menu_book Chapter 20

Chapter 20 of Aurora Floyd. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading done by Jules Harlock of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braden. Chapter 20. Captain Prater.

While the Doncaster Express was carrying Mr. and Mrs. Melish northward, another express journeyed from Liverpool to London with its load of passengers. Among these passengers there was a certain broad-shouldered and rather bull-necked individual who attracted considerable attention during the journey and was an object of some interest to his fellow travellers

and the railway officials at the two or three stations where the train stopped. He was a man of about 50 years of age, but his years were worn very lightly and only recorded by some wandering streaks and patches of grey among his thick blue-black stubble of hair. His complexion, naturally dark, had become of such a bronze and coppery tint

by perpetual exposure to meridian suns, tropical hot winds, the fiery breath of the sea moon, and the many other inconveniences attendant upon an outdoor life as to cause him to be frequently mistaken for the inhabitant of some one of those countries in which the complexion of the natives fluctuated between burnt sienna, Indian red, and Van Dyke brown.

But it was rarely long before he took an opportunity to rectify this mistake and to express that hearty contempt and aversion for all foreigners which is natural to the unspoiled and unsophisticated Britain. Upon this particular occasion, he had not been half an hour in the society of his fellow passengers before he had informed them that he was a native of Liverpool

and the captain of a merchant vessel. Trading in the manner of speaking, he said everywhere, that he had run away from his father and his home at a very early period of his life and had shifted for himself in different parts of the globe ever since, that his Christian name was Samuel and his surname Prater,

and that his father had been, like himself, a captain in the merchant service. He chewed so much tobacco and drank so much fiery Jamaica rum from a pocket pistol in the intervals of his conversation that the first class compartment in which he sat was odorous with compound perfume. But he was such a hearty, loud-spoken fellow,

and there was such a pleasant twinkle in his black eyes that the passengers, with the exception of one crusty old lady, treated him with great good humour and listened very patiently to his talk. Chewing ain't smokin', you know, is it? he said with a great guffaw, as he cut himself a terrible block of catmintish,

and railway companies ain't got any laws against that. They can put a fellow's pipe out, but he can chew his quid in their faces, though I won't say which is wust for their carpets, neither. I am sorry to be compelled to confess that this brown-visaged merchant captain, who said wust and chewed cavendish tobacco,

was uncle to Mrs. John Mellish of Mellish Park, and that the motive for this very journey was neither more nor less than his desire to become acquainted with his niece. He imparted this fact, as well as much other information relating to himself, his tastes, habits, adventures, opinions and sentiments,

to his travelling companions in the course of the journey. Do you know for why I'm going to London by this identical train? he asked generally, as the passengers settled themselves into their places after taking refreshments at Rugby. The gentleman looked over their newspapers at the talkative sailor,

and a young lady looked up from her book. But nobody volunteered to speculate an opinion upon the mainspring of Mr. Protter's actions. I'll tell you why, resumed the merchant captain, addressing the assembly as if in answer to their eager questioning. I'm going to see my niece, which I have never seen before.

When I ran away from my father's ship, the Venturesome, nigh upon forty years ago, and went aboard the craft of a captain by the name of Mowgli, which was a good master to me for many a day, I had a little sister as I had left behind at Liverpool, which was dearer to me than my life.

He paused to refresh himself with rather a demonstrative sip from the pocket pistol. But if you, he continued generally, if you had a father that fetched you a clout of the head as soon as look at you, you'd run away, perhaps, and so did I. I took the opportunity to be missing one night as father was set in sail from Yarmouth harbour.

And, not setting that wonderful store by me, which some folks do by their only sons, he shipped his anchor without stopping to ask many questions, and left me hiding in one of the little alleys which cut the town of Yarmouth through and across like they cut the cakes they make there. There was many in Yarmouth that knew me, and there wasn't one that didn't say,

serve him right, when they heard how I'd given father the slip. And the next day, Captain Mowgli gave me a berth as cabin boy about the Marrior Anne. Mr. Protter again paused to partake of refreshments from his portable spirit store, and this time politely handed the pocket pistol to the company. Now, perhaps you'll not believe me, he resumed after his friendly offer had been refused,

and the wicker-covered vessel replaced in his capacious pocket. You won't perhaps believe me when I tell you, as I tell you candid, that up to last Saturday week I never could find the time nor the opportunity to go back to Liverpool and ask after that little sister that I'd left no higher than the kitchen table, that had cried fit to break her poor little heart when I went away.

But whether you believe it or whether you don't, it's as true as gospel, cried the sailor, thumping his ponderous fist upon the padded elbow of the compartment in which he sat. It's as true as gospel. I've crossed America, north and south. I've carried West Indian goods to the East Indies and East Indian goods to the West Indies. I've traded in Norwegian goods between Norway and Hull.

I've carried Sheffield goods from Hull to South America. I've traded between all manners of countries and all manners of docks. But somehow or other I've never had the time to spare to go on the shore at Liverpool and find out the narrow little street in which I left my sister, Eliza, no higher than the table more than 40 years ago until last Saturday was a week.

Last Saturday was a week I touched at Liverpool with a cargo of furs and pulled parrots, what you may call fancy goods. And I said to my mate, I said, I tell you what I'll do, Jack. I'll go ashore and see my little sister, Eliza. He paused once more and a softening change came over the brightness of his black eyes.

This time he did not apply himself to the pocket pistol. This time he brushed the back of his brown hand across the eyelashes and brought it away with a drop or two of moisture glittering upon the bronze skin. Even his voice was changed when he continued and had mellowed to a richer and more mournful depth until it very much resembled the melodious utterance which 21 years before had assisted

to render Miss Eliza Percival the popular Tridygian of the Preston and Bradford circuit. God forgive me, continued the sailor in that altered voice, but throughout my voyages I'd never thought of my sister Eliza but in two ways, sometimes one, sometimes that. One way of thinking of her and expecting to see her was as the little sister that I'd left,

not altered by so much as one lock of her hair being changed from the identical curl into which it was twisted the morning she cried and clung about me on board the venturesome, having come aboard to wish father and me goodbye. Perhaps I oftenest thought of her in this way. Anyhow, it was this way and no other that I always saw her in my dreams.

The other way of thinking of her and expecting to see her was as a handsome, full-grown, buxom married woman with a troop of saucy children hanging onto her apron string, and every one of them asking what Uncle Samuel had brought him from foreign parts. Of course this fancy was the most rational of the two, but the other fancy of the little child with the long black curly hair would come to me very often,

especially at night when all was quiet aboard and when I took the wheel in a spell while the helmsman turned in. Lord bless you, ladies and gentlemen, many a time of a starlit night, when we've been in them latitudes where the stars are brighter than common, I've seen the floating mists upon the water take the very shape of that light figure of a little girl in a white pinafore and come skipping towards me across the waves.

I don't mean that I've seen a ghost, you know, but I mean that I could have seen one if I had the mind, and that I've seen as much of a one as folks ever do see upon this earth, the ghosts of their own memories and their own sorrows mixed up with the mists of the sea or the shadows of the tree waving backward and forward in the moonlight, or a white curtain again a window, or something of that sort.

Well, I was such a precious old fool with these fancies and fan-tics. Mr. Samuel Protter seemed rather to pride himself upon the latter word as something out of the common, that when I went ashore at Liverpool last Saturday was a week. I couldn't keep my eyes off the little girls in white pinafores as passed me by in the streets, thinking to see my Eliza skipping along with her black curls flying in the wind and a bit of chalk to play hopscotch with,

in her hand, so I was obliged to say to myself, quite serious, now Samuel Protter, the little girl you're looking for, must be fifty years of age if she's a day, and it's more than likely that she's left off playing hopscotch and wearing white pinafores by this time. If I hadn't kept repeating this eternally like all the way I went, I should have stopped half the little girls in Liverpool to ask them if their name was Eliza,

and if they ever had a brother as ran away and was lost. I had only one thought of how to set about finding her, and that was to walk straight to the back street in which I remembered leaving her forty years before. I had no thought of those forty years could make any more change than to change her from a girl to a woman, and it seemed almost strange to me that they could make as much change as that.

There was one thing I never thought of, and if my heart beat loud and quick when I knocked at the little front door of the very identical house in which we lodged, it was with nothing but hope and joy. The forty years that had sent railway spinning all over England hadn't made much difference in the old house. It was forty years dirtier, perhaps, and forty years shabbier, and it stood in the very heart of the town instead of on the edge of the open country.

