The Unspeakable Gentleman Part 2
"Who said anything about France?" he demanded.
"And did you not?" I asked, beginning to enjoy my visit. "Surely you were speaking just now about a chateau, the scene of some pleasant adventure.
Pray don't let me interrupt you."
A bead of perspiration rolled down Mr. Aiken's brow, and he tightened his handkerchief about his throat, as though to stifle further conversation.
He sat silent for a minute while his mind seemed to wander off into a maze of dim recollections, and his eyes half-closed, the better to see the pictures that drifted through his memory.
"What am I here ash.o.r.e and sober for," he asked finally, "so I won't talk, that's why, and I won't talk, so there's the end of it. It's just that I have to have my little joke, that's all, or I wouldn't have said anything about the chato or the Captain either.
"Though, if I do say it," he added in final justification, "there ain't many seafaring men who have a chance to sail along of a man like him."
"And how does that happen?" I asked.
"Because there ain't any more like him to sail with."
He sat watching me, and the gap between us seemed to widen. He seemed to be looking at me from some great distance, from the end of the road where years and experience had led him, full of thoughts he could never express, even if the desire impelled him.
"No, not any," said Mr. Aiken.
The dusk was beginning to gather when I rode home, the heavy purple dusk of autumn, full of the crisp smell of dead leaves and the low hanging wood smoke from the chimneys.
My father was reading Voltaire beside a briskly burning fire. Closing his book on his forefinger, he waved me to a chair beside him.
"My son," he said, "they mix better than you think, Voltaire and gunpowder. Have you not found it so?"
"I fear," I replied, "that my experience has been too limited. Give me time, sir, I have only been twice to sea. Next time I shall remember to take Voltaire with me."
"Do," he advised courteously; "you will find it will help with the privateers--tide you over every little unpleasantness. Ah yes, it is advice worth following. I learned it long ago--a little difference of opinion--and the pages of the great philosopher--"
He raised his arm and glanced at it critically.
"Words well placed--is it not wonderful, their steadying effect--the deadly accuracy which their logic seems to impart to the hand and eye? A man can be dangerous indeed with twenty pages of Voltaire behind him."
He took a pinch of snuff, and leaned forward to tap me gently on the knee, his expression coldly genial.
"I have read all the works of Voltaire, Henry, read them many times."
Unbidden, a picture of him came before me in a room with gilt chairs and candelabra whose gla.s.s pendants sparkled in the mild yellow light--with a smell of powder mingling strangely with the scent of flowers.
"But why," he concluded, "should I be more explicit than Mr. Aiken? To fear nothing, say nothing. It is a maxim followed by so many politicians.
Strange that it still stays valuable. Strange--"
And he waved his hand in a negligent gesture of deprecation.
"Why, indeed, be more explicit," I rejoined. "Your sudden interest is quite enough to leave me overcome, sir, when, after years of neglect, you see to it I ride out safely of an afternoon."
He tapped his snuff box thoughtfully.
"Coincidence again, Henry, that is all. How was I to know you would be outside Ned Aiken's house while I was within?"
"And how should I know that paternal care would prompt you to remain within while I was without?"
For a second it seemed to me that my father was going to laugh--for a fraction of a second something like astonishment seemed to take possession of him. Then Brutus appeared in the doorway.
"My son," he said, as I followed him to supper, "I must compliment you.
Positively you improve upon acquaintance."
III
I had remembered him as a man who disliked talk. I had often seen him sit for hours on end without a word, looking at nothing in particular, with his expressionless serenity. But on this particular evening the day's activities appeared to have made his social instincts vividly a.s.sertive, and to arouse him to unusual, and almost unnatural animation.
As we sat at a small round table beside the dining room fireplace, he launched into a cheerful discourse, ignoring completely any displeasure I attempted to a.s.sume. The great room with its dingy wainscot only half lighted by the candles on the table before us, was cluttered with a hundred odds and ends that collect in a deserted house--a ladder, a stiff, rusted bridle, a coil of frayed rope, a kettle, a dozen sheets of the Gazette, empty bottles, dusty crockery and broken chairs. He surveyed them all with a bland, uncritical glance. From his manner he might have been surrounded by brilliant company. From his conversation he might have been in a pot house.
