Sir John Constantine Part 20

"The gift of music," said Mr. Badc.o.c.k, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the two portions of the instrument together, "is born in some. The great Batch--John Sebastian Batch, gentlemen--as I am credibly informed, composed a fugue in his bed at the tender age of four."

"He was old enough to have given his nurse warning," said Mr. Fett.

"With me," pursued Mr. Badc.o.c.k, modestly, "it has been the result of later and (I will not conceal the truth, sirs) more a.s.siduous cultivation. This instrument"--he tapped it affectionately--"came to me in the ordinary way of trade and lay unredeemed in my shop for no less than eight years; nor when exposed for sale could it tempt a purchaser. 'You must do something with it,' said my Artemisia--an excellent housewife, gentlemen, who wasted nothing if she could help it. I remember her giving me the same advice about an astrolabe, and again about a sun-dial corrected for the meridian of Bury St.

Edmunds. 'My dear,' I answered, 'there is but one thing to be done with a flute, and that is to learn it.' In this way I discovered what I will go no further than to describe as my Bent."

Mr. Badc.o.c.k put the flute to his lips and blew into it. A tune resulted.

"But," persisted Billy Priske, after a dozen bars or so, "the latest thing to be mentioned was my appet.i.te: and 'tis wonderful to me how you gentlemen are letting the conversation stray, this afternoon."

"The worst of a flute," said Mr. Badc.o.c.k, withdrawing it from his lips with obvious reluctance, "and the objection commonly urged by its detractors, is that a man cannot blow upon it and sing at the same time."

"I don't say," said Billy, seriously, "as that mayn't be a reas'nable objection; only it didn't happen to be mine."

"You have heard the tune," said Mr. Badc.o.c.k. "Now for the words--

"I attempt from love's sickness to fly, in vain, Since I am myself my own fever and pain."

"Bravo!" my father cried. "Mr. Badc.o.c.k has. .h.i.t it. You are in love, Billy, and beyond a doubt."

"Be I?" said Billy, scratching his head. "Well, as the saying is, many an a.s.s has entered Jerusalem."

CHAPTER XI.

WE FALL IN WITH A SALLEE ROVER.

"We laid them aboard the larboard side-- With hey! with ho! for and a nonny no!

And we threw them into the sea so wide, And alongst the Coast of Barbary."

_The Sailor's Onely Delight_.

My father, checked in the midst, or rather at the outset, of a panegyric upon love, could not rest until he had found an ear into which to deliver it; but that same evening, after the moon had risen, drew Nat aside on the p.o.o.p, and discharged the whole harangue upon him; the result being that the dear lad, who already fancied himself another Rudel in quest of the Lady of Tripoli, spent the next two days in composing these verses, the only ones (to my knowledge) ever finished by him:

NAT FIENNES' SONG TO THE UNDISCOVERED LADY.

"Thou, thou, that art My port, my refuge, and my goal, I have no chart, No compa.s.s but a heart Trembling t'ward thee and to no other pole.

"My star! Adrift On seas that well-nigh overwhelm, Still when they lift I strain toward the rift, And steer, and hold my courage to the helm.

"With ivory comb, Daylong thou dalliest dreaming where The rainbow foam Enisles thy murmuring home: Home too for me, though I behold it ne'er!

"Yet when the bird Is tired, and each little wave, Aloft is heard A call, reminds thee gird Thy robe and climb to where the summits rave:

"Yea, to the white Lone sea-mark shaken on the verge-- 'What of the night?'

Ah, climb--ah, lift the light!

Ah, lamp thy lover labouring in the surge!

"Fray'd rope, burst sail, Drench'd wing, as moth toward the spark-- I fetch, I fail, Glad only that the gale Breaks not my faith upon the brutal dark.

"Be it frost or fire, Thy bosom, I believed it warm: I did aspire For that, and my desire-- Burn thou or freeze--fought thro' and beat the storm.

"Thou, thou, that art My sole salvation, fixed, afar, I have no chart, No compa.s.s but a heart Hungry for thee and for no other star."

