Читать книгу The Admiral - Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen - Страница 5

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MY Lord Eastry belonged to the grand old race of East Kent squires, who brought up their sons to fear nothing and hate the French, aye, and brought up their daughters to be the wives and mothers of men who should sail the salt seas till too stiff with age or wounds to climb to their quarter-decks. For how could their sons help going to sea when they saw the boatmen of Deal from their open beach defying the guns of the French and the might of the fiercest storms that blew?

My Lord Eastry began his bold life as younger son of a squire, who bore the old Kent name of Fleet. But of John Fleet, the eldest, there is only an empty memorial in Eastry Church, which records that “his body lies in the great South Seas in the hope of a joyful resurrection.” His ship, full of honour and glory and prize-money, was spoken two days east of Trinidad in the great storm of 1759; and mariners maintain that fighting Jack Fleet’s black frigate sails there still, whenever the cyclone is coming down, with canvas enough on her to overset a hundred-gun ship. And Dick had his call on the glorious 1st of June—had the van-ship and sailed into the French with the grand air of his family, as if he never could have his belly full of fighting—laid alongside half a dozen of them at one time and another, and had a chain-shot through his middle just as he sent the Vengeur to the bottom with her colours in the act of striking. Once he was hard pressed, though; and Harry, the Lord Eastry that, as he lay dying, drank Wellington’s health when the news was brought of Waterloo, saw it and, leaving the line flat in neglect of signals, bore up to him. Lord! what a family they were to fight! When the tall Ramillies ran in between the Brunswick and the Achille to receive her fire, it was like an explosion of devils from hell. The men, men of the Cinque Ports that all had a dead father or a dead brother to charge to the French, would have followed Jack, Dick, or Harry into Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace.

Well, Harry Fleet—the Lord Harry, as they called him in the Channel—came safe out of the great battle; and not so many months afterwards fell upon a great convoy guarded by ships that should have blown his squadron of frigates out of the water, drove their escort under the guns of Martinique, and carried the convoy, with the army on board them that should have taken our Indies, safe into Antigua, from which he brought home more prize-money than ever. He was just too late to close the eyes of his father, the tough old squire of Eastry who lived his fourscore-and-odd years like his fathers before him, the few of them that did not die with their shoes on and the flag overhead.

They made him the Lord Eastry and a Knight of the Bath, but he had had so much lead through his leg by that time, that he could never fight a ship again, so he came to the old home at Eastry to find his fourteen-year old daughter the most wonderful bit of woman’s flesh in all the halls of Kent. Captain Jack and Captain Dick were never married. What children they may have had fell not into any list of the landed gentry, and so it came that the long-descended lands of the Fleets, and Admiral my Lord Eastry’s prodigious coffers of prize-money must all come to Katherine Fleet, now the Lady Katherine.

Now, no man that ever breathed was less of a coxcomb than Admiral Harry, but as the name of his ancient family was to pass out of the earth with his death, he looked to it that the son-in-law who succeeded to his honours and his great estate should be of such rank and fame that it might be no regret even for the Fleets of Eastry to be lost in their greater honours: some Duke it might be, or at least an Earl, whose belted ancestors had fought for the White or Red Rose; and Katherine Fleet, aged now eighteen, might have had any such an one as came within the magic of her moods.

There are some women who are not completely graceful, and yet give the onlooker a great sense of satisfaction. There is a sort of wild freedom, a declaration of strength and health, an evidence of courage and high spirits, which bespeak an animal perfection too intense for the gentle ease of grace. Katherine was one of those mettlesome women who make men’s blood tingle, and whose own red blood never runs cold in the direst peril. I suppose she was tall. She would have looked it had she been more than common short. She was such a noble creature, and she had the same blue eyes that were worth a dozen pikes to the Lord Eastry, when, in his old frigate days, he had jumped aboard a Frenchman and a wave had checked half his boarding party—gay blue eyes withal, that could laugh like her dimples and white teeth—gay blue eyes that could be as loving or reckless as the mobile mouth. And she had the pure curves of cheek and eyebrow which are almost necessary to beauty absolute like hers.

What follows, I, Thomas Trinder, Captain retired on half-pay in His Majesty’s Navy, and now of Beach Cottage, Walmer, who am writing this chronicle, had from Will the night before I led his sister to Ripple Church.

One March night of 1798 was Katherine’s coming-out ball. And her father’s hopes looked like fulfilment, for the greatest of Kentish peers, the young Marquis of Dover, had been spending week after week at his mansion of Pegwell, where never within the memory of the countryside, which noted all his doings, had he spent two days on end. And Katherine in a ball-room was a witch. She danced as such women do, light-footed and tireless, radiating health and high spirits, and with the unconscious smile of conquest on their lips, until the victor comes who makes them replace it with the most exquisite gentleness.

