Butler had a tender and almost reverential love for Joshua Harkness, but he could not help using a little patronage toward him, since his health had grown delicate, and his fortunes had not distinctly prospered.
"I am glad you like it, Jack," said Harkness quietly.
"The Captain is a mass of compliments tonight," remarked Helen.
The Captain grinned his consciousness. "You are a minx," he said admiringly to Helen. Then he threw back his head and pulled at his cigar, uttering between puffs, " No, but I mean it, Harkness. There's something uncommonly fine about it. A man gets to be noblesse by sticking to any old order of things. It makes one think of the ancien régime somehow to look at you. Why, you're still of the oldest tradition of commerce, the stately and gorgeous traffic of the orient; you're what Samarkand, and Venice, and Genoa, and Lisbon, and London, and Salem have come to."
"They've come to very little in the end then," said Harkness as before.
"Oh, I don't know about that;" the Captain took the end of his cigar out and lit a fresh one from it before he laid it down upon the ash-holder; "I don't know about that. We don't consider material things merely. There has always been something romantic, something heroic about the old trade. To be sure, now that it's got down to telegraphing, it's only fit for New-Yorkers. They're quite welcome to it." This was not very logical taken as a whole, but we cannot always be talking reason. At the words romantic and heroic Helen had pricked her ears, if that phrase may be used concerning ears of such loveliness as hers, and she paused from her millinery. "Ah ha, young lady!" cried the Captain; "you're listening, are you? You didn't know there was any romance or heroism in business, did you?"
"What business?" asked Helen.
"Your father's business, young woman; my old business, the India trade."
"The India trade? Why, were you ever in the India trade, Captain Butler?"
"Was I ever in the India trade ?" demanded the Captain, taking his cigar out of his mouth in order to frown with more effect upon Helen. "Well, upon my word! Where did you think I got my title? I'm too old to have been in the war."
"I didn't know," said Helen.
"I got it in the India trade. I was captain and supercargo many an eleven months' voyage, just as your father was."
Helen was vastly amused at this. "Why, papa! were you ever captain of a ship?"
"For a time," said Mr. Harkness, smiling at the absurdity.
"Of course he was !" shouted the Captain.
"Then why isn't he captain, now?"
"Because there's a sort of captain that loses his handle when he comes ashore, and there's a sort that keeps it. I'm one sort and your father's the other. It's natural to call a person of my model and complexion by some kind of title, and it isn't natural to call such a man as your father so. Besides, I was captain longer than he was. I was in the India trade, young lady, and out of it before you were born."
"I was born a great while ago," observed Helen, warningly.
"I daresay you think so," said the Captain. "I thought I was, at your age. But you'll find, as you grow older, that you weren't born such a very great while ago after all. The time shortens up. Isn't that so, Harkness?"
"Yes," said Mr. Harkness. "Everything happened day before yesterday."
"Exactly," said the Captain. Helen thought how young she must be to have already got that letter of Robert's so many centuries ago. "Yes," the Captain pursued. "I had been in the India trade twenty-five years when I went out of it in 1857—or it went out of me." He nodded his great, close-clipped head in answer to her asking glance. "It went out of a good many people at that time. We had a grand smash. We had overdone it . We had warnings enough, but we couldn't realize that our world was coming to an end. It hadn't got so low as telegraphing, yet; but it was mere shop then even, compared with the picturesque traffic of our young days. Eh, Harkness?"
"Yes, it had lost all attraction but profit."
"Were you ever down at India Wharf, Helen? "demanded the Captain. "I don't blame you; neither were my girls. But were you?"
"Of course," said Helen, scorning to lift her eyes from her work. "The Nahant boat starts from it."
"The Nahant boat!" repeated the Captain in a great rage. "In my day there was no Nahant boat about India Wharf, I can tell you, nor any other steamboat; nor any dirty shanties ashore. The place was sacred to the shipping of the grandest commerce in the world. There they lay, those beautiful ships, clean as silver, every one of them, and manned by honest Yankee crews." The Captain got upon his feet for the greater convenience of his eloquence. "Not by ruffians from every quarter of the globe. There were gentlemen's sons before the mast, with their share in the venture, going out for the excitement of the thing; boys from Harvard, fellows of education and spirit; and the forecastle was filled with good Toms and Jims and Joes from the Cape; chaps whose aunts you knew; good stock through and through, sound to the core. The supercargo was often his own captain, and he was often a Harvard man—you know what they are!"
"Nicest fellows in the world," consented Helen.
The Captain blew a shaft of white smoke into the air, and then cut it through with a stroke of his cigar. "We had on a mixed cargo, and we might be going to trade at eastern ports on the way out. Nobody knew what market we should find in Calcutta. It was pure adventure, and a calculation of chances, and. it was a great school of character. It was a trade that made men as well as fortunes; it took thought and forethought. The owners planned their ventures like generals planning a campaign. They were not going to see us again for a year; they were not going to hear of us till we were signaled outside on our return. When we sailed it was an event, a ceremony, a solemnity; and we celebrated it with song from all the tarry throats on board. Yes, the men used to sing as we dropped down the bay."
"Oh, Captain Butler, it was fine!" cried Helen, dropping her hands on her work, and looking up at the Captain in his smoke-cloud, with rapture. "Papa, why didn't you ever let me come down to see your ships sail?"
"It was all changed before you were born, Helen," began her father.
"O yes, all changed," cried the Captain, taking the word away from him. "The ships had begun, long before that, to stop at East Boston, and we sold their cargoes by sample, instead of handling them in our warehouses, and getting to feel some sort of human interest in them. When it came to that, a mere shopman's speculation, I didn't much care for the New-Yorkers getting it." The Captain sat down and smoked in silence.
"How did the New-Yorkers get it?" asked Helen, with some indignant stir in her local pride.
"In the natural course of things," said her father. "Just as we got it from Salem. By being bigger and richer."
"Oh, it was all changed anyway," broke in the Captain. "We used to import nearly all the cotton goods used in this country,—fabrics that the natives wove on their little looms at home, and that had the sentiment you girls pretend to find in hand-made things,—but before we stopped we got to sending our own cottons to India. And then came the telegraph, and put the finishing-stroke to romance in the trade. Your father loads now according to the latest dispatches from Calcutta. He knows just what his cargo will be worth when it gets there, and he telegraphs his people what to send back." The Captain ended in a very minor key: "I'm glad I went out of it when I did. You'd have done well to go out too, Harkness."
