A Roving Commission Part 47

It was expected that the _Spartane_ would be at least a month in the hands of the shipwrights, and the men on signing were given leave of absence for that time. As soon as all this was arranged, Nat took a post-chaise and drove to Southampton. There he found the d.u.c.h.esnes at an hotel. Their ship had gone into the port two days previously, but all their belongings were not yet out of the hold, and indeed it had been arranged that they would not go up to town till they saw him. They were delighted to hear that his appointment had been confirmed, and that he was to have the command of the _Spartane_.

"Now, I suppose you will be running down to see your people at once?"

Myra said with a little pout.

"I think that is only fair," he said, "considering that I have not seen them for six years. I don't think that even you could grudge me a few days."

"Yeovil is a large place, isn't it?" she asked.

"Yes; why do you ask?"

She looked at her mother, who smiled.

"The fact is, Nat, Myra has been endeavouring to persuade her father and me that it would be a nice plan for us to go down there with you and to form the acquaintance of your parents. Of course we should stay at an hotel. We are in no particular hurry to go up to London; and as while you are away we shall naturally wish to see as much as we can of your people, this would make a very good beginning. And perhaps some of them will come back to London with us when you join your ship."

"I think it would be a first-rate plan, madame, the best thing possible.

Of course I want my father and mother and the girls to see Myra."

"When will you start?"

"To-morrow morning. Of course we shall go by post. It will be a very cross-country journey by coach, and many of these country roads are desperately bad. It is only about the same distance that it is to London, but the roads are not so good, so I propose that we make a short journey to-morrow to Salisbury, and then, starting early, go through to Yeovil. We shall be there in good time in the afternoon. I shall only be taking a very small amount of kit, so that we ought to be able to stow three large trunks, which will, I suppose, be enough for you. Of course we could send some on by a waggon, but there is no saying when they would get there, and as likely as not they would not arrive until just as we are leaving there; of course Dinah will go on the box."

At four o'clock, two days later, the post-chaise drove up to the princ.i.p.al hotel at Yeovil. Rooms were at once obtained for the d.u.c.h.esnes, and Nat hired a light trap to drive him out to his father's rectory, some three miles out of the town. As he drove up to the house, three girls, from sixteen to two-and three-and-twenty, ran out, followed a moment later by his father and mother. For a few minutes there was but little coherent talk. His sisters could scarcely believe that this tall young officer was the lad they had last seen, and even his father and mother agreed that they would scarce have recognized him.

"I don't think the girls quite recognize me now," he laughed. "They kissed me in a very feeble sort of way, as if they were not at all sure that it was quite right. Indeed, I was not quite sure myself that it was the proper thing for me to salute three strange young ladies."

"What nonsense you talk, Nat," his eldest sister Mary said. "I thought by this time, now you are a lieutenant, you would have become quite stiff, and would expect a good deal of deference to be paid to you."

"I can't say that you have been a good correspondent, Nat," his mother said. "You wrote very seldom, and then said very little of what you had been doing."

"Well, mother, there are not many post-offices in Hayti, and I should not have cared to trust any letters to them if there had been. There is the advantage, you see, that there is much more to tell you now than if I had written to you before. You don't get papers very regularly here, I think?"

"No, we seldom see a London paper, and the Bath papers don't tell much about anything except the fashionable doings there."

"Then I have several pieces of news to tell you. Here is a _Gazette_, in which you will see that a certain Nathaniel Glover brought into Portsmouth last week a French thirty-six-gun frigate which he had captured, and in another part of the _Gazette_ you will observe that the same officer has been confirmed in the acting rank of commander, and has been appointed to the _Spartane_, which is to be recommissioned at once. Therefore you see, sisters, you will in future address me as captain."

There was a general exclamation of surprise and delight.

"That is what it was," the rector said, "that Dr. Miles was talking to me about yesterday in Yeovil. He said that the London papers were full of the news that a French frigate had been captured by a little ten-gun brigantine, and had been brought home by the officer who had taken her, who was, he said, of the same name as mine. He said that it was considered an extraordinarily gallant action."

"We shall be as proud as peac.o.c.ks," Lucy, the youngest girl, said.

"Now as to my news," he went on. "Doubtless that was important, but not so important as that which I am now going to tell you. At the present moment there is at Yeovil a gentleman and lady, together with their daughter, the said daughter being, at the end of a reasonable time, about to become my wife, and your sister, girls."

The news was received with speechless surprise.

"Really, Nat?" his mother said in a tone of doubt; "do you actually mean that you have become engaged to a young lady who is now at Yeovil?"

"That is the case, mother," he said cheerfully. "There is nothing very surprising that a young lady should fall in love with me, is there? and I think the announcement will look well in the papers--on such and such a date, Myra, daughter of Monsieur d.u.c.h.esne, late of the island of Hayti, to Nathaniel, son of the Rev. Charles Glover of Arkton Rectory, commander in his majesty's navy."

"d.u.c.h.esne!" Ada, the second girl, said, clapping her hands, "that is the name of the young lady you rescued from a dog. I remember at the time Mary and I quite agreed that the proper thing for you to do would be to marry her some day. Yes, and you were staying at her father's place when the blacks broke out; and you had all to hide in the woods for some time."

"Quite right, Ada. Well, she and her father and mother have posted down with me from Southampton in order to make your acquaintance, and to-morrow you will have to go over in a body."

"Does she speak English?" Mrs. Glover asked.