But except that, it was pretty much the same, and I expected to see the same landlady come to open the door with the same dirty artificial flowers in her cap and the same old slippers down at heel scraping after her along the bit of oilcloth. It gave me a kind of turn when I didn't see this identical landlady, though she had been turned a hundred years old if she had been alive, and I might have prepared myself for the disappointment if I'd thought of that, but I hadn't.

And when the door was opened by a young woman with sandy hair brushed backward as if she'd been a Chinese and no eyebrows to speak of, I did feel disappointed. The young woman had a baby in her arms, a black-eyed baby, with its eyes open so wide that it seemed as if it had been very much surprised with the look of things on first coming into the world, and hadn't quite recovered itself yet.

So I thought to myself, as soon as I clapped eyes on the little one, why, as sure as a gun, that's my sister Elisa's baby, and my sister's Elisa's married and lives here still. But the young woman had never heard the name of Prader and didn't think there was anybody in the neighborhood as ever had. I felt my heart, which had been beating louder and quicker every minute, stop all of a sudden when she said this and seemed to drop down like a dead weight.

But I thanked her for her civil answers to my questions and went on to the next house to inquire there. I might have saved myself the trouble, for I made the same inquiries at every house on each side of the street, going straight from door to door, till the people thought I was a seafaring tax gatherer. But nobody had ever heard the name of Prader, and the oldest inhabitant in the street hadn't lived there ten years. I was quite disheartened when I left the neighborhood, which had once been so familiar,

and which seemed so strange and small and mean and shabby now. I'd had so little thought of failing to find Elisa in the very house in which I'd left her, that I'd made no plans beyond. So I was brought to a dead stop, and I went back to the tavern where I'd left my carpet bag, and I had a chalk brought me for my dinner, and I sat with my knife and fork before me thinking what I was to do next. When Elisa and I had parted forty years before, I remember father leaving her in charge of a sister of my mother's.

My poor mother had been dead a year, and I thought to myself, the only chance there is left for me now is to find Aunt Sarah. By the time Mr. Prader arrived at this stage of his narrative, his listeners had dropped off gradually. The gentleman returning to their newspapers and the young lady to her book, until the merchant captain found himself reduced to communicate his adventures to one good-natured-looking young fellow, who seemed interested in the brown-faced sailor and encouraged him every now and then with an assenting nod or a friendly aye-aye to be sure.

The only chance I can see, says I, continued Mr. Prader, is to find Aunt Sarah. I found Aunt Sarah. She'd been keeping a shop in the General Line when I went away forty years ago, and she was keeping the same shop in the General Line when I came back last Saturday week. And there was the same fly-blown handbills of ships that was to sail immediate, and that had sailed two years ago, according to the date upon the bills,

and the same wooden sugar loaves wrapped up in white paper and the same lattice work gate, with a bell that rang as loud as if it was meant to give the alarm to all Williverpool, as well as to my Aunt Sarah in the parlour behind the shop. The poor old soul was standing behind the counter, serving two ounces of tea to a customer when I went in. Forty years had made so much change in her that I shouldn't have known her if I hadn't known the shop.

She wore black curls upon her forehead and a brooch like a brass butterfly in the middle of the curls, where the parting ought to have been. And she wore a beard, and the curls were false, but the beard wasn't. And her voice was very deep and rather manly, and she seemed to me to have grown manly altogether in the forty years that I'd been away.

She tied up the two ounces of tea and then asked me what I pleased to want. I told her that I was little Sam and that I wanted my sister, Eliza. The merchant captain paused and looked out of the window for upward 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, and Sarah told me all about it. She tried the artificial flower making, and she hadn't liked it. And she turned play actress, and when she was nine and twenty she married. She married a gentleman that had no end of money, and she'd gone to live at a fine place somewhere 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 am going 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 playing at hopscotch forty years before, until I thought my heart would burst. But I didn't shed a tear, and 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 around 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 Bag parlor.

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 Venture some forty years before. I got round by little and little, and I was able half an hour afterward 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 Beckingham 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 chap that would be no great ornament in a young lady's drawing room.

But if Eliza's daughter, anything like Eliza, I know what she'll say and what she'll do as well as if I see her saying it and doing it. She'll clap her pretty little hands together and she'll clasp her arms around my neck and she'll say, Lord uncle, I'm 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 crying. 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 Protter. And I don't think the truest born lady that ever was could do any better. The good natured traveler heard a good 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's 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 Protter. The merchant captain reached Beckenham as the evening shadows were deepening among the Felden oaks and beaches. And the long rays of red sunshine fading slowly out in the low sky. He drove up to the old red brick mansion in a hired fly and presented himself at the hall door.

Just as Mr. Floyd was leaving the dining room to finish the evening in his lonely study. The banker paused to glance with some slight surprise at the loosely clad, weather beaten looking figure of the sailor. And mechanically put his hand among the gold and silver in his pocket. He thought the seafaring man had come to present some petition for himself and his comrades. A lifeboat was wanted somewhere on the Kentish coast, perhaps.

And this good tempered looking bronze coloured man had come to collect funds for the charitable work. He was thinking this when in reply to the town bread footman's question, the sailor uttered the name of Protter. And in the one moment of its utterance, his thoughts flew back over one in 20 years. And he was madly in love with a beautiful actress who owned blushingly to that plebeian cognum in. The banker's voice was faint and husky as he turned to the captain and bade him welcome to Felden Woods.

Step this way Mr. Protter, he said, pointing to the open door of the study. I am very glad to see you. I have often heard of you. You are my dead wife's runaway brother. Even amid his sorrowful recollection of that brief happiness of the past, some natural alloy of pride had its part. And he closed the study door carefully before he said this. God bless you sir, he said, holding out his hand to the sailor.

I see I am right. Your eyes are like Eliza's. You and yours will always be welcome beneath my roof. Yes Samuel Protter, you see I know your Christian name. And when I die you will find that you have not been forgotten. The captain thanked his brother-in-law heartily and told him that he neither asked nor wished for anything except permission to see his niece, Aurora Floyd. As he made this request he looked toward the door of the little room, evidently expecting that the heiress might enter at any moment. He looked terribly disappointed when the banker told him that Aurora was married and lived near Doncaster.

But that, if he had happened to come ten hours earlier, he would have found her at Felden Woods. Ah, who has not heard those common words? Who has not been told that if they had come sooner or gone earlier or hurried their pace or slackened it or done something that they have not done the whole course of the journey? Who's life would have been otherwise? Who has not looked back regretfully at the past, which, differently fashioned, would have made the present other than it is? We think it hard that we cannot take the fabric of our lives to pieces as a Mantua maker unpicks her work and makes up the stuff another way. How much waste we might save in the cloth, how much better a shape we might make the garment if we only had the right to use our scissors and needle again and refashion the past by the experience of the present.

To think, now, that I should have been coming yesterday, exclaimed the captain, but put off my journey because it was a Friday, if I had only known. Of course, Captain Prater, if you had only known what it was not given to you to know, you would, no doubt, have acted more prudently and so would many other people. If Mr. William Palmer had known that detection was to dog the footsteps of crime and the gallows to follow at the heels of detection, he would most likely have hesitated before he mixed the strickening pills for the friend whom, with cordial voice, he was untreating to be of good cheer. If the speculators upon this year's Derby had known that the crack at us was to be the winner, they would scarcely have hazard their money upon buckstone and the marquee. We spend the best part of our lives in making mistakes and the poor remainder in reflecting how very easily we might have avoided them.

Mr. Floyd explained rather lamely perhaps how it was that the Liverpool spinster had never been informed of her grandniece's marriage with Mr. John Mellish, and the merchant captain announced his intention of starting for Doncaster early the next morning. Don't think that I want to intrude upon your daughter, sir," he said, as if perfectly acquainted with the banker's nervous dread of such a visit. I know her station's high above me, though she's my own sister's only child, and I make no doubt that those about her would be ready enough to turn up their noses at a poor old salt that has been tossed and tumbled about in every variety of weather for this forty year. I only want to see her once and away, and to hear her say perhaps, Lor-Uncle, what a rumble chap you are.

There, exclaimed Samuel Potter, suddenly I think if I could only once hear her call me uncle, I could go back to sea and die happy, though I never came ashore again. End of chapter twenty. Captain Protter.