monsoon, as long as transports can be provided for three or four thousand men. What kind of man is this Dr Maturin, may I ask? Is he to be trusted? He looks something of the foreigner to me.'
'Oh, I believe he is quite trustworthy, sir,' said Jack, with an inward grin. 'Lord Keith has a great opinion of him: offered him to be physician of the fleet. And the Duke of Clarence called him in, when the whole faculty was at a stand. He thinks the world of Dr Maturin.'
'Oh, indeed?' cried the Admiral, deeply impressed. 'I shall have to take care of him, I find. Not that these clever politicoes can really be trusted, you know. You must take a long spoon to sup with the Devil, I always say. However, let us get to our lobsters. You can trust my lobsters, Aubrey, ha, ha. I sent a couple of boats to the westward for 'em, the moment you made your number.'
The lobsters were trustworthy, so were the oysters, so was the rest of the enormous meal, which carried on, remove after remove, until the cloth was drawn at last and the port appeared, when Admiral Bertle called out, 'Fill up, gentlemen. Bumpers all round. Here's to Lucky Jack Aubrey with three times three; and may he thump em again and again.'
A week later the Governor of the Cape also honoured the Commodore with a feast. It consisted of game-- blauwbok, springbok, steinbok, klipspringer, hartebeest, wildebeest, the black and the blue--no lobster at all, and it took even longer to eat; but this was as far as the Governor's originality could take him; once more the meal ended with cabinet pudding, and once more the guests drank their port wishing that Jack might thump them again and again.
At the time of this second toast Stephen was eating bread and cold meat with Mr Farquhar and Mr Prote, his secretary, in an upper room of the government printinghouse, a secluded place from which the workmen had withdrawn. They were all of them more or less black, for in the light of Stephen's most recent intelligence they had been recasting a proclamation to the people of La Reunion, as well as a number of handbills and broadsheets that painted, in glowing colours and fluent French, the advantages of British rule, promising respect for religion, laws, customs and property, pointing out the inevitably disastrous consequences of resistance, and the rewards (perhaps a little imprecise and rhetorical) of cooperation. There were similar documents, though in a less forward state of preparation, addressed to the inhabitants of Mauritius; and all these were to be printed as secretly as possible, with the help of two confidential journeymen. Yet since neither of these knew a word in French, Farquhar and Prote had been perpetually in and out of the house, and both had grown fascinated by the technical processes of printing. In their eagerness to show Stephen their proficiency they corrected three long texts in the galley, reading by means of a little looking-glass that they tended to snatch from one another, plucking out letters, inserting others, prating about upper case, lower case, formes, coigns and composing-sticks, setting-rules and justification, and gradually smearing themselves, and him, with an unreasonable quantity of printer's ink.
They were no longer talking about the act of printing, however, not even about their insidious printed warfare: that, together with Stephen's detailed report of the promising state of public feeling on La Reunion and his account of the agents he had acquired, was far behind them; and now, as they ate their blotted meat, they discussed the poetry of the law, or rather poetry in the law, a subject to which they had been led by considerations on the inheritance of landed property in Mr Farquhar's future kingdom.
'The French system, their new French code, is very well on paper,' observed Farquhar, 'very well for a parcel of logical automata; but it quite overlooks the illogical, I might say almost supra-logical and poetic side of human nature. Our law, in its wisdom, has preserved much of this, and it is particularly remarkable in the customary tenure of land, and in petty serjeanty. Allow me to give you an example: in the manors of East and West Enbourne, in Berkshire, a widow shall have her free-bench--her sedes libera, or in barbarous law Latin her francus bancus--in all her late husband's copyhold lands dum sola et casta fuerit; but if she be detected in amorous conversation with a person of the opposite sex--if she grant the last favours--she loses all, unless she appears in the next manor-court, riding backwards on a black ram, and reciting the following words:
'Here I am
Riding on a black ram
Like a whore as I am;
And for my crinkum-crankum
Have lost my binkum- bankum;
And for my tail's game
Am brought to this worldly shame.
Therefore good Mr Steward let me have my lands again.
'My uncle owns one of these manors, and I have attended the court. I cannot adequately describe the merriment, the amiable confusion of the personable young widow, the flood of rustic wit, and--which is my real point--the universal, contented acceptance of her reinstatement, which I attribute largely to the power of poetry.'
'There may be a significant statistical relationship between the number of black ram-lambs suffered to reach maturity,' said Prote, 'and that of personable young widows.'
'And 'tis no isolated case,' continued Farquhar. 'For in the manor of Kilmersdon in Somerset, for example, we find what is essentially the same purgation, though in an abbreviated form, since no more than this distich is required:
'For mine arse's fault I take this pain.
Therefore, my lord, give me my land again.
'Now is it not gratifying, gentlemen, to find our black rams--unprofitable creatures but for this interesting ceremony--so far apart as Berkshire and Somerset, with no record of a white ram's ever having been admitted? For your black ram, gentlemen, is, I am persuaded, intimately connected with the worship of the Druids
Mr Farquhar was a man with a good understanding and a great deal of information, but at the first mention of Druids, oak-groves or mistletoe a wild gleam came into his eye, a gleam so wild on this occasion that Stephen looked at his watch, rose to his feet, said that he must regretfully leave them, and gathered up his book.
'Should you not like to wash before you go?' asked Farquhar. 'You are somewhat mottled.'
'Thank you,' said Stephen. 'But the being upon whom I am about to wait, though eminent for precedence, does not stand on ceremony.'
'What can he have meant by eminent for precedence?' asked Mr Prote. 'Anyone who is anyone, apart from us,