People looked to see that in Lady Katherine, before the night was dead, for Ralph, Marquis of Dover, Earl of River, Viscount Ripple, and Baron Waldershare, all in the Peerage of England, and Lord Lieutenant of the County of Kent. For he was a fine man, who rode straight to hounds, and had already climbed high in the Government, and Katherine had shown herself well inclined to him.

The great minuet was to be at midnight, and Katherine was promised to Lord Dover for it. In his fine scarlet uniform of Lord Lieutenant, he was already waiting for her in the door of the great barn with transepts like a church, which had been turned into a ball-room, decked with the trophies of Lord Eastry’s wars.

For in another two or three minutes the first stroke would clang from the tower of Eastry’s little Norman church. Katherine had been up to her room,—she had girlish vanity enough to wish to look her best in the great minuet,—and now she was stepping down the stairway with an eloquent hesitancy, her left hand clearing from her lovely feet the heavy shimmery satin, which, young as she was, it seemed natural for such an imperial woman to wear. Dividing the line between her beautiful throat and her shoulders, were the famous pearls that were the trophy of Lord Eastry’s wildest exploit.

Who could doubt but that when she went out from that minuet, it would be to have the greatest name in all the kingdom of Kent offered for her keeping?

But suddenly, through the open, ivy-shrouded Elizabethan pane at the turn of the stair, came a low voice,—a young voice, with the low distinctness which I shall never forget,—“Kitty Fleet, Kitty Fleet, is it you, Kitty Fleet?”

A light came over the girl’s face, which, I am prepared to swear, the great Marquess of Dover had never seen, as she replied,

“Hush, Will! keep in the shadow, and I’ll come—but only for a minute.”

But, instead of doing as she bade him, he came right into the door,—into the full blaze of light. He was then a fair boy of eighteen, and I can tell you that his charming figure was shown off to great advantage by the quaint dress of our day,—the tight-fitting Nankeen hose and short dark blue jacket. And when he bared his head he showed fair hair, as glossy and golden as Katherine’s own, in a very long queue. I can picture him fidgeting with his sugar-loaf beaver, for he had something great on his mind.

“Oh, Will,” she whispered, “we shall be discovered.”

“No matter.”

“But why?” began Kitty; and suddenly prepared to fly, as the first stroke of twelve rang out painfully clear to her anxious ear.

“I’m going with the Admiral, Kitty, and you know what that means.”

“Yes,—that is, what does it mean?”

“It means,—well, it’s Admiral Nelson: and it means that I shall never come back at all, or come back a man.”

“When do you start, Will?” asked Katherine, forgetting all about the minuet and her marquess, and coming forward to take his hands and look into his face. At eighteen it was a beautiful face, but even then so proud that its natural frankness was almost obscured. And yet you forgave its haughtiness, for you felt that such pride would not stoop to anything cowardly or mean, anything that would prevent its keeping itself aloof and aloft. As she took his hands in hers I know how the stern, clean-cut mouth melted into one of the irresistible smiles that such mouths mostly have once in a way.

“Oh, Will!” she said, “I was wondering why did you not come to my coming-out ball—you, Will, my best friend.”

“To see my Lord Dover’s triumph when he had won you, Kitty?” he asked almost bitterly: “I could not bear it. No, I should not have come at all if I had not been going by the morning coach with my mother to Portsmouth.”

“Why, Will, what is Lord Dover to me?” she asked.

“He means to marry you.”

“I don’t mean to marry him.”

“But what will your father say?”

“My father will say nothing. I have no need to marry the first lover with a title who presents himself. I am a lord’s daughter, passing rich—and passably good-looking, Will?”

“Be serious, Kitty.”

“Indeed I must, and say good-bye, Will,” she cried, as the strokes had ceased ringing out from Eastry Tower some two or three minutes, “for the minuet was for twelve o’clock, and I am engaged to Lord Dover—for that only. Good-bye, dear Will.”

With a sudden impulse she sprang forward, and laying her hands on his shoulders kissed him.

Hardly had she finished, when—

“What’s this, what’s this?” cried a bluff voice, with an accompanying thud of a lame man’s stick on the polished oak floor—“Will Hardres off to fight the French! Nay, lad, not so sudden! the coach does not start till six, and Cissy’s at school, and your mother going with you. This way, this way!”

He led Will into the ball-room and up to the Marquess.

