sneeze: he refilled his glass.
‘… so there they still are at St Helen’s and I am still at the Nore, which is a very great shame. I protest, Toby, that it is quite disgusting …’
Toby was very sorry to hear that it was a disgusting shame; but he had ridden sixty-two miles that day, after a sleepless night of the greatest emotional agitation that he had ever known, and now, for the first time in his life, he had nearly a pint of strong punch glowing inside him. He was almost entirely taken up with watching the strange coming and going of Jack’s face the other side of the candle – sometimes it was large and distinct and sometimes it was small, blurred and remote – but by taking laborious care he could make out sentences of Jack’s discourse, now and then.
‘… and so, my dear Toby,’ said Jack’s voice through the thickening haze, ‘that is what I meant in the very first place, when I said “Come with me, and I will make your fortune.” If all goes well, and upon my word I don’t see how it can fail, we shall come back amazingly rich.’
Tobias allowed his eyes to close upon these encouraging words, and at once an exquisitely comfortable darkness engulfed him. He heard no more, except an unknown, distant voice saying, ‘I will take his feet. Why, bless my soul, Mr Byron, sir, your friend has got a pair of list slippers on.’
These slippers were the first things that met his eye in the morning. Somebody had put them on the window-seat, where they caught the first light of the sun in all their violent glory, and Jack was sitting by them, looking pink and cheerful.
‘Lard, Toby, how you do sleep,’ he said. ‘It’s nearly five o’clock.’
Slowly Tobias looked from the slippers to Jack, and from Jack to the slippers. He had been very deeply asleep, and it was some moments before he could remember where he was and how he came to be there. ‘I have run away: we are half-way to London,’ he observed to himself. ‘And I dreamt that Jack had put me into the way of making my fortune.’
‘I dreamt that you said that we should make our fortunes presently,’ he said to Jack, as they rode away from the ale-house.
Jack looked at him with a very knowing air, and said, ‘I don’t believe you remember much of what I told you last night.’
‘No, truly I do not,’ said Tobias. ‘It is much confused in my memory – not unlike a series of dreams.’
‘Well,’ said Jack, laughing with wonderful good humour for so early in the morning, ‘I shall tell you again. You know I am in the guard-ship at the Nore, although I was promised to be posted to the Burford: and the Burford was the flagship at Porto Bello?’
‘Yes, I remember you told me that before; and it was a great disappointment to you not to be at the battle.’
‘It was indeed: Admiral Vernon had promised it to my uncle, or at least practically promised it; and it was a horribly shabby thing to sail off in that manner, leaving his best friend’s nephew languishing between a guard-ship and a press-smack at the Nore. The Nore is a very disgusting station, Toby.’
‘I am much concerned to hear it, Jack.’
‘But, however, it is probably all for the best. It is perfectly obvious that the Admiralty owes me some reparation – no reasonable being could deny that for a moment – and this secret expedition gives them a perfect chance of making all square.’
‘What secret expedition?’
‘The one I was telling you about – but you did not take it in, I find. It is an expedition,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘that is fitting out for the South Sea, to attack the Spaniards there, where they least expect it. Lard, Toby,’ he cried, ‘think of Chile and Peru, and all the treasure there. Think of Acapulco and Panama and the Philippines. Pieces of eight,’ he cried, in a transport of greed and enthusiasm, throwing his arms out to indicate the immensity of the wealth. He was a fairly good horseman, but his fervour for prize money was too much for him, and he fell slowly over the chesnut’s shoulder.
‘Never mind,’ he said, as Tobias dusted him. ‘It was all in a good cause. The whole point is, that I must be posted to one of these ships. And if I had gone off to the West Indies in the Burford I could not have been here to join this expedition, could I? Everybody who has any interest is trying to get into it, of course, but it is plain enough that I have much more right than most, having been so very ill-used.’
‘Did you say it was a secret expedition?’
Oh yes. You must not speak of it, you know.’
‘Then how is it that people are trying to get into it?’
‘Well, it is secret in a certain sense; I mean, it is officially secret. That is to say, everybody in the know knows about it, but nobody else.’
A single magpie crossed the road, and Jack paused to see if another would follow: but the bird was alone. ‘I wish that damned bird had chosen another moment to go over,’ he said. ‘But as I was saying, I have a perfect right to the appointment; and what is much more important, I have got just about twice as much interest as I need to get aboard. So, do you see, I shall be able to get in with half, and use the rest to draw you in after me. Lard, Toby, I don’t know how a fellow with your simple tastes will spend all the money.’
‘How very kind you are, Jack: I am very much obliged to your goodness. As for a great deal of money, I don’t know that I want it; but when you consider, Jack, that not one single sentient being has even remotely glimpsed the birds of the Pacific Ocean and its shores -’
‘But, my poor Toby, people have been sailing round the Horn and into the South Sea these hundred years and more.’
‘Only mariners, Jack: and, with respect, your mariner is but a shallow creature. I have read Narborough and Dampier and the few other voyages into those regions, and the unhappy men might as well have been blind. They saw nothing, nothing.’
‘They saw noddies and boobies. I particularly remember that Woods Rogers said, “Boobies and noddies.”’
‘They saw birds that they called noddies and boobies; but do we know that they were noddies and boobies? May they not merely have resembled noddies and boobies? It is no good coming to me and saying, “Ha, ha, I have seen noddies and boobies in the Great South Sea,” unless you can support your statement with the measurements and weights, and preferably the skins, of your noddies and boobies.’
This seemed a frivolous objection to Jack, and he only replied, ‘Still, you would find it prodigiously agreeable to have a fortune, you know. You could lay it out in sending fellows off to Kamschatka, or Crim Tartary, to gaze at the boobies there, and measure ‘em, too.’
They wrangled about the disposition of the money for some miles, and then Jack said, ‘Well, you shall do whatever you please with it, Toby, if only you will sit the right way round.’
‘I beg pardon,’ said Tobias, loosening his grip on the grey cob’s tail and swarming back into the saddle: the cob was not the steadiest mount in the world, and a tenth part of this behaviour in anyone else would have sent it into a foaming fit; but it trotted placidly along the road to Bedford, and Jack resumed his account of the secret expedition.
‘There are to be five ships. The Gloucester and the Severn are both fifties, and the Centurion – she’s the flagship – is a sixty; then there is
