By Conduct and Courage: A Story of the Days of Nelson

“That is exactly what I tell myself, Will. Still, you know, a dog with two bones in his mouth will growl if he loses one of them. Nevertheless £40,000 is not to be despised by any means, and I shall have plenty to give my little Alice a good portion when she marries.”

“That will be comfortable for her, sir, but I should say that the man would be lucky if he got her without a shilling.”

“Well, well, we’ll see, we’ll see. I have no desire to part with her yet.”

“That I can well understand, sir.”

“Ah, here she is!”

A rosy colour spread over the girl’s face when she saw who her father’s visitor was.

“I expected you in a day or two,” she said, “but not so soon as this. When we saw your name in the Gazette we made sure that it would not be long before you paid us a visit. I am glad to see that your wound has not pulled you down much.”

“No indeed. I am all right; but it was certain that I should come here first of all.”

“And what are your plans now?” Mr. Palethorpe asked.

“I am going to set to work at once to discover my family. I have not been to my lawyer yet, so I don’t know how much he has done, but I certainly mean to go into the business in earnest.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter to you much now, Will, whether your family are dukes or beggars. You can stand on your own feet as a captain in the royal navy with a magnificent record of services.”

“Yes, I see that, sir; but still I certainly do wish to be able to prove that I come of at least a respectable family. I have not the least desire to obtain any rank or anything of that kind, only to know that I have people of my own.”

“I do not say that it is not a laudable ambition, but I don’t believe that anyone would think one scrap better or worse of you were you to find that you were heir to a dukedom.”

Will slept there that night, and the next morning drove into the city to his lawyer’s office. “Well, Captain Gilmore?”said that gentleman as Will entered his private room. “I am glad to see you. I have been quietly at work making enquiries since you were last here. I sent a man down to Scarcombe some months ago. He learned as much as he could there, and since then has been going from village to village and has traced your father’s journeyings for some months. Now that you are home I should suggest employing two or three men to continue the search and to find out if possible the point from which your father started his wanderings. Assuming, as I do, that he was the son of Sir Ralph Gilmore, I imagine that he must have quarrelled with his father at or about the time of his marriage. In that case he would probably come up to London. I have observed that most men who quarrel with their parents take that step first. There, perhaps, he endeavoured to obtain employment. The struggle would probably last two, or three, or four years. I take the last to be the most likely period, for by that time you would be about three years old. I say that because he could hardly have taken you with him had you been younger.

“It is evident that he had either no hope of being reconciled to his father or that he was himself too angry to make advances. I therefore propose to send men north from London to enquire upon all the principal roads. A man with a violin and a little child cannot have been altogether forgotten in the villages in which he stopped, and I hope to be able to trace his way up to Yorkshire. Again, I should employ one of the Bow Street runners to make enquiries in London for a man with his wife and child who lived here so many years ago, and whose name was Gilmore. I am supposing, you see, that that was his real name, and not one that he had assumed. I confess I have my doubts about it. A man who quits his home for ever after a desperate quarrel is as likely as not to change his name. That of course we must risk. While these enquiries are being made I should like you to go back to your old home; it is possible that other mementoes of his stay there may have escaped the memory of the old people with whom you lived. Anything of that kind would be of inestimable value.”

“I will go down,” Will said. “I am afraid there is little chance of my finding them both alive now. I fancy they were about fifty-five when I went to live with them, which would make them near eighty now. One or other of them, however, may be alive. I have not been to my agent yet, and therefore do not know whether he still sends them the allowance I made them.”

After leaving the lawyer he went to his agent and found that the allowance was still paid, and regularly acknowledged by a receipt from the clergyman. He supposed, therefore, that certainly one, if not both, of the old people were still alive. He went back to Dulwich and said that he had taken a seat on the north coach for that day week. “I could not bring myself to leave before,” he said, “and I knew you would keep me.”

“Certainly, my boy. I don’t think either Alice or myself would forgive you were you to run away the moment you returned.”

When the time came Will started for the north, though he felt much reluctance to leave Alice. He acknowledged now to himself that he was deeply in love with her. Though from her father’s manner he felt that when he asked for her hand he would not be refused, about Alice herself he felt far less confident. She was so perfectly open and natural with him that he feared lest she might regard him rather as a brother than as a lover, and yet the blush which he had noticed when he first met her on his return gave him considerable hope.

On arriving at Scarborough he stopped for the night at the house of his old friend Mrs. Archer. She and her husband listened with surprise and pleasure to his stories of his adventures in spite of his assurances that these were very ordinary matters, and that it was chiefly by luck that he had got on. He was a little surprised when, in reply to this, Mrs. Archer used the very words Mr. Palethorpe had uttered. “It is of no use your talking in that way, Will,” she said. “No doubt you have had very good fortune, but your rapid promotion can only be due to your conduct and courage.”

“I may have conducted myself well,” he said warmly, “but not one bit better than other officers in the service. I really owe my success to the fortunate suggestion of mine as to the best method of attacking that pirate hold. As a reward for this the admiral gave me the command of L’Agile, and so, piece by piece, it has grown. But it was to my good fortune in making that suggestion, which really was not made in earnest, but only in reply to the challenge of another midshipman, that it has all come about. Above all, Mrs. Archer, I shall never forget that it was the kindness you showed me, and the pains you took in my education, that gave me my start in life.”

The next day he drove over to Scarcombe, and to his pleasure, on entering the cottage, found John and his wife both sitting just where he had last seen them. They both rose to greet him.

