Athelstane Ford

Of Rupert, as well as of old Muzzy, I must briefly speak. I conducted my cousin to his father, as I had promised, and sought to reconcile them. But I found my uncle to be harsher than I had expected. He had, besides, married again, and his wife looked sourly on the blind man she was asked to entertain in her house. The upshot of it was that I told her if she would take care of Rupert till I was married I would then have him to live with me. And in our house he still abides, a much altered man, given to the hearing of sermons, and never so happy as when Patience sits down to read him a piece from the Bible or the Norwich Journal; though sometimes a flash of his old spirit returns when I sit beside him after supper and talk over our old adventures in the East.

I found it more difficult at first to befriend old Muzzy. For though the old man professed to be, and I am sure really was, anxious to reform and lead a better life, he made but a poor business of it, and his constant profane oaths and habits of rum-drinking proved a severe trial to my mother and Patience. I had told them of his many services to me, including his having saved my life, and therefore they made it a duty to show kindness to the old man, and endeavour to bear with his ways. But I think they would have failed, and I should have been obliged to find a home for him elsewhere, but for his having accidentally told them of the affair outside Calcutta. No sooner did these tender-hearted women learn that I had saved old Muzzy’s life (as they chose to consider it) than they instantly conceived a strong affection for the old man, and instead of finding him a burden nothing pleased them better than to sit in his company while the boatswain related the story of my prowess, interrupting it at every minute to excuse himself for some dreadful expression which had brought the tears into their eyes. The tale lost nothing in the telling, and I am ashamed to say that he so improved upon it in course of time as to make it appear that I had marched single-handed through the Nabob’s entire army, severely wounded the Nabob himself, and slain many of his principal generals, and finally emerged, carrying old Muzzy himself across my shoulders like a suckling lamb.

Peace to old Muzzy! His heart was as innocent as his life and conversation were depraved. I believe my mother used to buy tobacco for him; and I am certain I once detected my wife secretly giving him rum.

In this peaceful manner my adventures ended, and I found myself, far beyond my deserts, settled at last in the land where I was born, among those who loved me and whom I loved.

And we are so made, and this life of ours is so strange a thing, that sometimes, when I walk abroad in the evening, as I was wont to do in my boyhood, and stand beside the lonely, rippling water of the broad, and watch the reflection of the sunset upon the distant walls of Yarmouth town; sometimes, I say, I ask myself whether all this has really been as I have thus written it, or whether all these events from my first running away from my father’s roof; and those nights and days in the streets of yonder town and beneath the roof of the old “Three-decker”; and the woman I loved and fought for; and my cousin Rupert’s enmity; and the voyage which I took to the East Indies, and the battles and perils which I passed through; and last of all that white tomb in the seraglio garden in far-off Moorshedabad; whether they are not dreams and visions which have come to me while I have slept.

UNWIN BROTHERS, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON