The merchant-captain paused, and looked out of the window for upwards of five minutes before he resumed his story. When he did resume it, he spoke in a very low voice, and in short detached sentences, as if he couldn’t trust himself with long ones for fear he should break down in the middle of them.
“Eliza had been dead one-and-twenty years. Aunt Sarah told me all about it. She’d tried the artificial flower-makin’; and she hadn’t liked it. And she’d turned play-actress. And when she was nine-and-twenty, she’d married; she’d married a gentleman that had no end of money; and she’d gone to live at a fine place somewheres in Kent. I’ve got the name of it wrote down in my memorandum-book. But she’d been a good and generous friend to aunt Sarah; and aunt Sarah was to have gone to Kent to see her, and to stop all the summer with her. But while aunt was getting ready to go for that very visit, my sister Eliza died, leaving a daughter behind her, which is the niece that I’m goin’ to see. I sat down upon the three-legged wooden stool against the counter, and hid my face in my hands; and I thought of the little girl that I’d seen playin’ at hopscotch forty years before, until I thought my heart would burst; but I didn’t shed a tear. Aunt Sarah took a big brooch out of her collar, and showed me a ring of black hair behind a bit of glass, with a gold frame round it. ‘Mr. Floyd had this brooch made a purpose for me,’ she said; ‘he has always been a liberal gentleman to me, and he comes down to Liverpool once in two or three years, and takes tea with me in yon back parlour; and I’ve no call to keep a shop, for he allows me a handsome income; but I should die of the mopes if it wasn’t for the business.’ There was Eliza’s name and the date of her death engraved upon the back of the brooch. I tried to remember where I’d been and what I’d been doing that year. But I couldn’t, sir. All the life that I looked back upon seemed muddled and mixed up, like a dream; and I could only think of the little sister I’d said goodbye to, aboard the Ventur’some forty years before. I got round by little and little, and I was able half an hour afterwards to listen to aunt Sarah’s talk. She was nigh upon seventy, poor old soul, and she’d always been a good one to talk. She asked me if it wasn’t a great thing for the family that Eliza had made such a match; and if I wasn’t proud to think that my niece was a young heiress, that spoke all manner of languages, and rode in her own carriage? and if that oughtn’t to be a consolation to me? But I told her that I’d rather have found my sister married to the poorest man in Liverpool, and alive and well, to bid me welcome back to my native town. Aunt Sarah said if those were my religious opinions, she didn’t know what to say to me. And she showed me a picture of Eliza’s tomb in Beckenham churchyard, that had been painted expressly for her by Mr. Floyd’s orders. Floyd was the name of Eliza’s husband. And then she showed me a picture of Miss Floyd, the heiress, at the age of ten, which was the image of Eliza all but the pinafore; and it’s that very Miss Floyd that I’m going to see.”
“And I dare say,” said the kind listener, “that Miss Floyd will be very much pleased to see her sailor uncle.”
“Well, sir, I think she will,” answered the captain. “I don’t say it from any pride I take in myself, Lord knows; for I know I’m a rough and ready sort of a chap, that ’u’d be no great ornament in a young lady’s drawing-room; but if Eliza’s daughter’s anything like Eliza, I know what she’ll say and what she’ll do, as well as if I see her saying and doing it. She’ll clap her pretty little hands together, and she’ll clasp her arms round my neck, and she’ll say, ‘Lor, uncle, I am so glad to see you!’ And when I tell her that I was her mother’s only brother, and that me and her mother was very fond of one another, she’ll burst out a cryin’, and she’ll hide her pretty face upon my shoulder, and she’ll sob as if her dear little heart was going to break for love of the mother that she never saw. That’s what she’ll do,” said Captain Prodder, “and I don’t think the truest born lady that ever was could do any better.”
The good-natured traveller heard a great deal more from the captain of his plans for going to Beckenham to claim his niece’s affections, in spite of all the fathers in the world.
“Mr. Floyd’s a good man, I dare say, sir,” he said; “but he’s kept his daughter apart from her aunt Sarah, and it is but likely he’ll try to keep her from me. But if he does he’ll find he’s got a toughish customer to deal with in Captain Samuel Prodder.”
The merchant-captain reached Beckenham as the evening shadows were deepening amongst the Felden oaks and beeches, and the long rays of red sunshine
