Edward Howard

“ Pray be no longer angry. I think I am dying; will you forgive me?—will you shake hands with me?” And he extended to me his thin and delicate hand.
“Oh, no, no!” I exclaimed, accompanying my sneer with all the scorn that I could put in my countenance. “Such things as you don’t die—reptiles are tenacious of life. For the malicious and ape-like mischiefs that you have done to me and to my messmates—though in positive guilt I hold them to be worse than actual felony—I forgive you—but, interchange the token of friendship with such as you—never!”
“Ralph Rattlin, I know you!” ”

“ Take my advice, sir, and have soup twice, sir. As it was carried along the main-deck, I’m dishonest, if the young gentlemen didn’t follow it, with the water running down in streams from the corners of their mouths, and their tongues entreatingly lolling out, like a parcel of hungry dogs in Cripplegate, following the catsmeat-man’s barrow. One more rasp over your upper lip, and you are as smooth as the new-born babe—talking of lips, as the first spoonful of that turtle-soup glides over them—the devil! ”

“ A mother can trust to a mother. Though you are not parents, you have known a parent’s love. I have no doubt that you are fond of children— (‘Very,’ both in a breath) —from the profession you have chosen. I am the godmother of this boy. Alas! I am afraid no nearer relation will ever appear to claim him. He has no mother, Mrs Root, without you will be to him as one; and I conjure you, sir, to let the fatherless find in the preceptor, a father. Let him only meet for a year or two with kindness, and I will cheerfully trust to Providence for the rest. ”

“ I believe that he was nothing more than a personage’s fat steward, or some other menial obesity; for it was very plain that he was ashamed to look me in the face! and I understand he gave himself many second-hand airs.
And now we are off in earnest. The Nore-light is passed; the pilot is on the hammock nettings. The breeze takes the sails; the noble frigate bends to it, as a gallant cavalier gently stoops to receive the kiss of beauty: the blocks rattle as the ropes fly through them; the sails court the wind to their embrace, now on one side, now on the other. ”

“ When I have most cause to deem myself blessed, or to call myself triumphant, it is then that I am stricken with a feeling of undesert, that I am grave with humility, or sad with the thought of human instability. But, on the eve of battle, on the yardarm in the tempest, or amidst the dying in the pest-house, say, O ye companions of my youth, whose jest was the most constant, whose laugh the loudest? Yet the one feeling was not real despondence, nor the other real courage. In the first place, it is no more than the soul looking beyond this world for the real ”

“ When the fray was over, my sturdy opponent had no reason to be envious of my smooth face.
Rather inflamed than satiated with the result of my encounter, whilst my opponent turned into his hammock, and there lay moaning, I, with both my eyes dreadfully blackened, and my countenance puffed up, threw myself upon the lockers, and there sleeplessly passed the whole night, devouring my own heart. If, for a moment, I happened to doze, I was tearing, in my imagination, Joshua Daunton piecemeal, hurling him down precipices, or crushing him beneath the jagged fragments of stupendous rocks. ”

“ I shall be in London in the course of eight-and-forty hours—you cannot escape me—if it cost me a hundred pounds, I will loose the bloodhounds of justice after you—you shall be made, in chains, to give up your hateful secret. I am no longer a boy; nor you, nor the lawyer that administers my affairs, shall longer make a plaything of me. I will know who I am. Thank God, I can always ask Mrs Cherfeuil.”
At that name, a smile, no longer bitter, but deeply melancholy, and almost sweet, came over his effeminate features. ”

“ Mr and Mrs Root lifted their hands imploringly to heaven. “Not love me!” they both exclaimed together, with a tone of heartfelt surprise and wounded sensibility, that would have gone far to have made the fortune of a sentimental actor.
“Come here, sir, directly,” said Mr Root. “Look me full in the face, sir. You are a singular boy, yet I did think you loved me. Don’t be frightened, Ralph, I would not give you pain on any account; and you know I never did. Now tell me, my dear boy,” gradually softening from the terrible to the tender, “tell me, my dear boy, why you fancy you do not love me. ”

