Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon Volume I Part 36

"No, sir, another major; his name is Mulroon, or Mundoon, or something like that."

"Monsoon, you son of a lumper potato," cried out a surly, gruff voice from a berth opposite. "Monsoon. Who's at the other side?"

"Mr. O'Malley, 14th," said I, by way of introduction.

"My service to you, then," said the voice. "Going to join your regiment?"

"Yes; and you, are you bound on a similar errand?"

"No, Heaven be praised! I'm attached to the commissariat, and only going to Lisbon. Have you had any dinner?"

"Not a morsel; have you?"

"No more than yourself; but I always lie by for three or four days this way, till I get used to the confounded rocking and pitching, and with a little grog and some sleep, get over the time gayly enough. Steward, another tumbler like the last; there--very good--that will do. Your good health, Mr.--what was it you said?"

"O'Malley."

"O'Malley--your good health! Good-night." And so ended our brief colloquy, and in a few minutes more, a very decisive snore p.r.o.nounced my friend to be fulfilling his precept for killing the hours.

I now made the effort to emanc.i.p.ate myself from my crib, and at last succeeded in getting on the floor, where, after one _cha.s.sez_ at a small looking-gla.s.s opposite, followed by a very impetuous rush at a little bra.s.s stove, in which I was interrupted by a trunk and laid prostrate, I finally got my clothes on, and made my way to the deck. Little attuned as was my mind at the moment to admire anything like scenery, it was impossible to be unmoved by the magnificent prospect before me. It was a beautiful evening in summer; the sun had set above an hour before, leaving behind him in the west one vast arch of rich and burnished gold, stretching along the whole horizon, and tipping all the summits of the heavy rolling sea, as it rolled on, unbroken by foam or ripple, in vast moving mountains, from the far coast of Labrador. We were already in blue water, though the bold cliffs that were to form our departing point were but a few miles to leeward.

There lay the lofty bluff of Old Kinsale, whose crest, overhanging, peered from a summit of some hundred feet into the deep water that swept its rocky base, many a tangled lichen and straggling bough trailing in the flood beneath. Here and there upon the coast a twinkling gleam proclaimed the hut of the fisherman, whose swift hookers had more than once shot by us and disappeared in a moment. The wind, which began to fall at sunset, freshened as the moon rose; and the good ship, bending to the breeze, lay gently over, and rushed through the waters with a sound of gladness. I was alone upon the deck. Power and the captain, whom I expected to have found, had disappeared somehow, and I was, after all, not sorry to be left to my own reflections uninterrupted.

My thoughts turned once more to my home,--to my first, my best, earliest friend, whose hearth I had rendered lonely and desolate, and my heart sank within me as I remembered it. How deeply I reproached myself for the selfish impetuosity with which I had ever followed any rising fancy, any new and sudden desire, and never thought of him whose every hope was in, whose every wish was for me. Alas! alas, my poor uncle! how gladly would I resign every prospect my soldier's life may hold out, with all its glittering promise, and all the flattery of success, to be once more beside you; to feel your warm and manly grasp; to see your smile; to hear your voice; to be again where all our best feelings are born and nurtured, our cares a.s.suaged, our joys more joyed in, and our griefs more wept,--at home!

These very words have more music to my ears than all the softest strains that ever siren sung. They bring us back to all we have loved, by ties that are never felt but through such simple a.s.sociations. And in the earlier memories called up, our childish feelings come back once more to visit us like better spirits, as we walk amidst the dreary desolation that years of care and uneasiness have spread around us.

Wretched must he be who ne'er has felt such bliss; and thrice happy he who, feeling it, knows that still there lives for him that same early home, with all its loved inmates, its every dear and devoted object waiting his coming and longing for his approach.

Such were my thoughts as I stood gazing at the bold line of coast now gradually growing more and more dim while evening fell, and we continued to stand farther out to sea. So absorbed was I all this time in my reflections, that I never heard the voices which now suddenly burst upon my ears quite close beside me. I turned, and saw for the first time that at the end of the quarter-deck stood what is called a roundhouse, a small cabin, from which the sounds in question proceeded. I walked gently forward and peeped in, and certainly anything more in contrast with my late revery need not be conceived. There sat the skipper, a bluff, round-faced, jolly-looking little tar, mixing a bowl of punch at a table, at which sat my friend Power, the adjutant, and a tall, meagre-looking Scotchman, whom I once met in Cork, and heard that he was the doctor of some infantry regiment. Two or three black bottles, a paper of cigars, and a tallow candle were all the table equipage; but certainly the party seemed not to want for spirits and fun, to judge from the hearty bursts of laughing that every moment pealed forth, and shook the little building that held them.