I noticed at once what many had been at pains to mention to me before--that my father was not a temperate man. Nor did our cellar seem wholly bleak. He pressed wine upon me, and soon had finished a bottle himself, only to gesture Brutus to uncork a second. And all the while he regaled me with anecdotes of the gaming table and the vices of a dozen seaports. With hardly a pause he described a lurid succession of drinking bouts and gallant adventures. He finished a second bottle of wine, and was half way through a third. Yet all the while his voice never lost its pleasant modulation. Never a flush or an increase of animation came to change him. Politely detached, he discoursed of love and murder, gambling and chicanery, drawing on the seemingly exhaustless background of his own experience for ill.u.s.tration. He seemed to have known the worst men from all the ends of the earth, to have shared in their business and their pleasures. He seemed to have been in every discreditable undertaking that came beneath his notice. In retrospect they pleased him--all and every one.
What he saw when he glanced at me appeared to please him also. At any rate, it gave him the encouragement that one usually receives from an attentive listener.
"Brutus, again a bottle. It is at the fourth bottle," he explained, "that I am at my best. It is the fourth bottle, or perhaps the fifth, that seems to free me from the restraints that old habits and early education have wound about me. _In vino veritas_, my son, but the truth must be measured in quarts for each individual. Some men I know might be drowned in wine and still be hypocrites, so solidly are their heads placed upon their shoulders. But my demands are modest, my son, just as modest as I am a modest sinner."
He called to Brutus to toss more wood upon the fire, leaned back for a while, holding his gla.s.s to the light of the flames, and turned to me again with his cool, perfunctory smile.
"Strange, is it not, that men through all the ages have sought fools and charlatans to tell their fortunes, when a little wine is clearer than the most mystic ball of crystal. Before the bottle the priests of Egypt and the Delphic oracle seem as faint, my son, as the echoes in a snail sh.e.l.l.
Palmistry and astrology--let us fling them into the whirlpool of vanity!
But give a man wine enough, and any observer can tell his possibilities.
A touch of it--and where are the barriers with which he has surrounded himself? Another drop, and how futile are all the deceptions which he is wont to practice upon others! In St. Kitts once I drank wine with a most respectable merchant, a man who carried the Bible beside his snuff box, and referred to both almost as frequently as he did to the profit and balance on his ledger. And would you believe it? The next time he met me, he blamed me for the loss of many thousands of pounds. He even laid at my door certain reprehensible indiscretions of his wife, though I could have told him that night over the gla.s.ses that both were inevitable long before either occurred.
"But pray do not look at me so blankly, my son. It was not clairvoyance on my part--merely simple reasoning, aided by very excellent and very heady Madeira. How true it is that there is truth in wine--and money too, if the grape is used to the proper advantage.
"Again--some men talk of fortune at cards, good luck or bad, but as for me, I can tell how the luck will run by the number of bottles that are placed beside the table. A little judgment, and the crudest reasoning--that is all. But doubtless mutual friends have already hinted to you of my propensities at cards--and other things. Is it not so, my son?"
Was it the gentle inflection of the question, or his intent glance that made me feel, as I had felt before that day, that I was face to face with an alert antagonist? He called on me to speak, and I was loth to break my silence. If he had only left me to my own bitter thoughts,--but why should I have expected him to be tactful? Why should I have expected him to be different from the gossip that clouded his name?
"Your card playing is still remembered, sir," I told him. "I have heard of it two months back."
Deliberately he pushed one of the candles aside, so that the light should stand less between us, poured himself another gla.s.s of wine, and flicked the dust from the bottle off his sleeve.
"Indeed?" was his comment. "Your memory does you credit, even though youthful impressions are apt to lodge fast. Or shall I say it is only another proof of the veracity of my man of business? Two months ago, at a certain little gathering, someone, whose name I have yet to discover, informed you of certain bad habits I had contracted in games of chance. I remember being interested at the time that my reputation lasted so well in my absence. But I beg you--let me confirm the report still further. Am I mistaken in believing you made some apt retort?"
"Sir," I said in a voice that sounded strangely discordant, "I told him he lied."
"Ha!" said my father, and for a moment I thought he was going to commend my act, but instead his eyes moved to the table.
"Brutus," he continued, "is my mind becoming cloudy, or is it true the wine is running low? Open another bottle, Brutus."
There was a silence while he raised his gla.s.s to his lips.