"Oh, yes, she speaks a good deal of English; her people have for the past two years intended to settle in England, and have all been studying the language to a certain extent. Besides that, they have had the inestimable advantage of my conversation, and have read a great many English books on their voyage home."

"Is Miss d.u.c.h.esne very dark?" Lucy asked in a tone of anxiety.

Nat looked at her for a moment in surprise, and then burst into a fit of laughter.

"What, Lucy, do you think because Myra was born in Hayti that she is a little negress with crinkley wool?"

"No, no," the girl protested almost tearfully. "Of course I did not think that, but I thought that she might be dark. I am sure when I was at Bath last season and saw several old gentlemen, who, they said, were rich West Indians, they were all as yellow as guineas."

"Well, she won't be quite so dark as that, anyhow," Nat said; "in fact I can tell you, you three will all have to look your best to make a good show by the side of her."

"But this talk is all nonsense, Nat," the rector said gravely. "Your engagement is a very serious matter. Of course, now you have been so wonderfully fortunate, and are commander of a ship, you will, I have no doubt, have an income quite sufficient to marry upon, and, of course, you are in a position to please yourself."

"We are not going to be married just at present, father. She is three years younger than I am, and I am not far advanced in years; so it has been quite settled that we shall wait for some time yet. By then, if I am lucky, my prize-money will have swelled to a handsome amount, and indeed, although I don't know the exact particulars, I believe I am ent.i.tled to from eight to ten thousand pounds. Moreover as the young lady herself is an only child, and her father is a very wealthy man, I fancy that we are not likely to have to send round the hat to make ends meet."

The visit was duly paid the next day, and was most satisfactory to all parties, and, as the rectory was a large building, Mr. and Mrs. Glover insisted upon the d.u.c.h.esnes removing there at once.

"We want to see as much of Nat as we can," his mother urged, "and if he is to divide his time between Yeovil and the rectory, I am afraid we should get but a very small share of him."

"I suppose your brother has told you all his adventures," Myra said the next morning, as she and all the party, with the exception of Mr. Glover and Nat, were seated in the parlour after breakfast was over.

"No, he is a very poor correspondent. He just told us what he had been doing, but said very little about his adventures. I suppose he thought that girls would not care to hear about midshipmen's doings. He did tell us, though, that he had had a fight with a dog that had bitten you."

Myra's eyes opened wider and wider as the eldest, Mary Glover, spoke.

Her face flushed, and she would have risen to her feet in her indignation had not her mother laid her hand upon her arm.

"I do not think, Miss Glover," Monsieur d.u.c.h.esne said gravely, "that you can at all understand the obligation that we are under to your brother.

The bite of a dog seems but a little thing. A huge hound had thrown Myra down, and had rescue been delayed but half a minute her death was certain. Your brother, riding past, heard her cries, and rushed in, and, armed only with his dirk, attacked the hound. He saved my daughter's life, but it was well-nigh at the cost of his own, for although he killed it, it was not until it had inflicted terrible injuries upon him--injuries so serious that for a time it was doubtful whether he would live. This was the first service to us. On the next occasion he was staying with us when the blacks rose. Thanks to our old nurse, there was time for them to run out into the shrubbery before the negroes came up, and then take refuge in the wood. My wife was seized with fever, and was for days unconscious.

"The woods were everywhere scoured for fugitives. Six blacks, led by two mulattoes, discovered their hiding-place. Your son shot the whole of them, but had one of his ribs broken by a pistol-ball. In spite of that, he and Dinah carried my wife some thirty miles down to the town across rough ground, where every step must have been torture to him, and brought her and Myra safely to me. Equal services he performed another time to a family, intimate friends of ours, composed of a gentleman and his wife and two daughters, who, with six white men, were prisoners in the hands of the blacks, and would a.s.suredly have suffered deaths of agonizing torture. Though he had but twenty men with him, he landed them all, marched them up to the place, rescued the whole party, and made his way down to his boat again through three hundred and fifty maddened blacks. No less great was the service he rendered when he rescued some fifteen ladies and gentlemen who had been captured by a pirate, and whose fate, had he not arrived, would have been too horrible to think of. As to his services at sea, the official reports have testified, and his unheard-of promotion shows the appreciation of the authorities.

Never were more gallant deeds done by the most valiant naval captains who have ever lived."

Myra had held her father's hand while he was speaking; her breath had come fast, and her eyes were full of tears.

"Thank you, Monsieur d.u.c.h.esne," Mrs. Glover said, gently; "please remember that all this is quite new to us. Now that we know something of the truth, we shall feel as proud of our boy as your daughter has a right to be."

"Excuse me, Mrs. Glover," Myra said, walking across to her, and kissing her, "but when it seemed to me that these glorious deeds Nat has achieved were regarded as the mere adventures of a midshipman, I felt that I must speak."

"It is quite natural that you should do so," Mrs. Glover said; "for, if fault there is, it rests with Nat, who always spoke of his own adventures in a jesting sort of way, and gave us no idea that they were anything out of the common."

"They were out of the common, madame," Myra said; "why, when he came into Port Royal, with the great frigate in tow of his little brigantine, and two huge merchantmen he had recaptured from her, the admiral's ship and all the vessels of war in the harbour saluted him. I almost cried my eyes out with pride and happiness."

"Myra does not exaggerate," her mother said; "your son's exploits were the talk of Jamaica, and even the capture of the French frigate was less extraordinary than the way in which, with a little craft of four guns, he captured a pirate which carried ten, and a crew four times as numerous as his own."