenerate
London. It chanced, however, that the mayor and corporation waited
upon him with an address of thanks for his good intentions towards
the town, and that the burgesses, having ordered new coats from
London for the occasion, were all arrayed in velvet collars, which
so preyed upon my uncle's spirits that he took to his bed, and never
showed his face in public again. His money, which had ruined what
might have been a great life, was divided amongst many bequests, an
annuity to his valet, Ambrose, being amongst them; but enough has
come to his sister, my dear mother, to help to make her old age as
sunny and as pleasant as even I could wish.
And as for me--the poor string upon which these beads are strung--I
dare scarce say another word about myself, lest this, which I had
meant to be the last word of a chapter, should grow into the first
words of a new one. Had I not taken up my pen to tell you a story
of the land, I might, perchance, have made a better one of the sea;
but the one frame cannot hold two opposite pictures. The day may
come when I shall write down all that I remember of the greatest
battle ever fought upon salt water, and how my father's gallant life
was brought to an end as, with his paint rubbing against a French
eighty-gun ship on one side and a Spanish seventy-four upon the
other he stood eating an apple in the break of his poop. I saw the
smoke banks on that October evening swirl slowly up over the
Atlantic swell, and rise, and rise, until they had shredded into
thinnest air, and lost themselves in the infinite blue of heaven.
And with them rose the cloud which had hung over the country; and it
also thinned and thinned, until God's own sun of peace and security
was shining once more upon us, never more, we hope, to be bedimmed.
THE END.
'Rodney Stone', by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. _
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