"Humph!" said I, by way of criticism, when these verses were shown to me. "Where be the mackerel lines, Captain Jo? There's too much love-talk aboard this ship of yours."

"Mackerel?" said Captain Jo. "Why, where's your bait?"

"You shall lend me an inch off your pipe-stem," said I, and, to tease Nat, began to hum the senseless old song:

"She has ta'en a siller wand An' gi'en strokes three, An' chang'd my sister Masery To a mack'rel of the sea.

And every Sat.u.r.day at noon The mack'rel comes to me, An' she takes my laily head An' lays it on her knee, An' kames it wi' a kame o' pearl, An' washes it i' the sea--"

"Mackerel?" said Captain Pomery. "If ye found one fool enough to take hold at the rate we're sailing, ye'd pull his head off."

"Why, then, he would be off his head," answered I: "and there are plenty here to make him feel at home."

In truth I was nettled; jealous, as a lad in his first friendship is quick to be. Were not Nat and I of one age? Then why should he be leaving thoughts we might share, to think of woman? I had chafed at Oxford against his precocious entanglements. Here on shipboard his propensity was past a joke; with no goose in sight to mistake for a swan, he must needs conjure up an imaginary princess for his devotion. What irritated most of all was his a.s.suming, because I had not arrived at his folly, the right to treat me as a child.

South and across the Bay of Biscay the weather gave us a halcyon pa.s.sage; the wind falling lighter and lighter until, within ten leagues of Gibraltar, we ran into a flat calm, and Captain Pomery's face began to show his vexation.

The vexation I could understand--for your seaman naturally hates calm weather--but scarcely the degree of it in a man of temperament so placid. Hitherto he had taken delight in the strains of Mr.

Badc.o.c.k's flute. Suddenly, and almost pettishly, he laid an embargo on that instrument, and moreover sent word down to the hold and commanded old Worthyvale to desist from hammering on the ballast.

All noise, in fact, appeared to irritate him.

Mr. Badc.o.c.k pocketed his flute in some dudgeon, and for occupation fell to drinking with Mr. Fett; whose potations, if they did not sensibly lighten the ship, heightened, at least, her semblance of buoyancy with a deck-cargo of empty bottles. My father put no restraint upon these topers.

"Drink, gentlemen," said he; "drink by all means so long as it amuses you. I had far rather you exceeded than that I should appear inhospitable."

"Magnifshent old man," Mr. Fett hiccuped to me confidentially, "_an'_ magnifshent liquor. As the song shays--I beg your pardon, the shong says--able 'make a cat speak an' man dumb--

"Like 'n old courtier of the queen's An' the queen's old courtier--"

Chorus, Mr. Bawc.o.c.k, _if_ you please, an', by the way, won't mind my calling you Bawc.o.c.k, will you? Good Shakespearean word, bawc.o.c.k: euphonious, too--

"Accomplisht eke to flute it and to sing, Euphonious Bawc.o.c.k bids the welkin ring."

"If," said Mr. Badc.o.c.k, in an injured tone and with a dark glance aft at Captain Pomery, "if a man don't _like_ my playing, he has only to say so. I don't press it on any one. From all I ever heard, art is a matter of taste. But I don't understand a man's being suddenly upset by a tune that, only yesterday, he couldn't hear often enough."

Out of the little logic I had picked up at Oxford I tried to explain to him the process known as _sorites_; and suggested that Captain Pomery, while tolerant of "I attempt from Love's sickness to fly" up to the hundredth repet.i.tion, might conceivably show signs of tiring at the hundred-and-first. Yet in my heart I mistrusted my own argument, and my wonder at the skipper's conduct increased when, the next dawn finding us still becalmed, but with the added annoyance of a fog that almost hid the bowsprit's end, his demeanour swung back to joviality. I taxed him with this, in my father's hearing.

"I make less account of fogs than most men," he answered. "I can smell land; which is a gift and born with me. But this is no weather to be caught in anywhere near the Sallee coast; and if we're to lose the wind, let's have a good fog to hide us, I say."

He went on to a.s.sure us that the seas hereabouts were infested with Moorish pirates, and to draw some dismal pictures of what might happen if we fell in with a prowling Sallateen.