“I have a favour to ask you, my Lord Dover. I wish Will Hardres here,” the nobleman bowed, “to lead the minuet with my daughter. We Fleets think it the greatest honour in the world to fight the French in a King’s ship; and Will is to have the special honour of sailing with Admiral Nelson—a greater man, to my mind, than St. Vincent, or Hood, or Howe.”

“As you please,” said the Marquess, in such a chilling way that Will, as he said, could have killed him, and I know the kind of light which came into Katherine’s eyes.

“I cannot take my Lord Marquess’s place,” said Will.

“Then, by G—d, you shall take my daughter herself, if she’ll have you,” said Lord Eastry, more thoroughly roused and vexed with himself for the slight he had put upon the Marquess.

“By G—d, he shall, if he’ll have me,” said Katherine, also roused, and using her father’s not very elegant language.

Poor Will, the very pattern of good manners, which were well nigh all that his widowed mother had to bestow upon him, was dumfounded. In a moment of pique Katherine and her father had bestowed her hand upon him—that which he coveted more than anything else in the world, and dared not covet; and the bestowal had been made in a manner and language so extraordinary that he was at a loss how to effect the acceptance.

For the moment the Marquess came to the rescue.

“I think I am to have the honour—for the minuet.”

It was not natural to Katherine not to be gracious; and she had months of remembered kindnesses to this man’s credit. Indeed she had come within an ace of thinking of him as her husband. So she accepted the situation with womanly tact, she afterwards maintaining that she spoke as little as she might.

She danced the minuet with grave sweetness and gentleness, which, in a mischievous girl like Katherine, who was little more than a child, was, in itself, an ominous sign for the Marquess.

She also cast from time to time a tender glance, a speaking smile, to Will.

“It seems to me,” said his lordship, bitterly—he could not be chilling to Katherine, who had his heart—“that you are stepping with me, and dancing with that boy.”

“I am but lately affianced to him, my lord,” retorted Katherine, this time with mischief in her eyes.

“You don’t mean to say that you’re taking this tomfoolery seriously, Lady Katherine—Kitty?”

“It is no tomfoolery to me, my lord,” she said, with a flash of rising anger that warned him. “I had kissed him my love, before you nettled my father into giving me the leave he might never have given otherwise.”

By this time the minuet was over, and Katherine had suffered herself to be led into one of the aisles of the barn which had been rigged into a ball-room.

“Oh, Kitty,” cried the Marquess, with a change of tone, which made her woman’s heart gentle to him, “I won’t call it that name again, because it makes you angry; but tell me that you did not mean it seriously, for you know I have loved you three months past, and been waiting for the opportunity you have always fenced off with some jest or piece of mischief.”

“And could you not guess why, my lord?”

“Why?” he echoed, sadly.

“Because I knew I did not love you honestly, and, warmly as I liked you, I was waiting to see if I could love you. You may rely on it, that when I felt myself conquered, I should have thrown down my weapons and surrendered at discretion.”

“And can you not love me yet?”

“Never now, my lord, more than a friend.”

“Why so suddenly?”

“Why? Because events have been like runaway horses to-night. They have taken the bits between their teeth and dashed us over a precipice.”

“Against your will?”

“Nay, not against my will; but it was a leap I might never have dared to take.”

“And you mean to marry him, Kitty?”

“Yes, my lord; when he is a man.”

“And when will that be?”

“I know not; but manhood comes quickly in these piping times, and lives are short,” she added, with a little break in her voice.

“And he goes to sea to-morrow?”

“It is to-day,” she answered, with a bigger break.

“Then I am an ill friend to be keeping you from him,” he said, his better nature asserting itself at the sight of the sorrow of the woman he loved so well. “Good-bye, Kitty,” he said gravely, bowing to kiss her hand.

“Good-bye, my lord. You are not angry with me?”

“No; not with you. Not angry, but hurt, and heart-sick. You will be my friend still, little Lady Kitty?”

“I am five feet six, Lord Dover. Is that tall enough to be the friend of a Marquess and the Lord Lieutenant of Kent?”

“It is tall enough for my heart, Kitty.”

“You must not talk of your heart any more, or I shall not let you come and see me.”

“But I may come and see you still, and walk and ride with you still. How often may I come and see you?”

“As often as you can bring me news of the fleet—Admiral Nelson’s fleet.”

This account of the leave-taking from Lord Dover I had from Katherine, the day I had the honour of becoming her brother-in-law, through Will’s sister Cecilia. But what took place at her leave-taking from her boy-lover I never had, for that is sacred to the girl and boy, who have the honour of being lovers still.