“Thank God, Will,” John said, “that we have been spared to see you alive again! I was afraid that our call might come before you returned.”

“Why, father, I don’t think you look a year older than you did when I last saw you. Both you and mother look good for another ten years yet.”

“If we do, Will, it will be thanks to the good food you have provided for us. We live like lords; meat every day for dinner, and fish for breakfast and supper. I should not feel right if I didn’t have a snack of fish every day. Then we have ale for dinner and supper. There is no one in the village who lives as we do. When we first began we both felt downright fat. Then we agreed that if we went on like that we never could live till you came back, so we did with a little less, and as you see we both fill out our clothes a long way better than we did when you were here last.”

“Well you certainly do both look uncommonly well, father.”

“And you ain’t married yet, Will?”

“No, I’ve not done anything about that yet, though perhaps it won’t be very long before I find a wife. I am not going to apply to go on service again for a time, so I’ll have a chance to look round, though I really have one in my mind’s eye.”

“Tell us all about it, Will,” the old woman said eagerly;“you know how interested we must be in anything that affects you.”

“Well, mother, among the many adventures I have been through I must tell you the one connected with this young lady.”

He then told her of his first meeting, of his stay at her father’s house, and of the hurricane which they experienced together.

“Well, mother, I met her again unexpectedly more than two and a half years ago in London. Her father had come over here to live, and has a fine house at Dulwich. I have just been staying there for a week, and I have some hope that when I ask her she will consent to be my wife.”

“Of course she will,” the old woman said quite indignantly.“How could she do otherwise? Why, if you were to ask the king’s daughter I am sure she would take you. Here you are, one of the king’s captains, have done all sorts of wonderful things, and have beaten his enemies all over the world, and you are as straight and good-looking a young gentleman as anyone wants to see. No one, who was not out of her mind, could think of saying ‘No’ to you.”

“Ah, mother, you are prejudiced! To you I am a sort of swan that has come out of a duck’s egg.”

They chatted for some time, and then Will said:

“Are you quite sure, John, that the bundle the clergyman handed over to me contained every single thing my father left behind him?”

“Well, now I think of it, Will, there is something else. I never remembered it at the time, but when my old woman was sweeping a cobweb off the rafters the other day she said:‘Why, here is Will’s father’s fiddle’, and, sure enough, there it was. It had been up there from the day you came into the house, and if we noticed it none of us ever gave it a thought.”

“I remember it now,” Will exclaimed. “When I was a young boy I used to think I should like to learn to play on it, and I spoke to Miss Warden about it. But she said I had better stick to my lessons, and then as I grew up I could learn it if I still had a fancy to do so.”

He got on to a chair, and took it from the rafter on which it had so long lain. Then he carefully wiped the dust off it.

“It looks a very old thing, but that makes no difference in its value to me. I don’t see in the least how this can be any clue whatever to my father’s identity. Still, I will take it away with me and show it to my lawyer, who is endeavouring to trace for me who my father was.”

“And do you think that he will succeed, Will?”

“I rather believe he will. At any rate he has found a gentleman, a baronet, who has the same name and bears the same coat of arms as is on the seal which was in my father’s bundle. We are trying now to trace how my father came down here, and where he lived before he started. You see I must get as clear a story as I can before I go to see this gentleman. Mind, I don’t want anything from him. He may be as rich as a lord for anything I care, and may refuse to have anything to do with me, but I want to find out to what family I really belong.”

“He must be a bad lot,” John said, “to allow your father to tramp about the country with a fiddle.”

“I would not say that,” Will said; “there are always two sides to a story, and we know nothing of my father’s reasons for leaving home. It may have been his fault more than his father’s, so until I know the rights and wrongs of the case I will form no judgment whatever.”

“That is right, my boy,” the old woman said. “I have noticed that when a boy runs away from home and goes to sea it is as often his fault as his father’s. Sometimes it is six of one and half a dozen of the other; sometimes the father is a brute, but more often the son is a scamp, a worth less fellow, who will settle down to nothing, and brings discredit on his family. So you are quite right, Will, not to form any hard judgment on your grandfather till you know how it all came about.”

“I certainly don’t mean to, mother. Of course I have so little recollection of my father that it would not worry me much if I found that it were his fault, though of course I would rather know that he was not to blame. Still, I should wish to like my grandfather if I could, and if I heard that my poor father was really entirely to blame I should not grieve much over it.”

“I can’t help thinking that he was to blame, Will. He was a curious-looking man, with a very bitter expression at times on his face, as if he didn’t care for anyone in the world, except perhaps yourself, and he often left you alone in the village when he went and wandered about by himself on the moor.”

“Well, well,” Will said, “it matters very little to me which way it is. It is a very old story now, and I dare say that there were faults on both sides.”

Will spent a long day with the old people and then returned to Scarborough, taking the violin with him. When he told how he had found it Mr. Archer took the instrument and examined it carefully.

“I think really,” he said at last, “that this violin may prove a valuable clue, as valuable almost as that coat of arms. That might very well have been picked up or bought for a trifle at a pawnshop, or come into the hands of its possessor in some accidental way. But this is different; this, unless I am greatly mistaken, is a real Amati, and therefore worth at least a couple of hundred guineas. That could hardly have come accidentally into the hands of a wandering musician; it must be a relic of a time when he was in very different circumstances, and may well have been his before he left the home of his childhood.”