The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous (Vol. 1-3). George Augustus Sala
and saw him helped, tottering, into his chair, a company of the Foot-guards surrounding it; for he was much misliked by the mobile at that time, and few cried, God bless him! Indeed, as the company moved away, I heard a ragged fellow (who should have been laid by the heels for it) cry, "There goes Starvation Jack, that fed his soldiers on boiled bricks and baked mortar."
"He is a Whig now," said my Grandmother to me, when I rejoined her; "but he was of the bravest among men, and in the old days loved the true King dearly."
When this man was young and poor, the mobile used to call him "Handsome Jack." When he was rich and old and famous, he was "Starvation Jack" to them. And of such are the caprices of a vain, precipitate age. But I am glad I saw him, Whig and pinchpenny as he was. I am proud of having seen this Great Captain and Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. The King of Prussia, the Duke of Cumberland, my Lord George Sackville, Marshal Biron, Duke Richelieu, and many of the chiefest among the Turkish bashaws, have I known and conversed with; but I still feel that Man's trembling hand on my head; my blood is still fired, as at the sound of a trumpet, by the remembrance of his voice; I still rejoice at my fortune in having set eyes, if only for a moment, on John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough.
It was on the Twenty-ninth of January (o.s.) that our servants, who had declared to having heard the death-watch ticking for days, asserted that those ominous sounds grew faster and faster, resolving themselves at length into those five distinct taps, with a break between, which are foolishly held by the vulgar to spell out the word death. And although the noise came probably from some harmless insect, or from a rat nibbling at the wainscot, that sound never meets my ear—and I have heard it on board ship many a time, and in gaol, and in my tent in the desert—without a lump of ice sliding down my back. As for Ghosts, John Dangerous has seen too many of them to be frightened.[G]
That night I slept none. It was always my lot in that huge house to be put, little fellow as I was, in the hugest of places. My bed was as spacious as a Turkish divan. Its yellow silken quilt, lined with eiderdown, and embroidered with crimson flowers, was like a great waving field of ripe corn with poppies in it. When I lay down, great weltering waves of Bed came and rolled over me; and my bolster alone was as big as the cook's hammock at sea, who has always double bedding, being swollen with other men's rations. This bed had posts tall and thick enough to have been Gerard the Giant's lancing-pole, that used to stand in the midst of the bakehouse in Basing Lane; and its curtains of yellow taffety hung in folds so thick that I always used to think birds nestled among them. That night I dreamt that the bed was changed into our great red pew at St. George's, only that it was hung with dark velvet instead of scarlet baize, and that the clergyman in the pulpit overhead, with a voice angrier than ever, was reading that service for the martyrdom of K. C. 1st, which I had heard so often. And then methought my dream changed, and two Great Giants with heading-axes came striding over the bed, so that I could feel their heavy feet on my breast; but their heads were lost in the black sky of the bed's canopy. Horror! they stooped down, and lo, they were headless, and from their sheared shoulders and their great hatchets dripped, dripped, for ever dripped, great gouts of something hot that came into my mouth and tasted salt! And I woke up with my hair all in a dabble with the nightdews, with my Grandmother's voice ringing in my ears, "Remember the Thirtieth of January!" Mercy on me! I had that dream again last night; and the Giants with their axes came striding over these old bones—then they changed to a headless Spaniard and a bleeding Nun; but the voice that cried, "Remember!" spake not in the English tongue, and was not my Grandmother's. And the hair of my flesh stood up, as Job's did.
