Читать книгу The Admiral - Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen - Страница 6

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I WAS sitting with Will in the morning-room of his mansion of Eastry, which he had with Katherine, when one of his footmen came in to announce that a lady wished to speak to him very particularly. She refused to give her name, but she came on a matter of great importance connected with Lord Nelson, whose confidence Captain Hardres had enjoyed. It was, she told the footman, a very intimate personal matter in connection with his late Lordship.

Now, Will was not ordinarily what is called an approachable person; but she had hit upon the password to which he never could turn a deaf ear, and he directed that she should be shown in.

No sooner had she entered the door, carrying a bundle, which, to the footman’s evident distress, she had refused to trust out of her own hands, than, seeing me, she stopped. But Will said, in cold tones that would have frightened any one not sure of her mission, “This gentleman also had the honour of serving under the Admiral.” To all who had served under that immortal man he was always “the Admiral.”

She looked at us both, and I am vain enough to think that she felt my presence would make what she had come to say easier, rather than more difficult, though Will’s face had softened when he saw that she was a gentlewoman of reduced circumstances.

The bundle she had brought with her, tied up in a piece of faded green silk, contained something hard and square. When she unknotted it and produced three leather-bound volumes of the kind used for journals, and opened one at random, Will might have seen a ghost.

This was in the year 1819, you must remember,—long years after the Admiral had seen his work finished, and had passed away like Moses in sight of the fulfilled promise. And Will, who had been in constant personal attendance nearer and more confidential than a secretary, saw before him, as plainly as his eyes could show him, three volumes of the identical kind always employed by the Admiral for his private affairs, and written, as it seemed to Will, by the Admiral’s very own hand. And Will, though he was not wise in book-learning, nor had given much attention to such matters, had had the very best opportunities for observing the Admiral’s writing. He knew every turn in the clear but shaky characters, written with the left hand by one accustomed till he was more than thirty-five years old to penning with his right. The binding, the paper, and the ink, as well as the handwriting, were the counterparts of what Will had seen so often before the Admiral on his desk.

The old lady did not offer a word of explanation until we had examined them for some minutes, and, looking up, had laid them down, and then she told us a likely story enough.

It came out that she was Mrs. Hunter, and the good soul who had taken my Lady Hamilton, then like to die, and in great destitution, into her house at Boulogne, and had sheltered her and maintained and nursed her free of charge until her death.

“These three volumes,” she said, “were her Ladyship’s last and greatest treasure, which she never would have far away from her, and which, when she was alone, she read to her great comfort.”

When Lady Hamilton, some hours before her death, felt that the end was surely coming, not having (after all the fortune which had poured through her hands) the wherewithal to pay a lawyer’s fee for drawing up a will, she had given her these books, bidding her to sell them, and take what they brought to recompense her for her kindness and the expense to which she had been put. They were, her Ladyship said, journals of the years 1798, 1799 and 1800; the happiest years of her life, which she had spent in his Lordship’s friendship on the shores of their beloved Mediterranean, and presented by him to her as a memorial of them. Had the ungrateful nation not neglected his last charge that it should maintain her, she would have bequeathed these volumes to it; but seeing that Mrs. Hunter had proved herself her best friend since Lord Nelson’s glorious death, it was right that she should have them to sell and recompense herself.

Accordingly, having been given by My Lady Captain Hardres’s name, among others of his Lordship’s dearest friends,—Will bowed gravely,—and the sailing packet which had brought her from Boulogne having landed her at Dover, she had come to him first, as being the nearest of the gentlemen mentioned (Eastry is but a few miles from Dover); and then she came direct to the point—would Will purchase these journals of the Admiral?

She named a very great price; but then Will, living in such a mansion-house as Eastry, in the style that he affected, was clearly a man of great means.

As I expected, he would not promise her at once, and inquired where she would sleep for the night; and, I think, he was about to require her to leave them with him until the morning, which I am sure to the simple soul would have seemed like leaving her purse in a strange house, when Katherine came in, looking like her own daughter, with the added gentleness of years of happy wifehood, though she was a mettlesome creature, and not to be frightened by Will or the devil.

Will put his arm round her youthful waist, and led her into the oriel to repeat everything, she glancing from time to time at Mrs. Hunter. When he had finished they came back again, and Will began, with some hesitation, “Mrs. ——,” when Katherine, reading what was in his eyes, said, “You are never going to let her who performed the last offices for the woman the Admiral loved with all the wealth of his great heart—you are never going to let the lady sleep in a poor village inn, when there are two of the Admiral’s officers in this very house?”

To which Will replied gallantly, “You are the mistress of this house, Kitty, and such an invitation should come from a lady.”

I think he was glad of the proposal, for it gave him the opportunity of judging the woman that would sell the books, as well as the books she would sell. Though no talker, Will was, as silent men are apt to be, an observer of character, and I could tell that he was not wholly satisfied.

And so it was settled that a groom or a gardener should bring her box from the inn, and she dined and slept and breakfasted the following morning at Eastry Place. Will had her on his right hand at meals, and talked with her while we were in the ladies’ company after dinner; though I own we joined them late, for we had the journals at the table while we sat over Madeira wine that had laid in the Goodwin Sands for many a year in a wreck that was bared by their shifting—as fine a wine as ever came into East Kent, duty or no duty.