“ Captain Reud heard me to the end in silence; he even permitted me to go down half the ladder unmolested, when, rousing himself from his utter astonishment, he jumped forward, and spurning me with his foot violently on my back, dashed me on the main deck. I was considerably bruised, and, before I got to the midshipmen’s berth, two marines seized me and dragged me again to the quarter-deck. Once more I stood before my angry persecutor, looking hate and defiance.
“To the mast-head, sir, immediately.”
“I will not. I consider myself a prisoner.” ”

“ For myself I did not do much—I could not—I could not for very rapture. I danced and shouted in all the madness of exhilaration. I tasted then, for the first time, the fierce and delirious poison of contention. Had the battle-cry been “A Rattlin!” instead of “A Saint Albans!” I could not have been more elated. The joy of battle to the young heart is like water to the sands of the desert—which cannot be satiated. ”

“ There is not a man in that noble fabric who has not adopted her, who has not a love for her; they refer all their feelings to her, they rest all their hopes upon her. The Venetian Doge may wed the sea in his gilded gondola, ermined nobles may stand near, and jewelled beauty around him—religion, too, may lend her overpowering solemnities; but all this display could never equal the enthusiasm of that morning, when above three hundred true hearts wedded themselves to that beauty of the sea, the Eos, as she worked round the North Foreland into the Downs. ”

“ It is now twenty-one years since I saw my unfortunate parent interred, and I walk about my domains Sir Ralphed to my heart’s content—or, more properly speaking, discontent. Old Pigtop is a fixture, for he has now really become old. I cannot call him my friend, for I must venerate him to whom I give that title, and veneration, or even esteem, Pigtop was never born to inspire. My humble companion he is not, for no person in his deportment towards me can be less humble than he. He is as quarrelsome as a lady’s lapdog, and seems never so happy as when he has effectually thwarted my intentions. ”

“ When I grew older, he had many stories to tell me about my pantings, and my implorings, and my offers of unnumbered kisses, and of all my playthings, if he would not put me in that cold water—only this one, one morning. And about a certain Dr Buck, who had taken a wonderful liking to me, after the manner of the Lambeth surgeon, and had prescribed for me, and sent me physic, and port wine, all out of pure philanthropy; and how much I hated this same Dr Buck, and his horrible “Give him t’other dip, Brandon.” But all these are as things that had long died from my own recollection. ”

“ That kennel is the stream of life—and a dirty and a weary one it is, if we may judge by the old gentleman’s looks. All is hurried into that common sewer, the grave! What bubbles float down it! Everything that is fairly in the middle of the stream seems to sail with it, steadily and triumphantly—and many a filthy fragment enters the sewer with a pomp and dignity not unlike the funeral obsequies of a great lord. ”

“ Take a housekeeper!—oh Lord! oh Lord! oh Lord! I would just as soon see you married, or in your coffin.”
“But some such a person is absolutely necessary in an establishment of this extent; so a housekeeper I’ll have, of some sort.”
“Why the devil need it be a woman, then? why won’t a man do—why won’t I do?”
“You?”
“Yes, me—Andrew Pigtop. I ask the appointment—do, there’s a good Sir Ralph, make it out directly. Clap your signature to it, and let it run as much like a commission as possible. I ask it as a favour. You know the great sacrifices that I have made for you.” ”

“ This memorable evening, over our light supper, I drank, perhaps, two glasses of claret more than was my wont at Captain Reud’s table. I was excessively wearied both in mind and body. I became so unaccountably, and lethargically drowsy, that, in spite of every effort of mine to the contrary, I fell fast asleep in the midst of a most animated harangue of the good Manuel, upon the various perfections of his lovely daughter—a strange subject for a lover to sleep upon; but so it was. Had Josephine’s nurse and the Obeah woman anything to do with it? perhaps. They are skilful druggers. ”

“ No child ever haunted by a ghost-story was more terrified than myself, as I lay panting on my tear-steeped pillow. At length, imagination began its dreadful charms—the room enlarged itself in its gloom to vast space—I began to hear cries from under my bed. Some dark bodies first of all flitted across the gloaming. My bed began to rock. I tried to sing a hymn. I thought that the words came out of my mouth in flames of bright fire. I then called to mind the offerings from the altars of Cain and Abel. I watched to see if my hymns turned into fire, and ascended up to heaven. ”