In the morning, when the clouds of night broke up from the pale winter's sky, and went trooping away like so many funeral coach-horses to their stable, they told me that my Grandmother was Dead; that she had passed away when the first cock crew, softly sighing "Remember." It was a dreadful thing for me that I could not, for many hours, weep; and that for this lack of tears I was reproached for a hardened ingrate by those who were now to be my most cruel governors. But I could not cry. The grief within me baked my tears, and I could only stare all round at the great desert of woe and solitude that seemed to have suddenly grown up around me. That morning, for the first time, I was left to dress myself; and when I crept down to the parlour, I found no breakfast laid out for me—no silver tankard of new milk with a clove in it, no manchet of sweet diet bread, no egg on a trencher in a little heap of salt. I asked for my breakfast, and was told, for a young cub, that I might get it in the kitchen. It would have gone hard with me if, in my Grandmother's time, I had entered that place to her knowledge; but all things were changed to me now, and when I entered the kitchen, the cook, nay, the very scullion-wench, never moved for me. John Footman sat on the dresser drinking a mug of purl that one of the maids had made for him. The cook leered at me, while another saucy slut handed me a great lump of dry bread, and a black-jack with some dregs of the smallest beer at the bottom. What had I done to merit such uncivil treatment?
By and by comes Mr. Cadwallader with a sour face, and orders me to my chamber, and get a chapter out of Deuteronomy by heart by dinner-time, "Or you keep double fast for Martyrdom-day, my young master," he says, looking most evilly at me.
"Young master, indeed," Mrs. Nancy repeated; "young master and be saved to us. A parish brat rather. No man's child but his that to hit you must throw a stone over Bridewell Wall. Up to your chamber, little varlet, and learn thy chapter. There are to be no more counting of beads or mumblings over hallowed beans in this house. Up with you; times are changed."
Why should this woman have been my foe? She had been a cockering, fawning nurse to me not so many months ago. Months!—yesterday. Why should the steward, who was used to flatter and caress me, now frown and threaten like some harsh taskmaster of a Clink, where wantons are sent to be whipped and beat hemp. I slunk away scared and cowed, and tried to learn a chapter out of Deuteronomy; but the letters all danced up and down before my eyes, and the one word "Remember," in great scarlet characters, seemed stamped on every page.
It should have been told that between my seventh and my eighth year I had been sent, not only to church, but to school; but my grandmother deeming me too tender for the besom discipline of a schoolmaster—from which even the Quality were not at that time spared—I was put under the government of a discreet matron, who taught not only reading and writing, but also brocaded waistcoats for gentlemen, and was great caudle-maker at christenings. It was the merriest and gentlest school in the town. We were some twenty little boys and girls together, and all we did was to eat sweetmeats, and listen to our dame while she told us stories about Cock Robin, Jack the Giant-Killer, and the Golden Gardener. Now and then, to be sure, some roguish boy would put pepper in her snuff-box, or some saucy girl hide her spectacles; but she never laid hands on us, and called us her lambs, her sweethearts, and the like endearing expressions. She was the widow of an Irish colonel who suffered in the year '96, for his share in Sir John Fenwick's conspiracy; and I think she had been at one time a tiring-woman to my Grandmother, whom she held in the utmost awe and reverence. I often pass Mrs. Triplet's old school-house in what is now called Major Foubert's Passage, and recall the merry old days when I went to a schoolmistress who could teach her scholars nothing but to love her dearly. It was to my Grandmother, a kind but strict woman, to whom I owed what scant reading and writing ken I had at eight years of age.
Rudely and disdainfully treated as I now was, my governors thought it fit, for the world's sake, that I should be put into decent mourning; for my grandmother's death could not be kept from the Quality, and there was to be a grand funeral. She lay in State in her great bedchamber; tapers in silver sconces all around her, an Achievement of arms in a lozenge at her head, the walls all hung with fine black cloth edged with orris, and pieced with her escocheon, properly blazoned; and she herself, white and sharp as waxwork in her face and hands, arrayed in her black dress, with crimson ribbons and crimson scarf, and a locket of gold on her breast. They would not bury her with her rubies, but these, too, were laid upon her bier, which was of black velvet, and with a fair Holland sheet over all.
Not alone the chamber itself, but the anterooms and staircase were hung from cornice to skirting with black. The undertaker's men were ever in the house: they ate and drank whole mountains of beef and bread, whole seas of ale and punch (thus to qualify their voracity) in the servants' hall. They say my Grandmother's funeral cost a thousand pounds, which Cadwallader and Mrs. Talmash would really have grudged, but that it was the will of the