Katherine, of course, saw much more of her than we, and had the more opportunity of judging her. Katherine was no mean judge, though ever inclined to condone those whom her judgment condemned. To Katherine’s eye, as well as our own, the creature had certain faults. As she felt the more at home her garrulity and vanity ran away with her, till she almost claimed her share of credit for the Admiral’s victories by some retrospective process of merit. In fact, like other garrulous persons, she was inclined to fire without loading. But there did not seem any reason to doubt that she was the Mrs. Hunter who had befriended Lady Hamilton, which was, after all, the chief query.

Well, Will and I turned those journals over and over, at first while we were sitting over our Madeira, and afterwards far into the night over our pipes and grog; and, try where we would, we could find nothing that seemed in the penmanship of another hand, or that the Admiral, knowing him as we did, might not have put down in a journal; for he was ever fond of his pen, and in the wont of writing down what he felt strongly, and more especially is it true that when he was out of health, which was so often the case, he would examine himself and discuss from every point what he had done or should do.

In a matter like that of his affection for my Lady Hamilton, it was of course impossible for him, by reason of his position in the Service, as well as of his greatness, to talk with any on the ship; and what he could not say in words it was quite in keeping with his habits for him to commit carefully to paper, it may be, all along with the idea of presenting them for My Lady’s reading as another proof of his sincere esteem, but more likely at first, at any rate, to ease his soul. And therefore, when the morning came and we had risen from breakfast, after a short absence with Katherine, Will came to Mrs. Hunter, whom he had left with me in the gentle sunshine on the terrace, and said that he should give her the price she asked. Which he did, by order on Mr. Laurie’s bank at Dover.

I think we were all glad to be rid of Mrs. Hunter, even Katherine, who made excuses for her as being old, and a woman, though I know of few men worthy to be compared with such a woman as Katherine. It was Katherine who decided him, for she had read her Roman history and knew the story about the Sybil bringing nine precious books to the Roman King, and, when he would not have them at her price, destroying three of them, and offering him the six for the same price, and when he would not have the six, destroying three more, until he gave her for the last three the money for which he might have had the whole nine.

She did not, she confessed, expect Mrs. Hunter to burn her books; but, remembering the regret of the King when he found the value of the three remaining books which he had bought, thought that Will might feel just such a regret if he lost for ever the opportunity of buying what seemed to be the journals of the Admiral, to whom England and he owed everything. The story of the Sybilline books was new to Will, and impressed him mightily. I daresay it did not lose anything in the telling. Katherine was, after all, a woman, and she had read it in her childhood.

This was, as I have said, in the year 1819, four years after the death of her Ladyship. If Mrs. Hunter had brought them to us at once, upon the death of her Ladyship, while the country was ringing with the announcement of it, ten days after she died, in the Morning Post, and with the talk of the Admiral’s brother, the Earl, going over to Calais to see what papers she might have left behind her, I think Will might have done something about them there and then. The Earl’s visit in search of papers would be taken by some as sufficient evidence that he knew of the existence of these journals, though I would not dare to say so much.

But, as it was, he bought them rather for our private reading, to recall our adored Admiral; and it was not until he had had them in his possession for years, that the thought came to him of giving them to the public to counteract the false and erroneous statements and judgments, which seemed to be for ever on the increase.

Now Will, living inland at Eastry, with the affairs of a great estate to administer, had little leisure or inclination for writing, even if he had had the power, but he was a man of action only, one of the kind that make history and leave it for smaller men, like myself, to chronicle it; while I, living at Walmer, on the sea-shore, in the midst of many retired naval men, and much discussion of naval affairs, had fallen into a pernicious habit of writing letters to the Post, giving an old salt’s plain condemnations of this and the other shortcomings, and writing over the signature of ‘Cinque Ports’ indignant refutations of anything that was said against the memory of the Admiral. So Will had come to look upon me for as great a writer as the mysterious Scotchman, who wrote, the year before we had the journals, “The Heart of Midlothian” and “The Bride of Lammermoor,” and who, if you could believe the reviewers, was the only writer in the three kingdoms worthy of any consideration for any writing but poetry. Having married Will’s sister, and having nothing to do but to make the best living I could on my stored-up prize money and my half-pay, I often took her to Eastry. It was on one of these visits, while we were keeping the fire warm before we went to bed, that Will took the pipe from between his lips, and said to me,—

“Thomas, I have been thinking.”

Unless his mind lay fallow, he must have thought a good deal in his long, frequent silences. However, Will was not a man to jest with, so I made no comment of this kind, but waited to hear, understanding that he had a decision to communicate to me.

“Thomas, I have been thinking that we are getting on in years.”

This seemed indisputable, but I did not know that I wished to be reminded of it. I again waited, until he came to the point that we, from our close personal attendance on him, knew much about the Admiral which perhaps ought not to be lost to the world, and that he thought that I should write it down, and give with it such portions of the Admiral’s journals as seemed necessary for letting the public know how sincerely that immortal man always endeavoured to do the right.