“ Well said, my boy, well said—because he has no right to get himself flogged, and thus give a wretched world an opportunity of saying that Ralph Rattlin had been brought to the gangway. But do not let this cast you down. You will do well yet—while I—Oh, that I had a son!—I might then escape. God bless you!—I must pray for strength of mind—strength of mind—mark me, strength of mind. Go, my good boy; if misfortunes should overtake you, and they leave me anything better than a dark cell and clanking chains, come and share it with me. ”

“ All the jalousies in front of the house were nailed up, so that, if by chance I wandered into one of the rooms in that quarter, I saw nothing.
I had been domesticated in this paradise—a fool’s perhaps, but still a paradise—a month: and I was sitting alone in the shade, reading, behind the house, when Josephine flew along the avenue of lemon-trees, and flung herself into my arms, and, sobbing hysterically, exclaimed, “My dear, dear Ralph, now you are almost wholly mine! there is only one left.” ”

“ By Heaven, show me the man that flinches from his duty, and I’ll show you whatever may be his outward bearing, a craven at heart! I am very ill—I feel that I am fast sinking into a premature grave—but what of that. I should be but too happy if I could make my dying struggles subservient to my country. My body, Mr Farmer—Mr Wade, this poor temple of mine contains an insidious enemy—a strange, a dreadful, and a wasting disease. ”

“ How I picked up this knowledge I never could discover: both my foster-parents were grossly illiterate. Perhaps old Ford taught me—but this is one of the mysteries I could never solve; and it is strange that I should have so totally forgotten all about an affair so important, as not to remember a single lesson, and yet to hold so clear a recollection of many minor events. But so it is. To school I went: my master was a cadaverous, wooden-legged man, a disbanded soldier, and a disciplinarian, as well as an a-b-c-darian.
I well remember old Isaacs, and his tall, handsome, crane-necked daughter. ”

“ They must certainly have been light reading, as they floated about triumphantly. “I wonder whether they will pave their way up to Kingston,” said the captain, with a sneer.
As the author would not suffer them to be picked up, they sank, one by one, and disappeared, like the remembrance of their creator in the minds of his companions. We heard, a few weeks after, that he had died of the yellow fever: and thus he, with his books, was consigned to oblivion, or is only rescued from it, if happily this work do not share his fate, by this short memento of him. ”

“ Gentlemen, come here;” and the captain, between two supporters and the rest of the company, with Mr Silva, approached the mysterious looking, elongated affair, that lay, covered with the union-jack, like the corpse of some lanky giant, who had run himself up into a consumption by a growth too rapid. The doctor and purser, who were doubtlessly in the secret, wore each a look of the most perplexing gravity—the captain one of triumphant mischief; the rest of us, one of the most unfeigned wonder.
“If,” spluttered out Captain Reud, see-sawing over the yet concealed thing. ”

“ She glided in, and stooped over to Mrs Causand, as she lay on the couch, and their short conference was in whispers. As she retired, I was rather puzzled by the deep sorrow on her countenance, and the unfeigned look of pity with which she regarded her mistress or her friend. When we were again alone, I resumed my low seat, and was growing rather passionate over one of her beautiful hands, when, looking down, apparently much pleased with these silly endearments, she said, “Yes, Ralph, make the most of it; hand and heart, all, all are yours, for the little space that they will be mine.” ”

“ My identity is gone, and so, poor youth, is yours. We will part friends. These tears are not all for you—they are for myself; too. I do not mind crying before you now, for it is not the true John Reud that is now weeping. You think that I have been a tyrant to you—but, I tell you, Rattlin, there is a tyrant in the ship greater than I—it is that horrible Dr Thompson. He is plotting to take away my commission, and to get me into a madhouse!—oh, my God!—my God! remove from me this agony. Hath Thine awful storm no thunderbolt—Thy wave no tomb! ”

“ You ask me to rise—oh, son of my best friend—know, that I cannot—without assistance—without danger—I am on my sick-couch—on my dying bed—they tell me—me—me, whom you just now so praised for improved beauty, that my days are numbered—but, I believe them not—no—no—no—but hush, softly!—I may not agitate myself—you, my sweet boy, have surely come to me the blessed messenger of health—your finger shall turn back the hand upon the dial, and years, whole years of happiness, shall be yours and mine. ”