Page:Cerise, a tale of the last century (IA cerisetaleoflast00whytrich).pdf/213

 what not, maybe, to the Lord-Lieutenant himself. Why, that very mug as you see there was given me by poor Captain Delaval; quite the gentleman he was! An' he made no secret where he took it from, nor how they cut the Portuguese chap's throat as was drinking from it in the after-cabin. And now, it's as likely as not the Whigs would hang a man in chains for such a thing. I tell you, Captain, the hands don't fancy it. They can't cruise a mile along-shore without running foul of a gibbet with a pi—I mean, with a skeleton on it, rattling and grinning as if he was alive. It makes a difference, Captain—it makes a difference!"

"Take it or leave it," replied the other, looking like a man who had made his highest bid, which no consideration would induce him to increase by a shilling.

Bob evidently thought so. "A bargain be it," said he, with a villainous smile on his shining face, and muttering something about his wish to oblige a customer and the high respect he entertained for his guest's character, in all its relations, public, private, and nautical, he shambled out of the room, leaving the latter to tackle once more with his accounts.

A shade of melancholy crossed the Captain's brow, deeper and darker than was to be attributed to the unwelcome nature of his employment or the sombre surroundings of his position. The light of two tallow-candles, by which he worked was not indeed enlivening, bringing into indistinct relief the unsightly furniture and the gloomy pictures on the walls. The yard-dog, too, behind the house, had not entirely discontinued his lamentations, and the dip and wash of a retiring tide upon the shingle no farther off than the end of the street was like the voice from some unearthly mourner in its solemn and continuous wail. It told of lonely nights far out on the wild dark sea; of long shifting miles of surf thundering in pitiless succession on the ocean shore; of mighty cliffs and slabs of dripping rock, flinging back their defiance to the gale in the spray of countless hungry, leaping waves, that toss and madden round their prey ere she breaks up and goes to pieces in the storm. More than all, it told of desolation, and doubt, and danger, and death, and the uncertainty beyond.