Power, as usual with him, seemed to be taking the lead, and was evidently amusing himself with the peculiarities of his companions.

"Come, Adjutant, fill up; here's to the campaign before us. We, at least, have nothing but pleasure in the antic.i.p.ation; no lovely wife behind; no charming babes to fret and be fretted for, eh?"

"Vara true," said the doctor, who was mated with a _tartar_, "ye maun have less regrets at leaving hame; but a married man is no' entirely denied his ain consolations."

"Good sense in that," said the skipper; "a wide berth and plenty of sea room are not bad things now and then."

"Is that your experience also?" said Power, with a knowing look. "Come, come, Adjutant, we're not so ill off, you see; but, by Jove, I can't imagine how it is a man ever comes to thirty without having at least one wife,--without counting his colonial possessions of course."

"Yes," said the adjutant, with a sigh, as he drained his gla.s.s to the bottom. "It is devilish strange,--woman, lovely woman!" Here he filled and drank again, as though he had been proposing a toast for his own peculiar drinking.

"I say, now," resumed Power, catching at once that there was something working in his mind,--"I say, now, how happened it that you, a right good-looking, soldier-like fellow, that always made his way among the fair ones, with that confounded roguish eye and slippery tongue,--how the deuce did it come to pa.s.s that you never married?"

"I've been more than once on the verge of it," said the adjutant, smiling blandly at the flattery.

"And nae bad notion yours just to stay there," said the doctor, with a very peculiar contortion of countenance.

"No pleasing you, no contenting a fellow like you," said Power, returning to the charge; "that's the thing; you get a certain ascendancy; you have a kind of success that renders you, as the French say, _tete montee_, and you think no woman rich enough or good-looking enough or big enough."

"No; by Jove you're wrong," said the adjutant, swallowing the bait, hook and all,--"quite wrong there; for some how, all my life, I was decidedly susceptible. Not that I cared much for your blushing sixteen, or budding beauties in white muslin, fresh from a back-board and a governess; no, my taste inclined rather to the more sober charms of two or three-and-thirty, the _embonpoint_, a good foot and ankle, a sensible breadth about the shoulders--"

"Somewhat Dutch-like, I take it," said the skipper, puffing out a volume of smoke; "a little bluff in the bows, and great stowage, eh?"

"You leaned then towards the widows?" said Power.

"Exactly; I confess, a widow always was my weakness. There was something I ever liked in the notion of a woman who had got over all the awkward girlishness of early years, and had that self-possession which habit and knowledge of the world confer, and knew enough of herself to understand what she really wished, and where she would really go."

"Like the trade winds," puffed the skipper.

"Then, as regards fortune, they have a decided superiority over the spinster cla.s.s. I defy any man breathing,--let him be half police-magistrate, half chancellor,--to find out the figure of a young lady's dower. On your first introduction to the house, some kind friend whispers, 'Go it, old boy; forty thousand, not a penny less.' A few weeks later, as the siege progresses, a maiden aunt, disposed to puffing, comes down to twenty; this diminishes again one half, but then 'the money is in bank stock, hard Three-and-a-Half.' You go a little farther, and as you sit one day over your wine with papa, he certainly promulgates the fact that his daughter has five thousand pounds, two of which turn out to be in Mexican bonds, and three in an Irish mortgage."

"Happy for you," interrupted Power, "that it be not in Galway, where a proposal to foreclose, would be a signal for your being called out and shot without benefit of clergy."

"Bad luck to it, for Galway," said the adjutant. "I was nearly taken in there once to marry a girl that her brother-in-law swore had eight hundred a year; and it came out afterwards that so she had, but it was for one year only; and he challenged me for doubting his word too."

"There's an old formula for finding out an Irish fortune," says Power, "worth, all the algebra they ever taught in Trinity. Take the half of the a.s.sumed sum, and divide it by three; the quotient will be a flattering representative of the figure sought for."

"Not in the north," said the adjutant, firmly,--"not in the north, Power.

