The Adventures of Harry Richmond — CompleteMeredith, George
General
The Adventures of Harry Richmond — Complete
Meredith, George
Adventure and adventurers -- Fiction
'Well, young gentleman!' he accosted me, and he hoped I had slept well.
My courteous request to him to bid the tug stand by to take us on
board, only caused him to wear a look of awful gravity. 'You're such a
deuce of a sleeper,' he said. 'You see, we had to be off early to make
up for forty hours lost by that there fog. I tried to wake you both; no
good; so I let you snore away. We took up our captain mid-way down the
river, and now you're in his hands, and he'll do what he likes with
you, and that's a fact, and my opinion is you's see a foreign shore
before you're in the arms of your family again.'
At these words I had the horrible sensation of being caged, and worse,
transported into the bargain.
I insisted on seeing the captain. A big bright round moon was dancing
over the vessel's bowsprit, and this, together with the tug thumping
into the distance, and the land receding, gave me—coming on my
wrath—suffocating emotions.
No difficulties were presented in my way. I was led up to a broad man
in a pilot-coat, who stood square, and looked by the bend of his
eyebrows as if he were always making head against a gale. He nodded to
my respectful salute. 'Cabin,' he said, and turned his back to me.
I addressed him, 'Excuse me, I want to go on shore, captain. I must and
will go! I am here by some accident; you have accidentally overlooked
me here. I wish to treat you like a gentleman, but I won't be
detained.'
Joe spoke a word to the captain, who kept his back as broad to me as a
school-slate for geography and Euclid's propositions.
'Cabin, cabin,' the captain repeated.
I tried to get round him to dash a furious sentence or so in his face,
since there was no producing any impression on his back; but he
occupied the whole of a way blocked with wire-coil, and rope, and
boxes, and it would have been ridiculous to climb this barricade when
by another right-about-face he could in a minute leave me volleying at
the blank space between his shoulders.
Joe touched my arm, which, in as friendly a way as I could assume, I
bade him not do a second time; for I could ill contain myself as it
was, and beginning to think I had been duped and tricked, I was ready
for hostilities. I could hardly bear meeting Temple on my passage to
the cabin. 'Captain Jasper Welsh,' he was reiterating, as if sounding
it to discover whether it had an ominous ring: it was the captain's
name, that he had learnt from one of the seamen.
Irritated by his repetition of it, I said, I know not why, or how the
words came: 'A highwayman notorious for his depredations in the
vicinity of the city of Bristol.'
This set Temple off laughing: 'And so he bought a ship and had traps
laid down to catch young fellows for ransom.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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