They are all well off there. There's a race of canny, thrifty, half-Scotch n.i.g.g.e.rs,--your pardon, Doctor, they are all Irish,--linen-weaving, Presbyterian, yarn-factoring, long-nosed, hard-drinking fellows, that lay by rather a snug thing now and then. Do you know, I was very near it once in the north. I've half a mind to tell you the story; though, perhaps, you'll laugh at me."

The whole party at once protested that nothing could induce them to deviate so widely from the line of propriety; and the skipper having mixed a fresh bowl and filled all the gla.s.ses round, the cigars were lighted, and the adjutant began.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE ADJUTANT'S STORY.--LIFE IN DERBY.

"It is now about eight, may be ten, years since we were ordered to march from Belfast and take up our quarters in Londonderry. We had not been more than a few weeks altogether in Ulster when the order came; and as we had been, for the preceding two years, doing duty in the south and west, we concluded that the island was tolerably the same in all parts. We opened our campaign in the maiden city exactly as we had been doing with 'unparalleled success' in Cashel, Fermoy, Tuam, etc.,--that is to say, we announced garrison b.a.l.l.s and private theatricals; offered a cup to be run for in steeple-chase; turned out a four-in-hand drag, with mottled grays; and brought over two Deal boats to challenge the north."

"The 18th found the place stupid," said his companions.

"To be sure, they did; slow fellows like them must find any place stupid.

No dinners; but they gave none. No fun; but they had none in themselves.

In fact, we knew better; we understood how the thing was to be done, and resolved that, as a mine of rich ore lay unworked, it was reserved for us to produce the shining metal that others, less discerning, had failed to discover. Little we knew of the matter; never was there a blunder like ours. Were you ever in Derry?"

"Never," said the three listeners.

"Well, then, let me inform you that the place has its own peculiar features. In the first place, all the large towns in the south and west have, besides the country neighborhood that surrounds them, a certain sprinkling of gentlefolk, who, though with small fortunes and not much usage of the world, are still a great accession to society, and make up the blank which, even in the most thickly peopled country, would be sadly felt without them. Now, in Derry, there is none of this. After the great guns--and, _per Baccho!_ what great guns they are!--you have nothing but the men engaged in commerce,--sharp, clever, shrewd, well-informed fellows; they are deep in flax-seed, cunning in mola.s.ses, and not to be excelled in all that pertains to coffee, sa.s.safras, cinnamon, gum, oak.u.m, and elephants' teeth. The place is a rich one, and the spirit of commerce is felt throughout it. Nothing is cared for, nothing is talked of, nothing alluded to, that does not bear upon this; and, in fact, if you haven't a venture in Smyrna figs, Memel timber, Dutch dolls, or some such commodity, you are absolutely nothing, and might as well be at a ball with a cork leg, or go deaf to the opera."

"Now, when I've told thus much, I leave you to guess what impression our triumphal entry into the city produced. Instead of the admiring crowds that awaited us elsewhere, as we marched gayly into quarters, here we saw nothing but grave, sober-looking, and, I confess it, intelligent-looking faces, that scrutinized our appearance closely enough, but evidently with no great approval and less enthusiasm. The men pa.s.sed on hurriedly to the counting-houses and wharves; the women, with almost as little interest, peeped at us from the windows, and walked away again. Oh, how we wished for Galway, glorious Galway, that paradise of the infantry that lies west of the Shannon! Little we knew, as we ordered the band, in lively antic.i.p.ation of the gayeties before us, to strike up 'Payne's first set,' that, to the ears of the fair listeners in Ship Quay Street, the rumble of a sugar hogshead or the crank of a weighing crane were more delightful music."

"By Jove!" interrupted Power, "you are quite right. Women are strongly imitative in their tastes. The lovely Italian, whose very costume is a natural following of a Raphael, is no more like the pretty Liverpool damsel than Genoa is to Glasnevin; and yet what the deuce have they, dear souls, with their feet upon a soft carpet and their eyes upon the pages of Scott or Byron, to do with all the cotton or dimity that ever was printed? But let us not repine; that very plastic character is our greatest blessing."

"I'm not so sure that it always exists," said the doctor, dubiously, as though his own experience pointed otherwise.

"Well, go ahead!" said the skipper, who evidently disliked the digression thus interrupting the adjutant's story.